Writing Urbanism
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WRITING URBANISM
Urban design continues to grow and mature as a field of study, research, andprofessional endeavour. This welcome collection of both invited and pub-lished essays is panoramically broad and comprehensive in its scope. Com-bining essays from both practice and academia, this volume includes someof the most significant texts on urban design from the last two decades, aperiod of transformational growth in the field and exponential growth in themetropolis.
Writing Urbanism asks how cities can become more coherent, sustain-able, authentic, and equitable, as well as aesthetically compelling and cul-turally meaningful. The essays probe such issues as community, socialequity, design theory, technology, and globalism. How does a rapidlyurbanizing and polarizing world embrace these and other issues, and howcan urban design translate them into consequential and workable urbanform?
By assembling a range of voices across different institutions and gener-ations, Writing Urbanism offers the most multifaceted portrait of urbandesign today. Scholars, students, and design professionals alike will find thiscollection to be a useful resource for understanding this increasinglyimportant design field and for insights into the forces that shape the cityitself.
Douglas Kelbaugh F.A.I.A. is Dean and Professor of Architecture and UrbanPlanning at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architectureand Urban Planning. He is a leading practitioner, teacher, and thinker inurban design, is the author of several books on urban design, and has taughtdesign at eight schools of architecture in the USA, Europe, Japan, andAustralia.
Kit Krankel McCullough is a lecturer at the University of Michigan Taub-man College of Architecture and Urban Planning. She is Principal of KitKrankel McCullough Urban Design, and has significant and broad experi-ence as a practitioner of urban design as well as having taught a variety ofcourses in urban design.
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THE A.C.S.A. ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION SERIES
The intent of the Architectural Education Series is to produce readers foruse across the curriculum in architecture and design programs matchingcurrent lines of scholarly inquiry with curricular needs. Each reader focuseson a thematic topic and is composed of chapters presented originally atA.C.S.A. conferences along with invited chapters. Leading edge design workand scholarship are included to give faculty, students and professionalsresources for the studio and classroom.
SERIES EDITORIAL BOARD
Michael Benedikt, University of Texas at AustinLuis Carranza, Roger Williams UniversityThomas Fisher, University of MinnesotaLisa Iwamoto, University of California at BerkeleyFernando Luiz Lara, University of MichiganJohn Stuart, Florida International University
ABOUT A.C.S.A.
The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (A.C.S.A.) is a non-profit organization founded in 1912 to enhance the quality of architecturaleducation. School membership in A.C.S.A. has grown from 10 charterschools to more than 200 schools in several membership categories world-wide. Through these schools, more than 5,000 architecture faculty membersare represented in A.C.S.A.’s membership. A.C.S.A., unique in its repre-sentative role for professional schools of architecture in the United Statesand Canada, provides a major forum for ideas on the leading edge of archi-tectural thought. Issues that will affect the architectural profession in thefuture are being examined today in A.C.S.A. member schools. Additionalinformation is available at www.acsa-arch.org.
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WRITINGURBANISM
A design reader
EDITED BY DOUGLAS KELBAUGH ANDKIT KRANKEL McCULLOUGH
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First published 2008by Routledge270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UKby Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2008 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted orreproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafterinvented, including photocopying and recording, or in anyinformation storage or retrieval system, without permission inwriting from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataWriting urbanism : a design reader / edited by Douglas Kelbaugh &Kit Krankel McCullough.
p. cm. – (The A.C.S.A. architectural education series)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978–0–415–77438–3 (hbk : alk. paper) – ISBN 978–0–415–77439–0(pbk: alk. paper) – ISBN 978–0–203–92702–1 (ebk) 1. City planning–United States.I. Kelbaugh, Doug. II. McCullough, Kit Krankel. III. Association of Collegiate Schoolsof Architecture.NA9105.W75 2008307.1′2160973–dc222007047375
ISBN10: 0–415–77438–1 (hbk)ISBN10: 0–415–77439–X (pbk)ISBN10: 0–203–92702–8 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–77438–3 (hbk)ISBN13: 978–0–415–77439–0 (pbk)ISBN13: 978–0–203–92702–1 (ebk)
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’scollection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
ISBN 0-203-92702-8 Master e-book ISBN
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CONTENTS
Notes on contributors ix
Foreword xv
Robert FishmanPreface xxi
Douglas Kelbaugh and Kit Krankel McCulloughAcknowledgments xxv
I URBAN PROCESS 1
Introduction 3
Kit Krankel McCullough
ObservationsThe virtues of cities 6
Alex KriegerWorking cities: Density, risk, spontaneity 12
J. Max Bond, Jr.Meaningful urban design: Teleological/catalytic/relevant 14
Aseem InamMathematics of the ideal roadtrip 24
Christopher MonsonCity walking: Laying claim to Manhattan 34
Ben Jacks
Preservation, re-use, and sustainabilityGreen Manhattan 45
David OwenStewardship of the built environment: The emerging synergies
from sustainability and historic preservation 57
Robert A. YoungDROSS; Re-genesis of diverse matter 61
Lydia KallipolitiThe shared global ideology of the big and the green 69
David Gissen
CommunityLevittown retrofitted: An urbanism beyond the property line 75
Teddy CruzThe mnemonic city: Duality, invisibility, and memory in American
urbanism 80
Craig Evan Barton
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Mapping East Los Angeles: Aesthetics and cultural politics in another L.A. 87
José GámezCelebrating the city 96
Alan J. PlattusSkid Row, Los Angeles 98
Camilo José Vergara
II URBAN FORM 103
Introduction: Further thoughts on the three urbanisms 105
Douglas Kelbaugh
Everyday urbanism, landscape urbanism, and infrastructureEveryday urban design: Towards default urbanism and/or
urbanism by design? 115
John KaliskiWithout end: Mats, holes, and the promise of landscape urbanism 120
Karen M’CloskeyBoston’s New Urban Ring: An antidote to urban fragmentation 127
George ThrushInfrastructure for the new social compact 138
William R. Morrish and Catherine R. Brown
New urbanismWhatever happened to modernity? 155
Daniel SolomonThe town of Seaside: Designed in 1978–1983 by Duany
Plater-Zyberk & Co. 168
Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-ZyberkThe impact of ideology on American town planning 176
Tony Schuman and Elliott SclarNew Urbanism as a counter-project to post-industrialism 185
Ellen Dunham-JonesIntegrating urbanisms: Growing places between New Urbanism and
Post-Urbanism 194
Carl Giometti
Post urbanismRem Koolhaas’s writing on cities: Poetic perception and gnomic
fantasy 203
William S. Saunders“Bigness” in context: Some regressive tendencies in Rem
Koolhaas’ urban theory 220
Jorge Otero-Pailos
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Habraken and Koolhaas: Two Dutchmen flying over Bijlmermeer 229
June P. WilliamsonHeterotopias and Urban Design 237
David Grahame Shane
III URBAN SOCIETY 245
Introduction 247
Douglas Kelbaugh
The public realmBig Brother is charging you 250
Michael SorkinCommunitas and the American public realm 254
Spiro KostofContesting the public realm: Struggles over public space in Los
Angeles 271
Margaret CrawfordAction space 281
Richard ScherrThe inscription of “public” and “civic” realms in the contemporary city 291
Michael E. Gamble
Globalism and local identityZone 297
Keller EasterlingDis-assembling the urban: The variable interactions of spatial form
and content 303
Saskia SassenTropical Lewis Mumford: The first critical regionalist urban planner 313
Liane Lefaivre and Alexander TzonisThe luxury of languor 324
Michael A. McClure and Ursula Emery McClure
TechnologyTechnoscience and environmental culture: A provisional critique 333
Kenneth FramptonTechnology, place, and the nonmodern thesis 345
Steven A. MooreImmanent domain: Pervasive computing and the public realm 360
Dana CuffCity of dreams: Virtual space/public space 372
Eugenia Victoria Ellis
Index 383
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Craig Evan Barton is an associate professor of urban design and the Directorof the Urban Studies Program at the University of Virginia. He is afounding principal of RBGC Associates. He investigates issues of culturaland historical preservation and their interpretation through architecturaland urban design. He is the editor of the anthology Sites of Memory:Perspectives on Architecture and Race.
J. Max Bond, Jr. is a partner at Davis Brody Bond in New York. Heestablished the Architects Renewal Committee of Harlem, where heserved as director. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.He received the 2005 President’s Award from the A.I.A. New YorkChapter for his commitment to design excellence, activism, and diversityin the profession.
Catherine R. Brown (1950–1998) was a Minneapolis landscape architect,civic leader, and director of special projects at the Design Center for theAmerican Urban Landscape at the University of Minnesota. Along withher husband, William Morrish, she is the author of Planning to Stay.
Margaret Crawford is a professor of urban design and planning theory atthe Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research focuses on theevolution, uses, and meanings of urban space. Her book Building theWorkingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Townsexamines the rise and fall of professionally designed industrial environ-ments. Her most recent book, Nansha Coastal City: Landscape andUrbanism in the Pearl River Delta, was published in early 2006.
Teddy Cruz is principal of Estudio Teddy Cruz and associate professor ofarchitecture at Woodbury University. His practice and pedagogy reflecthis commitment to advancing architectural and urban planning projectsthat address the global, political, and social problems that proliferate oninternational borders, with special focus on San Diego and Tijuana.
Dana Cuff is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Universityof California, Los Angeles. Her expertise concerns social issues in thebuilt environment, which she engages as a practitioner and as an aca-demic. Her book The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Archi-tecture and Urbanism was supported by the Getty and the NationalEndowment for the Arts.
Andrés Duany is a principal of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (D.P.Z.)and a co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism. D.P.Z. hasbecome a major leader in the practice and direction of urban planning,having designed over 300 new and existing communities in the UnitedStates and overseas. He is a co-author of Suburban Nation and The NewCivic Art.
Ellen Dunham-Jones is the Director of the Architecture Program at theGeorgia Institute of Technology. She serves on the Board of Directors of
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the Congress for the New Urbanism, and the advisory boards of thejournal Places, the Phoenix Urban Research Lab and the Ax:son JohnsonInstitute for Sustainable Urban Design in Sweden. Her current researchfocuses on retrofitting suburbs.
Keller Easterling is an architect, urbanist, and writer from New York City.She is an associate professor at Yale University. She is the author ofEnduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades,Organization Space: Landscapes, and Highways and Houses in America.Her forthcoming book, Extrastatecraft, examines global infrastructurenetworks as a medium of global polity.
Eugenia Victoria Ellis is the managing partner of BAU in Elkins Park, PA,and an associate professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Shehas practiced for over 25 years in the states of Illinois, Florida, andPennsylvania where her focus has been in civic and municipal facilities,energy-conscious environmental design, and health care facilities.
Robert Fishman is the Emil Lorch Professor at Taubman College of Archi-tecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan. He is the author ofUrban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank LloydWright and Le Corbusier and Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall ofSuburbia. He is a past president of the Urban History Association, andPublic Policy Fellow at the Wilson Center.
Kenneth Frampton is the Ware Professor of Architecture at ColumbiaUniversity. He has worked as an architect and as an architecturalhistorian/critic in England, Israel, and the United States. His books includeLe Corbusier and Labor, Work and Architecture. An expanded andupdated edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History waspublished in summer 2007.
Michael E. Gamble is an associate professor of architecture at the GeorgiaInstitute of Technology in Atlanta and a principal with Gamble andGamble, Architects. His design research is focused on contemporaryurban practices. His firm has received several awards, including the Amer-ican Institute of Architects Georgia Chapter Honor Award, and has beenexhibited in a variety of regional and national venues.
José Gámez is an assistant professor of architecture and a member of theLatin American Studies faculty at the University of North Carolina atCharlotte. His research and design practice explores questions of culturalidentity in architecture and urbanism.
Carl Giometti is a project coordinator with JTS Architects in Lincolnshire,IL. His graduate thesis, “Integrating Urbanisms . . .”, was selected forpresentation at the 2006 A.C.S.A. Annual Meeting. He is active in severallocal and national organizations dedicated to advancing the theory andpractice of urban development.
David Gissen is a professor at Pennsylvania State University where heteaches architectural and urban theory and design. His research focuses
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on the architectural production of nature. He is the author of Big andGreen and curator of the eponymous exhibition shown at Yale University,Museum of the City of New York, Chicago Architecture Foundation, andThe National Building Museum.
Aseem Inam is Senior Project Manager at Moule & Polyzoides Architectsand Urbanists in California. Prior to that, he conducted research andtaught urban design at the University of Michigan. He is the author of thebook Planning for the Unplanned and a number of award-winningjournal articles. He has worked as an architect, urban designer, andplanner in Canada, France, India, and the United States.
Ben Jacks is an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture andInterior Design at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. A licensed architect,he practiced for fifteen years prior to beginning an academic career. Heonce hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. He is currentlywriting a book about walking and the built environment.
John Kaliski is a principal of Urban Studios in Los Angeles. A key com-ponent of his work is his ability to integrate public concerns into designprocesses. He has led workshops, charrettes, and meetings nationally andhas worked collaboratively with communities and professionals on abroad range of project types. He is the co-author of Everyday Urbanismwith John Chase and Margaret Crawford.
Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program inthe history and theory of architecture at Princeton University. She isthe recipient of the 2006 Lawrence Anderson Award from M.I.T. for thecreative documentation of architectural history, the Marvin E. Goodyaward for excellence in the use of materials, and a Fulbright scholarship.For her dissertation, “Mission Galactic Household,” she has beenawarded the 2006–2007 Woodrow Wilson Fellowship.
Spiro Kostof (1936–1991) was Professor of Architectural History at theUniversity of California, Berkeley. His many books include TheArchitect: Chapters in the History of the Profession, A History of Archi-tecture: Settings and Rituals, and America by Design, the companionto a five-part television series he presented. He received a posthumousaward for excellence in architectural education from the A.C.S.A./A.I.A.in 1992.
Alex Krieger, F.A.I.A. is Professor in Practice of Urban Design at HarvardUniversity Graduate School of Design, and former Chair of the Depart-ment of Urban Planning and Design. A practitioner as well as a teacher,author and lecturer, he is a founding principal of Chan Krieger Sienewiczin Cambridge, M.A.
Liane Lefaivre is the Chair of Architectural History and Theory at theUniversity of Applied Arts in Vienna and a research fellow at theDelft University of Technology Urbanism Department. Her work andnumerous books are devoted to architectural culture and criticism in the
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framework of cognitive history, architectural history, and creativity inWestern culture.
Karen M’Closkey is an assistant professor of architecture at the Universityof Pennsylvania. She is a founding partner of PEG office of landscape +architecture. PEG’s award-winning work spans small-scale retail andresidential work to large landscape infrastructure.
Michael A. McClure is an assistant professor at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and Ursula Emery McClure is an associate professor at Louisi-ana State University. Their firm, emerymcclure architecture, hasdeveloped a wide range of research and design projects and has beenrecognized by the 2006 Venice Biennale and the A.I.A. Their work andwriting have been published in numerous venues including 306090–05,Dwell Magazine, and Southern Living Magazine.
Christopher Monson is an associate professor of architecture at the Collegeof Architecture, Art + Design at Mississippi State University. Built aroundissues of ethics and inter-subjective communication, his research interestsinclude pedagogies of professional design education, contemporaryAmerican architecture, theories of formmaking and objecthood, and thephilosophical structures of architectural practice.
Steven A. Moore is the Bartlett Cocke Professor of Architecture andPlanning at the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches designand courses related to the philosophy, history, and application ofsustainable technology. He is Director of the graduate programin Sustainable Design and Co-director of the University of Texas Centerfor Sustainable Development.
William R. Morrish is the Elwood R. Quesada Professor of Architecture,Landscape Architecture, and Urban and Environmental Planning, at theSchool of Architecture, University of Virginia. His work approachesinfrastructure as a cultural landscape that knits citizens, public spaces,social institutions, cultural expression, and the natural environment intomulti-operational urban landscape networks.
Jorge Otero-Pailos is Assistant Professor for Historic Preservation atColumbia University. His research probes the boundaries between con-temporary preservation and architecture. A founder and director of thejournal Future Anterior, his forthcoming book, Inside Postmodernism:Architectural Phenomenology and How Experience Came to MatterMore Than History, traces the struggle to deploy a historical conscious-ness within modern architecture during the 1970s.
David Owen has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1991. He isthe author of a dozen books, most recently Sheetrock & Shellac, pub-lished in 2006, and Copies in Seconds, which was published in 2004.
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is the Dean of the University of Miami School ofArchitecture and a principal of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company(D.P.Z.). She is also a co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism.
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D.P.Z. has become a major leader in the practice and direction of urbanplanning, having designed over 300 new and existing communities in theUnited States and overseas. She is a co-author of Suburban Nation andThe New Civic Art.
Alan J. Plattus is a professor of architecture and urbanism at Yale Uni-versity, where he teaches courses on architectural history and theory,urban history, and design, and directs the School’s China Studio. Hefounded and directs the Yale Urban Design Workshop, a communitydesign center that has undertaken urban design and building projectsthroughout Connecticut.
Saskia Sassen is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia Uni-versity after many years at the University of Chicago and is CentennialVisiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Sassen is theauthor most recently of Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval toGlobal Assemblages.
William S. Saunders is GSD Assistant Dean for External Relations, editor ofHarvard Design Magazine and a founding editor of GSD NEWS andHarvard Design Magazine. He is the author of Modern Architecture:Photographs by Ezra Stoller and the editor of eight other books. He haswritten numerous articles on architectural issues, education, and theory.
Richard Scherr is Professor of Architecture at Pratt Institute, where he waspreviously Chairman of the Graduate Programs in Architecture andUrban Design (1989–1999). He is the author of The Grid (2001), and haswritten extensively on urban design and theory.
Tony Schuman is Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor at theNew Jersey Institute of Technology. His is past president of the Associ-ation of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (A.C.S.A.). He was a foundingmember of a series of advocacy and activist organizations includingUrban Deadline, The Architects’ Resistance (T.A.R.), Homefront, andPlanners Network.
Elliott Sclar is Professor of Urban Planning and International Affairs atColumbia University School of International and Public Affairs and thedirector of the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at ColumbiaUniversity’s Earth Institute. He was a co-coordinator of the UnitedNations Millennium Project’s Taskforce on Improving the Lives of SlumDwellers. He is the author of You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For:The Economics of Privatization (2000).
David Grahame Shane teaches at Columbia University, Cooper Union andCity College. He co-edited with Brian McGrath the Architectural DesignSpecial Issue “Sensing the 21st Century City; Upclose and Remote.” Hehas lectured extensively and has published widely. His book Recom-binant Urbanism; Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Designand City Theory appeared in 2005.
Daniel Solomon is Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Urban Design at
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the University of California, Berkeley. He is the founder of SolomonE.T.C., a W.R.T. Company. Residential architecture and urban designhave been the main focus of his work. He is a co-founder of the Congressfor the New Urbanism and an author, most recently of Global City Blues.
Michael Sorkin is Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at CityCollege of New York and the principal of the Michael Sorkin Studio. Helectures widely, is the author of many books and articles, and is currentlycontributing editor at Architectural Record and Metropolis. For tenyears, he was the architecture critic of The Village Voice. His most recentbook is Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National InsecurityState (2007).
George Thrush is Director of the School of Architecture at NortheasternUniversity in Boston, M.A. His work seeks to connect transportation,urban design, and civic image in an increasingly privatized economicarena.
Alexander Tzonis is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of ArchitecturalTheory and Design Methods at the Delft University of Technology andcurrent Director of Design Knowledge Systems, a multi-disciplinaryresearch center on architectural cognition. A prolific writer, he is authoror co-author of a number of books and has contributed over 200 articleson architectural theory, history, and design methods.
Camilo José Vergara is a writer, photographer, and sociologist. He has beenphotographing American urban landscapes since 1977, documentingthe changes taking place in the country’s inner cities. His books includeTwin Towers Remembered, Subway Memories, and How the Other HalfWorships. Vergara has received numerous awards, among them aMacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2002.
June P. Williamson is a practicing urban designer and architect in NewYork City specializing in the practice and theory of mixed-use suburbanredevelopment. She has been a visiting professor of architecture atGeorgia Tech, the University of Utah, and the Boston ArchitecturalCenter. With Ellen Dunham-Jones, she is writing a case-study book aboutretrofitting suburbs.
Robert A. Young is an associate professor of architecture and the HistoricPreservation Program Director at the University of Utah. His teachingand research focus combines historic preservation and sustainability inthe stewardship of the built environment. He has served on numerousboards related to preservation and revitalization issues.
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FOREWORD
ROBERT FISHMAN
After the near-death experience of the postwar urban crisis, the Americancity over the last fifteen years has seen a remarkable resurgence. The articlesin this remarkable collection embody a new hope, for they were written inprecisely the years when the seemingly indissoluble coupling of “urban” and“crisis” was decisively broken and urban design could begin to re-imaginethe American city as the site of a new public culture. Yet the tone of thesearticles is far from triumphalist. Urban design today necessarily bears theburdens of the “urban renewal” years, when a grand vision of a totallyrebuilt modern city led to near-total failure. Partly as a result, urban designin practice tends even now to be self-marginalizing in scale and ambition,struggling to challenge imaginatively the limitations of an increasinglyprivatized urban world. But as the American city renews its materialbase, seeks to overcome the crippling segregation of the past with a vitallydiverse urban culture, and begins to provide models of sustainable energyuse for the rest of our society, there is the danger that urban design willremain cautious and constricted. The articles in this book seek in very differ-ent ways to challenge our urban design vision to match the historicopportunities.
To understand the limitations under which American urban designoperated during the urban crisis years, one must go to Detroit and perhapsto a few other lagging metropolitan areas. There one can see the fate that aslate as the 1990s was predicted by many experts to be the inevitable onefor all American cities: a downtown marginalized and semi-abandoned;once-bustling factory zones turned into depopulated, de-industrialized andracially segregated “inner cities”; suburbs in the “first-ring” just beyond thecentral city caught in a rolling wave of abandonment about to engulf them;and—at the edge—the feverish, fragmented, low-density growth we knowas sprawl.1 This “anti-city,” as the great urbanist Lewis Mumford in the1960s called our dysfunctional metropolitan regions, reached its peak ofdisorganization with the “Rodney King riots” in Los Angeles in 1992—perhaps the most destructive urban riots in American history. Meanwhile,urbanists predicted that the rest of the 1990s would bring ever-higher ratesof urban crime, concentrated poverty, and flight from the city. Mumford’sdespairing 1975 prescription for New York City seemed fifteen years laterto apply to all major American cities. “Make the patient as comfortable aspossible,” he advised. “The case is hopeless.”2
In fact, the 1990s saw a dramatic recovery of most American cities, aprofound reurbanism of American life that made the city again the center ofAmerican culture. As Saskia Sassen was perhaps the first to observe, the veryforces of globalization that had devastated the factories of our inner cities
1 Reynolds Farley et al., DetroitDivided (New York: Russell SageFoundation, 2000).
2 Lewis Mumford, quoted in B.I.Shenker, “18 experts advise,castigate and console the city,” NewYork Times, July 30, 1975, p. 35.
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were also inexorably re-building the major American downtowns as crucialnodes for global finance and knowledge-production. This “downtownreurbanism” was complemented by another aspect of globalism: “immi-grant reurbanism” that repopulated many of the most devastated urbaneconomies and built a new small-scale economy from the ground up.Moreover, after the turmoil of the great black migration to northern cities, ablack middle class committed to the cities was finally emerging. Finally, onesaw a significant return of the white middle class, no longer confined to the“islands of renewal in seas of decay” as the geographer Brian J.L. Berry haddescribed the gentrifying areas of the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, this “whitemiddle-class reurbanism” complemented the immigrant and black middle-class reurbanism to reinvigorate whole neighborhoods and districts that hadseemed lost to the urban crisis.3
Reurbanism meant rising rather than falling urban population, rising taxreceipts, jobs to replace those lost by deindustrialization, and a significantshift in the regional balance of power from suburb to city. Perhaps moreimportantly, reurbanism has been a major cultural force, challenging thesuburban car culture with the classic urban virtues of density, walkability,and diversity. Cities are now hip, especially for the growing cohort ofthe young for whom the city is the natural environment after college, and,increasingly, after marriage and children as well. And if much of this hipnessis merely ease of consumption, especially the luxury goods and serviceslavishly provided in the centers where global capital and large immigrantpopulations meet, there are also some deeper lessons that perhaps only adense urban environment can convey: respect for social difference, and theneed to limit the “consumption of space” and ultimately the consumption ofall other scarce resources.
Here surely is a social and cultural movement that could be the basis for anew era in urban design. And yet urban design has, in my view, not yet risento the challenge of embodying the best of reurbanism. In part this is becausethe early successes of reurbanism—both in theory and in practice—tookplace apart from and even in opposition to an urban design still identifiedwith the massive clearances, highrise towers, and top-down power of urbanrenewal. Jane Jacobs’s seminal Death and Life of Great American Cities(1961) saw large-scale development as essentially a threat to the “close-grained diversity” and sidewalk life that she identified as the essence of theurban experience. The truly seminal urban design “project” for reurbanismtherefore was New York City’s Soho district, because it involved the reno-vation of existing urban fabric. Here a gritty district of semi-abandonedindustrial lofts accidentally spared from demolition by the cancellation ofRobert Moses’ Lower Manhattan Expressway was re-imagined andre-occupied by artists as an ideal environment for the production of con-temporary culture. This radical transvaluation of modernist urban design—“artists are real estate geniuses,” as art critic Henry Geldzahler explained4—
3 For further defense andelucidation of “reurbanism,” see my“The Fifth Migration,” Journal ofthe American Planning Association,vol. 71 #4 (Autumn 2005): 357–367.
4 Julia Szabo, “Regarding Henry,”New York, vol. 28 #3 (June 16,1995): 42.
FOREWORD
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proclaimed that the seemingly obsolete nineteenth-century city was in factbetter adapted to modern urban life than anything that modern architectureor urban design had been able to produce. So what was left for urban designbeyond some modest “contextual” work?
One major urban design project, however, met the challenge of JaneJacobs and Soho: Battery Park City on the Hudson River at the tip ofManhattan Island, built on 92 acres of landfill from the World Trade Center.Dating back to the early 1960s, the overambitious plans—first for a classic“tower-in-the-park” assortment of office and residential towers, then for aneven more elaborate “megastructure”—languished until 1979 when twoyoung urban designers, Alexander Cooper and Stanton Eckstut, were giventhe challenge of coming up with a wholly new masterplan in just twelveweeks.5 What they produced not only saved that project but established aparadigm for urban design that remains perhaps the most powerful intoday’s practice. Indeed, the “Battery Park City model” lies behind many ofthe articles in this book where it functions as a “default mode” for urbandesign. Conceived at a low point for the American city, the model’sstrengths are still compelling compared to the modernist model it replaced,but so too is the need to get beyond it.
For Cooper and Eckstut had learned the Jacobs/Soho lesson: thatthere was no need for a “new city,” not even on new land. If New York’straditional fabric worked so well, the key to success was to build more of it.This meant first abandoning the superblock and megastructure ideas andinstead extending the Manhattan grid onto the new territory. On the grid,one would put housing that, as they frankly put it, would resemble the“older and more established neighborhoods of New York.”6 A mix of town-houses, low-rise and high-rise apartments, architecture echoing New York’sgolden era of the 1920s, would all be built out to the street to achieve thatsense of enclosure and sidewalk vitality of the best old neighborhoods.Instead of the flowing modernist space of the superblock, the plan providessmall, enclosed parks modeled on the nineteenth-century squares.
New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger immediately hailedthe Cooper/Eckstut plan as one that was “not a visitation from the world ofBuck Rogers” but one that “understands the essence of Manhattan.”7 As theplan was gradually built out (it is still not complete) to include both housingand the Cesar Pelli’s World Financial Center opposite the Twin Towers, wehave come to understand that Cooper and Eckstut’s neo-traditionalism, apredecessor of so much that we have learned to call “New Urbanism,” wasonly the beginning of the meaning of this remarkable plan.
First, the Battery Park City plan foreshadowed the new balance-of-powerbetween the public and private sectors that has come to define real estatepractice. No longer could a public authority strictly define the concept,program, and phasing of a major project, as in the earlier megastructurewhich had to be built as a complete “total design” or not at all. The
5 David L.A. Gordon, Battery ParkCity: Politics and Planning on theNew York Waterfront (Amsterdam:Gordon and Breach, 1997).
6 Alexander Cooper and Associates,Battery Park City Draft SummaryReport and 1979 Master Plan (NewYork: Battery Park City Authority,1979). The firm was subsequentlyrenamed Cooper Eckstut andAssociates.
7 Paul Goldberger, “A Realist’sBattery Park City,” New YorkTimes, November 9, 1979, p. B4.
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“market” was now in control. As Tim Love has observed in a highly percep-tive recent article,8 Battery Park City’s reliance on the grid was more thanan hommage to the 1811 Commissioner’s Plan. Each block in the master-plan represented a convenient unit for a single developer, thus allowingdevelopment to occur sequentially in relatively independent phases and withthe variations in program and architecture that mark each developer’s adap-tations to a changing market. Moreover, the landscape of Battery Park Cityaptly expressed the emerging responsibility of the private sector to providepublic amenities such as the highly successful Esplanade along the river thatmunicipal government could no longer afford.
If Battery Park City reflects the new balance of public and private thattook hold during the Reagan years, the project has also come to embodythe design/siting principle I would term “finding lost space.” The olderurban renewal projects had cleared their own space out of the most thicklyinhabited central districts of the city through the ruthless use of eminentdomain. The massive human suffering that these projects imposed has nowmade such displacements politically impossible. Hence the need to findspace, and the best places to look are precisely those waterfront sites wheredisused, obsolete dockyards and wharves can be replaced without signifi-cant displacement of people or businesses. Fortunately for urban design,deindustrialization has created in almost every city a large inventory of such“brownfield” sites where lost space can be found: not only waterfrontlocales but abandoned factory and warehouse sites; railyards that can bereplaced or covered; or once-polluted waterways whose long-shunnedbanks can now be lined with new development. As reurbanism extends itsreach from the downtown core into a recovering inner city, such “lostspace” potentially available for redevelopment increases exponentially.
Paul Goldberger termed the 1979 Battery Park City masterplan “aproduct of the hard-nosed, practical idealism of the end of the 1970s.”9 Suchpracticality was no doubt necessary and appropriate during the worst yearsof the urban crisis. Nevertheless, the Battery Park City model had its faults.Although the use of different developers phased over decades makes designvariety theoretically possible, the actual result here and at comparable pro-jects is a corporate blandness in design that cannot match the vitality of thebest urban neighborhoods that supposedly inspired the model. As ElliottSclar and Tony Schuman observe in their contribution to this volume,Battery Park City eschewed the social diversity that it originally promised byabandoning the goal of including affordable housing in each new apartmenthouse. Instead, the profits from luxury development have been used tosubsidize affordable housing in other neighborhoods in the city.
Ironically, these resurgent neighborhoods have provided the most intensecompetition for the Battery Park City model. Opposite Battery Park Cityon the east side of Manhattan lies the Lower East Side, a century ago themost overcrowded slum in the world and, as late as the 1980s, a grim and
9 Goldberger, p. B4.
8 Tim Love, “Urban Design AfterBattery Park City: opportunities forvariety and vitality in large-scaleurban real estate development,”Harvard Design Magazine #25 (Fall2007): 60–70.
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dangerous place to avoid. Today the Lower East is one of the liveliestneighborhoods in the world, an ever-fascinating mix of old tenements andnew luxury apartments; discount stores that date a century to the “pushcartera” alongside New York’s hippest new bars and restaurants; and a popula-tion that blends not only artists and the new-rich young from the nearbyfinancial district, but also Jewish and Italian remnants of the old immigra-tion with newer black, Hispanic, and Asian residents.
Can urban design somehow capture this vitality, or perhaps comple-ment it with public spaces and amenities that the market cannot offer?How to incorporate what Max Bond has aptly called the “density, risk,spontaneity” of “working cities” into urban designs that must constantlymeet the burden of hard-nosed practicality in a market-driven system?These are the underlying questions that all the contributors to this volumeare ultimately facing. Moreover, we are beginning to see some of the answersin a variety of built projects, including, I would argue, the best of the HOPEVI affordable housing that has replaced failed high-rise housing projectswith mixed-use communities in cities throughout the United States.10
But the real monument of contemporary urban design is, in my view,Chicago’s Millennium Park (2004 official opening).11 In the Battery ParkCity tradition, the park is both “found space” and a “public–private part-nership.” It occupies the site of some highly unsightly railyards between theLoop and the lakefront in the heart of the city that Chicago designers sinceDaniel Burnham and the 1909 Plan of Chicago had been trying to capturefor civic purposes. And the remarkable public quality of the park couldnever have existed without the remarkable generosity of Chicago’s privatephilanthropists, who contributed over 175 million dollars to the project.
But Millennium Park finally is an expression of the best of America’s “ageof reurbanism.” The park masterplan began as a hardnosed, practical effortto build a massive underground parking garage for the Loop, covered with amodest park. With the political leadership of Mayor Richard M. Daley, thephilanthropic leadership of John Bryan, and the design leadership of SOM’sAdrian D. Smith, the plan metamorphosed into an underground intermodaltransportation center covered by the most important civic space thatAmerica has built since 1945.
In contrast to the “festival marketplaces” of the 1970s and 1980s, peopleare brought together not as consumers but as citizens. Perhaps themost impressive aspect of this civic space is the way in which the best ofavant-garde design—Anish Kapoor’s sculpture Cloud Gate; Jaume Plensa’smultimedia Crown Fountain; Gustafson Guthrie Nichol’s ecologicallyinspired Lurie Garden; and above all Frank Gehry’s serpentine bridge andJay Pritzker Music Pavilion—forms the basis of a space that is genuinely apeople’s park. To visit the park is to join a community as diverse as Chicagoitself, sharing a space that brings together the best of American designculture.
10 The fairest assessment of HOPEVI can be found in Susan J. Popkinet al., A Decade of HOPE VI:Research Findings and PolicyChallenges (Washington, D.C.: TheUrban Institute, 2004).
11 Timothy J. Gilfoyle, MillenniumPark: creating a Chicago landmark(Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2006) is a history worthy ofthe park itself.
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In a deeply felt contribution to this volume composed in 1987, just fouryears before his untimely death, Spiro Kostof meditates on what he fearsis the irreversible loss of a true “public realm” in America and the “com-munitas” it once represented. Writing when the urban crisis still heldthe American city in its grip, Kostof fears that the “urban beauty” in thebroadest sense that had been the ultimate goal of urban design “is now athing of the past, beyond resuscitation,” and that, as a result (quoting Pauland Percival Goodman), “our city crowds are doomed to be lonely crowds,bored crowds, humanly uncultivated crowds.” Although there is much inAmerican life that, two decades later, still bears out Kostof’s negativejudgment, one especially regrets that he never lived to see the resurgence ofAmerican urbanism, or to join the crowds at Millennium Park.
Without triumphalism or false optimism, this book points the waytoward that recovery of the public realm through urban design that Kostofrightly asserts “holds our pride as a people.”
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PREFACE
DOUGLAS KELBAUGH ANDKIT KRANKEL McCULLOUGH
It might be helpful to start with what Writing Urbanism is not meant tobe. It is not, for instance, meant to be the canon of definitive writings onurbanism and urban design—or even an exhaustive survey. Neither is it acompendium of urban design case studies, or a collection of writings aboutparticular cities. Nor is it about urban planning, as the text’s underlyingbias is design-based rather than policy-based. Nor does the book bear anyconnection to fictional urbanism, such as the surreal short stories of ItaloCalvino or the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. Last, it is not international inscope or voice, as the authors are, with a few exceptions, American.
Put simply, the book is a compilation of what we the editors thought werethe best articles on urbanism to be found among contemporary Americanacademicians. Many articles were drawn from the Journal of ArchitecturalEducation ( J.A.E.) and the conference proceedings of the Association ofCollegiate Schools of Architecture (A.C.S.A.), the sponsor of the book,while others were submitted expressly for this volume at our invitation.Following The Green Braid (2007), this volume is the second in a seriesA.C.S.A. intends to publish with Routledge. The articles are primarily fromthe last decade or so, although some date back to the 1980s. To this collec-tion, we added essays by nine guest contributors, who were carefully chosento either complement, clarify, contest, or broaden the collection. We alsoinvited Robert Fishman, our colleague in Taubman College at the Universityof Michigan, to write the Foreword. As editors, we wrote the introductionsto each of the book’s three sections, which divide the material into UrbanProcess, Urban Form, and Urban Society. The structure and contents areentirely our doing, and reveal our priorities and betray our predilections,although we have attempted to be open-minded and inclusive in both ourselections and invitations.
Why did we accept the A.C.S.A.’s and Routledge’s invitation to edit sucha book? The first reason was that we feel that urbanism is an under-appreciated subject and that urban design is an under-developed sensibilityin architectural schools and the profession. The hegemony, even fetishiza-tion, of the individual building in both the design studio and professionalpractice continues to plague architectural culture. The singular building—whether signature or vernacular—remains the digit of design in the builtenvironment. The building is still seen as the morphological, legal, financial,and operational unit of urban development. Buildings too rarely engage indialogue with their urban, not to mention their climatological, setting orcultural context. Designers have fixated on the pixel rather than the picture.And the individual architect—whether a star or journeyperson—is still
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romanticized as a solo artist. This heroic notion is becoming anachronisticand romanticized in an era when projects, their design teams, sites, and citiesare all becoming larger and more complex.
Project planning by real estate developers has increasingly replaced urbanplanning, as the private sector continues to displace the public, in our oftenunexamined, headlong rush to privatization of government services and thepublic realm. American architecture seems to have lost its social conscienceand civic compass and, as a result, is faced with some basic challenges. Cancontemporary architecture and architects be less self-centered? Can today’scities be more legible, coherent, holistic, authentic, and equitable, as well asaesthetically compatible and consistent? Can we still share common values,even ideals, in today’s fast changing, diverse cultures, or are proliferatingpluralism and commodification inevitable? And, if so, can we translate theminto compelling, meaningful, and consequential urban form? These essaysaddress these and related questions.
The second reason we agreed to work on this volume is the tsunami ofurban development that is sweeping the planet and overtopping our citiesand their physical, social, and institutional infrastructures, with the attend-ant issues of inequality, poverty, disease, and geo-political tension. The rateof global urbanization has been accelerating at an alarming rate. There’sbeen a tripling of the population living in cities since 1950. Suddenly, thefirst urban century is upon us, with over half of the world’s population livingin urbanized areas now and two-thirds expected to by the year 2030. Therapid pace of urbanization is one of the defining and dramatic phenomena ofour time. Massive influxes of people from the countryside are swelling andstressing many existing cities, turning them into teeming agglomerations often, fifteen, and even twenty million people, with fifteen of the twenty largestconurbations predicted to be in the “developing world.”
Cities now animate a singular civilization that envelops the entire planet.They have become the economic engines of the world’s economy, with thecity-state starting to eclipse the nation-state as its fundamental economicunit. Ironically, as cities elsewhere have been densifying in recent decades,many American cities have been decanting residents and jobs to the suburbsand exurbs. And some of their least sustainable aspects, single-use zoningand auto-dependency, are being emulated and exported around theworld.
The third raison d’être for this anthology is the crisis-cum-emergency ofecological deterioration. It is now an article of faith that our carbon-basedeconomy is on a collision course with global climate change, with a guaran-teed temperature rise already in the system that may prove disastrous.Whatever climate predictions or underlying causes one chooses to believe,the world is facing a Herculean set of high-stake issues and increasinglydifficult trade-offs. Because cities are inherently more energy-efficient thansuburbia and exurbia, urbanism will be an essential part of any strategy
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for sustainability and regeneration. And because the livability, sociability,and formal coherence of cities play a key role in urbanism, urban design willin turn also play a critical role in sustainability.
As the effects of human enterprise and consumption spread to everycorner of the planet and invade every environmental niche, we are beginningto be much more mindful of our ecological footprints. While acknowledgingthat the practice of ecology is often socially constructed, dynamic, andemergent, we also recognize that it is ultimately based on the laws of nature,which are for all practical purposes absolute. We are aware that technologyis as much a socio-political as an engineering act, and also that the law ofunintended consequences is unrelenting and cannot be repealed. And manyof us believe the relativism of the post-structural “critical project” duringthe last quarter century, as insightful and liberating as it may once have beenfor many designers and theorists, is giving way to more pragmatic theoryand “projective” practices. As we move from a critical-distancing-from-the-world to a critical engagement with it, we must be wary of the embrace ofcorporate capitalism, with its branding and commodification of just abouteverything, from architecture to zoos. The burgeoning interest in urbandesign is a significant and positive part of this sea change, and representsmore than a jump to larger-scale design; it also represents a paradigmaticshift to a more inclusive and comprehensive agenda.
Today’s students and designers need a better understanding of the emer-ging megalopolis if they are to design buildings that are more than mega-forms inserted into a miasma of urban disorder. In America, this meansempirically sensitizing ourselves to the contemporary metropolis and ourevolving sense of urbanism. It means understanding the nature of com-munity, with all the collateral issues of diversity, distributive justice, socialand environmental equity, and citizen participation, as well as the impactsof technology, especially the remarkable promise and pitfalls of the digitalrevolution. It also means understanding the geo-political and cultural differ-ences between urbanism in North America and in Europe, Asia, and SouthAmerica, where more and more American designers will work. (We alsoneed to educate more architects and urban designers from the developingworld.) Architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and plannerscould potentially play a more central and activist role in this century thanany in history. Their skills and talents have never been more critical or inmore demand. They need to be better prepared for the deluge of environ-mental, economic, political, and social problems and opportunities thatcome with rapid global growth and urbanization. And they need to fullyunderstand and utilize the ecological leverage they wield in designing andplanning, as well as redesigning and replanning, the built environment.
We hope this jostle of writings and images will raise the urban con-sciousness and conscientiousness of architecture students, faculty, andpractitioners, as well as their counterparts in the other design and planning
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disciplines and professions. In our opinion, the conversation became tooprivate and insular while critical theory dominated the academy for severaldecades. After the overly heroic and overly rational ambitions of Modern-ism failed, the academy over-reacted—understandably, arguably—bybecoming too disciplinary, theoretical, and pure. It narrowed the agenda toprimarily aesthetic issues, first symbolic and historicist, then speculative andavant-garde, more recently digital. The focus on form and surface has beensophisticated and skillful, if too esoteric and rarefied in its original en-counter and intrigue with literary theory and post-structuralist philosophy.Some of the authors in this volume and some readers may disagree with thisthumbnail analysis, but few would disagree that architecture became moreautonomous, disciplinary, and focused on design per se in the last quarter ofthe twentieth century. (And some would say this shift was for the better.)
As we begin to broaden our cone of vision and respread our inter-disciplinary wings, urbanism and urban design deserve more and moreattention. The math of urbanization, the imperatives of ecology, and thescales of justice suggest a mandate to reboot and to rethink our mission andmethods, as well as our ideals, if idealism is still possible in our era ofpostmodernity.
We believe that the knowledge and insights of our academic and pro-fessional colleagues, from different generations and institutions, illuminateand develop ways to think about urbanism and urban design. This is not tosay that the authors agree or even converge. The discourse is divided, andthe intellectual turf is contested and factionalized. Indeed, the territory is asdiverse, fascinating, and complex as the city itself. We hope the range ofessays and articles conveys the depth and the breadth of the intellectualterrain and will focus attention on these issues in our schools and the pro-fessions. But we cannot risk paralysis from over-analysis. Compelled andinspired by discourse and dialogue, we need to act in the world in new andmore effective ways.
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban PlanningUniversity of Michigan
October 2007
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, we must thank the Association of Collegiate Schoolsof Architecture for spearheading this series of readers, and for inviting us toedit this volume. We are particularly indebted to Michael Monti, ExecutiveDirector of the A.C.S.A., who provided able direction and guidance, withthe assistance of Kevin Mitchell of the A.C.S.A. national office.
Our trans-Atlantic thanks go to Caroline Mallinder, who was in chargeof publications on the built environment for Taylor & Francis Books, andGeorgina Johnson, Assistant Editor. Working with them was a pleasure.
We wish to also thank our colleagues at the Taubman College of Archi-tecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan for their support.In particular, we received critical and substantial help from Keria Rossin,who attended to the endless details of book writing, and Donald Buaku,who provided digital assistance. Christian Unverzagt and Nick Tobier (whois down the hall in the School of Art & Design) shared images from theircollections.
And of course there were the many contributors, especially those whowrote new essays for the book. These authors are the sine qua non of sucha reader, and, like urban design itself, their individual essays combine toform a compendium that is greater than the sum of its literary parts. We areencouraged by the growth of interest and activity in urbanism and urbandesign, both in the academy and the profession. Like sustainability andsocial justice, urbanism is one of those bonds that is almost chemical in itsstrength. They can unite the world in ways that are both common andprofound, and we hope this book adds to the conversation and ultimately tothe bond itself.
As ever, we are grateful for the unflagging support and forbearance ofour respective families, especially our spouses Kathleen Nolan and MalcolmMcCullough.
Kit McCulloughDoug Kelbaugh
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I URBAN PROCESS
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INTRODUCTIONKIT KRANKEL McCULLOUGH
When asked to compile essays for an urban design reader we jumped inwithout first establishing for ourselves what constituted urban design. Con-sequently everything we read was fair game for inclusion in this volume—aslong as it touched on urbanism, design, or both. To define urban designis difficult; indeed, there is no accepted definition. On the occasion of the50th anniversary of the symposium at Harvard University at which José LuisSert coined the term, Alex Krieger attempted a definition. Drawing fromdefinitions of the word territory in the dictionary, he came up with “spheresof urbanistic action to promote the vitality, livability and physical characterof cities.”1 With this definition in mind, we open this book with UrbanProcess, in which we consider urban design as “spheres of urbanisticaction.”
While urban design is often defined as architecture at the largest scale,these essays fit comfortably within “spheres of action” as opposed tophysical artifact. There is a preference for small actions over big ones, aswell as for collective action, with many participants—in short, an emphasison the “urban” over the “design.” This preference implies that it is theparticipants that determine the city more than the physical form. Thebeauty of the expression “spheres of action” is that it implies a communityof actors. In other words, it is ultimately people that define the city, and theiractions that constitute its design.
Which raises the question, what is the role of design in the city? Perhapsthe notion of urban design is undesirable, if not unattainable. Often, theurban areas that are most valued and appreciated are ones that seem to havesprung up organically, or at least incrementally, over time—in other words,not designed. Which begs a second question, can a city truly be designed?Indeed, the urban designer of today is not the master architect ego, à laHoward Rourke in The Fountainhead, making heroic design decisions onthe behalf of others. History is littered with examples of architects who haveattempted to design in this mode at the scale of the city, with failed, evendisastrous results. Rather, the role of the urban designer is to enable citizensto act on their own behalf—to design the structure that allows the possibilityof the city, rather than to design the city itself.
There can be no single designer of the city because the design of the cityis not a finite process; rather it is continual and unending. By necessity,the physical form of the city is shaped by multiple forces, players, andparameters. The urban designer has been likened to an orchestra conductor,someone who directs a process to arrive at a desired collective outcome.Urban design, more than other design disciplines, is inter-disciplinary, cross-ing the boundaries of architecture, planning, landscape architecture, and
1 Harvard Design Magazine,Spring/Summer 2006.
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engineering. Like planning, urban design is a creature of policy, politicaldecision-making, and power structures. Yet it is distinct from urbanplanning, because it is predicated on three-dimensional form. The process ofurban design is to resolve the political, economic, and social vectors with thegoal of arriving at urban form that works.
Although urban designers focus on built form, their design mode differsfrom that of the architecture profession, with its emphasis on the new andthe inventive. Urban designers instead take a more empiricist and pragmaticapproach, observing human interaction with the built environment in aneffort to discern which design moves will hold true for a longer time hori-zon. Cities are meant to last for a very long time. They do not represent theart of any one era, but evolve over time to reflect both the current andcumulative aspirations of their inhabitants. The essays in this chapter makedifferent observations regarding those aspirations, and arrive at differentconclusions as to what makes a city work, but they all describe a workingcity as one that tries to provide equity, sociability, and urbanity.
But it should be recognized that not all spheres of urbanistic action areso ideal, or even so visible or recognizable. Many of the actions that shapethe city occur within entirely separate spheres and with entirely differentmotives, from the traffic engineer whose only objective is to move more carsthrough an intersection to the financial markets that only wish to maximizethe returns and minimize the risk of global capital. Many of the essays in thissection describe underlying cultural currents that direct our urbanisticactions without our even realizing it. So rather than orchestra conductor, amore apt metaphor for the urban designer may be Greek chorus. Often theurban design process is one of trying to make people more aware of theiractions and how those actions impact and ultimately shape the city—a pro-cess of not only enabling, but one of education. Some of the processesdescribed in this section are meant to deliberately counter the global,corporate, financial, and cultural forces that act on our cities: charrettesbring direct public participation into the design process. Finance and zoningmechanisms allow average citizens to act as their own developers to buildtheir own homes and neighborhoods. Artists stage art works, protests, andcelebrations that help people to see their city differently, and uncover thehidden forces that shape it.
Perhaps there is no sphere in which actions shape our physical environ-ment more, or where it is more crucial to raise awareness and enable peopleto act, than that of environmental sustainability. Sustainability has emergedas the critical issue facing the design professions, one reason why the firstvolume in this series of readers focuses on this topic. But beyond sustain-ability as a specific design strategy, we argue in the Preface that urbanism isin and of itself an important contribution toward sustainability. The essayshere remind us that urbanists, as stewards of the built environment, areparticipating in sustainable design. Re-use is a central tenet of sustainability,
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be it the re-use of existing buildings or urban fabric through preservation orthrough the regeneration of waste materials and spaces. As we noted in thePreface, cities are innately more energy-efficient on a per capita basis thansuburban or exurban sprawl; denser is inherently greener. As David Owenpoints out in his essay, the mere act of living in a city is one of the mostsustainable choices one can make.
And so, perhaps we arrive at another definition of urban design, one alsoposed by Alex Krieger: urban design is a frame of mind, a shared com-mitment to the totality of the built environment—to urbanism, to the city.
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THE VIRTUES OF CITIESOBSERVATIONS ALEX KRIEGER (1995)
We Americans have long shown ambivalence towards the city. We have beenambivalent about the value of urbanity to our culture, about the appropriateform that the city should take and, especially, about where one is best placedin relationship to the city. How is “a good place to live” typically repre-sented: a charming porch, a conversation held across a trimly kept yard, abicycle leaning against a picket fence, lots of green space or a stately home?As enticing an evocation as this is, it does not depict a city very well.
Indeed, a number of American cultural predilections inadvertently workagainst establishing good urban places to live. Among our yearnings, forexample, is the desire to be on the move. We want to move up, physically,socially and economically. We want to move away, to start again, to do itbetter the next time around. We want to spread out, to stand apart, toexpress our individuality. It is not on the quarter-acre that we already own,but on one of the millions yet untaken that we dream about, believing thaton it a good place to live and happiness will be found. Notions of rooted-ness, stability and permanence of place, which in many cultures are identi-fied with good places to live and with urbanity, have been among Americansa less pressing matter.
Such yearnings for progress, mobility, individuality and space continue todetermine thousands of choices for dwelling on the periphery of existingcities. Not surprisingly, municipal officials, town planners and mayorsfrequently remark on the diminishing urbanity within their towns. Theydecry the popularity of regional malls, lament the lack of activity alongmain street, worry about falling downtown investment and the migration ofresidents and businesses outward. They blame sprawl for their problemswhile envying the good fortune of prosperous suburbs.
In pondering how their towns might confront such challenges they often,paradoxically, outline a vision that emulates the perceived advantages oflife on the periphery. It is not certain whether such emulation ever bringsresidents back to town, or merchants or places of work, but contributes tothe erasure of distinctions between towns, suburbs, hamlets and other formsof settlement. Without its ramifications fully considered, such homogeniza-tion has also been an American goal.
Pondering human nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson often reflected on thedifficulty of acquiring (much less maintaining) both “rural strength andreligion” and “city facility and polish.” Less philosophical by nature, norinhibited by metaphysical opposites, town boosters before and especiallysince Emerson sought, and often claimed, to have overcome this difficulty.Their efforts to establish what others have ennobled as the “middle
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landscape,” “borderlands,” “garden cities,” “edge cities,” or “greenfields”ultimately reinforce Emerson’s doubts. The great swaths of developmentbetween the ever-receding country and the decongested town seem con-ducive to acquiring neither rural strength and religion nor city facility andpolish.
So perhaps Woody Allen’s claim that he is “two with nature” contains auseful insight about town design. The long-standing American yearning fora state of settlement in which the benefits of urbanity and nature are enjoyedsimultaneously has been exposed as a form of fool’s gold that devalues bothtown and country. To compete with their ever-spreading peripheries citiesand towns might best maintain their own virtues. Under the leavening forcesof rampant disaggregation, however, we need frequent reminders of whatthese virtues are.
Density. An essential ingredient of a town is its density, measured not insquare feet but in the juxtaposition of artifice with human activity. “I havethree chairs in my house:” Thoreau wrote, “one for solitude, two for friend-ship, three for society.” He may have preferred solitude but understood thecivilizing force of aggregation. Density, as distinct from congestion, pro-motes engagement. Interaction, made possible by proximity, is crucial andfar more difficult to sustain where things are spread out across great dis-tance, e-mail notwithstanding. The photographer, Alfred Steiglitz, urgedhis students to move in a little closer, to crop their scene a little tighter, afterthey composed a shot. Similar advise would benefit those who build theAmerican city. Outside of a few pockets of genuine congestion, greaterproximity among buildings and activities would benefit sociability.
Propinquity. In an age promising ever more instant communication it iseasy, but wrongheaded, to assume that physical proximity is no longerimportant. Each day some 75,000 people visit the Mall of America, locatedin Bloomington, Minnesota, conveniently outside both Minneapolis and St.Paul. Are they there merely to shop, or does the popularity of the place liepartially in enabling a primitive kind of propinquity to occur? Some doshop, while more seem to be riding the indoor roller coaster, posing with thegiant Snoopy, building Lego castles and enjoying the crowd. Our need forcontact with others is such that we will commute great distances to placeslike mall concourses, forgetting that they are but simulations of environ-ments traditionally found in cities such as Minneapolis and St. Paul. Thepopularity of recreational shopping, tourism, theme parks, sporting events,specialized museums, trade shows, movie theaters (despite five hundredcable channels), even charity walk-a-thons, expresses a subliminal need forsocial contact—for the sheer pleasure of it.
Heterogeneity within an ordered fabric. This is a corollary to locatingmany things and activities close together. The beauty of Boston’s BackBay lies in the tension between the similarities and differences among thefacades along a block, and the repetition of such blocks along streets which
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themselves subtly differ in dimension, landscaping, edge definition andprincipal use. Buildings, like citizens, warrant their idiosyncrasies so long aseach behaves civilly toward neighbors. Spaced at intervals of a half-acreor more, the need for civility lessens. There is a kind of illusion of autonomyabout buildings spread over a vast landscape.
Juxtaposed realms. Lewis Mumford once defined a town as the placewhere the greatest numbers of choices are available in the smallest geo-graphical area. Nodding approval, we go so far as to label “Central BusinessDistrict” on our zoning maps and mix offices with shops. The demise ofvital downtowns generally parallels the rise in the use of the term CentralBusiness District. Why would anyone want to live, shop, dine, relax, meet afriend, cruise in a convertible, attend a concert, see a movie, go to school,take a walk with a sweetheart, or simply choose to hang out in a place calledthe Central Business District? Because our downtowns have become merebusiness districts their appeal diminishes even for businesses that eventuallyleave in search of environments that offer their employees a wider arrayof amenities. Instead of pining for the return of business interests to thedowntown we should turn our attention to overcoming the absence of allother interests.
Neighbors unlike ourselves. Some of the most charming early suburbs,like Forest Hill Gardens in Queens or Roland Park in Baltimore, contained arich mixture of dwelling sizes and clusters. Diversity in house types is morelikely to accommodate diversity of social, economic and age groups. This isnot particularly popular among contemporary suburban developers, manyof whom cater their subdivisions to increasingly narrow segments of thepopulation. A growing concern about such environments is that they breedindifference, or worse, intolerance, towards social groups beyond their gates.Such indifference is unlikely to enhance democracy. While towns werealways made up of defined neighborhoods, and even enclaves, proximityamong them, along with shared streets and public spaces, assured regularinteraction. Such interaction, or the mere promise of it, remains one of theadvantages of town life.
Social landmarks. A statue of President McKinley graces and organizestraffic in an otherwise graceless rotary in North Adams, Massachusetts. Thecenter of Riverside, Illinois, one of the nation’s earliest planned suburbs, ismarked by a modest train depot and a beautiful water tower. Landmarksconfer coherence and legibility, not status. They highlight things that aredear to a community—like remembering a president or the storage ofwater. They are not produced by labeling, or through form alone. This isapparently beyond the comprehension of those who name their shoppingstrip “Center Place,” their office park “Landmark Square,” and mark eachwith a faux campanile.
Texture, detail and narrative. The many buffalo gargoyles on the faceof the city hall in Buffalo, New York are not only endearing, but relate a
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place-name to an entire epoch of frontier urbanization. An old storefront inNew Bedford, Massachusetts may carry reminders of ships, whaling andtrade, not unlike a street in modern Tokyo that exhibits the near-cacophonyof a culture obsessed with digital technology. Public environments benefitfrom such excesses. Robert Browning’s “less is more” was not intended todescribe a town’s public realm. The aphorism’s principal modern pro-ponent, Mies van der Rohe, could also be heard to say, “God rests in thedetails.” A preponderance of detail invested with qualities characteristic of aplace was for Kevin Lynch essential to good city form. These details arewhat Italo Calvino’s Marco Polo describes to Kubla Khan in order to makehim see the cities of his travels.
Connectivity. Some of today’s most frustrating rush hour snarls occur onthe perimeter highways, which pass through the uncrowded suburbs.Arterial highways channel traffic and, therefore, limit choice. A network ofstreets, narrow, crooked and even redundant, provides actual choice and,more importantly, the promise of choice. On a congested highway relief isno closer than the next set of exit ramps, assuming one knows where theylead. By taking a quick left followed by a right while negotiating an urbanstreet grid, a less busy parallel street is found, a traffic back-up may beavoided, a “short-cut” is imagined, a sense of control or freedom is main-tained. This is an advantage that every city cabbie understands, but fewhighway engineers ever acknowledge.
Streetfronts. In a typical contemporary subdivision the elements furthestaway from the street right-of-way seem to receive the greatest designattention. Unfortunately, this leaves much of what influences the experienceof the public realm under-designed. On the inside of the fence in a Phoenixsubdivision there are beautiful homes, immaculate lawns, wonderfulterraces, decks and gardens. On the public side there is simply a road forcirculation assumed to require none of the pleasures provided by fronting ona street, instead of an artery.
Immediacy of experience. Americans are known for their dislike ofwalking. Yet they actually walk hundreds of yards each day through parkinglots, through shopping malls, through corridors of large buildings, throughairport terminals. Much of this walking is caused by providing for theconvenience of the automobile, and much of it is forgettable. In a car, or onfoot, we commute to a destination. The suburban landscape seems to onlyoffer destinations. But it is the seductions along an interesting path thatmake walking—and cities—enjoyable.
Sustainability, persistence, and adaptability. While few parts of anycity warrant strict preservation, virtually all have potential for reuse.Unfortunately this is often overlooked in the zeal to build anew, usuallysomewhere else, under the dubious supposition that rebuilding will enableus to get it right the next time. The town of Southfield, a few miles north ofDetroit, now boasts a daily commuter population greater than Detroit’s.
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Largely made up of office parks strung along a highway, Southfield’s chiefadvantage seems to be that it is new and not Detroit. And so with each newSouthfield a Detroit withers, but, one suspects, only temporarily. Long afterthe single-function office towers of Southfield become outmoded (or simplyless new and less profitable) enough of the infrastructure, street grid, build-ing stock, cultural institutions, historic monuments, and neighborhooddomains of Detroit will have survived to initiate, perhaps even inspire,reuse. The archetypal suburban landscape, with its coarse grain of develop-ment, relative absence of history, and single-use zoning has yet to prove asadaptable to changing social habits or needs.
Overlapping boundaries. A city is like a stacking of translucent quilts,with layers of social, architectural and geographical strata sometimes care-fully, sometimes imperfectly registered. Subtle or precise, such overlappingof precincts is crucial to place-making. An environment without perceivableboundaries is amorphous, indistinguishable from its surroundings andgenerally place-less. This is sadly characteristic of much of the modernmetropolitan landscape. With apologies to Robert Frost, good fences maynot insure good neighbors but neither does their absence foster connectivityor communality.
Public life. A large downtown shopping mall is a marvel of design and amagnet for activity. But a careful observer will note the limited range ofactivities that takes place inside. You will be ushered out unto the street forbehavior deemed inappropriate by the management. On that street, lowly orgrand, you have rejoined the town. In a city the sense of proximity to apublic realm remains palpable, with standards of acceptable public behaviordiscreetly reinforced. An urban environment cherishes this relative opennessand, therefore, yields to privatization only with considerable reluctance.
The potential for a centered life. Against most planners’ predictions, LosAngeles—the proverbial score of suburbs in search of a town—has recentlygrown a visible downtown. It is really mostly a collection of corporate officetowers, the product of speculative land economics at work. Yet perhapsthere is something in human nature that seeks comfort in centering, andsuch vertical outcroppings of commerce satisfy that impulse, at least sceno-graphically. While there may be fewer economic and technological reasonsfor concentration, the new Los Angeles downtown or, for that matter, thecontinuing reinvestment in Boston’s much older center, are expressions ofsupport for centering—concentration as a matter of choice rather than as anhistoric imperative.
There are those who believe that we will continue to disaggregate, leavingcities to live in closer proximity to the splendors of nature, with technologyproviding a modicum of (digital) social contact. Then how does one explainthe invention of the “internet” cafe? Will not the very convenience of beingable to perform most daily errands, most work functions and most businesstransactions from the privacy of our own homes (or anywhere else for that
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matter) compel us to escape the attendant disengagement from society?Retarding isolation will remain the special virtue of the contemporarycity. In it, and nowhere else as poignantly, a citizen can still partake ofthe pleasures of overlap, the pleasures of proximity, the pleasures ofpropinquity.
This essay is abridged from the original, which first appeared in Places: Forum ofDesign for the Public Realm, September 1995.
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WORKING CITIESOBSERVATIONS Density, risk, spontaneity
J. MAX BOND, Jr. (2001)
Cities reflect social and cultural norms as well as economic and technicalmeans. They are also expressions of belief and will. The current state of ourcities reflects much about our time: mobility, governmental policies, tech-nical shifts, race relations, materialism. Notwithstanding the continuinggrowth of suburbs and their attendant “edge cities” there is also evidence ofa renewed interest in our older cities. Urban redevelopment is being drivenby a number of factors, from retooling of the local economy to creativere-use of former industrial districts. While this redevelopment is welcomein any guise, contemporary urbanism in the U.S. betrays tendencies thatare antithetical to true urban regeneration because they don’t deal with thewhole city.
We are witnessing the suburbanization of our cities through the replace-ment of multi-family dwellings with single family homes and row housing.This makes inefficient use of the existing urban infrastructure and impairsthe ability of neighborhoods to generate the local commerce that dis-tinguishes walking cities from car-dependent suburbs.
Our cities are undergoing a process of sanitization, an effort to redesigncomplex urban environments with a narrower palette pitched to bourgeoissensibilities. New York City’s Forty-Second Street, for example, was notonly a sleazy precinct but also an entertainment center for working classkids. The redevelopment sponsored by Disney may make tourists morecomfortable, because it is so familiar, but at the cost of the city’s messyrealism. Urban regeneration is often propelled by the gentrification ofworking class districts into expensive upper middle class enclaves. Thisprocess is frequently attended by cultural cleansing and the withdrawal ofsupport systems for people of low income.
There is a palpable fear of risk in current American culture thatwants to make everything safe and predictable. As a nation we areambivalent about the very diversity we value. The success of the ersatztownscapes at Disney World’s Epcot and Universal Studios’ City Walkconfirms both our attraction to and fear of close encounters with othercultures. The city offers the possibility of the unexpected, even shocking,encounter.
These phenomena reinforce the consumerism that is the bedrock of ournational economy and ideology. They manifest an imbalance in spendingon private as opposed to public amenities, an emphasis on consumerproducts instead of buildings and places. The shopping mall and festivalmarketplace remove the agora to privately owned and controlled settings.
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Government policy favors the private automobile over mass transit despitethe cost in congestion, pollution and personal injury. Budget surpluses aretargeted for tax cuts rather than improved services and environments.
We may participate in a global society but we live in geographicallyspecific places. A list of what makes good cities is fairly obvious, encom-passing physical, economic, social and environmental elements. But inU.S. cities these elements are rarely applied with equal resources and com-mitment to the vast areas inhabited by the majority of people—workingpeople in need of working cities. I speak here of quality housing, schools andlibraries; of reliable and efficient municipal services; of properly funded andmaintained public transportation of parks and playgrounds. In poorerneighborhoods these essentials of decent living are too often inadequate.Because there is a high correlation between poverty and race in our cities,this burden falls disproportionately on minority groups.
Transforming a city to serve all the people requires a shift in values,attitude and will. America is rich enough to be able to make choices andcreate the city that reflects our goals. What will it take to create a workingcity? An emphasis on ordinary buildings as well as the exceptional. A focuson the public realm and systems. Increased emphasis on the visual quality ofthe environment. A merging of the disciplines of architecture and urbandesign. A shift in government priorities to support desirable land uses andurban systems. Support for the local economy, including the informal sector.
Cities must be well designed. Urban populations will only grow sig-nificantly if cities provide services, amenities and an attractive physicalenvironment for all people. For poor people cities offer opportunity; forartists and dissidents they offer freedom. For all they present the possibilityof social interaction and cultural growth. These qualities have been intrinsicto cities throughout history and explain why people still flock to vibranturban neighborhoods. The range of possibilities offered by cities is alsowhy our urban future does not reside in a risk-free bourgeois vision but ina denser, more broadly based, model of a pluralistic, dynamic and publicurbanism.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 89th Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2001.
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MEANINGFUL URBAN DESIGNOBSERVATIONS Teleological/catalytic/relevant
ASEEM INAM (1999)
MEANINGFUL URBAN DESIGN
The conventional approach to defining the field of urban design is morpho-logical; that is, according to the way it is structured and organized. Urbandesign is often regarded as an ambiguous combination of architecture,urban planning, landscape architecture, and civil engineering. This defin-ition puts urban designers at odds over power and resource with architects,planners, landscape architects, and civil engineers, and thereby dilutes theleading role urban design can play in the blossoming of cities. Furthermore,much of the recent interest in urban design repeats the familiar deficienciesof the past, such as a focus on the superficial aesthetics and picturesqueaspects of cities; an over-emphasis on the architect as urban designer and asingular obsession with design; an understanding of urban design primarilyas a finished product; and a pedagogical process that is comfortably rootedin architecture and design (e.g. matters of visual composition).
One major problem with current urban design thought and practiceis the sense that it is architecture, only at a larger scale and within anurban context. In this school of thought, there is far too much emphasison the “design”, and not enough of an understanding of the “urban.”Attempting to design a city as one designs a building is clearly misleadingand dangerous, because unlike individual buildings that tend to be objects,cities are highly complex, large scale, active entities, and contain a bewilder-ing multiplicity of communities. Few contemporary urban designersdemonstrate a fundamental understanding of the complex ways in whichcities function. Especially glaring is the naiveté of contemporary urbandesigners vis-à-vis power structures and decision-making processes, whichare dominated by politicians, bureaucrats, corporations, developers, andinterest groups.
I propose a meaningful approach to urban design, one that is truly con-sequential in improving the essential qualities of city life. The approachconsists of being teleological, that is, driven by purpose rather than definedby disciplines; being catalytic, that is, generating or contributing to long-term development processes; and being relevant, that is, grounded in firstcauses and pertinent human values. In my view, then, urban design is drivenby the purpose of addressing fundamental urban challenges, circumscribedby urban scale and complexity, and rests upon an interdisciplinary set ofskills, methodologies, and bodies of knowledge.
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TELEOLOGICAL
Urban design is an ongoing process with built forms such as open spaces,building complexes, and districts produced along the way. Primarily, itis a stimulus to other goals that are more critical to society and to thesubstantive challenges facing contemporary cities. These goals includecommunity empowerment and social integration, inner city revitalization,cross-cultural learning and collaboration, effective land use, and a widerrange of urban form choices for citizens.
A teleological urban design would address three critical aspects of theurban experience, which are the relationships between the city and theeconomy, the city and society, and the city and power. The relation-ship between the city and the economy considers the economic functioningof the city, including the city as a point in the production landscape as wellas a site of investment, the changing international division of labor, andthe consequent effects on the specific urban economies. The relationshipbetween the city and society focuses on the city as an arena of social inter-action, the distribution of social groups, residential segregation, the con-struction of gender and ethnic identities, and patterns of class formation.The relationship between the city and power is the representation ofurban structure and political power, and considers the city to be a systemof communication, a recorder of the distribution of power, and an arenafor the social struggles over the meaning and substance of the urbanexperience.
Such an approach would address the question: Why should the field ofurban design even exist when there are far more powerful actors shapingcities? Because urban design is the only field that is geared specificallyto shape the three-dimensional urban environment at multiple scales, and toconstantly assert an effective symbiosis between urban form and society andits political-economic structures.
CATALYTIC
Urban design projects and processes would generate or contribute sig-nificantly to three types of socio-economic development processes whileenhancing the built environment of cities: community development;economic development; and international development.
Urban design as a catalyst for community development consists of intelli-gent community participation in projects, facilitated by: dialogue betweencommunity representatives and urban designers; community leadershipwhich is representative of broader community views; institutional partner-ships, for example between private and nonprofit sectors; decision-makingsystems such as simulations and games; and the soft-programming of urbandesign, like the incorporation of public art into projects, and the integrationof designed activities, events, programs, and services integrated into builtform.
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For the urban designer, design communication is inherent in the act ofdesign, both as internal communication in the thinking process, and as anexternal communication with the client, user, or broader community.The people within a given context, such as homeowners in a residentialneighborhood or business owners in a commercial downtown, are theagents of change, aided by a communication process that speaks to theformal aspects of their environment. The better this communication processof design is, the higher the level of public awareness and sense of ownership,and the better the internal decisions of change. There are conventionalpublic involvement formats such as public hearings, city council meetings,and planning commission presentations, as well as informal meetings,workshops, and brainstorming sessions. The charrette is one of the morepowerful and effective mechanisms for active and intelligent communityparticipation.
The Urban Design Group in the UK1 provides a series of clear, concise,and extremely useful community participation forums, including innovativemechanisms such as street stalls and interactive displays. The popularity ofthe computer program SimCity, a city building simulator, attests to thepossibility of designing urban simulation models with broad public appeal.These examples point to creative, engaging, and beneficial forms of not onlycommunity participation, but more significantly, community development,because they increase community awareness, generate community strat-egies, and suggest modes of community intervention in the future of theirown environments.
An example of soft-programming as a long-term process of communitydevelopment is illustrated by the Hismen Hin-nu Terrace housing project inOakland, California.2 With a grant from the City of Oakland, the architectMichael Pyatok studied development scenarios for housing and neighbor-hood services on several sites in the city and organized a series of workshopsusing participatory modeling kits to help over 30 neighborhood participantsto design plans for the site and to understand the implications of density.The project not only houses families and elderly citizens with low incomes,but also helps mend a deteriorating neighborhood by restoring its mainboulevard with housing over shops. Family housing with a day care centeraround quiet courtyards is built behind a ground-floor market, niches forstreet vendors, and a job-training center, all of which contribute to com-munity development in the neighborhood. A multi-ethnic mix of tenants isdepicted in exterior murals, frieze panels, decorative tiles, and steel entrygates in the form of a burst of sunshine. The art is intended to prove thatAmerica’s cultural diversity is a source of energy for creating community,rather than a source of conflict.
Urban design as a catalyst for economic development involves designingprojects that generate employment on a long-term basis, that attract invest-ment into deprived areas, and that increase business and tax revenues.
1 Urban Design Group, “Involvinglocal communities in urbandesign.”
2 Jones, Pettus and Pyatok, GoodNeighbors: Affordable FamilyHousing.
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Horton Plaza, a highly successful shopping center in San Diego, gener-ated jobs for local residents when city officials utilized their position asstakeholders in the project to fill half of the nearly 1,000 new jobs, with70 percent minority workers and 60 percent from high-unemployment,low-income neighborhoods.
Urban design as a catalyst for international development takes the guiseof sensitivity to indigenous and cosmopolitan contexts, the generation ofcross-cultural learning, and urban mediations of economic globalization.
Cross-cultural learning arises out of understanding and applying in asympathetic and appropriate manner, urban design methodologies, pro-cesses, and forms from different cultural contexts.3 For example, housingauthorities in the United States could learn from Henri Ciriani’s socialhousing projects in France, which serve as a demonstration of how large-scale low-income housing projects built by the government can constitutepositive contributions to the urban environment instead of being eyesores.La Courdangle, a large social housing project outside Paris in Saint Denis,4
is a seven-story building with striped cladding and geometric frieze thatforms a corner in an otherwise loosely structured urban space. By creating avisually strong plan of geometrical precision, the project inspires a still-lifecomposition device in urban design. Transformed into a picture plane, thevarious free-standing buildings as well as high-rise buildings that surroundthe project integrate into a more harmonious urban setting. The courtyardside of the building is a pure, right-angled figure containing a perfectlydefined square space. The layering of the facades facilitates the articulationof the decreasing volumes, contains the apartments’ balconies and terraces,and mediates between the architecture of the building and the urbanity ofthe neighborhood. In this manner, La Courdangle constitutes a low-incomehousing project that is rich in architectural spaces and detail, while helpingdefine and enhance the urban space around it.
The ongoing phenomenon of globalization suggests some strategies forurban designers. Urban designers must be able to understand and react toinfluences impinging on their communities, regardless of where thoseinfluences originate (e.g. World Bank funded housing projects in developingcountries) and which actors are responsible (e.g. American architecturalfirms designing office complexes in London). Furthermore, urban designersmust develop associations and networks that extend beyond their spatialreach through collaborative endeavors and thereby provide anothermechanism for responding to the multitude of actors who shape theircommunities. For example, the Indian architect B.V. Doshi utilized an insti-tution, the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation for Studies and Research, to develop aninternationally funded (i.e. World Bank), local (i.e. Indore, India) housingproject in India, Aranya Nagar.5 The project has been largely a success dueto the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation, which carried out considerable research,including surveys to understand the physical and economic factors that
3 Inam, “Institutions, routines, andcrises: post-earthquake housingrecovery in Mexico City and LosAngeles.”
4 Ciriani, Henri Ciriani, pp. 66–73.
5 Serageldin, The Architecture ofEmpowerment: People, Shelter andLivable Cities.
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determine the size, type, and density of the housing plots that were specific tothe local context. The project translated international expectations intolocal needs through grassroots research.
RELEVANT
Urban design that is relevant is pertinent to matters at hand, and is based onfundamental human and natural conditions. I highlight three such relevantapproaches to urban design: (1) a history of urban form that analyzesthe determinant processes and human meanings of form, (2) a theory ofurban form that is normative and based on human values, and (3) a designmethodology of urban form that is empirically based and derived frompatterns of human behavior.
Urban form is related directly to urban process over time; that is, theconjunction of people, forces, and institutions that brings about urbanform. A way to examine this historical process is to ask probing researchquestions: Who actually designs cities? What procedures do they gothrough? Which are the empowering institutions and laws? Urban processalso refers to physical change through time. The tendency all too often is tosee urban form as a finite thing and a complicated object, but thousands ofwitting and unwitting acts every day alter a city’s lines in ways that areperceptible only over a certain stretch of time. City walls are pulled downand filled in; once rational grids are slowly obscured; a slashing diagonalboulevard is run through close-grained residential neighborhoods; rail-road tracks usurp cemeteries and waterfronts; and wars, fires, and highwaysannihilate city cores.6
As an example, let us consider the grid in history. The point ismade regularly that grids, especially in the United States, besides offeringsimplicity in land surveying, recording, and subsequent ownership transfer,also favored a fundamental democracy in property market participation.This did not mean that individual wealth could not appropriate con-siderable property, but rather that the basic initial geometry of land parcelsbespoke a simple egalitarianism that invited easy entry into the urban landmarket. The reality, however, is much less admirable. Ordinary citizensgained easy access to urban land only at a preliminary phase, when cheaprural land was being urbanized through rapid laying out. To the extent thatthe grid sped this process and streamlined absentee purchases, it may beconsidered an equalizing social device. Once the land had been identifiedwith the city, however, this advantage of the initial geometry of landparcels evaporated, and even unbuilt lots slipped out of common reach.What matters most in the long run is not the mystique of the grid geometry,but the luck of first ownership.7
For the conventional urban designer, a grid is simply a grid.8 At best it is avisual theme upon which to play variations: he or she might be concernedwith issues like using a true checkerboard design versus syncopated block
6 Kostof, The City Shaped: UrbanPatterns and Meanings ThroughHistory, p. 13.
7 Ibid., p. 100.
8 Ibid., pp. 10–11.
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rhythms, with cross-axial or other types of emphasis, with the placement ofopen spaces within the discipline of the grid, with the width and hierarchy ofstreets. For the meaningful urban designer, on the other hand, how, and withwhat intentions, the Romans in Britain, the builders of medieval Wales andGascony, the Spanish in Mexico, or the Illinois Central Railroad Companyin the American Midwest employed the same device of settlement is theprincipal substance of a review of orthogonal design. In fact, the grid hasaccommodated a startling variety of social structures, including territorialaristocracy in Greek Sicily, the agrarian republicanism of Thomas Jefferson,the cosmic vision of Joseph Smith in Mormon settlements like Salt LakeCity, and capitalist speculation.
There have been few serious attempts at a comprehensive and normativetheory of urban form. The book Good City Form is an impressive anddaring attempt by Kevin Lynch9 at a systematic effort to state general rela-tionships between the form of a place and its value to society. Lynch general-izes performance dimensions, which are certain identifiable characteristicsof cities due primarily to their spatial qualities and are measurable scalesalong which different groups achieve different positions. These performancedimensions are based on the following thinking:
The good city is one in which the continuity of [a] complex ecology ismaintained while progressive change is permitted. The fundamental goodis the continuous development of the individual or the small group andtheir culture: a process of becoming more complex, more richly connected,more competent, acquiring and realizing new powers—intellectual,emotional, social and physical . . . So that settlement is good whichenhances the continuity of a culture and the survival of its people, increasesa sense of connection in time and space, and permits or spurs individualgrowth: development, within continuity, via openness and connection . . .[a settlement that is] accessible, decentralized, diverse, adaptable, andtolerant to experiment. 10
In Lynch’s theory of good city form, there are seven basic dimensions. Firstis vitality, which is the degree to which an urban form supports the vitalfunctions, biological requirements, and capabilities, and protects the sur-vival of human beings, for example, via adequate throughput of water, air,food, and energy. Second is sense, which is the degree to which an urbanform is clearly perceived and mentally differentiated as well as structured intime and space, and the degree to which that mental structure connects withthe residents’ values and concepts, for example, via a distinct identity andunconstrained legibility. Third is fit, which is the degree to which urbanform matches the pattern and quantity of actions that people usually engagein, for example, via compatibility between function and form. Fourth isaccess, which is the ability to reach other people, activities, resources, and
9 Lynch, Good City Form.
10 Ibid., pp. 116–117.
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places, including the quantity and diversity of the elements that can bereached, for example, via ease of communication and movement. Fifth iscontrol, which is the degree to which the creation, access, use, maintenance,and modification to urban spaces and activities is managed by thosewho use, work or live in them, for example, via localized power. Sixthis efficiency, which is the cost of creating and maintaining an urban form,for example, via less energy-demanding processes. Seventh is justice,which is the way in which urban form costs and benefits are distributedamong people, according to a principles such as intrinsic worth or equity,for example, via equal protection from environmental hazards such astraffic and pollution.
A problem-solving approach to urban design would explicitly render itsdesign methodology, and describe how a meaningful urban designer mightdraw directly from empirical evidence and systematic research. The book APattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al. is most useful as a seriesof thoroughly analyzed and empirically based guidelines to solving commonproblems of urban form. Each suggested solution is described in a way thatprovides the key relationships, for example, between human behavior andspatial setting, needed to solve the problem, but in a general enough mannerto allow for adaptation to particular lifestyles, aesthetic tastes, and localconditions. Each pattern describes a problem that occurs repeatedly in thebuilt environment. The authors outline an urban design methodology that isbased on archetypal problems (e.g. neighborhood size), analyses of builtexamples, descriptions of historical precedents, and the explicit unpackingof design solutions to render them clear, relevant, and thoughtful. The basisfor the design patterns was extensive and thorough empirical research car-ried on over an eight-year period. There continues to be voluminousresearch on environment and behavior (e.g. Moore and Marans11) that ishighly relevant and useful for urban designers.
DESIGNING THE FUTURE OF URBAN DESIGN
Urban designers are beginning to question what in fact is “urban” in thecontemporary environment. A city is and will continue to be a relativelylarge, dense, and permanent settlement (or network of settlements) ofsocially heterogeneous individuals, and a point (or points) of maximumconcentration for the power and culture of a community. A city is, and willcontinue to be, a catalyst: its power of attraction providing a concentrationand diversity of peoples and purposes; its form celebrating the richcomplexity of the human condition; its essence the true nature of humanpotential.12
In this vein, urban designers should focus more on the “urban” of urbandesign, and become less infatuated with the “design” of urban design.Urban design must begin with cities: how they work, how they change, andwhat impacts they have in creating enabling versus destructive impacts.
11 Moore and Marans, Advances inEnvironment, Behaviour, andDesign.
12 Inam, “City, catalyst of hope.”
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For example, urban design has to be seen as both, within the framework ofinvestment and development policies, and as a shaper of those policies.Examples include David Crane’s “capital web of investment decisions”,13
and Richard Lai’s “invisible web of laws”14 that guide people’s behavior. Anillustration of these “webs” is the dependence on private investments andinitiatives for downtown rebuilding in American cities that has changedurban politics and the nature of the public realm. Private investment isgenerally seen as performing functions in the public interest. The publicsector has become a facilitator; it responds to, reacts to, and regulatesprivate initiatives. There is give-and-take in these public–private transactionsas developers demand enhanced development rights, zoning variances, landwrite-down, financial guarantees, or improvements in order to initiateinvestment in American downtowns, while planners require in returncertain urban amenities, usually public open space, street improvements,public art, housing, or even day care centers.15 The form of the contemporaryurban downtown is a product of negotiation, bargaining, and deal-makingbetween city governments and private developers, and not simply theproduct of an urban designer’s imagination.
In this essay, there are three levels of success for an urban design project.These include first, the purely aesthetically informed notion of urban designas a finished product: Does it look good? By the means of compressingits meanings into a concise formal expression, a poetic urban designproject draws the mind to a level of perception concealed behind theconventional presentations of urban form. The second is the sense ofthe project as an object that functions in an affordable, convenient andcomfortable manner for its users: Does it work well? By the means of ameticulous understanding of human behavior and human needs, a trulyutilitarian urban design project creates an environment that satisfies itsusers. The third is to have the urban design project generate or substantiallycontribute to socio-economic development processes: Does it producesignificant long-term impacts? In this framework, urban designers andurban design projects become catalysts for long-term human developmentprocesses such as community betterment, economic improvement, andcross-cultural understanding.
The critical question that guides this meaningful future of urban designis: So what? That is, what consequential purpose has been achieved byparticular urban design theories, urban design methodologies, urban designpractices, and urban design projects? In order to further develop this lineof thought, we can look to the American school of philosophy known aspragmatism. Pragmatism may be best characterized as the attempt to assessthe significance for human value of technology in the broadest sense; that is,technology as the totality of means employed to provide objects necessaryfor human sustenance.16 The primary question that pragmatism raisesis the question of meaning. Under what conditions does a statement
13 David Crane, Planning andDesign in New York: A Study ofProblems and Processes of itsPhysical Environment.
14 Richard Lai, Law in UrbanDesign and Planning: The InvisibleWeb.
15 Loukaitou-Sideris and Banerjee,Urban Design Downtown: Poeticsand Politics of Form.
16 Kaplan, The New World ofPhilosophy, p. 14.
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have meaning, and what meaning attaches to it in the light of thoseconditions?
What these formulations amount to is this: What conceivable bearingdoes a proposition, such as meaningful urban design, have on the conductof our lives? Meanings, above all, involve purposes: and a meaningful urbandesign should involve the most substantive purposes of generating long-termprocesses of human development and ensuring that outcomes of those pro-cesses are highly pertinent to fundamental human values. Such an approachto urban design requires profound cultural understanding, social sensitivity,political savvy, and an in-depth grasp of the nature of cities; but in order tobe truly meaningful, it needs to be driven primarily by a moral imperative.We can no longer afford to conceive of critical urban challenges—such aspoverty and homelessness—and the socio-economic development processesthat address them as being separate from urban design practices and pro-jects. To be effective urban designers, we must help design the processes thatshape our cities and foster true human development.
REFERENCES
Alexander, C., S. Ishikawa, M. Silverstein, M. Jacobson, I. Fiksdahl-King andS. Angel (1977) A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York,Oxford University Press).
Adams, P. (1997) SimCity, Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and
Planning, 14 (6): pp. 383–392.Beauregard, R. (1995) Theorizing the global-local connection, in: P. Knox and
P. Taylor (Eds.) World Cities in a World System (Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress).
Bratt, R. (1986) Public housing: the controversy and the contribution, in: R. Bratt,C. Hartman and A. Meyerson (Eds.) Critical Perspectives in Housing (Philadel-phia, Temple University Press).
Ciriani, H. (1997) Henri Ciriani (Rockport MA, Rockport Publishers).Crane, D. (1966) Planning and Design in New York: A Study of Problems and
Processes of its Physical Environment (New York, Institute of PublicAdministration).
Ellin, N. (1996) Postmodern Urbanism (Cambridge MA, Blackwell Publishers).Frampton, K. (1992) Modern Architecture: A Critical History (3rd edn., London,
Thames and Hudson Limited).Harvey. D. (1996) On architects, bees, and possible urban worlds, in: C. Davidson
(Ed.) Anywise (New York, Anyone Corporation).Inam, A. (1985) L’Architecture rurale en Inde: indices vers un avenir. Master’s thesis
in architecture, Paris, Ecole des Beaux-Arts.Inam, A. (1991) City, catalyst of hope. Manifesto, St. Louis, Washington University.Inam, A. (1992) The urban monument: symbol, memory, presence. Master’s thesis in
urban design, St. Louis, Washington University.Inam, A. (1997) Institutions, routines, and crises: post-earthquake housing recovery
in Mexico City and Los Angeles. Doctoral dissertation in urban planning, LosAngeles, University of Southern California.
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Jacobs, A. (1993) Great Streets (Cambridge MA, M.I.T. Press).Jones, T., W. Pettus and M. Pyatok (1995) Good Neighbors: Affordable Family
Housing (New York, McGraw-Hill).Kaplan, A. (1961) The New World of Philosophy (New York, Vintage Books).Katz, P. (1994) The New Urbanism: Towards an Architecture of Community (New
York, McGraw-Hill).Kelbaugh, D. (1997) Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design
(Seattle, University of Washington Press).Koolhaas, R. (1995) Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large (Rotterdam, 010
Publishers).Kostof, S. (1991) The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History
(Boston, Bulfinch Press).Lai, R.T. (1988) Law in Urban Design and Planning: The Invisible Web (New York,
Van Nostrand Reinhold).Loukaitou-Sideris, A. (1996) Cracks in the city: addressing the constraints and poten-
tials of urban design, Journal of Urban Design, 1 (1): pp. 91–103.Loukaitou-Sideris, A. and T. Banerjee (1998) Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and
Politics of Form (Berkeley, University of California Press).Lynch, K. (1984) Good City Form (Cambridge MA, M.I.T. Press, first published 1981
as A Theory of Good City Form).Moore, G. and R. Marans (Eds.) (1997) Advances in Environment, Behavior, and
Design: Toward the Integration of Theory, Methods, Research, and Utilization
(New York, Plenum Press).Moudon, A. (1992) A Catholic approach to organizing what urban designers should
know, Journal of Planning Literature, 6 (4): pp. 331–349.Relph, E. (1976) Place and Placelessness (London, Pion).Rowe, P. (1991) Making a Middle Landscape (Cambridge MA, M.I.T. Press).Saunders, W. (1997) Rem Koolhaas’s writing on cities: poetic perception and gnomic
fantasy, Journal of Architectural Education, 51 (1): pp. 61–71; and below,pp. 217–231.
Scott Brown, D. (1990) Urban Concepts (London, Academy Editions).Serageldin, I. (Ed.) (1997) The Architecture of Empowerment: People, Shelter and
Livable Cities (London, Academy Editions).Short, J.R. (1996) The Urban Order: An Introduction to Cities, Culture, and Power
(Cambridge MA, Blackwell Publishers).Urban Design Group (1998) Involving local communities in urban design, Urban
Design Quarterly, Issue 67 (July): pp. 15–38.Whyte, W. (1988) City: Rediscovering the Center (New York, Doubleday).
This essay is abridged from the original published in the Proceedings of the87th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1999.
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MATHEMATICS OF THE IDEAL ROADTRIPOBSERVATIONS CHRISTOPHER MONSON (1986)
[We Europeans] shall never enjoy the same freedom—not the formalfreedom we take for granted, but the concrete, flexible, functional, activefreedom we see at work in American institutions and in the head ofeach citizen. Our conception of freedom will never be able to rival theirspatial, mobile conception, which derives from the fact that at a certainpoint they freed themselves from [a] historical centrality.
Jean Baudrillard, from the roadtrip classic America 1
On U.S. Highway 93, which runs through the Flathead Valley from BritishColumbia to Missoula and on south eventually to Arizona, lies the city ofKalispell, Montana. Save for its spectacular mountain setting, this small citymight be mistaken for any typical American place, being formed by twointersecting highways and orthogonally gridded, with streets numberednorth to south and avenues east to west. Through Kalispell, U.S. 93 becomesthe city’s Main Street. On its south end, Main Street is forced around a plotin the middle of the roadway, the site of the Flathead County Courthouse.This physical fact would be unremarkable—the building being neither par-ticularly handsome nor its siting unusual—except for the curious experienceof driving around it. One can sense clearly, even without benefit of a map,that the Courthouse occupies the singular instance in the entire city gridwhere the regulation of order, of movement, was denied for another publicdomain: the symbolic center of regional government.
Certainly the reading intended at Kalispell is that of the “noble city,” of acitizenry made virtuous by the centrality of government. And yet travelingaround this plot, full with its civil aspirations of both place and polity,remains a distinctly troublesome act, not merely in the discomfort of follow-ing short curves in a road that by rights should be straight, but with thenagging fact of that particularly American feeling—by rights it should bestraight.
Such a thought might be dismissed as anti-authoritarian Americanpopulism if it were not for the suspicion that it is exactly such populism thesiting of the Courthouse seems to be resisting. After all, broad avenuestopped with courthouses are more Haussmann than Everyman. But the con-cern may be less a question of unwarranted authority than one of deferenceto an outside tradition. It appears that the Courthouse’s placement—a sitedeviation of a mere 150 feet from the grid in which it might have easily beenbuilt—is construed to be a civil act of profound consequence. The clearsuggestion is that the grid itself does not contain this political necessity; thatthe Courthouse site, as a dis-placement of both the ordered field and of
1 Jean Baudrillard, America, ChrisTurner trans. (London: Verso, 1988),p. 81.
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movement through it, is seen to exhibit some ideal civility that its surroundsapparently lack.
The denial of movement for the institution of a traditional center strikesat the heart of the American social compact. It is this assault put to thepossibility of indigenous form which makes Kalispell and places like it sodisconcerting, both to the citizen and the enlightened critic. Baudrillardmakes the point that it is exactly such urban civil traditions that have beensuperseded by the American project: a “historical centrality” overcome bythe spatial and mobile conception of American freedom. If Baudrillardoffers reason for the anxiety caused by Kalispell’s formal nature, then wehave a right to wonder about the recurring attempts to institute a civil orderin America through this Trojan Horse of historic form.
Should this challenge to an indigenous American civil form gounquestioned? Confronted with the rapid academic and legislativelegitimization of postmodern urban strategies, Americans might do betterby revisiting those who have offered criticism of these appropriatedtraditions. Frank Lloyd Wright made a career out of it (most notably withBroadacre City), a practice largely indebted to the eloquent plea of HoratioGreenough nearly a century before: “The want of an illustrious ancestrymay be compensated, fully compensated; but the purloining of the coat-of-arms of a defunct family is intolerable.”2 Perhaps the issue is not thatAmericans haven’t thought it incorrect to appropriate the forms of history—certainly, thinkers have long offered arguments to the contrary. But therestill appears to be a lack of faith in the possibility of a commensuratedemocratic order outside of this history and its aristocratic ideals. This isindeed a problem. Against the backdrop of history’s great intellectual and
Main Street in Kalispell, Montana,with axial view toward the FlatheadCounty Courthouse. (Photo: KarenNichols.)
2 Horatio Greenough, “AmericanArchitecture” in Form and Function:Remarks on Art, Design, andArchitecture (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1958), p. 64.
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artistic achievements, it is not certain whether we might produce com-parable successes which exemplify a society of equality.3
To what then can a truly American ideal aspire? The lesson from Kalispellis that the movement expected within the American landscape instills somepossibility toward giving form to the collective. The functions of the roadwhich manifest this notion—one could suggest its “mathematics”—givereason to suspect imposed hierarchy, precisely because the road’s nature,its equanimity, diversity, and individuality, is seen counterpoised to suchtraditions. The search for the proper American collective begins with thefact of movement.
THE INDIVIDUAL
Movement was an undertaking begun long before the actual transformationof the American continent. But its earliest manifestation was intellectual,not physical.
The political philosophies of the Enlightenment, which had becomepregnant with the possibility of an Arcadian world of complete socialreorganization, were persistently thwarted by entrenched western govern-ments. Bound from above, Europe was a place that required political andideological revolution; Arcadia was this, but moreover a moral revolutionas well. Such a utopian project, impossible from within the world it wasdesigned to escape, was in search for entirely new ground on which to birthand develop.
It is this “fantasy of emigration”4 that from the very beginning definedAmerica. More than the simple physical leap from the Old world to theNew, this movement, through the free act of abandoning the historic socio-political structure, brought the individual to new light. Movement becamethe construct by which the newly discerned citizen was gleaned fromthe sovereign order. But more importantly, emigration materialized theindividual in space and the new body politic that this dramatic departurecould define.
Movement has become the very lore of American life, from the Clippership, the DC-3, the ’57 Chevy, to the conquest of space. America’s storiesare those told through windshields: Steinbeck, Pirsig, and Kerouac allsearched for America on its roads, as did those from the old culture whoseperceptions have proved insightful here—Baudrillard’s late twentieth-century roadtrip mirrored Alexis de Tocqueville’s original tour in the earlynineteenth century. Reyner Banham put his finger to it saying, “like earliergenerations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in orderto read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angelesin the original.”5 Much of this necessity for firsthand experience is legacy tothe formal organization of the land. It is nearly inconceivable that the greatAmerican enterprise of movement would ever have been as intense orproductive without the very shape of the landscape—the fact of the grid.
3 These thoughts, and thesubsequent issues of maintenanceand reciprocity, are indebted to thework of Christopher Risher, Jr., andilluminated in his unpublishedmanuscript “The Problem withNatchez,” p. 2.
4 Baudrillard, p. 75.
5 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: TheArchitecture of Four Ecologies (NewYork: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 23.
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The institution of the continental grid, the six-square-mile townshipdivisions outlined in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, was a dramaticinvention of the young democracy, even though colored by the dissensionand misjudgments one would expect from an undertaking so radicallyunproven.6 But of larger interest here is the sympathy of the idea to theintrinsic American condition. Thomas Jefferson defended the grid as anassurance that “as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land,”7
and its application was designed as a formal demonstration of thatbelief. The grid also had the conceptual advantage of providing—in a singlelegislative idea—the spatial delineation of the entire continent, incorpor-ating lands both urban and rural, undeveloped and never intended fordevelopment.8 In that sense, the grid system contained within itself thecomplete social integration of place, and the landscape was thus markedwith equality’s fundamental sign: a social and spatial congruency as in theBuddhist mandala, or the South American Jesuit villages ordered aroundthe cross.9
The grid has always been about fluidity and movement, rather than placeor centrality. Even the surveyor’s graceful path of subdividing a townshipwas evidence of this. But nothing could be more illustrative than the factthat towns through the grid were located abstractly every sixth square mile,as a consequence of the system of calibration.10 This was a consciousattempt to objectify the landscape such that the whole existed as agency forthe individual. In this schema, one would not be able to find any reference tocenter, because the basic unit of land was produced through the orthogonalsystem and its disseminating network of movement.11
It is the grid’s utter denial of center which explains its criticism throughcomparisons with traditional urban types. As a pure formalist exercise,theorists have always found it both amazingly cogent and maddeninglynaïve. It is this apparent “obviousness” that has made the grid a sort ofmagic talisman for democracy; its emblematic simplicity reduced to anabstraction of orthographics. But it is not this type categorization thatbest suits the political reality, in fact quite the opposite. If movement is, assuggested, the concretized form which describes and maintains the indi-vidual in the collective American psyche, the grid is then the very effort,the essence, the “place” of equality, the only “center” that may be realized.And in this, it is not symbol so much as it is work.
This idea of the grid’s work, as both noun and verb, brings forth issuesthat are more active than simply demonstrative. The economy of the grid,the construction of property rights, personal liberties and jurisprudence arenot only manifestations of societal norms, but they also act as methods:procedures which allow for the maintenance of these utopian ideals. Bothmanifestation and method are inherently necessary for the exemplificationof the individual, and together with that individual define the spatialconstruct of the democratic collective. In this field of democracy, the
6 See Hildegard Binder Johnson,Order upon the Land (New York:Oxford University Press, 1976),Chap. 3.
7 Johnson, p. 39.
8 André Corboz, Looking for a Cityin America: Down These MeanStreets a Man Must Go (SantaMonica: The Getty Center for theHistory of Art and Humanities,1992), p. 51.
9 This paraphrases Foucault’sobservation of the Jesuits. MichelFoucault, “Of Other Spaces” inDiacritics Spring 1986, p. 27.
10 Benjamin Gianni, Bryan Shiles,and Kevin Kemner, Dice Thrown(New York: Princeton ArchitecturalPress, 1989), p. 18.
11 Corboz, p. 51.
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citizenry is identified and enabled by these actions it generates: theimage of collectivity, its manifestation, and the fact, the method, of itsmaking.
This is a particularly important issue in understanding the place ofAmerica. Unlike the metaphorical grounding of perspectival space—wherethe citizenry becomes a pawn in a transcendent order which exceeds them—the mutuality inherent to the operation of the grid is real reciprocity in realtime, without the mediating influence of either outside authority or repre-sentation. It is, in effect, a physical achievement of equality. This too is thecraft of the Constitution: a social pact not by egalitarian imposition, butthrough the fact that all are equal from the outset. A democracy attendantwith equality is thus both manifestation and method, living within a utopianideal while at the same time enabling its very possibility.
Many would attribute this startling product of the American system tothe achievement of individual freedom. Certainly Tocqueville employed thisanalysis. Yet, as Jefferson maintained throughout his life, the great threatto free societies was their inherent tendency toward individual excess at theexpense of the common good. Tocqueville spent a good deal of his energyassessing what he called “individualism,” which “at first only dams thespring of public virtues, but in the long run it attacks and destroys all theothers too and finally merges in egoism.”12 It is this excess, this “Darwinian”aspect of the idea of freedom, that was described as the single most danger-ous problem of democracies. Individualism remains an issue that, despitethe brilliant Constitutional development of balances to keep it in check, nodoubt still exists in various disturbing forms in contemporary America, asit always has to greater or lesser degrees. And despite the recent wholesalerepudiation of Marxism, we cannot ignore the great political struggles thathave been borne worldwide to overcome the ideological excesses of bothcapital and individual freedom.
It is this same excess of American formal freedom that Peter Blakedenounced in his categorical dismissal of New Orleans’ Canal Street com-pared to what he considered the lost possibilities of Jefferson’s lawn atthe University of Virginia. In the face of Blake’s assertion that Canal Streetwas banal and completely without civil character,13 Robert Venturi waseventually to defend the natural condition of Main Street by quipping that itwas instead “almost all right.”14 In large part, the present argument mightbe represented by these two American forms: the compelling image of newworld order proposed at Charlottesville and the functional pragmatic ofstreet life in New Orleans. But neither alone is the proper paradigm. Instead,it might indeed be the “almost all right”—the middle ground between thepleas of Blake and Venturi—that offers fertile ground: not in the Venturiansense, that Main Street would be all right if only architects had reorderedits present peculiarities, but in the possibility that the civil ideal may yet belatent in forms of the commonplace.
12 Alexis de Tocqueville,Democracy in America, GeorgeLawrence trans. (New York: Harperand Row, 1988), p. 507.
13 Peter Blake, God’s OwnJunkyard: The Planned Deteriorationof America’s Landscape (New York:Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979),p. 49.
14 Robert Venturi, Complexity andContradiction in Architecture (NewYork: The Museum of Modern Art,1990), p. 104.
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We begin to see that both of the extreme conditions—historic hierarchyand pure excessive freedom—thrive only by subjugating their systems totheir own very particular requirements. It is instead the operation of the“temperate between” which might appear more proper as an indigenoussystem, realizing that the natural American “place” must be between thesetwo poles; its manifestation, its things, and its people, exist as indivisiblewith the method which both generates and defends them. This give and takebetween being liberated and producing liberty is the proper and necessaryproject of equality.
Peter Blake’s comparison of theUniversity of Virginia lawn andCanal Street in New Orleans.[Photos: UVA by George Cserna.Canal Street by Wallace Litwin.From Peter Blake, God’s OwnJunkyard: The Planned Deteriorationof America’s Landscape (New York:Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979),p. 48.]
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THE OBJECT AND THE GRID
The question is, as it perhaps has always been, how does society maintain itsformal condition of equality?
America appears to provide a particularly rich opportunity for its socialorder to be exhibited through form. We are taught to believe that this hasalways been the case: that form “tells” us a collective history—primarilythrough symbol, formal evolution, and all explained by criticism and con-temporaneous events. This is the methodological essence of architecturalhistory. But the definition of this process is recognized by the contemporarytheories as highly suspect. Its primary fault lies in the fact that such historyis produced by interpretation, and subsequently cannot contain its ownstructural subjectivity.15 History’s defense is to denigrate form’s ambiguityand put its own procedural truth above and beyond the objects to which itlays claim. The result is form being “prostituted” by history making, and inthe brothel of typology, style, and representation, form cannot and does nothave any truly autonomous reality.
In distinction, the American ideal of democracy necessitates form: not todefine the society through visuality or a history, but as physical means andends for its very existence. This is revealed through the American themesof movement and equality. Movement is a construct of three dimensionsand time, while equality is a process of coextensive reciprocity. Both of theseoperations are questions of space, and so, ultimately, of objective form.Mindful of the requirement to both make visible the indigenous socialorder (manifestation) and act as its system of production (method), it isthe necessity of form that maintains the work of this equality. Form asevidenced by the work of America becomes a maintenance of its ideologicalbasis as well as its proof. Such plurality could not be more distant from thehistoric reading of form.
It is in the ensuing search for form sympathetic to the ideal of equalitythat we must define those objects and processes which deny this democraticwork of maintenance. But such conclusions are better seen through adirect inquiry into form, into architecture. These two paradigms of form—historic subjectivity and American objectivity—might be illuminated byan examination of architecture within that demilitarized zone betweenthe old world of history and the new one of modern democracy, New YorkCity.
At the center of this question between history and equality is the com-parison of two notable Manhattan landmarks, both sited on its “MainStreet”—Fifth Avenue—and suggested as culturally important vehicles forAmerican formal invention, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum andRockefeller Center. The contrast between these two forms is defined bytwo disparate conditions: Rockefeller as the “center in the grid,” and theGuggenheim as the “thing illuminating the grid.”
Comparatively, Rockefeller Center exists less in its “thingness” or
15 This reevaluation of thedeterminism of rationality is perhapsthe most useful work ofdeconstruction theory. Baudrillardgoes as far as to suggest that theseconcepts are already realized inAmerica: “[E]verything we havedreamed in the radical name of anti-culture, the subversion of meaning,the destruction of reason and the endof representation, that whole anti-utopia which unleashed so manytheoretical and political, aestheticand social convulsions in Europe . . .has all been achieved here inAmerica . . .” Baudrillard, p. 97.
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“objectness” and more in terms of its delineation of a public space, thefamed lower plaza fronting the RCA (now GE) Tower. The entire buildingproject has become known by this trademark feature, one defined by mostas memorably American. But, beyond its site and the gigantic systems ofengineering and economics necessary for its realization, the formal aspectsof the complex come clearly from a historic tradition of centered publicspaces. Indeed, the building massing and detailing—its setbacks, materials,and art program—defer thoroughly to the nature of the plaza space which isdefined by them. Even a private street was cut through the New York gridand aimed at the plaza to further illustrate its centrality (in a move equal to,but the inverse of, the Courthouse at Kalispell).
The Guggenheim by such standards is clearly found wanting, which isexactly how it has always been criticized as a piece of urbanism. Indifferentto the street and its context, by the rules of historiographic analysis its spiralstands aloof and unconversant. Yet through its comparisons of difference,the Museum both illuminates the structural form which allows for its“objectness”—the grid of Manhattan—and encourages its determinantreciprocity with the buildings around it. That is to say its aspects of indi-viduality, or its realization of a “thingness” within the grid, is the process bywhich it maintains the very same individuality in its neighbors. This oper-ation is evident nearby: no one can now deny the uniqueness of the plainapartment blocks behind the Guggenheim, for it was the Museum buildingwhich gave them a reality which themselves they had not had until itsconstruction.16
The normative critique would argue, of course, that it was RockefellerCenter which best represented the fullness of form within the grid. Ortho-graphically detailed from the pedestrian, to the street, to the very skyline ofManhattan, its skillful manipulation of scales speaks to every possibleanalytical reading. Subsumed by this evaluation, subsequent additions to theRockefeller complex were burdened with the task of repeating its analyticalsuccesses, rather than pursuing the more individual possibilities inherent tothe grid (the trite plazas at the feet of both the McGraw-Hill and ExxonTowers are heirs to this fault). The Museum building, on the contrary, pre-sumes no such universalist parti. One would never expect to see another“Guggenheim” aped somewhere down the Avenue, because it speaks not toa reusable formal language, but instead to the real operation of individualitywithin the larger American schema.
Of course, the argument leveled against objects like the Guggenheim isthe claim of terror that a city of architectural individuality would be topeople; without order, semblance of hierarchy, or a vision of the collective.History contends that situations of illuminated individuality are “placeless,”that they exhibit nothing of the reductive possibility of either judgment oranalysis; that they, in fact, become interchangeable. André Corboz notesthat such critiques are inclined to believe Americans “would as readily
16 This operation is now somewhatcompromised. By bringing thecontrast of the spiral on Fifth Avenueinto submission, the Guggenheim’srecent Gwathmey Siegel additioncreates a composition by which thebuilding can be occluded into thereasonability of the grid. See CarterWiseman, “Guggenheim Go-Around” in Architectural RecordOctober 1992, pp. 102–3.
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number their cities . . . as they do their streets.”17 But these arguments fail todifferentiate between their deceitful dismissal of all formal individuality,and the appropriate criticism of excess in places like Houston and Denver, orthe suburban vapidity of Orange County in California. These instances arefar beyond the reciprocal relationship of the properly manifest “thing in thegrid,” and must be seen for what they are. The agency of the grid remains, asit always must, but objects within these oft-cited examples exist only as thecollusive economies of capital, development, and tax law will allow. There isnothing of the play of object and system, no suggestion that these placesmaintain any formal equality. Giving nothing back to the grid, they becomethe bad objects of a misdirected egoism.
THE STREET
It is the reciprocal possibility of form and place, object and grid, whichappears most applicable in America, a possibility which is neither Houstonnor History. Objecthood is the unique component of the process: it isthe maintenance of equality among individuals and the form necessaryto accomplish that fact which in essence produces democracy. We canobserve such effect from objects which exhibit a particularly Americanurbanism outside that of tradition, in the manner of architectures likethe Guggenheim, as well as from the problematic situations which denythose instances, the Kalispells which rely on the centering operationof history. It is the manifest equality promised in the first case, and thequestion of unwarranted hierarchy in the second, which tell us that itis through the reciprocities of objecthood that the lessons of democracyare told.
Moreover, it is the construct of movement that makes such objectsboth visible and probable. The individuality of objects is heir to the formalpossibilities of the grid, and it is the delineation of this orthogonality—itsmathematics—which in turn elucidates the ideal of the road in Americanplacemaking. Movement is both parent and progeny in the process ofmaking equality into form.
This is the task of many honest American civil conditions, but nonemore evocative or telling than that of the street. The condition of the street issubject to both the legislative process of order, the irreducible aspect of thegrid, and the public desire for the display of its inherent individuality. Byfronting objects on the edge of a collective movement system—which bothdefines the operation of the individual forms and their very possibility—thestreet brings forth the essence of a reciprocal relationship of public life,individual liberty, equality which allows for its maintenance, and the formalaspects of an architecture which demonstrate the system as both achievedand becoming.
We cannot lose sight of the fact that this American civil ideal is difficultto achieve in the face of tradition. If predisposed to history, Main Street is a
17 Corboz, p. 43.
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myth like that of most fairy tales.18 This handicap of interpretation is alsowhy Kalispell looms ever larger. The imperative of history is widelyentrenched, and its ability to satisfy the intellectualization of space withoutabsorbing its true indigenous potential is difficult to battle against. Butsustaining the work of an architecture which supports the practical ideals ofdemocratic worth and dignity remains the only real way to manifest theidea of America.19 We must deflect the coercion of history and rein in theexcesses of freedom, both of which represent grave threats to civil form:history, in its willful ignorance of equality’s defeat of centrality, and theintemperance of freedom which mindlessly creates vulgarity, ego, andspectacle.
We recognize too that, in the end, movement is a practice of space,inextricable from the possibility of architecture. It is this fact that again tellsus of the essential work of form in expressing the values and tenets of oursociety.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 74th Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1986.
Main Street in Santa Monica,California. Edgemar, by Frank O.Gehry and Associates, is on the left.(Photo by the author.)
18 Rem Koolhaas has said that theeffect of EuroDisney on Europeans ismuch like that of a large sculpturepark, because “the myth of MainStreet is as unrecognizable as themyths of all the characters in theDisney stories.” Noted in a studioreview at Harvard University’sGraduate School of Design,December 1992.
19 Risher, p. 2.
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MATHEMATICS OF THE IDEAL ROADTRIP
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CITY WALKINGLaying Claim to Manhattan
OBSERVATIONS BEN JACKS (2006)
The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellip-ses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.
Michel de Certeau1
We conceive of the postmodern city as a fragmentary assemblage of frac-tured parts of the traditional city, districts of modernist reform, and jumblesof late-capitalist consumer experiences. Simultaneity, fragmentation,and ephemerality characterize the experience of the contemporary city.2
Walking around helps us to know the city, to position ourselves within it,to lay claim to it, and to belong. But the city made for walking is largely thecity of the past.3 We may now know places in fragments, but to begin toassemble a sense of a city or an urban region or an extensive territoryrequires more than the relatively straightforward “mental map.”4 For theindividual in the postmodern city, the territorial practice of walking iscomplicated to the point of chaos. How does walking, an old way of layinghold of the city, still help us in this altered spatial, temporal, and conceptualfield?
This essay documents a range of recent projects in Manhattan by citizens,artists, activists, and revolutionaries who seek to understand and addresscity concerns through walking.5 Each project represents a subversive meansof re-asserting a territorial hold on the character and space of the city in lightof the conditions of postmodernity. Through the projects, practitionersattempt to deal with the daily challenge of alien and alienating territory towhich one nevertheless wishes to reassert some claim. We find evidence inthese intentional walking projects—many of which are mediated throughdigital technologies—of the coalescence of communities around whatgeographer Edward Soja has called a “shared spatial consciousness.”6
In “Thirdspace,” Soja cites a recent trend in spatial studies towardrebalancing the traditional oppositional dualism of history and society, ofbreaking down the dialectic between perceived and conceived space. Thisontological shift toward what Soja calls “the trialectics of being” unites“historicality, sociality, and spatiality.”7 Describing the long-term politicaldimensions of this shift, Soja says:
Inspired by the breakdown of totalizing modernist political epistemologies. . . and the possibility of a radical postmodernism . . ., a new socio-spatialmovement or “community of resistance” is beginning to develop around
1 Michel de Certeau (tr. StevenRendell), The Practice of EverydayLife (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1984), p. 107.
2 David Harvey, The Condition ofPostmodernity (Cambridge, MA:Blackwell, 1990).
3 Sam Bass Warner, StreetcarSuburbs: the Process of Growth inBoston, 1870–1900 (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press,1962).
4 Kevin Lynch, The Image of theCity (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press,1960).
5 Because of space limitations thisparticular paper cites nine ofapproximately three dozen specificNew York examples. New Yorkserves as both an arbitrary and aunique frame for walking practices;similar projects have beenundertaken elsewhere, in many casesby practitioners who have alsopracticed in New York.
6 Edward W. Soja, “Thirdspace:Expanding the Scope of theGeographical Imagination” (ed.Alan Read), Architecturally Speaking:Practices of Art, Architecture and theEveryday (New York: Routledge,2000); Thirdspace: Journeys to LosAngeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, MA,and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996).
7 “Thirdspace: Expanding theScope of the GeographicalImagination,” p. 14.
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what I am describing as a Thirdspace consciousness and a progressivecultural politics that seeks to break down and erase the specifically spatialpower differentials arising from class, race, gender and many other formsof marginalizing. . . . Rather than operating in separate and exclusivechannels, this new movement/community is insistently inclusive . . .,searching for new ways of building bridges and effective politicalcoalitions across all modes of radical subjectivity and collective resistance.In this coalition-building, it is a shared spatial consciousness, and acollective determination to take greater control over the production of ourlived spaces, that provides the primary foundation—the long missing“glue”—for solidarity and political praxis. 8
As Soja points out, this new critical spatiality, the ethos surrounding ashared spatial consciousness, is a recent phenomenon in its earliest stages ofdevelopment. As shared frames of reference for experience, whether ofsocial life or material culture, the projects documented here illustratespecific manifestations of the new consciousness Soja points to. For archi-tecture and the urban landscape, the implications of these practices are thatdigital means do not trump bodily experience, and that design establishesrelevance through daily life and the everyday world.
CITY WALKING
Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., thetrajectories it “speaks.”
Michel de Certeau9
In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau opens his chapter oncity walking from a vantage point on top of one of the two World TradeCenter towers.10 He views our walking from afar, as a surveillant unable toidentify individuals—as if we are ants in the labyrinthine spaces of the city.He takes on for a moment the role of the all-seeing scientist content with (orstuck within) the frame of the dominant rational consumer-capitalist orderso that we might be able to see beyond the official frame to the everyday. Butin the remainder of the text he likens walking to reading and cooking, andhe sees in everyday practices myriad ways in which the weak (most of us),trick, trip up, and play with the system. The order that threatens to oppress,he notes, is a “sieve order,” shot through with holes between and withinwhich some maneuvering is possible.
In light of de Certeau, we can consider walking from two very differentperspectives: from above and afar, from a perspective in which walkers aresubjects and objects, controlled by the dominant order, or intimately, fromour own perspectives as walkers, in touch with the spaces and gaps in the“sieve order.” These two perspectives correspond to de Certeau’s categories,proper and quotidian, to the scientific and the everyday, and to the official
8 Ibid., p. 29.
9 de Certeau, Practice of EverydayLife, p. 99.
10 Ibid., p. 91.
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and the vernacular. The first perspective belongs to what de Certeau callsthe strategy of the hegemonic order, and the second to the tactics of thepowerless.
The walking projects documented here reveal the contours of tacticalmaneuvering: as complex, localized, territorial, interwoven, and constantlynegotiated and renegotiated practices. The practices range from theunconscious everyday to the politically informed and motivated. The moreovert practices of resistance—such as surveillance camera mapping—havemuch in common with those that appear on the surface to take a morecooperative stance toward the dominant order. Alone, each way of walkingmay seem a bit desperate, deranged, or even silly, but this is perhaps thedisguise or the ruse of the everyday, which, as de Certeau argues, makesrevolution beside the point: a tactic like walking takes place “within enemyterritory.”11
De Certeau defines tactics in terms of the powerlessness of the prac-titioner: the weak practice tactics in response to the force employed by thedominating power through its strategy. In some of the practices documentedhere walking is a conscious counter-strategy, a tactic used as a strategy toreclaim public space. As public space has become more limited, controlled,and circumscribed, the tactics of the powerless have had to become moreexplicitly about using actual public space. Walking is more than a utilitarianway of getting from one place to another: walking is an everyday practicethat may be taken up as a tool.
Walking, however, crosses overlaid terrains: it may be impossible toseparate ideal and practical territorial walking from everyday walkingthat tends to habituate the walker to surroundings under the control of adominating and unwanted authority. This lack of clarity about the efficacyof walking has led some proponents of walking as a critical spatial practiceto turn to situationist ideas to theorize their activities. At the very least,the situationist’s dérive and psychogeography illuminate the potential ofwalking to shake the dominion of habit.12
SITUATIONIST AND SITUATIONISM
In The Situationist City, Simon Sadler points out, “one is not even meant touse the word situationism.” He quotes an early dictum from the journalInternationale Situationniste: “The notion of situationism is obviouslydevised by antisituationists.”13 Generally credited with forming the Situ-ationist International at Alba, Italy, in 1957 are the Lettrist International,the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (IMIB), and COBRA(a name formed from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam).14 What hadbeen a substantially Dadaist and surrealist-inspired aesthetic vision underthe Lettrist International and IMIB and an anti-functionalist architecturalaesthetic under COBRA became a stronger renunciation of art and astrengthening of the politics of the “situation” through the new organiza-
11 Ibid., p. 37.
12 Walking artists and projectsdirectly influenced by situationistideas, in addition to those describedhere, include the Italian groupStalker, and the English groupWrights & Sites. Some recentsituationist-influenced designprojects and speculations arepartially documented in Iain Bordenand Sandy McCreery, eds. NewBabylonians, Architectural Design,June 2001, 71–73.
13 Simon Sadler, The SituationistCity, (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press,1998), p. 3.
14 Most situationist historiesexplain that delegates from two orthree small groups formed theSituationist International—fourgroups counting The “LondonPsychogeographical Committee,” aname invented by its only member,artist Ralph Rumney. See RalphRumney (tr. Malcolm Imrie), TheConsul, Conversations with GérardBerréby (San Francisco: City LightsBooks, 2002), p. 37. Acknowledgedalso is that the term delegate isperhaps too formal a term, reflectingboth the earnestness, and the mockseriousness of participants, who metat Alba “in a state of semi-drunkenness.” See Stewart Home,The Assault on Culture: UtopianCurrents from Lettrisme to ClassWar (London: Aporia Press andUnpopular Books, 1988), p. 30.
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tion. Headed by Guy Debord, the group published twelve issues of thejournal Internationale Situationniste between 1958 and 1969, and trum-peted its vision for anarchist social democracy.15 Perhaps because hedeveloped intentionally misleading histories, or because he incited dramaticexcommunications and resignations of members, or because his The Societyof the Spectacle has been widely read, Guy Debord is identified with the setof ideas called situationist.16
Of these situationist ideas, psychogeography and the dérive show upexplicitly in the walking projects documented here. The dérive is an inten-tionally aimless walk, involving both structure and chance, designed toprovide a fresh encounter with the city and to uncover its fragmentarynature. Psychogeography broadly refers to the study of the effects of thephysical environment on individuals. Guy Debord would have denouncedand disowned most new situationist projects for failing to advance revo-lutionary goals. As Sadler points out: “Situationism was founded on thebelief that general revolution would originate in the appropriation andalteration of the material environment and its space. Activities that have notshared this aim have a poor claim to being situationist.”17
Lettrist and situationist ideas, and their predecessors in Dada andsurrealism, should be understood as an index of the power of walking,not as unique points of origin for walking practices. If we wish to valuewalking—its potential for encounter and knowledge—we must lookbeyond avant-garde provenance. We have an instinct for fresh encounters,for “the end of boredom,” tapped by psychogeography and the theory of thedérive.
In a footnote to The Situationist City, Sadler recognizes the connectionbetween Michel de Certeau and the situationists, commenting that deCerteau “vastly expand(s) upon and make(s) explicit what was only inferredin situationism.” Sadler remarks that de Certeau’s “tender, almost poetictone” has made the constellation of situationist ideas “more palatable toacademe.”18 The walking practices documented here, some quiet and gentle,some bearing the overt mark of situationist politics, nevertheless beginto constellate something like a grounded theory of walking. Perhaps thedevelopment of community around a fundamentally human attribute likewalking is radical, indicative of the new “shared spatial consciousness,”remarked by Edward Soja, and as revolutionary a practice as the currentpolitical environment will allow.
The walks range from the personal undertaking of Caleb Smith to themore or less mainstream cultural productions of the walking artists,from the organized walks around Manhattan to advocate for a betterenvironment to the radical protest of the Surveillance Camera Players.
15 Internationale Situationniste(reprint, Librairie Arthème Fayard,1997).
16 Guy Debord, The Society of theSpectacle (New York: Zone Books,1994). As Sadler and others haveenumerated, in addition to spectacle,the main lettrist and situationistideas are psychogéographie(psychogeography), détournement(diversion), dérive (drift), situations(situations), and urbanisme unitaire(unitary urbanism).
17 Sadler, Situationist City, p. 13.
18 Ibid., p. 186 (note 123).
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WALKING PROJECTS
CALEB SMITH, “NEW YORK CITY WALK”
The possibility, the idea, of walking every street in the grid of Manhattanoccurred to Caleb Smith as the result of coming across a church—theChurch of the Transfiguration, “The Little Church Around the Corner,” on29th Street near 5th Avenue.19 The church is set back from the street, like ajewel in the insistent street grid, and it occurred to Smith then that countlessother such jewels lay hidden on the more than 3,000 blocks of Manhattan.He would have to walk every block if he hoped to discover New York’shidden treasures. Accomplishing the task of walking every block was notSmith’s initial goal, but rather he wished to explore, to sightsee, and to revelin what he called the celebrity and glamor of New York, in contrastto his hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Besides, he had learnedto sightsee and wander from his parents in the open spaces of the west—urban exploration was just an extension of that early experience. Hebegan by walking in a new neighborhood every time he went out of hisapartment and then reading about the area he had visited when he got home.Later he marked on a map every block he had walked. After realizing thenecessity of walking every Manhattan street to discover the city’s secrets,he decided upon a few rules to define the “official” walk: he would walkalone, he would carry his map and a pen to mark off completed blocks,and he would take photographs. The project took him two and a half yearsto finish.
In reporting Smith’s walk in New Yorker magazine, Ben McGrathinvokes the trope of the task-obsessed eccentric.20 Beginning with Smith’sdecision to finish his walk on the day that Thomas J. Keane had completedhis walk of every block in Manhattan fifty years earlier, and endingwith his “passing the torch” to another every-block-walker, McGrath slylysuggests that only a complete nut-case would waste his time on suchan activity. What McGrath overlooks in his focus on the odd statisticsof Smith’s long-distance walk is the care and concern with which Smithlooked at the city. Even this point is twisted in the direction of suggestingmonomania: he quotes Smith as saying, “Greeenwich Village and theFinancial District were almost a total loss, because you’re looking atthe map the whole time. I’m clearly going to have to go back and dothem again.”
Though highly personal, Smith’s walk is motivated quite simply by alove of the city and a willingness to explore, and it is documented withouta trace of irony or posturing. Smith’s walk repeats, unselfconsciously andunintentionally, de Certeau’s walking tactic: to walk every street is to insistthat the city may be and should be known.
19 Caleb Smith, “New York CityWalk,” December 2004, <http://www.newyorkcitywalk.com/html/about.html> (accessed May 19, 2005).
20 Ben McGrath, “The Talk of theTown,” New Yorker, January 3,2005, pp. 22–23.
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JIM NAURECKAS, “NEW YORK SONGLINES”
“New York Songlines,” an interactive map of Manhattan streets in the formof a simplified grid organizing a collection of hyperlinks, also insists onthe knowability of the city.21 The introduction compares Manhattan’sstreets to Australian aboriginal songlines, explaining how the song-storiesof Aboriginals guided people across the land by way of physical features.Concluding that the aboriginal songline was a way of organizing largeamounts of information, the site’s author, Jim Naureckas, argues “the Webis our technological society’s closest equivalent.” Naureckas feels that acertain mindlessness has developed because it is so easy to get around thecity using knowledge of the grid, a few signs, a subway map, and taxis.People may go past the same buildings hundreds of times without ever reallylooking; many lack a sense of place. In answer to this condition, “New YorkSonglines” offers “virtual walking tours of Manhattan’s streets” that mayuncover New York’s own “giants, heroes, and monsters.” The songlines arethe result of a kind of reverse engineering; their power comes from thecongruity of the hyperlinked Web and the grid organization of the city.
SHOREWALKERS, “THE GREAT SAUNTER”
Shorewalkers, a non-profit environmental/recreational group, takes an on-the-ground approach to knowing Manhattan. Every first Saturday in Maysince 1985 it has been possible to take a walk around the approximatelythirty-two-mile long waterfront edge of the island of Manhattan on “TheGreat Saunter.”22 The event begins early in the morning at South StreetSeaport and proceeds clockwise. Involving in some years as few as seventeenpeople, and one year more than 500, Shorewalkers’ mission is “to enhance,enjoy and protect the parks, promenades, and paths along the watersthroughout the New York metropolitan area.” The group’s activism has
Walkers on “The Great Saunter” in2004, near 150th Street west ofHarlem, with the GeorgeWashington Bridge in thebackground. (Photo by Mark Lentz.)
21 Jim Naureckas, “New YorkSonglines: virtual walking tours ofManhattan’s streets,” <http://www.nysonglines.com/> (May 23,2005).
22 Shorewalkers,<www.shorewalkers.org> (May 13,2005).
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contributed to the establishment and development of the Manhattan Water-front Greenway, a continuous path around Manhattan linking numerouspublic parks, providing recreational opportunities and waterfront access.
Walking, as de Certeau explored, is a speech act. In the case of “TheGreat Saunter,” the walk, like much successful protest and advocacy, isexplicitly for fun, but it also makes a clear political statement. Cy Adler, afounder of Shorewalkers, in his guidebook, Walking Manhattan’s Rim:The Great Saunter, remarks on the citizen’s ability to speak out in supportof the environment, that “no activity symbolizes the essence of conservationmore than walking.”23 The act of walking the edge of Manhattan suggeststhe city foundation ritual.24 In this case the ritual has been repeated annuallyfor the past twenty years, reflecting ongoing concern for the limits andenvironmental impact of human inhabitation of earth. As citizens andclaimants, Shorewalkers walk to advocate an environmental understandingof territory.
SURVEILLANCE CAMERA PLAYERS AND THE INSTITUTE FOR
APPLIED AUTONOMY
Advocating against the growing police state, Surveillance Camera Playershas protested the use of surveillance cameras in Manhattan since 1996,creating plays for “the bored people who must watch the cameras,” con-tinuously updating maps, authoring position papers, encouraging othersecurity camera protesters, and, beginning in 2000, offering walking tours.25
Each walking tour (nine offered in the summer of 2005) is based on maps ofall known cameras in a particular zone.
Cameras, reasons S.C.P., do not aid in the prevention of crime, nor areoperators interested in the prevention of crime. Rather, vendors promoteprivate security cameras to document events surrounding insurance losses.In wealthy neighborhoods building owners receive discounts on insurance ifthey install cameras, so cameras proliferate. On the other hand, contendsS.C.P., there are few cameras in poor neighborhoods regardless of the levelof crime. While arguments in favor of surveillance cameras claim theyinduce paranoia selectively in criminals, S.C.P. counters that surveillancecameras are intended to induce paranoia in everyone—they cannot do soselectively. In a delightful analysis of press coverage that attempts to pos-ition Bill Brown and other members of S.C.P. as paranoid, Brown simplyturns the tables on interviewers. He says both, “I am very paranoid,” and“the group isn’t and refuses to become paranoid.” Brown wants us to joinhim in this refusal to become paranoid. On the contrary, paranoia is acondition of the spectacular society, a condition of the people who sup-ported and continue to support the installation of more than 15,000 surveil-lance cameras in Manhattan.
Now it is almost impossible to walk in Manhattan without encounteringa surveillance camera—there are perhaps five to ten cameras for every block.
Surveillance Camera Playersmap used on the walking tour ofChelsea. (Drawing by Kelly Shields.)
23 Cy A. Adler, WalkingManhattan’s Rim: The GreatSaunter (New York: Green EaglePress, 2003), p. xiii.
24 See Joseph Rykwert, The Idea ofa Town (London: Faber and Faber,1976).
25 Surveillance Camera Players,<http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html> (May 26, 2005).
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But if one wanted to take a walk without being watched, the Institute forApplied Autonomy has created iSee, an interactive web-based map ofsurveillance camera locations.26 The user can enter a starting and stoppingpoint for a trip in Manhattan and, provided the map data is up to date,iSee will generate a camera-avoiding route. The I.A.A. website answers thequestion, “Who should use iSee?: minorities, women, youth, ‘outsiders,’activists, and everyone else.” I.A.A. points out surveillance cameras areunregulated and do very little to reduce crime. Police and security guardsurveillants watch minorities and young men because of their appearance,women voyeuristically, “outsiders” (including people surveying for surveil-lance cameras), activists engaged in legal dissent, and others who might becaught kissing a lover in the street or visiting a psychiatrist. In answer to thequestion, “But what’s the harm?” I.A.A. points out that footage from sur-veillance cameras is mostly privately owned and may be broadcast withoutconsent. Increasing sophistication—networking and facial recognitionsoftware—will compound these problems. Perhaps of greatest concern toI.A.A. is the effect of the surveillance society in social and psychologicalterms. The iSee map is designed to mirror the use of surveillance cameras,paranoia for paranoia, social caution for social caution. While the issuesraised by anti-surveillance groups remain unresolved, anti-terroristintelligence-gathering efforts have expanded greatly in response to Septem-ber 11, including the coordination of cameras controlled by New York Citypolice.27 The projects by S.C.P. and I.A.A., responding to the proliferationof surveillance cameras, directly address the worst fears expressed by deCerteau and the situationists.
GLOWLAB AND CONFLUX
Explicitly inspired by situationist history and theory, the annual PsyGeoConflux (held in New York in 2003 and 2004), is both a conference and apublic festival concerned primarily with “current artistic and social investi-gations in psychogeography.”28 Taking place over four days, the conferencebrings together “visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers andthe public to explore the physical and psychological landscape of thecity.” Most of the events involve some form of walking around and directexperience of the city. Many of the presenters acknowledge situationistorigins in psychogeography, the dérive, and détournement. As a clear andsignificant change from earlier psychogeographical experiments, many ofthe projects involve digital mapping, transmitted instructions, and otheruses of computers and peripherals as tools and media.
Odin Cappello’s psychogeographically inspired project “Navigazing”takes an elegant, straightforward, and thoughtful approach to the dérive,sending participants out into the city with viewfinder cards and chalk toview and share the aesthetic experience of framing.29 Cappello’s instructionsstate the city is filled with “narrative artifacts, points of visual, or aural
26 Institute for Applied Autonomy,<http://www.appliedautonomy.com/isee.html> (May 17,2005).
27 William Finnegan, “TerrorismBeat: How is the N.Y.P.D. Defendingthe City?” New Yorker, July 25,2005, pp. 58–71.
28 PsyGeo Conflux 2004 pressrelease, <http://www.psygeocon.org> (May 20,2005).
29 PsyGeo Conflux, projects:Navigazing, <http://glowlab.blogs.com/psygeocon/2004/02/participant_07.html>(September 14, 2005).
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Odin Cappello sends participantsinto the city to frame and discover“narrative artifacts” in“Navigazing.” (Courtesy OdinCappello.)
interest that suggest the existence of a story, either real or fictional.” Par-ticipants use the viewfinder cards to frame something that they consider tobe a narrative artifact, and use chalk to record positions on the pavement.Other participants, and passersby, are drawn into the story. Cappellointends for participants to develop both a physical and psychologicalawareness of environment. Participants develop such awareness by sighting,measuring, and communicating about narrative objects among a com-munity of peers.
Dario D’Aprile uses flour to stencil faux pedestrian crossings, in “StreetStripes with Memory.” A video camera records the effects over time ofpeople and cars using the crossing. D’Aprile’s interest is in the “resistancetime of urban furnishings made by flour,” and “to characterize and createtraces and ways inside the urban space.”30 In a similar vein, NoriyukiFujimura’s “Footprint Mapping” uses a backpack with a pedometer, acompass, a webcam, and a computer “to create a digital map of streets andpublic spaces by gathering ‘footprints’ of participants.”31 Fujimura latercollates the walks into a single map.
“One Block Radius,” a project of Christina Ray and Dave Mandl (foun-ders of Glowlab and the PsyGeo Conflux), provides a website to serve as arepository of information concerning the city block completely destroyed tobuild the New Museum of Contemporary Art.32 Conceived as a navigableonline map and database, the idea of “One Block Radius” is to collect “theamount of information one would normally find in a guidebook for anentire city.” Included are photographs, video, historical, narrative, andcreative writing, and other forms of information gathered from a wide
30 PsyGeo Conflux, projects: StreetStripes with Memory, <http://glowlab.blogs.com/psygeocon/2004/02/participant_47.html>(September 14, 2005).
31 PsyGeo Conflux, projects:Footprint Mapping, <http://glowlab.blogs.com/psygeocon/2004/02/participant_12.html>(September 14, 2005).
32 PsyGeo Conflux, projects: OneBlock Radius, <http://glowlab.blogs.com/psygeocon/2004/02/participant_23.html>(September 14, 2005).
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variety of people having direct experience with the block. The idea is tocreate a website environment capable of receiving an enormous volume ofdata at scales not normally considered important, and to make the dataavailable to anyone wishing to navigate the site. The “multi-layered portraitof the block as it has never been seen before (and never will be seen again)”is intended to constitute “an extensive psychogeographic survey.” A revisedversion of the project allows for the assemblage of similar kinds of informa-tion on a citywide scale.33 The psychogeographical projects of the PsyGeoConflux reflect perhaps the most intentional and self-conscious forms ofterritorial practice.
CONCLUSION
Each of these projects illuminates a particular frame or theme throughwhich we might understand the territorial practice of walking and localnegotiations with the dominant order. Walking every street in the gridtemporarily unearths an apparently comprehensive collection of memoriesin physical things. A virtual walking tour similarly contends the city isknowable. Walking the shore consecrates the earth as home. Walking on a
Noriyuki Fujimura creates a digitalmap of a walk in the city using abackpack outfitted with apedometer, microprocessor,webcam, and laptop in “FootprintMapping.” (Courtesy NoriyukiFujimura.)
33 Correspondence with author.
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tour of surveillance cameras protests their proliferation, the police state,and the loss of civil liberties. Walking a psychogeographical drift makesa surprisingly poetic experience out of the raw material of the city. In deCerteau’s terms, each such act of walking is a speech act. Each constitutesa “rhetoric of walking,” making dialogue out of the everyday and therational. Each reconnects us, no matter how temporarily, to the alienatinginfrastructure of the contemporary city.
It seems the list of intentional and self-conscious tactics has only grownsince the historical moment of the situationists, and the dissemination of deCerteau’s thought. Is this in response to the proliferation of academic theoryor to conditions? Is this merely the playful illusion and delusion of intel-lectuals, or is it that we are increasingly aware of all kinds of oppressions,large and small?
Quotation, “poaching,” to carry forward one of de Certeau’s playfulideas, is the backbone of walking (as well as of reading and writing). Quota-tion lets us move forward as a community. When we walk we are quotingthe walkers who have come before us, and performing communal turns oneach quotation. The myriad ways we walk the city seem to yield ever moreturns, more variations, on the spaces of the pedestrian everyday.
This paper was published in a different form in Places 18:1 (Spring 2006) and in theProceedings of the 94th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools ofArchitecture, 2006.
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GREEN MANHATTANPRESERVATION,RE-USE, ANDSUSTAINABILITY
Why New York is the greenest city inthe U.S.DAVID OWEN (2004)
My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young andnaïve and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first homein a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For sevenyears, we lived, quite contentedly, in circumstances that would strike mostAmericans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just sevenhundred square feet, and we didn’t have a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, alawn, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot, and when we neededto travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space athome was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size.Our electric bills worked out to about a dollar a day.
The utopian community was Manhattan. (Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth Street, between Second and Third.) Most Americans, including mostNew Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a waste-land of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but incomparison with the rest of America it’s a model of environmentalresponsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenestcommunity in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world.The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment hasarisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which NewYorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumesgasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United Stateswas the Ford Model T. Eighty-two percent of Manhattan residents travel towork by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate forAmericans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los AngelesCounty. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if itwere granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.
“Anyplace that has such tall buildings and heavy traffic is obviously anenvironmental disaster—except that it isn’t,” John Holtzclaw, a transporta-tion consultant for the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources DefenseCouncil, told me. “If New Yorkers lived at the typical American sprawldensity of three households per residential acre, they would require manytimes as much land. They’d be driving cars, and they’d have huge lawns andbe using pesticides and fertilizers on them, and then they’d be overwateringtheir lawns, so that runoff would go into streams.” The key to New York’srelative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s
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population density is more than eight hundred times that of the nation as awhole. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mileisland sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful, and forces themajority to live in some of the most inherently energy-efficient residentialstructures in the world: apartment buildings. It also frees huge tracts of landfor the rest of America to sprawl into.
My wife and I had our first child in 1984. We had both grownup in suburbs, and we decided that we didn’t want to raise our tiny daughterin a huge city. Shortly after she learned to walk, we moved to a smalltown in northwestern Connecticut, about ninety miles north of midtownManhattan. Our house, which was built in the late seventeen-hundreds, isacross a dirt road from a nature preserve and is shaded by tall white-pinetrees. After big rains, we can hear a swollen creek rushing by at the bottomof the hill. Deer, wild turkeys, and the occasional black bear feed themselvesin our yard. From the end of our driveway, I can walk several miles throughwoods to an abandoned nineteenth-century railway tunnel, while crossingonly one paved road.
Yet our move was an ecological catastrophe. Our consumption ofelectricity went from roughly four thousand kilowatt-hours a year, towardthe end of our time in New York, to almost thirty thousand kilowatt-hoursin 2003—and our house doesn’t even have central air-conditioning. Webought a car shortly before we moved, and another one soon after wearrived, and a third one ten years later. (If you live in the country and don’thave a second car, you can’t retrieve your first car from the mechanic afterit’s been repaired; the third car was the product of a mild midlife crisis, butsoon evolved into a necessity.) My wife and I both work at home, but wemanage to drive thirty thousand miles a year between us, mostly doingordinary errands. Nearly everything we do away from our house requires acar trip. Renting a movie and later returning it, for example, consumesalmost two gallons of gasoline, since the nearest Blockbuster is ten milesaway and each transaction involves two round trips. When we lived in NewYork, heat escaping from our apartment helped to heat the apartment aboveours; nowadays, many of the BTUs produced by our brand-new, extremelyefficient oil-burning furnace leak through our two-hundred-year-old roofand into the dazzling star-filled winter sky above.
When most Americans think about environmentalism, they picture wild,unspoiled landscapes—the earth before it was transmogrified by humanhabitation. New York City is one of the most thoroughly altered landscapesimaginable, an almost wholly artificial environment, in which the terrain’sprimeval contours have long since been obliterated and most of the partsthat resemble nature (the trees on side streets, the rocks in Central Park) areessentially decorations. Ecology-minded discussions of New York City oftenhave a hopeless tone, and focus on ways in which the city might be made toseem somewhat less oppressively man-made: by increasing the area devoted
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to parks and greenery, by incorporating vegetation into buildings them-selves, by reducing traffic congestion, by easing the intensity of develop-ment, by creating open space around structures. But most such changeswould actually undermine the city’s extraordinary energy efficiency, whicharises from the characteristics that make it surreally synthetic.
Because densely populated urban centers concentrate human activity, wethink of them as pollution crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot, NewYork City generates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and producesmore solid waste than most other American regions of comparable size. Ona map depicting negative environmental impacts in relation to surface area,therefore, Manhattan would look like an intense hot spot, surrounded, atvarying distances, by belts of deepening green.
If you plotted the same negative impacts by resident or by household,however, the color scheme would be reversed. My little town has about fourthousand residents, spread over 38.7 thickly wooded square miles, and thereare many places within our town limits from which no sign of settlement isvisible in any direction. But if you moved eight million people like us, alongwith our dwellings and possessions and current rates of energy use, into aspace the size of New York City, our profligacy would be impossible tomiss, because you’d have to stack our houses and cars and garages and lawntractors and swimming pools and septic tanks higher than skyscrapers.(Conversely, if you made all eight million New Yorkers live at the densityof my town, they would require a space equivalent to the land area of thesix New England states plus Delaware and New Jersey.) Spreading peopleout increases the damage they do to the environment, while making theproblems harder to see and to address.
Of course, living in densely populated urban centers has many draw-backs. Even wealthy New Yorkers live in spaces that would seem crampedto Americans living almost anywhere else. A well-to-do friend of mine whogrew up in a town house in Greenwich Village thought of his upbringingas privileged until, in prep school, he visited a classmate from the suburbsand was staggered by the house, the lawn, the cars, and the swimming pool,and thought, with despair, You mean I could live like this? Manhattan isloud and dirty, and the subway is depressing, and the fumes from the carsand cabs and buses can make people sick. Presumably for environmentalreasons, New York City has one of the highest childhood-asthma rates in thecountry, with an especially alarming concentration in East Harlem.
Nevertheless, barring an almost inconceivable reduction in the earth’spopulation, dense urban centers offer one of the few plausible remediesfor some of the world’s most discouraging environmental ills. To borrow aterm from the jargon of computer systems, dense cities are scalable, whilesprawling suburbs are not. The environmental challenge we face, at thecurrent stage of our assault on the world’s non-renewable resources, is nothow to make our teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The true
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challenge is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan. Thisnotion has yet to be widely embraced, partly because it is counterintuitive,and partly because most Americans, including most environmentalists, tendto view cities the way Thomas Jefferson did, as “pestilential to the morals,the health, and the liberties of man.” New York is the place that’s fun to visitbut you wouldn’t want to live there. What could it possibly teach anyoneabout being green?
New York’s example, admittedly, is difficult for others to imitate, becausethe city’s remarkable population density is the result not of conscientiousplanning but of a succession of serendipitous historical accidents. Themost important of those accidents was geographic: New York arose on asmallish island rather than on the mainland edge of a river or a bay, and thesurrounding water served as a physical constraint to outward expansion.Manhattan is like a typical seaport turned inside out—a city with a harboraround it, rather than a harbor with a city along its edge. Insularity gaveManhattan more shoreline per square mile than other ports, a major advan-tage in the days when one of the world’s main commercial activities wasmoving cargoes between ships. It also drove early development inward andupward.
A second lucky accident was that Manhattan’s street plan was createdby merchants who were more interested in economic efficiency than inboulevards, parks, or empty spaces between buildings. The resulting crushof architecture is actually humanizing, because it brings the city’s com-mercial, cultural, and other offerings closer together, thereby increasingtheir accessibility—a point made forty-three years ago by the brilliantlyiconoclastic urban thinker Jane Jacobs, in her landmark book The Deathand Life of Great American Cities.
A third accident was the fact that by the early nineteen-hundreds mostof Manhattan’s lines had been filled in to the point where not even RobertMoses could easily redraw them to accommodate the great destroyer ofAmerican urban life, the automobile. Henry Ford thought of cars as toolsfor liberating humanity from the wretchedness of cities, which he viewedwith as much distaste as Jefferson did. In 1932, John Nolen, a prominentHarvard-educated urban planner and landscape architect, said, “The futurecity will be spread out, it will be regional, it will be the natural product ofthe automobile, the good road, electricity, the telephone, and the radio,combined with the growing desire to live a more natural, biological lifeunder pleasanter and more natural conditions.” This is the idea behindsuburbs, and it’s still seductive. But it’s also a prescription for sprawl andexpressways and tremendous waste.
New York City’s obvious urban antithesis, in terms of density and auto-mobile use, is metropolitan Los Angeles, whose metastatic outward growthhas been virtually unimpeded by the lay of the land, whose early settlerscame to the area partly out of a desire to create space between themselves
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and others, and whose main development began late enough to be shapedby the needs of cars. But a more telling counterexample is Washington,D.C., whose basic layout was conceived at roughly the same time asManhattan’s, around the turn of the nineteenth century. The District ofColumbia’s original plan was created by an eccentric French-born engineerand architect named Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, who befriended GeneralWashington during the Revolutionary War and asked to be allowed todesign the capital. Many of modern Washington’s most striking features arehis: the broad, radial avenues; the hublike traffic circles; the sweeping publiclawns and ceremonial spaces.
Washington is commonly viewed as the most intelligently beautiful—themost European—of large American cities. Ecologically, though, it’s a mess.L’Enfant’s expansive avenues were easily adapted to automobiles, and thelow, widely separated buildings (whose height is limited by law) stretchedthe distance between destinations. There are many pleasant places inWashington to go for a walk, but the city is difficult to get around on foot:the wide avenues are hard to cross, the traffic circles are like obstaclecourses, and the grandiloquent empty spaces thwart pedestrians, by actingas what Jane Jacobs calls “border vacuums.” (One of Jacobs’s manyarresting observations is that parks and other open spaces can reduce urbanvitality, by creating dead ends that prevent people from moving freelybetween neighborhoods and by decreasing activity along their edges.) Manyparts of Washington, furthermore, are relentlessly homogeneous. There areplenty of dignified public buildings on Constitution Avenue, for example,but good luck finding a dry cleaner, a Chinese restaurant, or a grocery store.The city’s horizontal, airy design has also pushed development into thesurrounding countryside. The fastest-growing county in the United Statesis Loudoun County, Virginia, at the rapidly receding western edge of theWashington metropolitan area.
The Sierra Club, an environmental organization that advocates thepreservation of wilderness and wildlife, has a national campaign calledChallenge to Sprawl. The aim of the program is to arrest the mindlessconversion of undeveloped countryside into subdivisions, strip malls, andS.U.V.-clogged expressways. The Sierra Club’s Web site features a slide-show-like demonstration that illustrates how various sprawling suburbanintersections could be transformed into far more appealing and energy-efficient developments by implementing a few modifications, among themwidening the sidewalks and narrowing the streets, mixing residential andcommercial uses, moving buildings closer together and closer to the edges ofsidewalks (to make them more accessible to pedestrians and to increaselocal density), and adding public transportation—all fundamental elementsof the widely touted anti-sprawl strategy known as Smart Growth. In arecent telephone conversation with a Sierra Club representative involved inChallenge to Sprawl, I said that the organization’s anti-sprawl suggestions
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and the modified streetscapes in the slide show shared many significantfeatures with Manhattan—whose most salient characteristics include widesidewalks, narrow streets, mixed uses, densely packed buildings, and anextensive network of subways and buses. The representative hesitated, thensaid that I was essentially correct, although he would prefer that the pro-gram not be described in such terms, since emulating New York City wouldnot be considered an appealing goal by most of the people whom the SierraClub is trying to persuade.
An obvious way to reduce consumption of fossil fuels is to shift morepeople out of cars and into public transit. In many parts of the country,though, public transit has been stagnant or in decline for years. New YorkCity’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Department of Trans-portation account for nearly a third of all the transit passenger milestravelled in the United States and for nearly four times as many passengermiles as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and the LosAngeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority combined.
New York City looks so little like other parts of America that urbanplanners and environmentalists tend to treat it as an exception rather thanan example, and to act as though Manhattan occupies an idiosyncraticuniverse of its own. But the underlying principles apply everywhere. “Thebasic point,” Jeffrey Zupan, an economist with the Regional PlanningAssociation, told me, “is that you need density to support public transit. Inall cities, not just in New York, once you get above a certain density twothings happen. First, you get less travel by mechanical means, which isanother way of saying you get more people walking or biking; and, second,you get a decrease in the trips by auto and an increase in the trips by transit.That threshold tends to be around seven dwellings per acre. Once youcross that line, a bus company can put buses out there, because they knowthey’re going to have enough passengers to support a reasonable frequencyof service.”
Phoenix is the sixth-largest city in the United States and one of the fastest-growing among the top ten, yet its public transit system accounts for justone percent of the passenger miles that New York City’s does. The reason isthat Phoenix’s burgeoning population has spread so far across the desert—greater Phoenix, whose population is a little more than twice that ofManhattan, covers more than two hundred times as much land—that notransit system could conceivably serve it. And no amount of browbeating,public-service advertising, or federal spending can change that.
Cities, states, and the federal government often negate their own effortsto nurture public transit by simultaneously spending huge sums to make iteasier for people to get around in cars. When a city’s automobile trafficbecomes congested, the standard response has long been to provideadditional capacity by building new roads or widening existing ones. Thisapproach eventually makes the original problem worse, by generating what
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transportation planners call “induced traffic”: every mile of new highwaylures passengers from public transit and other more efficient modes oftravel, and makes it possible for residential and commercial developmentto spread even farther from urban centers. And adding public transit in thehope of reducing automobile congestion is as self-defeating as building newhighways, because unclogging roads, if successful, just makes driving seemmore attractive, and the roads fill up again. A better strategy would be toeliminate existing traffic lanes and parking spaces gradually, thereby forcingmore drivers to use less environmentally damaging alternatives—in effect,“induced transit.” One reason New Yorkers are the most dedicated transitusers in America is that congestion on the city’s streets makes drivingextraordinarily disagreeable. The average speed of crosstown traffic inManhattan is little more than that of a brisk walker, and in midtown atcertain times of the day the cars on the side streets move so slowly that theyappear almost to be parked. Congestion like that urges drivers into thesubways, and it makes life easier for pedestrians and bicycle riders byslowing cars to a point where they constitute less of a physical threat.
Even in New York City, the relationship between traffic and transit is notwell understood. A number of the city’s most popular recent transportation-related projects and policy decisions may in the long run make the city aworse place to live in by luring passengers back into their cars and awayfrom public transportation: the rebuilding and widening of the West SideHighway, the implementation of EZ-Pass on the city’s toll bridges, thedecision not to impose tolls on the East River bridges, and the currentrenovation of the F.D.R. Drive (along with the federally funded hundred-and-thirty-nine-million-dollar Outboard Detour Roadway, which isintended to prevent users of the F.D.R. from being inconvenienced while thework is under way).
Public transit itself can be bad for the environment if it facilitates ratherthan discourages sprawl. The Washington Metropolitan Area TransitAuthority is considering extensions to some of the most distant branchesof its system, and those extensions, if built, will allow people to live evenfarther from the city’s center, creating new, non-dense suburbs where allother travel will be by automobile, much of it to malls and schools and gasstations that will be built to accommodate them. Transit is best for theenvironment when it helps to concentrate people in dense urban cores.Building the proposed Second Avenue subway line would be environ-mentally sound, because it would increase New Yorkers’ ability to live with-out cars; building a bullet train between Penn Station and the Catskills(for example) would not be sound, because it would enable the vast,fuel-squandering apparatus of suburbia to establish itself in a region thatcouldn’t support it otherwise.
On the afternoon of August 14, 2003, I was working in my office, on thethird floor of my house, when the lights blinked, my window air-conditioner
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sputtered, and my computer’s backup battery kicked in briefly. This was thebeginning of the great blackout of 2003, which halted electric service inparts of eight Northeastern and Midwestern states and in southeasternCanada. The immediate cause was eventually traced to Ohio, but publicattention often focused on New York City, which had the largest concentra-tion of affected power customers. Richard B. Miller, who resigned as thesenior energy adviser for the city of New York six weeks before the black-out, reportedly over deep disagreements with the city’s energy policy, toldme, “When I was with the city, I attended a conference on global warmingwhere somebody said, ‘We really need to raise energy and electricity pricesin New York City, so that people will consume less.’ And my response atthat conference was ‘You know, if you’re talking about raising energy pricesin New York City only, then you’re talking about something that’s reallybad for the environment. If you make energy prices so expensive in the citythat a business relocates from Manhattan to New Jersey, what you’re reallytalking about, in the simplest terms, is a business that’s moving from asubway stop to a parking lot. And which of those do you think is worse forthe environment?’”
People who live in cities use only about half as much electricity as peoplewho don’t, and people who live in New York City generally use less than theurban average. A truly enlightened energy policy would reward city dwellersand encourage others to follow their good example. Yet New York Cityresidents pay more per kilowatt-hour than almost any other Americanelectricity customers; taxes and other government charges, most of whichare not enumerated on electricity bills, can constitute close to twenty per-cent of the cost of power for residential and commercial users in New York.Richard Miller, after leaving his job with New York City, went to work as alawyer in Consolidated Edison’s regulatory affairs department, spurred byhis thinking about the environment. He believes that state and local officialshave historically taken unfair advantage of the fact that there is no politicalcost to attacking a big utility. Con Ed pays more than six hundred milliondollars a year in property taxes, making it by far the city’s largest property-tax payer, and those charges inflate electric bills. Meanwhile, the cost ofdriving is kept artificially low. (Fifth Avenue and the West Side Highwaydon’t pay property taxes, for example.) “In addition,” Miller said, “theburden of improving the city’s air has fallen far more heavily on powerplants, which contribute only a small percentage of New York City’s airpollution, than it has on cars—even though motor vehicles are a muchbigger source.”
Last year, the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C., held ashow called “Big & Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21stCentury.” A book of the same name was published in conjunction with theshow, and on the book’s dust jacket was a photograph of 4 Times Square,also known as the Condé Nast Building, a forty-eight-story glass-and-steel
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tower between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets, a few blocks west ofGrand Central Terminal. (The New Yorker’s offices occupy two floors in thebuilding.) When 4 Times Square was built, in 1999, it was considered amajor breakthrough in urban development. As Daniel Kaplan, a principal ofFox & Fowle Architects, the firm that designed it, wrote in an article inEnvironmental Design & Construction in 1997, “When thinking of greenarchitecture, one usually associates smaller scale,” and he cited as anexample the headquarters of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofitenvironmental research and consulting firm based in Snowmass, Colorado.The R.M.I. building is a four-thousand-square-foot, superinsulated,passive-solar structure with curving sixteen-inch-thick walls, set into a hill-side about fifteen miles north of Aspen. It was erected in the early eightiesand serves partly as a showcase for green construction technology. (It is alsothe home of Amory Lovins, who is R.M.I.’s co-founder and chief executiveofficer.) R.M.I. contributed to the design of 4 Times Square, which has manyinnovative features, among them collection chutes for recyclable materials,photovoltaic panels incorporated into parts of its skin, and curtain-wallconstruction with exceptional shading and insulating properties.
These are all important innovations. In terms of the building’s true eco-logical impact, though, they are distinctly secondary. (The power generatedby the photovoltaic panels supplies less than one percent of the building’srequirements.) The two greenest features of 4 Times Square are ones thatmost people never even mention: it is big, and it is situated in Manhattan.
Environmentalists have tended to treat big buildings as intrinsicallywasteful, because large amounts of energy are expended in their construc-tion, and because the buildings place intensely localized stresses on sewers,power lines, and water systems. But density can create the same kinds ofecological benefits in individual structures that it does in entire com-munities. Tall buildings have much less exposed exterior surface per squarefoot of interior space than smaller buildings do, and that means they presentrelatively less of themselves to the elements, and their small roofs absorb lessheat from the sun during cooling season and radiate less heat from insideduring heating season. (The beneficial effects are greater still in Manhattan,where one building often directly abuts another.) A study by MichaelPhillips and Robert Gnaizda, published in CoEvolution Quarterly in 1980,found that an ordinary apartment in a typical building near downtown SanFrancisco used just a fifth as much heating fuel as a new tract house in Davis,a little more than seventy miles away. Occupants of tall buildings also do asignificant part of their daily coming and going in elevators, which, becausethey are counterweighted and thus require less motor horsepower, areamong the most energy-efficient passenger vehicles in the world.
Bruce Fowle, a founder of Fox & Fowle, told me, “The Condé NastBuilding contains 1.6 million square feet of floor space, and it sits on oneacre of land. If you divided it into forty-eight one-story suburban office
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buildings, each averaging thirty-three thousand square feet, and spreadthose one-story buildings around the countryside, and then added parkingand some green space around each one, you’d end up consuming at least ahundred and fifty acres of land. And then you’d have to provide infra-structure, the highways and everything else.” Like many other buildings inManhattan, 4 Times Square doesn’t even have a parking lot, because thevast majority of the six thousand people who work inside it don’t needone. In most other parts of the country, big parking lots are not onlynecessary but are required by law. If my town’s zoning regulations applied inManhattan, 4 Times Square would have needed sixteen thousand parkingspaces, one for every hundred square feet of office floor space. The RockyMountain Institute’s showcase headquarters has double-paned krypton-filled windows, which admit seventy-five percent as much light as ordinarywindows while allowing just ten percent as much heat to escape in coldweather. That’s a wonderful feature, and one of many in the building thatpeople ought to copy. In other ways, though, the R.M.I. building sets a verypoor environmental example. It was built in a fragile location, on virgin landmore than seven thousand feet above sea level. With just four thousandsquare feet of interior space, it can hold only six of R.M.I.’s eighteen full-time employees; the rest of them work in a larger building a mile away.Because the two buildings are in a thinly populated area, they forcemost employees to drive many miles—including trips between the twobuildings—and they necessitate extra fuel consumption by delivery trucks,snowplows, and other vehicles. If R.M.I.’s employees worked on a singlefloor of a big building in Manhattan (or in downtown Denver) and lived inapartments nearby, many of them would be able to give up their cars, andthe thousands of visitors who drive to Snowmass each year to learn aboutenvironmentally responsible construction could travel by public transitinstead.
Picking on R.M.I.—which is one of the world’s most farsighted environ-mental organizations—may seem unfair, but R.M.I., along with many otherfarsighted environmental organizations, shares responsibility for per-petuating the powerful anti-city bias of American environmentalism. Thatbias is evident in the technical term that is widely used for sprawl: “urban-ization.” Thinking of freeways and strip malls as “urban” phenomenaobscures the ecologically monumental difference between Phoenix andManhattan, and fortifies the perception that population density is anenvironmental ill. It also prevents most people from recognizing thatR.M.I.’s famous headquarters—which sits on an isolated parcel morethan a hundred and eighty miles from the nearest significant public transitsystem—is sprawl.
When I told a friend recently that I thought New York City should beconsidered the greenest community in America, she looked puzzled, thenasked, “Is it because they’ve started recycling again?” Her question reflected
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a central failure of the American environmental movement: that too manyof us have been made to believe that the most important thing we can do tosave the earth and ourselves is to remember each week to set our cans andbottles and newspapers on the curb. Recycling is popular because it enablespeople to relieve their gathering anxieties about the future without alteringthe way they live. But most current recycling has, at best, a neutral effect onthe environment, and much of it is demonstrably harmful. As WilliamMcDonough and Michael Braungart point out in Cradle to Cradle: Remak-ing the Way We Make Things (2003), most of the materials we place on ourcurbs are merely “downcycled”—converted to a lower use, providing apause in their inevitable journey to a landfill or an incinerator—often with arelease of toxins and a net loss of fuel, among other undesirable effects.
By far the worst damage we Americans do to the planet arises not fromthe newspapers we throw away but from the eight hundred and fifty millionor so gallons of oil we consume every day. We all know this at some level,yet we live like alcoholics in denial. How else can we explain why our carshave grown bigger, heavier, and less fuel-efficient at the same time thatscientists have become more certain and more specific about the con-sequences of our addiction to gasoline?
On a shelf in my office is a small pile of recent books about the environ-ment that I plan to reread obsessively if I’m found to have a terminal illness,because they’re so unsettling that they may make me less upset about beingsnatched from life in my prime. At the top of the pile is Out of Gas: TheEnd of the Age of Oil, by David Goodstein, a professor at the CaliforniaInstitute of Technology, which was published in 2004. “The worldwill soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap oil,” Goodsteinbegins. In succeeding pages, he lucidly explains that humans have consumedalmost a trillion barrels of oil (that’s forty-two trillion gallons), or abouthalf of the earth’s total supply; that a devastating global petroleum crisis willbegin not when we have pumped the last barrel out of the ground but whenwe have reached the halfway point, because at that moment, for the firsttime in history, the line representing supply will fall through the line repre-senting demand; that we will probably pass that point within the currentdecade, if we haven’t passed it already; that various well-established laws ofeconomics are about to assert themselves, with disastrous repercussions foralmost everything; and that “civilization as we know it will come to an endsometime in this century unless we can find a way to live without fossilfuels.”
Standing between us and any conceivable solution to our energy night-mare are our cars and the asphalt latticed country we have built to obligethem. Those cars have defined our culture and our lives. A car is speed andsex and power and emancipation. It makes its driver a self-sufficient nationof one. It is everything a city is not.
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Most of the car’s most tantalizing charms are illusory, though. By helpingus to live at greater distances from one another, driving has underminedthe very benefits that it was meant to bestow. Ignacio San Martín, anarchitecture professor and the head of the graduate urban-design programat the University of Arizona, told me, “If you go out to the streets of Phoenixand are able to see anybody walking—which you likely won’t—they aregoing to tell you that they love living in Phoenix because they have abeautiful house and three cars. In reality, though, once the conversationgoes a little bit further, they are going to say that they spend most of theirtime at home watching TV, because there is absolutely nothing to do.” Oneof the main attractions of moving to the suburbs is acquiring ground of yourown, yet you can travel for miles through suburbia and see no one doinganything in a yard other than working on the yard itself (often with thehelp of a riding lawnmower, one of the few four-wheeled passenger vehiclesthat get worse gas mileage than a Hummer). The modern suburban yard isperfectly, perversely self-justifying: its purpose is to be taken care of.
In 1801, in his first Inaugural Address, Thomas Jefferson said thatthe American wilderness would provide growing room for democracy-sustaining agrarian patriots “to the thousandth and thousandth gener-ation.” Jefferson didn’t foresee the interstate highway system, and hisarithmetic was off, in any case, but he nevertheless anticipated (and, in manyways, embodied) the ethos of suburbia, of anti-urbanism, of sprawl. Thestandard object of the modern American dream, the single-family homesurrounded by grass, is a mini-Monticello. It was the car that put it withinour reach. But what a terrible price we have paid—and have yet to pay—forour liberation from the city.
This essay was originally published in The New Yorker October 18, 2004.
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STEWARDSHIP OF THEPRESERVATION,RE-USE, ANDSUSTAINABILITY
BUILT ENVIRONMENTThe emerging synergies fromsustainability and historic preservationROBERT A. YOUNG (2004)
AN OVERVIEW
Sustainable architecture looks at long-term socioeconomic goals rather thanjust near-term financial ones. In the United States, the predominant long-term goal has been to extract maximum profit from the land. Natural andbuilt environments have always been vulnerable to wasting due to percep-tions that there was always more land somewhere else and that any land usecould change when something more profitable could be built upon orextracted from it. In this fashion, land could also be cast aside when easierdevelopment choices existed elsewhere. As such, current economics-drivenpractices continually reshape the built and natural environments. Thisrecurring paradigm is clearly evident in how “undeveloped” lands initiallyprized for their extractable natural resources were subsequently turned intoagricultural lands and then finally were smothered by suburban sprawl, orin how previously developed lands are left to deteriorate. These cycles willaffect all open and developed land, eventually leaving them undifferentiated,lacking vitality, and having little to no regional identity. This can readily beseen by the homogeneity of franchise architecture and seemingly identicalsuburban housing tracts across the country that have proliferated since theadvent of the interstate highway system.
STEWARDSHIP OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
Stewardship of the built environment counters this extraction andconsumption-based economic philosophy. Despite the growing emergenceof sustainability as a viable design medium, the goals of stewardship of thebuilt environment, based on long-term environmental sustainability, areviewed by many as contrary to the endemic approach of seeking near-termimmediate economic gain. Long-term sustainability, while attractive inprinciple, pales economically against the near-term economic benefits gainedfrom “standard” practices of the past half-century. While defenders of thenatural environment have existed as a minority, the current cultural land-scape of the United States reflects the premise that the majority has longadopted the depletion-extraction economic perspective as the justifiableparadigm. Today, the fact that vast tracts of the built environment remainunderutilized demonstrates how suburban sprawl drains vitality from cen-tral cities. Continuing development of the suburban periphery overwhelms
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previously individual smaller towns adjoining a central city, consumes openor agricultural lands, and subsequently results in increased traffic conges-tion, air pollution, and infrastructure costs for highways, utilities, andschool systems. The concept of stewardship, rather than extraction, is acritical aspect of sustainable design that evaluates how changes in the builtand natural environments act as a singular system rather than two separateones. A primary outcome of stewardship is that it can act to engage thepractice of redevelopment and in turn reverse the outward suburban flowback towards the neighborhoods and business districts that already existwithin many core cities. Many neighborhoods in older communities alreadyhave existing infrastructure, access to public transit, and a far less homo-geneous architectural heritage that can act to reduce overall constructionexpenses, make housing more affordable, and engender a higher and moreaffordable quality of life than their suburban counterparts.
Concurrent to the emergence of sustainability, the recognition of theeconomic and social value recaptured in existing buildings has resulted ina steadily growing interest in historic preservation nationwide. Whilethe preservation movement has often been derided as being opposite tothe “accepted” concepts of growth and profitability, successful historicpreservation projects nationwide have shown that preservation can be astrategy that not only retains a cultural identity of a given community butalso can be successful in generating renewed community development andmaintaining a long-term sustainable aspect of the environment.
A NEXUS
The renewed interest in preserving and/or rehabilitating buildings at theturn of the twenty-first century can be directly traced to the AmericanBicentennial. Tax laws enacted between 1976 and 1986 made rehabilitatinghistoric buildings attractive and spawned significant growth in the rehabili-tation industry. The 1986 tax act, however, has virtually eliminated invest-ment opportunities in historic property rehabilitation. This catalytic decadeof rehabilitation activities created an awareness of the amenities that arevitalized central city could provide. Many central city neighborhoods arelikely to have the advantages of more non-profit institutions, interestingarchitecture, walkable neighborhoods, and access to mass transit. Recogni-tion of these amenities brought about the new urbanist movement of the latetwentieth century. While this movement ascribes to providing housing thatadopts the amenities common to existing central city neighborhoods, thetyranny of “easy development decisions” still generates a greater increase indevelopment at the suburban periphery rather than the redevelopment ofthe original built environment that first held (and often still does hold) thesefeatures. As described by Lucy and Phillips:1
1 Lucy, W., and Phillips, D.Confronting Suburban Decline.Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000.10.
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In land development, business calculations may lead to options thatare relatively easy to accomplish, such as . . . greenfield residentialsubdivisions . . . They receive extra weight with options that are difficultto implement such as mixed-use residential and commercial developmentson infill sites even if the more difficult options hold potential for higherprofits.
Accordingly, many central city buildings and land have been left fallow asthe suburbs push further outward. Since large-scale residential projects areoften perceived as more profitable due to the realizable economy in massproduction, these projects tend to be large in scope and require large tractsof open (or cleared) land. While new urbanism projects occur in both thesuburban and central city contexts, the vast majority still appear to be insuburban locations. As a result, open suburban land is still being developedor central city buildings are being removed to create a “tabula rasa” for newdevelopment and existing building stock that can be reused is oftenremoved. Due to the perceived difficulty in navigating regulatory proceduresand the expense of assembling tracts within the central city, particularly inhistoric districts, the developers initiate suburban developments morefrequently and at a large scale rather than at the individual homeownerscale. Sustainability, stewardship, and preservation seemingly havingreached a nexus in that they all are beginning to reach for the sameeconomic, ecologic, and social viability values. However, misperceptions,miscommunications, and outright arrogance and ignorance quite often leadto multiple parties standing in opposition to one another while these com-mon long-term values and goals become imperiled. All parties want certainaspects of the same thing but fail to reach a viable means of doing so,especially as the project scope and scale of larger developments tend to leadto an “all or nothing” attitude from all parties involved. A possible alterna-tive having greater implications for sustainability in the long term is thehistoric preservation/stewardship approach that adapts and reuses the exist-ing built environment rather than continuing to build in the suburbanperiphery or worse, remove existing buildings to simply replace them withnew construction.
The concepts of sustainability, stewardship, and preservation havegained increased visibility in the past fifteen years. Surprisingly, all havemoved along parallel paths without significant interaction and each in itsown way substantiates the goal of long-term viability of the built and naturalenvironments. Sustainability recognizes the need to do things in the presentthat can protect the future. Stewardship recognizes the trade-offs that needto be assessed to protect both the natural and built environments. Preserva-tion recognizes the importance of understanding the past while promotingolder buildings as part of the future of the built environment. From thelarge-scale collaborative efforts common with the conversion of military
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bases for contemporary civilian uses to the growing number of privatehomeowners respectfully rehabilitating inner-city houses, there is a growinglist of examples that demonstrate how all three perspectives are compatiblewith one another. The sustainable aspects demonstrate how existingbuilding stock can fit into promoting redevelopment within the urbancore and thereby promote long-term revitalization. Extending the idea,appropriate stewardship can cultivate a renewed social and economicvitality in the community while reducing the net cycle of extraction andconsumption all along the rehabilitation/reuse spectrum. And lastly, theintegration of the sustainability and preservation financial incentivesdirectly helps to make the process even more acceptable from an economicperspective while fostering the retention of our cultural roots.
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
With the further recognition at a broader scale of the synergies that thesethree concepts interactively generate, a longer term sustainable builtenvironment can be realized. Through the appropriate stewardship of boththe natural and built environments, the relationship between reusedbuildings and the retention of a healthy natural environment will becomeincreasingly evident. Through recognition of the social and economic valuesoffered by historic preservation, the connections of the cultural past tothe future societal viability of reused buildings can result in the reducedpressures of expansion at the suburban periphery and renewed use of theurban core. Individually, each is a potentially significant strategy to under-take but collectively they form a synergistically coherent perspective thatcan hold a tremendous potential for (re)shaping a sustainable culturallandscape and ecosystem.
This essay is abridged from the original published in the Proceedings of the 92ndAnnual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2004.
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DROSS; RE-GENESIS OF DIVERSE MATTERPRESERVATION,RE-USE, ANDSUSTAINABILITY
LYDIA KALLIPOLITI (2005)
The word dross refers to matter that is foreign, worn out and impure; it is aphantom material condition that is unnoticeable to such an extent that italmost does not exist in our perception. Dross is worthless; it is an inci-dental, displaced material, and a side effect of chemical reactions that servesno purpose. Nevertheless, when it appears, a necessity is created for itsremoval. In time and through the use and misuse of language, the word hassignified waste, impurity or any incongruous accumulation of disparateelements, pieces and material fragments.1 However, the etymological originof the word refers to a residual substance that emerges in transitionalmaterial stages,2 such as the process of melting a metal or the sedimentationof a liquid. Therefore, dross signifies more than an entropic landscape: itdepicts material derailment and the production of displaced matter. Alongwith the compelling will to subvert, invert or transmute matter unceasinglyto higher states, the occurrence of dross reminds us that pure operations ofmaking seem to belong to the sphere of impossibility.
The purpose of analyzing the ingredients and the properties of drosssubstance lies beneath the wonder of metamorphic materials. Dross may bea spin-off of alchemical endeavors and a phantom material condition, but atthe same time it is a product, or better stated a by-product, of social reality,paraphrasing Donna Haraway.3 The intrinsic properties of dross substanceare analyzed to serve as a medium for the comprehension of a culturalphenomenon of incidentally displaced matter that is automatically renderedmeaningless and serves no purpose whatsoever. Based on the perception ofmaterial impurity, this paper will attempt to encompass the generativepotential of obsolete objects and spaces, or in other words waste materialthat is displaced culturally or functionally from either its previous or itsoriginal identity.
The cultural fabric for this condition revolves around the material ramifi-cations of unprecedented technological evolutions in communications thathave irreversibly shifted our production and consumption modes during thepast two decades. The technological evolutions in computer software andhardware that have been producing novel tools, have been in parallel pro-ducing immense quantities of “techno-junk,” tons of purposeless and Dross materials.
1 See Merriam-Webster OnlineDictionary, <http://www.m-w.com/dictionary.htm>
2 Middle English “dros” originatesfrom Old English drOs—DREGS.Dregs, grounds and settlings aresediments that have settled at thebottom of a liquid, or small amountsof residue. For the etymology of theword “dross,” see the CambridgeDictionary Online, <http://dictionary.cambridge.org/>
3 I am borrowing here DonnaHaraway’s definition of the“cyborg” as a cultural product ofemerging socio-political regimes andpractices of everyday life.Specifically, Haraway writes: “Acyborg is a cybernetic organism, ahybrid of machine and organism, acreature of social reality as well as acreature of fiction.” See Donna J.Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs andWomen. The Reinvention of Nature(New York: Routledge, 1991), 149.
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indestructible matter, almost impossible to dispose of. Over the past decade,concerns related to waste streams have shifted in their orientation. Waste isno longer an issue that relates solely to quantity. It now also relates to theintricacy of the waste matter and its material composition. With the adventof highly advanced manufacturing methods and processes, many productsthat reach the end of their useful lives quickly and unexpectedly, are highlycomplex in form and material composition, containing in parallel highamounts of embodied energy. Electronic waste, known as e-waste, is thelargest growing industry of waste on a global scale.4 Alongside the numbers,a personal computer “contains over 1,000 different substances, manyof which are toxic, and creates serious pollution upon disposal.”5 Itssubsequent recycling becomes an excruciating and elusive task thatrequires numerous preparatory stages of shredding and segregating intoconstituent components and materials; this new type of intensive manuallabor is reportedly exported to Asia and prison houses.6 Consideringthe socio-political conditions directly linked to this rising material reality,there seems to be a necessity to use defunct circuitboards as larger ready-made complexes or as components embedded in other materials for entirelynew uses. Such a practice is supported through the production of materialsby recombinant methods and assemblies: materials within materials.7
Spanning scales, from the scale of obsolete “objects” to the scale of obso-lete “rooms” and “buildings,” a mundane reality of big defunct objects—displaced building parts—is overwhelming the contemporary city. “Techno-junk” is an emerging city-born condition; defunct oil tanks, air-conditioningtubes, advertising billboards, containers and other apparatuses articulate anew urban language that violates the building envelope or attaches itself to itas an outgrowth. If one identifies in the city fabric a stratum of buildingsthat can be easily mapped due to their longevity, equivalently one couldidentify a stratum of mechanical appendages that cannot easily be mappeddue to their ephemerality. The significantly different lifetime of the twostrata is the cause for an erosion of the outer building shell that cannot adaptto the change taking place in it or around it. The un-mappable urbancondition of this “floating matter” in the city has not yet been explored bycontemporary architecture. The necessity of such a discourse is not onlydriven by the formulation of an ecological awareness, but also by the need tomanipulate this kind of raw material and engage with “techno-excrements”as an emerging city-born condition, derivative of the urban system’s internalerosion.
RE-GENESIS OF DIVERSE MATTER; A DESIGN POST-PRAXIS
We think of Picasso’s bicycle seat (Bull’s Head) of 1944:
You remember that bull’s head I exhibited recently? Out of handle barsand the bicycle seat I made a bull’s head, which everybody recognized as a
4 The rates of computerobsolescence are so extreme that “inthe year of 2005, one computer willbecome obsolete for every new oneput on the market.” See Jim Puckett,Leslie Byster, Sarah Westervelt,Richard Gutierrez, Sheila Davis,Asma Hussain and Madhumitta Dutta(2002), “Exporting Harm. TheHigh-Tech Trashing of Asia,” TheBasel Action Network (BAN) &Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTSVTC) (February 25, 2002), <http://www.svtc.org/resource/pubs/pub_index.html>. Accessed February 25,2004.
5 “Exporting Harm,” The BaselAction Network & Silicon ValleyToxics Coalition.
6 Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition,<http://www.svtc.org/resource/pubs/pub_index.html>.
7 Sheila Kennedy writes howsecondary and tertiary methods ofpost-industrial production producerecombinant materials: materialswithin materials. For example, manysheet claddings are made of choppedup or reconstituted bits of othermaterials. See Sheila Kennedy andChristoph Grunenberg, KVA:Material Misuse (London:AA Publications, 2001), 63.
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bull’s head. Thus a metamorphosis was completed; and now I would liketo see another metamorphosis take place in the opposite direction.Suppose my bull’s head is thrown on the scrap heap. Perhaps some day afellow will come along and say: “Why there’s something that wouldcome in handy for the handle bars of my bicycle . . .” and so a doublemetamorphosis would have been achieved. 8
By engaging a strategy of irony as a legitimate method of approachingphenomena, Picasso asserts that there is no social or constructed reality“that we have to accept in toto,”9 but a composite present realm consistingof fragments. A discourse of “collaging” fragments is ironic, because itresists utopia. It recognizes a loss in objects, buildings or urban domainsthat have misplaced their previous fixed identity and encompasses thisloss as a generative potential. In this citation, meaning is not an inscribed,static quality, embedded in objects. Conversely, it is tacit and malleable;it is perpetually redefined, as the object is appropriated and re-used, as itundergoes a metamorphosis. In this sense, the tactic of re-use is not solelyan environmental strategy directed to the ethics of the world’s salvation.It becomes a psycho-spatial or mental disposition, “fueling a reality ofchange, motion, action.”10 Along the same lines of thought, the conditionof flow and unremitting transformation is characterized by Gyorgy Kepesas a fundamental reorientation of the twentieth century. He explainsthat,
The dominant matrix of nineteenth-century attitudes was the use ofMarx’s term “reification”; relationships were interpreted in terms ofthings, objects or commodity values. Today a reversal of this attitudehas begun to appear; there is a steadily increasing movement in scienceand in art toward processes and systems that dematerialize the objectworld and discredit physical possessions. What scientists consideredbefore as substance shaped into forms, and consequently understood astangible objects, is now recognized as energies and their dynamicorganization. 11
Stretching strategies of appropriation, re-use and transformation, drosspraxis does not begin from scratch, but from the reality of an existinginoperative component; therefore, meaning is inevitably shifted. It can nolonger be located in the process of representing an abstract concept, but inthe act of manipulating matter and bonding new functions to objects thathave lost their previous, fixed identity. Instead of a genesis of meaning, thereis a regeneration of meaning and identity. A dross post-praxis dwells con-ceptually in what one could consider as the counterpart of parthenogenesis—the phenomenon of virgin birth. It emerges as a germinal creative drive,through the desire for transformation of existing information, concepts and
8 Alfred Barr, Picasso: Fifty Years ofhis Art (New York: Published for theMuseum of Modern Art by ArnoPress, 1946), 241.
9 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter,Collage City (Cambridge, Mass:M.I.T. Press, 1978), 149.
10 Rowe and Koetter, Collage City.
11 Gyorgy Kepes, “Art andEcological Consciousness” inGyorgy Kepes (Ed.), Arts of theEnvironment (New York: GeorgeBraziller, 1972), 11.
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physical entities; it engrafts a copiousness of thought, defying pure, virginalcreations. If we assume that nothing emerges “out of zero,”12 a post-praxisaims to retain the energy induced in creative systems and exploit theaccumulative effect of knowledge and materiality.
COLLAGE VERSUS MOLDING
The issue of re-use has emerged as monumentally appealing, as an offspringof rapidly advancing industrialized processes. Marcel Duchamp’s declar-ation of the urinal as a work of art emancipated a syllogism that discon-nected the reminiscence an object was carrying along with it from its materi-ality. The object could then be viewed as raw material utilized for furtherspatial deployments. In the same spirit, Kurt Schwitters gathered materialfrom the street and collaged it to make interior artifices in his Hanoverapartment and created the compelling work of the “Merzbau.” Schwitters’declaration was to build out of nothing—merz—meaning out of displacedmaterial that experienced the loss of its identity. However, the importanceof the “Merzbau” extends to the material techniques Schwitters deployed;he did not simply put together his collected materials in an additivemanner. Instead, he created a second smooth membrane that sealed therealm of “collage.” Eventually, the compositions of the prosthetic artbecame latent building material, revealed locally through openings called“grottos.” Schwitters’ wrapping of his collected waste material depicts twofundamentally different principles that constitute simultaneously bipolarand inherent drives in creative praxis. These principles are collage andmolding; where the first denotes an additive logic of juxtapositions andsuperimpositions and the latter denotes a procedural, evolving logic oftransfusion.
Collage, as a process of bringing fragments together and interrogatingtheir newly formed relationships in new assemblages, constitutes a primeartistic revolution of the twentieth century. Collage embeds the notion of
Re-use paradigms of building partsand components, using “molding”techniques. Work by Lo/Tek andRachel Whiteread.
12 David J. Furley argues that thisphilosophical position is credited toDemocritus and the theory ofatomism in ancient Greekphilosophy. See David J. Furley, TwoStudies in the Greek Atomists(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1967). According toDemocritus, “the nature of theeternal things is small existences(ουσ�αι) unlimited in number, and inaddition to these he assumes space(τ�πο) infinite in extent.” See CyrilBailey, The Greek Atomists andEpicurus (New York: Russell &Russell Inc, 1964), 117.
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re-use in an elemental sense. It is a practice that “violates ‘property’; a kindof theft.”13 Although molding also involves the appropriation of existingobjects and contexts, its case is vitally different. The obsolete matter is inter-rogated for its textural and formal potential and successively used either as amatrix or as material that can be plastically manipulated. Then the matrixis subjected to a process of many stages: a process that essentially feeds itselfas molds and casts change roles in and out without a definitive ending. Byputting the two principles of collage and molding in opposition, one candraw the following assumptions: if collage signifies the change of context,then molding signifies a material transfer; if collage’s scope is a syntaxchange, then molding’s scope is a substance change; if the intrinsic principleof collage is prosthesis of parts, then the intrinsic principle in moldingis fusion of parts; if collage is about transformation, molding is abouttransmutation.
COMPOSITE RE-USE
Experimenting with dross strategies, two methodologies are engaged: com-posite graft and plastic matter.
Composite grafting denotes the combination of actual obsolete objectswith their molded by-products, where “by-product” refers to new artificialobjects that can be formed by using an obsolete component as a repro-ductive matrix; or a mold where new materials can be cast. This operationfunctions under the premise that the occurring by-product components willretain partially characteristics of the original object, but will have differentproperties, creating assembly lines of materials with new local behaviorsand properties, according to the material synthesis of the by-products.Composite materials make a useful analogy to the methodology of a com-posite graft; they are composed of elements that work together to producematerial properties that are different to the properties of those elements ontheir own. The method also touches on some of re-use’s most deeply rootedconventions, such as the conviction that re-use should be structured as aprecise analogue of the way that natural systems deal with their waste: inclosed loops. By considering the production of new components out ofcasting on found objects, artificiality becomes part of the equation foreffectively managing waste streams.
Plastic matter refers to a condition of material indeterminacy, wherematerial is malleable and deformed slightly from its original status, whileretaining some of its primary characteristics. In reality, this condition occursin a wide variety of thermoplastic polymers when heat is applied to them andthey reach a mesophase where they are neither liquids nor solids. Heating isa method that is considered distinct from any tools linked to the archi-tectural design process; however, the effects of heating in materials such asthermoplastic polymers that directly affects their chemical compositioncould be described as a physical analogue of currently available digital tools.
13 Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Objectof Post-Criticism” in Hal Foster(Ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays onPostmodern Culture (New York: TheNew Press, 1998), 102.
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In order to test my selected methodological operations, I have created amatrix of objects escalating in scale that can serve as a pool for designexploration. The items of this matrix are a circuitboard, a helmet, a plasticcontainer, a bikelid, a watertank, a partition wall and a building part. In theselection of objects, a number of parameters were considered, ranging fromthe textural and formal complexity of the obsolete objects, disposabilitydifficulties and other factors. Each object of the matrix ran through differentdigital molding processes, escalating in complexity and varying the relation-ship between the cast and the mold. Consequently, the objects themselvesalong with the by-products that emerge from the molding operations will beused in design experiments, each in a different site and location. In thissense, the matrix plays the role of a generating device for new material, newimages and new concepts. Each obsolete object delivers innumerable andvariable by-products that can either open the imagination through anapocalypse of the material plasticity in each case, or can be directly used innew assemblages.
An example of a dross design experiment is sited in the basement infinitecorridor of M.I.T.’s main building. This location has become a depositorand a pick-up point for obsolete electronics, such as outmoded computersand machinery, acquiring in time a dross function. The intention was to use
Matrix of selected obsolete objects, spaces and building parts.
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some of the discarded items, that is, the circuitboards, to create a pocketdevice that accommodates within it the obsolete matter and also registersits flux in and out of the corridor. The installation was conceived as a secondskin on the wall—a double layer created of circuitboards and elastomercircuitboard by-products—that can be opened and “stuffed” with moreobsolete items. The combination of flexible and rigid components succes-sively into assembly lines of double-skin stripes yields a heterogeneousperformance to the device, where the stripes open up and deform inmultiple ways according to diversified local material properties of thenew skin.
In the experiment, both collage and molding operations were imple-mented. Molding was put in effect via the direct selection and use of thematrix’s objects as molds for the production of new elements with differentmaterial properties. Collage was put in effect via the repetition of differenttypes of components joined in assembly lines. The combination of actualobsolete components with their occurring by-products—differentiated intexture, elasticity, form and performance—was a decision that initiallymade little sense, given standard environmental ethics that reason the reduc-tion of haphazard material compositions. However, the process entailed adisclosure; the material produced out of this quasi-evolutionary logic could
Matrix of by-products generated through the use of the obsolete item as a “mold.”
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be described as an enhanced mosaic of new and preexisting properties,where the re-use of obsolete matter was no longer semantically linked to itsprevious use. In this sense, the strategies of composite graft and plasticmatter unravel an unorthodox field of ad hoc ecology,14 meaning a method-ology of re-use for specific needs, places and purposes. Withholding theburden of precise future predictions for a “natural” or metabolic, closed-loop material re-use, composite graft could be useful in dealing with a newgenealogy of materially intricate waste objects, so that they can be re-used asthey are; launched by the drive of material synthesis, rather than the task ofcautiously segregating materials in constituents.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 93rd Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2005.
“Pocket Wall” made of obsoletecircuitboards and their molded by-products, located in the basementinfinite corridor of M.I.T., andaccommodating and recording theflux of obsolete items.
14 The term “adhoc ecology” isbased on Charles Jencks and NathanSilver’s definition of “adhocism,” asin situ design decisions taken forspecific needs and purposes. SeeCharles Jencks and Nathan Silver,Adhocism: The Case forImprovisation (New York:Doubleday, 1972).
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THE SHARED GLOBAL IDEOLOGY OF THEPRESERVATION,RE-USE, ANDSUSTAINABILITY
BIG AND THE GREENDAVID GISSEN (2003)
Many of the massive proposals for the World Trade Center site exhibitedthis past year at the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center containedreferences to their “green-ness,” but of all the projects that made suchclaims, the proposal by Norman Foster and Partners stood out. The textof Norman Foster and Partners’ entry to the competition claimed thatthe striking twin-tower proposal “would be the biggest and greenest build-ing ever built.” Through a variety of building technologies and subtlearticulations of architectural form, Foster would certainly be able to realizesuch a structure, but his statement raises several theoretical issues: whywould an architect want to achieve both of these contradictory goals; andhow can a building be the most massive building ever built and the mostenvironmentally sensitive? It would seem that massive development andenvironmental sensitivity are contradictory projects and therefore are notcompatible. The unprecedented scale of Foster’s proposal demands arethinking of the increased weaving of what might be called the theories ofthe “big” and the theories of the “green.” Foster’s project is not alone;recent buildings by his firm and buildings by many other firms employenvironmental technologies and siting techniques at huge scales. Collect-ively, these projects force us to understand why and how “bigness” and“greenness” are conflated, and how we ever imagined these theoreticalapproaches as opposed.
DEFINING BIGNESS AND GREENNESS
The large-scale architecture that defines late-modern, post-industrial,“global” urbanism was first dubbed “colossal architecture” by MarioGandelsonas in 1990 and then “bigness” by Rem Koolhaas in 1993.Gandelsonas came up with his concept of colossal architecture by exami-ning the work of Cesar Pelli through the writings of Jacques Derrida andSaskia Sassen.1 Koolhaas arrived at his concept of bigness as a way todescribe his firm’s large-scale architectural approach that was beingexhibited at M.O.M.A. in 1993 (the concept of bigness extended hiscritique of twentieth-century urbanism, first laid out in Delirious NewYork).2 Both “colossal” architecture and “bigness” described building typessuch as skyscrapers, high-rise buildings, mid-rise buildings, large-spanbuildings, among numerous other large-scale constructions. Both Gandel-sonas and Koolhaas claimed that these structures emerged from the eco-nomic forces of globalization, forces that demanded universal architectural
1 “Conditions for a ColossalArchitecture” in Cesar Pelli:Buildings and Projects, MarioGandelsonas and John Pastier, 1991,Rizzoli: New York.
2 “Bigness” in S,M,L,XL, RemKoolhaas et al., 1995, MonacelliPress: New York.
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solutions for living, working, and the sites for the production and consump-tion of goods.
Using Cesar Pelli’s World Financial Center and Pacific Design Center asexamples, Gandelsonas described colossal architecture as an architectureof endless growth and infinite verticality: “By cutting the towers’ shafts atdifferent heights, Pelli provides a way to indicate the concept of the infinitelytall tower . . . This same concept of cutting something infinitely long ispresent in the colossal length of the Pacific Design Center, a skyscraper on itsside . . . the colossal implies the enormous, the immense, the excessive, thelack of limits: ‘the infinite is present in it. It is too big, too large for our grasp,for our apprehension.’ ”3 Koolhaas describes bigness with similar language,but in this case, bigness is described as architecture that uses technologyto realize a limitless interior space, disconnected from its surroundings:“Together, all these breaks—with scale, with architectural composition,with tradition, with transparency, with ethics—imply the final, most radicalbreak: Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue. It exists; at most itcoexists. Its subtext is fuck context.”4
Between the 1960s and the 1990s, “green” or “environmentally con-scious” architecture theorists, such as Maxwell Fry, Roland Rainer, HassanFathy, Sym Van der Ryn, and Kenneth Frampton, attacked the samebuildings and building practices that Gandelsonas, and more particularlyKoolhaas, used to outline their vision for a new global architecture. Greenbuilding theory can roughly be surmised as an ideology that professes themaintenance of local resources and cultural building traditions through aform of ecological and cultural mimesis. In “Natural Energy and VernacularArchitecture,” Hassan Fathy argues that large buildings with their equallylarge air-conditioning packages are causing people to “forget” localresponses to the environment. Fathy calls for the use of vernacular low-techapproaches to mitigate the financial and environmental impact of largebuildings. In his book Livable Environments, Roland Rainer deridedthe skyscraper’s and the highway’s consumption of land, calling for region-ally based, small scale development. Pictures of German farmhouses andJapanese gardens were used as illustrations of a more environmentallysensitive way to build. Kenneth Frampton has repositioned the ideas inhis famous “Critical Regionalism” essay in more recent and explicitlyenvironmentalist works including his essay “Architecture and Ecosophy.”Frampton continues to maintain that large-scale speculative developmentsare at odds with a more local, climatically and topographically based archi-tecture, and that these developments were responsible for the destruction ofunique landscapes and cultural features.5
Frampton, Fathy, Van der Ryn, and Rainer cite the product-like nature ofskyscrapers, the bulldozing of land, and the use of artificial lighting andventilation, as symptoms of rampant international development that hasgone out of control. In response, these thinkers call for humanly scaled
3 “Conditions for a ColossalArchitecture,” p. 12.
4 “Bigness,” p. 502.
5 Hassan Fathy, “Natural Energyand Vernacular Architecture:Principles and Examples withReferences to Hot Arid Climates”Theories and Manifestoes ofContemporary Architecture, CharlesJencks and Karl Kropf (eds.), 1975,Academy Editions, p. 145. KennethFrampton, “Critical Regionalism:Six Points for an Architecture ofResistance” in The Anti-Aesthetic,Hal Foster, 1983, Port Townsend,WA: Bay Press, p. 17. Roland Rainer,Livable Environments 1972, Zurich:verlag fur Architektur Artemis.
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buildings that incorporate the “intimate knowledge of specific places” and“locally-inflected tactile features,” including topography, context, climate,and natural light. This combination of local features “jointly have the cap-acity to transcend the mere appearance of the technical,” while withstand-ing “the relentless onslaught of global modernization.”6
THE SHARED GLOBAL AGENDA OF BIGNESS AND GREENNESS
Although the idea of a “large-scale global environmentalist architecture”would seem contradictory, within the past five years a number of architectshave made claims that their projects were both “big” (in the way outlined byGandelsonas and Koolhaas) and green (by many of the standards presentedby Rainer, Fathy, Van der Ryn, and Frampton). Architects such as NormanFoster, Richard Rogers, William McDonough, and Kenneth Yeang claim thatseveral of their recent projects simultaneously owed their form to the forcesof international capitalist development and green ideology. Among themany projects, the Gap San Bruno Headquarters (1996) by WilliamMcDonough and Menara Mesiniaga (1996) by Kenneth Yeang are signifi-cant “big and green” projects, particularly described in this way. WilliamMcDonough describes Gap’s San Bruno Headquarters as a key feature of his“green business revolution,” and Kenneth Yeang received the Aga Khanaward for the way he fitted IBM’s regional headquarters into its Malaysianeco-system.
Numerous magazines, architectural journals, and architectural institu-tions have praised these projects for “tempering” the forces at work ininternational business that destroy context. On Kenneth Yeang’s MenaraMesiniaga, the jury of the Aga Khan prize reported: “designing with theclimate in mind, it brings an aesthetic dimension to [Menara Mesiniaga]that is not to be found in typical glass-enclosed air-conditioned high risebuilding. The tower has become a landmark, and increased the value of the
Below left: Gap San BrunoHeadquarters, William McDonough+ Partners. (Image courtesy ofWilliam McDonough + Partners.)
Below right: Menara Mesiniaga,Hamzah & Yeang. (Image courtesyof Hamzah & Yeang Architects.)
6 Fathy, p. 145; Frampton, p. 17.
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land around it. The jury found it to be a successful and promising approachto the design of many-storied structures in a tropical climate.”7 WilliamMcDonough often is praised in architecture and business magazines forshowing that good business practices can incorporate green perspectives.The Christian Science Monitor wrote: “His statements encapsulate hisefforts to bring about a rapprochement between corporate America and theenvironmental movement. One colleague in the environmental movementcalls him ‘our great translator,’ because he can defend the dreams of theenvironmental movement with arguments that an MBA can understand.”8
The “success” of McDonough and Yeang is largely due to their ability torectify what are presented as “opposing” forces of greenness and bignesswithin contemporary business.
Yeang and McDonough should be praised for their commitment toreducing building energy consumption, their sympathy to local resourceavailability, and their constant incorporation of natural light and air inalmost all of their projects. Yet the oppositional rhetoric that they haveinherited from the early green movement, and that they and others use todescribe their method of mediating “big” architecture, needs to be exam-ined. Rather than seeing projects such as Menara Mesiniaga and the GapSan Bruno building as remarkable because they adjust or “translate”between global business practices and local and ecological issues, these pro-jects actually reveal the international, global ideology that big business andenvironmentalism often share. As Mark Jarzombek so carefully argued,green technological systems became a billion dollar business in the 1990s,and companies often justified big green buildings as lowering the costs ofbusiness. These important observations force us to re-think whether“green” architecture is a movement about corporate resistance, which ishow it has been traditionally positioned, or whether it shares some funda-mental feature with the capitalist flow.
Both the Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek and the American writer DavidReiff offer a new theoretical connection between the global and the local,an explanation which could help re-position the links between the “big”and the “green.” As Zizek noted: “the opposition between globalizationand the survival of local traditions is false. Globalization directly resusci-tates local traditions, it literally thrives on them.”9 Zizek here is talkingabout tourism, spice trades, language and cultural classes, and otherinstances where business thrives off what is “local.” David Reiff makes asimilar argument when he claims that globalization is not a form of “west-ernization,” as is so often claimed. “Western Civilization does not occupy asacred place in the heart of capitalism. In fact, the dominant ideal of a‘white, European male’ stands in the way of capturing whole new marketsof non-white, non-European, non-male consumers . . . Everything is com-modifiable . . . there is money being made on all the Kinte cloths andKwanza paraphernalia.”10
8 “Making the Business Case forGoing Green,” Michael Fainelli,Christian Science Monitor, October18, 2001.
9 “From Western Marxism toWestern Buddhism,” Slavoj Zizek inCabinet Magazine, issue 2.
7 Aga Khan Prize, Jury Report,1996; <http://www.akdn.org/agency/akaa/sixthcycle/malaysia.html>
10 “Multiculturalism’s SilentPartner: It’s the New GlobalizedConsumer Economy, Stupid,”David Reiff, Harpers Magazine,August 1993, p. 62.
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In a related argument, Alan Calquhoun has demonstrated that thesupposed “resistance” within a locally based, small-scale culture is oftenfalse. What are often called vernacular “responses”, ideological systemsthat certainly would not produce a 2,000,000 square foot office tower, arenonetheless often the very same “products” of cultural elites. One neednot look too far back in history to see the way local and vernacular culturesare maintained as ways to maintain cultural cohesion, in the name of cen-tralized or globalized forms of power.11 Using these arguments as a newinterpretive framework, the supposed distance between bigness and green-ness might be false. Like the American business man who imagines himselfto learn “Japanese-ness” in order to conduct a highly competitive businessin Japan, big projects now learn the particularities of the local in order tobetter position the needs of a business enterprise. According to a thinkersuch as Slavoj Zizek or David Reiff, the presence of Western corporationsdoes not automatically result in the attitude “f k context”; often corpor-ations embrace the local, and the forces of globalization are often needed toresuscitate local features.
Menara Mesiniaga and Gap San Bruno have brought attention tothe unique architecture and climatology of Malaysia and California.Menara Mesiniaga and Yeang’s other realized Malaysian towers, such asABN-AMRO, incorporate traditional methods of air ventilation found intraditional Malaysian houses and they incorporate local plant species, all ina skyscraper format. Gap San Bruno’s habitat roof for local birds and plantlife has brought increased attention to its local Californian eco-system, andput wildlife firmly within the matrix of corporate experience. Another bigand green project, Eastgate, located in Zimbabwe and designed by thePearce Partnership, is based upon termite mounds found in Zimbabwe,which use a form of natural air-conditioning to keep the mound cool. Thearchitects studied the termite mounds and local houses, which also use localcooling methods, and incorporated them into a massive office and shoppingmall building made from locally available resources and covered with nativeplant species.12
In an effort to affirm the inherent resistance that green architecture theoryis supposed to offer, many green theorists might argue that what is beingrecovered is not the “real” culture, just the one that big business enterprisesfind useful. The wind-catching techniques that Kenneth Yeang claims arebased on Malaysian traditions are not the “real” wind-catching techniquesused by “real” Malaysian builders, because they are only being used forresource efficiency and their cultural meaning has been lost. The designers ofEastgate are not interested in maintaining local ecology and are not operat-ing within a business format that resists the impact of capitalist production.The local cultures that Alan Calquhoun refers to are not the type greentheorists want to revive, and so on. But what philosophical system couldpossibly sort through these types of divisions without resorting to a
11 Alan Calquhoun, “Critique ofRegionalism,” Casabella Magazine,630–631, pp. 51–55.
12 In a similar development, bookssuch as Sol Power, by Sophia andStefan Behlig (New York: Prestel,1996), interpret all local, indigenous,regionalist architecture through thelens of Western energy use.Malaysian long houses are “good”because they do not require air-conditioning; igloos and grass housesof the steppes are “good” becausethey do not require heat. The actualeconomic or cultural conditions thatshaped these buildings are ignored inlieu of a Western search forindigenous smarts. Interpreting localarchitecture based on the thrifty useof commodities that a building’sinhabitants never even had theopportunity to use to heat or cooltheir homes is a questionableenterprise.
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problematic epistemology? These are difficult questions that big and greenprojects raise and that must be addressed for those green thinkers that con-tinue to position themselves against the “big.”
A big and green project suggests alarming correlations and contradictionslocated within the contemporary theories of bigness and greenness. It isvirtually impossible to argue with any architect who is interested inmitigating the environmental impact of buildings, especially large ones.Recent buildings such as M.V.R.D.V.’s “Pig City,” a multi-story slaughter-house, begin to operate on an ideological plane that acknowledges themassive scale of nature production under capitalism, that is the intertwiningof the big and green. The architects of this building do not emerge as“enobled” subjects who have tamed global forces by making an environ-mentally sensitive place to destroy thousands of animals. M.V.R.D.V.demonstrate how efforts to be “good” environmentally result in a larger andmore massive factory environment. Similar thinking is behind their “stackedgarden,” realized as the Dutch Pavilion at Expo 2000. In this exhibitionpavilion, regional natural forms actually “de-naturalize” a global buildingtype toward its surroundings, exposing the global ideology of environ-mentalism, while making a very environmentally responsible building,nonetheless.
The fact that environmentalism can so easily be incorporated or extendout of twenty-first-century forms of global business practice may cause someenvironmentalist or politically active architects to shrink away from the bigand green project. The fear is that one might be participating in some largerunstated corporate enterprise, yet the linkages between what were onceimagined as opposed theories provide the circumstances for an evolving siteof investigation. Hopefully we will be able to look to many more architectswho examine the inter-dependence of the forces of globalization andenvironmentalism on some conceptual level. There is still much need for anarchitecture that brings attention to the destruction and maintenance ofinternational material conditions as this moves through the parameters ofinternational business. The ideological issues and conflicts of big and greenprojects should not result in an abandonment of the seeming hypocrisiesadvanced by them, but in a renewed reflection on the liberatory momentumcontained within architecture’s paradoxes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author wishes to thank Rachel Schreiber who provoked the questionabout Foster’s project, and forced a re-examination of many of the author’sarguments about this subject.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 91st Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2003.
Dutch Pavilion, M.V.R.D.V.(Image courtesy of M.V.R.D.V.)
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LEVITTOWN RETROFITTEDCOMMUNITYAn urbanism beyond the property line
TEDDY CRUZ (2007)
1. THE POLITICAL EQUATOR
Along the newly reconstituted global border that this post-9/11 worldhas produced between first and third worlds (a division, freshly re-conceptualized by the Pentagon’s New Map, between “The Non-IntegratingGap” and the “The Functioning Core”), we are witnessing how societies ofoverproduction and excess are barricading themselves in an unprecedentedway against the sectors of scarcity they have produced out of politicaland economic indifference. On one hand, the increasing migration ofpeople across this global border gives shape to an unprecedented illegalflow from the non-integrating gap as the migrant communities fromLatin America, Africa, and Asia move northward in search of the “strong”economies of the functioning core. On the other hand, the redistributionof centers of manufacturing moves in the opposite direction, as thefunctioning core targets the non-integrating gap as the site to enact itspolitics of outsourcing and its search for the world’s cheapest labormarkets.
The dramatic images emerging from this political equator converge andare intensified through the prism of the current politics of fear manifested atthe border between the United States and Mexico. As the U.S. Congresspasses regulation to build 700 more miles of border wall, the fusion of anti-terrorism and anti-immigration sets the stage for the current confrontationsover immigration policy and the further hardening of social legislature in theAmerican metropolis. Geographies of conflict such as the San Diego–Tijuana border become anticipatory scenarios of the twenty-first-centuryglobal metropolis, where the city will increasingly become the battlegroundwhere strategies of control and tactics of transgression, formal and informaleconomies, legal and illegal occupations meet.
2. STRATEGIES OF SURVEILLANCE: TACTICS OF TRANSGRESSION
But despite the apocalyptic implications of a more fortified border withintensified surveillance infrastructure, the growing tension between thevarious communities of San Diego and those of Tijuana have elicited amultitude of insurgent responses—new opportunities for constructingalternative modes of encounter, dialogue, and debate, sharing resourcesand infrastructure, recycling at the most outlandish levels the fragments andsituations of these two cities, and constructing practices of encroachmentinto the increasingly privatized and controlled public realm.
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A series of “off the radar” two-way border crossings—North–South andSouth–North across the border wall—suggests that no matter how high andlong the post-9/11 border wall becomes, it will always be transcended bymigrating populations and the relentless flows of goods and services backand forth across the formidable barrier that seeks to preclude them. Theseillegal flows are physically manifested, in one direction, by the informal landuse patterns and economies produced by migrant workers flowing fromTijuana and into San Diego, searching for the strong economy of SouthernCalifornia. But, while “human flow” mobilizes northbound in search ofdollars, “infrastructural waste” moves in the opposite direction to constructan insurgent, cross-border urbanism of emergency.
This cross-border urbanism is made, for example, of nomadic disposablehouses that literally move on wheels from San Diego into Tijuana, and alsoof a large amount of left over materials and systems, including garage doorsand rubber tires that are recycled into new spatial narratives and informalinfrastructure. Most recently, this invisible flow was made visible, when thegeneral public was finally made aware of the thirty or so tunnels that havebeen dug in the last eight years, a vast “ant farm”-like maze of subterraneanroutes crisscrossing the border from California to Arizona. An archaeo-logical section map of the territory today would reveal an undergroundurbanism worming its way into houses, churches, parking lots, warehouses,and streets. Not only were the fantastic images of cross-border two-waytunnels, all equipped with retaining walls, electricity, water extraction, andventilation systems, exposed here, but also the undeniable presence of aninformal economy and density at work at the border.
3. FROM THE GLOBAL BORDER TO THE BORDER NEIGHBORHOOD
This is how the perennial alliance between militarization and urbanization isreenacted at the San Diego–Tijuana border and later reproduced in manyUS neighborhoods, as the expansion of a social legislation of fear is trans-forming the 11 million illegal laborers who live there into criminal suspects.What are the implications of these forces of control on one hand and ofnon-conformity on the other in the reshaping of the American city? Ourparticipation in the 2007 Rotterdam Architecture Biennale reflects on thesetrans-border urban dynamics, using this territory of conflict as backdrop tocritically observe the clash between current top-down discriminating forms
Flow of waste moves north tosouth: migrant housing.
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of urban economic re-development and planning legislature (as expressedthrough dramatic forms of unchecked eminent domain policies supportingprivatization and NIMBYism), on one hand, and the emerging Americanneighborhoods nationwide made of immigrants, on the other, whosebottom-up spatial tactics of encroachment thrive on informality and alter-native social organizational practices.
Our project primarily engages the micro scale of the neighborhood, trans-forming it into the urban laboratory of the twenty-first century. The forcesof control at play across the most trafficked checkpoint in the world haveprovoked the small border neighborhoods that surround it to constructalternative urbanisms of transgression that infiltrate themselves beyond theproperty line in the form of non-conforming spatial and entrepreneurialpractices. A migrant, small-scale activism alters the rigidity of discrimin-atory urban planning of the American metropolis, and searches for newmodes of social sustainability and affordability. The political and economicprocesses behind this social activism bring new meaning to the role of theinformal in the contemporary city. What is interesting here is not the“image” of the informal but the instrumentality of its operational socio-economic and political procedures. The counter-economic and social organ-izational practices produced by non-profit social service organizations(turned micro-developers of alternative housing prototypes and publicinfrastructure at the scale of the parcel) within these neighborhoods arecreating alternative sites of negotiation and collaboration. They effectivelysearch to transform top-down legislature and lending structures, in order togenerate a new brand of bottom-up social and economic justice that canbridge the political equator.
4. CASA FAMILIAR: PRACTICES OF ENCROACHMENT
The most experimental work in housing in the U.S. is not in the hands ofprivate development or government. It is instead in the hands of progres-sive, community-based non-profit organizations such as Casa Familiar
Human flow moves south to north:illegal zoning.
Tijuana subdivision: mini tract homesretrofitted to accommodate growth.
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working at the border neighborhood of San Ysidro, California. These typesof agencies have been the primary social service organizations engaging andmanaging the shifting cultural demographics caused by immigration withinmany mid-city neighborhoods in the U.S.
DESIGNING CONDITIONS, DESIGNING COLLABORATION: A.H.O.Z.
MICRO-POLICY
Working with the premise that no advances in housing design in the U.S. canoccur without advances in its housing policy and subsidy structures, ourcollaboration with Casa Familiar has been grounded on the shaping ofcounter political and economic frameworks that can, in turn, yield tacticalhousing projects inclusive of these neighborhoods’ informal patterns ofmixed-use and density. In San Ysidro housing will not be only “units”spread indifferently across the territory. Here, housing is dwelling in rela-tionship to a social and cultural program managed by Casa Familiar. In thiscontext, density is not just an amount of “units per acre,” it is an amount of“social exchanges per acre.”
In the last five years, we have designed a micro-policy with Casa Familiarthat can act as an informal process of urban and economic development forthe neighborhood, and empower the community of San Ysidro to becomea developer of alternative dwelling prototypes for its own housing stock. This“Affordable Housing Overlay Zone” (A.H.O.Z.) micro-policy proposes thatcommunity-based non-profit organizations such as Casa Familiar canbecome mediating agencies between the municipality and the neighborhood,facilitating knowledge, policy, and micro-credits. In essence, these agencieswill incrementally become informal City Halls, managing and supportingthe shifting of socio-cultural demographics within many of these inner cityneighborhoods.
LIVING ROOMS AT THE BORDER
“Living Rooms at the Border” is the small housing project that emergesfrom the micro-policy and serves as a catalyst to anticipate San Diego’sneeded densities and mixed uses, while becoming a political instrument toenable Casa Familiar to further transform existing rigid zoning regulationfor the border city of San Ysidro.
The informal negotiation of boundaries and spaces typical of thisneighborhood becomes the basis for incremental design solutions that have acatalytic effect on the urban fabric. In a small parcel where existing zoningallows only three units of housing, this project proposes, through negotiateddensity bonuses and by sharing kitchens, twelve affordable housing units,the adaptive re-use of an existing 1927 church on the site as a communitycenter, offices for non-profit in the church’s new attic, and a communitygarden that serves as social armature to support this community’s non-conforming micro-economies and improvisational public events. Connected
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to the garden and the church, this armature is composed of a series of open-air rooms that contain electricity, serving as a site for a variety of neigh-borhood activities. The ambiguity of these spaces takes a different meaningas they are inscribed with a social program and community organizationmanaged by Casa Familiar. The pairing of ambiguity and specificity is theessence of this project.
The tactical interweaving of dwelling units and social service infra-structure transforms the small parcel into a system that can anticipate,organize, and promote social encounter. Furthermore, Casa Familiar injectsmicro-economic tactics such as time banking through sweat equity to pro-duce alternative modes of affordability (barter housing units, exchange ofrent for social service, etc.). In a place where current regulation allows onlyone use, we propose five different uses that support one another, suggestinga model of social sustainability for the neighborhood, one that conveysdensity not as bulk but as social choreography and neighborhoodcollaboration.
This essay is drawn from a paper presented at Global Place: Practice, Politics and thePolis, a conference at the University of Michigan in January 2007.
Counter tactics of development,as a community-based non-profitorganization (Casa Familiar)becomes a facilitator of political andeconomic frameworks for affordablemixed housing (in the borderneighborhood of San Ysidro).
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THE MNEMONIC CITYCOMMUNITY Duality, invisibility, and memory in
American urbanismCRAIG EVAN BARTON (1996)
Ask your wife to take you around the gin mills and the barbershops andthe juke joints and the churches, Brother. Yes and the beauty parlors onSaturdays when they’re frying hair. A whole unrecorded history is spokenthen, Brother.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952
This essay explores the effect of race upon the development of the urbanfabric of cities in the American South. While these cultural issues are presentthroughout America, the American South is a particularly interesting fieldof inquiry because of the historical relationship between black and whitecultures, their proximity to one another throughout the late nineteenthand twentieth centuries and ultimately because so many of the critical eventsof the Civil Rights Movement took place there. Using the work of HannahArendt, Pierre Nora and Maurice Halbwachs, the text examines the issuesof duality, invisibility, and memory and proposes to integrate them into acritical reading of the southern city in an effort to better understand theimprint of the phenomenal cultural forces left upon the physical form ofcities.
In “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” Cornel West proposed thatin attempting to control the means and practices of representation, the latetwentieth-century cultural worker faced three critical challenges which hedefined as intellectual, existential and political.
The intellectual challenge . . . is how to think about representationalpractices in terms of history, culture and society. How does oneunderstand, analyze and enact such practices today? An adequate answerto this question can be attempted only after one comes to terms with theinsights and blindnesses of earlier attempts to grapple with the question inlight of the evolving crisis in different histories, cultures and societies. Theexistential challenge requires that the cultural worker acquire the requisitecultural capital necessary to produce and survive. The political challengenecessitates a view toward the coalescing of black and white peoples basedupon a commonalty of moral and political intent. 1
It is in light of West’s existential challenge that I would like to examineissues of race, culture, spatial representation and urbanism. As architects
Aerial view of Selma, Alabama.
1 “The New Cultural Politics ofDifference,” in West, Cornel,Keeping Faith Philosophy and Racein America (New York: RoutledgePress, 1993), p. 5.
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and urbanists we are among the cultural workers to whom West refers; thecultural capital which we need to acquire lies in the invisible history andmemory of the city. Intellectually we bear the responsibility through ourwork to investigate, discern and ultimately to make legible the “invisiblehistories” to which Ellison refers. The nature of this investigation is specula-tive and as such is incomplete. But I feel the discussion which these issuesprompt is critical to our conception of the city of the future. I find thatthe questions and issues which I keep returning to are those which seek tounderstand the role of race in our conception of the historical city (bywhich I mean the city of collective memories), and in a vision for the city ofthe future. My interest lies not so much in using the lens of architecturaldesign and history to acquire a synthetic understanding of the chronologicaldevelopment of architectural typology and in so doing to review the develop-ment of urban form in America, but rather to go beyond the orthodoxmethods of architectural history and design to comprehend, within the city,the relationship between space, form, history and memory. In doing so I findthat I am more compelled by that to which architecture does not yet speakdirectly: issues of race, ethnicity and recognition of cultural identity. Thesehave become the resonant concerns of my work.
I speak from the margins, as a witness to an architectural culture andhistory which has yet to adequately represent the diversity of the culturewhich it shelters. Left unquestioned, architecture, and the architecturalhistory of America, would leave us with the succinct impression that theworldview reflected in its interpretation of built form, is one which containslittle or no reference to any of us living and working at the margins: nowomen, blacks or any group understood to be “other.” Is it simply aquestion of historical oversight, corrected by tardy acknowledgment of thecontributions of many of these groups? I suspect not.
Contemporary cultural criticism has attempted to re-focus the debatefrom object to subject; forcing us to ask whom and what does history seekto interpret and represent. The history of the United States is largely muteabout the presence and contribution of marginal cultures, and specificallyblack culture, to the development of American culture. The discursivelanguage of the city speaks to few of the components of cultural identity towhich I feel a proprietary interest. As a discipline, architecture proposes thatthe city is the synthesis of the memory of its political, social and economichistories. Moreover, this synthetic, collective urban history is understood tobe legible and as such is subject to a variety of modes of formal analysis. Thetheoretical and pragmatic investigation of American urbanism has typicallyfocused on issues such as technology and its impact upon typology andmorphology, and on the significance of style in the evolution of urbanfabric. Because cities have traditionally been understood as artifacts of thedominant cultures which built them, the impact of their marginalizedcultures has not been thoroughly examined, and yet the form and image of
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American urbanism, particularly in the American South, is clearly linked tothe presence of a black population and culture.
The problem of course is that history is subjective, constructing anarrative, which with its gaps and omissions has tended to render blackculture historically “invisible.” Writing in 1957, Richard Wright noted that,“The history of the Negro in America is the history of America written invivid and bloody terms; it is the history of Western Man writ small.”2 Forthe black cultural worker, West’s tenets of “production and survival” areinextricably tied to a responsibility to augment the narratives of dominanthistory through the “excavation” and construction of those objects anddevices capable of evoking memory. In this context memory becomes a toolwith which to construct a critical reading of the city by making visible thatwhich is invisible.
Historically the construction of American black culture has been cast interms of duality and of opposition. To be black is to be the “other,” separateand subordinate to dominant culture. Black culture has been defined notso much by what it is but by what is not. To be black is to be not white,and as such to be understood as being neither politically empowered norculturally affluent. The oppositional nature and the terms of the definitionof this cultural construction have resulted in a singular and monolithicrepresentation of black culture, when in fact black culture is rich anddiverse. The irony of course is that in America, black culture serves as asort of avant-garde testing ground for popular culture in general. Fashion,music, art and language draw heavily and directly from contemporary blackculture. Black culture is nothing if not diverse, yet the myth of a singularblack experience prevails, and when accepted as fact serves only to de-modulate the complexity of black culture, marginalize it, remove it fromthe discourse about the construction of culture and ultimately render itinvisible.
The invisibility of black cultural narrative is largely due to the informaltraditions and formal statutory practices of racism, which with its separa-tion of black and white cultures formed a series of racially distinct social,physical and spatial structures. Within the form and structure of Americancities, particularly cities in the American South, the physical and spatiallegacy of Plessy v. Ferguson3 (in which the social and political doctrineof “separate but equal” was articulated) and its interpretation of the Con-stitution’s Fourteenth Amendment is an urbanism of separation, duality andinvisibility, where the forms and spaces of black culture were separatefrom and subordinate to those of white culture. By separating one culturefrom the other and by establishing a hierarchy of space and form, blackculture was effectively isolated and rendered invisible in the public realm ofthe dominant culture.
The concept of “separate but equal” identities creates a hierarchy ofvalue which elevates the products of the dominant culture and relegates to a
2 Wright, Richard, White ManListen! (New York: Doubleday,1957), p. 109.
3 Plessy v. Ferguson was arguedbefore the United States SupremeCourt in April 1896 and decided infavor of the plaintiff later that year.In this case the court affirmed alower court ruling supporting theconstitutionality of a statute enactedby the State of Louisiana whichprovided for separate railway carsfor white and black travelers. Theruling by the U.S. Supreme Courtprovided for a revised reading of theobligations of the ThirteenthAmendment (which made illegal thepractice of slavery) and modified thescope of the language of theFourteenth Amendment to the U.S.Constitution (which provided forequal protection under the law for allcitizens). In the case of theFourteenth Amendment theinterpretive revisions of the scope ofthe amendment’s language allowedthe doctrine of “separate but equal”to be articulated.
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subordinate status the products, forms and spaces controlled or conditionedby marginal culture. Because the urban artifacts of black culture were so de-valued within the fabric of the city they have become both phenomenallyand literally invisible. As a result, the urban artifacts produced and/or con-ditioned by black culture have largely been excluded from the theoreticaldiscourse about the conception and re-invention of American urbanism andso the impact of black culture upon it has been minor. Yet a critical readingof American urbanism is incomplete if it fails to include the forms andspaces influenced by black culture.
There are many ways in which invisibility can be defined. Literally weunderstand that which is invisible is that which is unseen. Contemporaryculture ascribes a generally positive value to invisibility, nominally equatingit with the freedom to move unseen. Within the context of architecture andurbanism invisibility is a cultural construction, achieved by consciouslyremoving from the public gaze that which is neither intended nor desiredto be seen. Within an understanding of the phenomenal forces of cultureoperative in the city, “invisibility” is as much a social and political phenom-enon as it is a literal and physical one.
Considered in this context Hannah Arendt’s concept of “spaces ofappearance” provides a critical tool with which to understand the con-struction of invisibility. For Arendt “the space of public appearance”4 is that“space” “which comes into being whenever men are together in the mannerof speech and action.”5 Further it is the space
where I appear to others as others appear to me . . . This space does notalways exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most ofthem—like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, likethe laborer or craftsman prior to the modern age, the jobholder orbusinessman in our world do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in itall the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality whichhumanly and politically speaking is the same as appearance.6
Yet to be visible in this space one must be able to “appear through speechand action” in the public realm. The duality of American urban structureparticularly in the South made “visibility” for black culture virtuallyimpossible. Perhaps the most important legacy of the American Civil RightsMovement was its challenge to enter and to be visible in the space of publicappearance. In the theory of landscape architecture, the result of an agent or(culture) acting upon a medium or (a natural area) is defined as a “culturallandscape.” 7 If by analogy a fragment of the city is the medium and culturethe agent that acts upon it, the result can be defined as a “cultural frag-ment.” It is axiomatic, then, that the memory of culture is inscribed ontothese fragments, and that these fragments, conditioned by social, politicaland cultural forces, form the fabric of the city. Individually and collectively
Segregated drinking fountain.(Photo by Elliot Erwitt,courtesy Magnum Photos.)
4 Arendt, Hannah, The HumanCondition (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1958), p. 199.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., pp. 198–199.
7 Sauer, “Landscape,” in Lark,Robert P. and Gary L. Peters, eds.,Dictionary of Concepts in HumanGeography (Westport, CT:Greenwood Press, 1983),pp. 139–144.
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these cultural fragments are what Pierre Nora terms “lieux de memoire” or“sites of memory.” As mnemonic devices these fragments are the siteswhere
memory crystallizes and secretes itself at a particular historical moment, aturning where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with asense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose theproblem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense ofhistorical continuity persists.8
Linked through “excavation,” construction, or forms of intervention, the“collective memory” or mnemonic narrative of the city is made visible inthese fragments. The narratives evoked by these sites of memory provide ameans to further explore the idea of the American city as a cultural artifact;to examine the dominant and marginalized cultures which form thecity. Further they offer the opportunity to investigate alternative readings ofthe fabric of the American city by examining the issues of site, form andmemory as they relate to the spatiality of culture and to the constructionof “place” within the urban landscape. Within this proposition lies the ideathat “place” is codified by the relationship of form and space to a series ofsocial, political and cultural forces which historically have shaped theform of any given city. When they are made “visible” in the urban fabricthese forces provide a narrative structure with which to comprehend thememories of a city.
Here it is important to understand the concept of memory which MauriceHalbwachs defines as the “group or collective memory.”9 For Halbwachscollective memory allows an individual to “act merely as a member of grouphelping to evoke and maintain impersonal remembrances of the group,”10
and as such collective memory can function as a historical narrative.Within any given urban fabric, some of these cultural fragments are
more legible (opaque) and others are invisible (transparent). The relativetransparency and opacity of the cultural fragments reflects the explicithierarchy of social values and status. The most opaque fragments arehistorically connected to the dominant culture, and are literally the mostsolid and visible, while the fragments of marginalized cultures tend to betransparent, invisible and ephemeral. For these marginalized cultures, thepower of the fragment as a mnemonic device lies in its ability to supplementthe gaps of dominant history. With greater legibility these fragments holdthe potential to alter the context in which urban history is read, and throughthis altered context to develop architecture derived from the reading andanalysis of these fragments and thus expressive of that culture.
The cities of the American South provide an opportunity to examine theconstruction of invisibility, the legibility of various “sites of memory” andthe articulation of narratives of collective memory. As an example, in a city
8 Fabre, Genevieve and O’Mealley,Robert, eds., History and Memoryin African American Culture (NewYork: Oxford University Press,1994), p. 284.
9 Halbwachs, Maurice, TheCollective Memory (New York:Harper & Row, 1980), p. 50b.
10 Ibid.
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like Selma, Alabama, one finds an urbanism of duality, where there are infact two separate “cities,” one black and one white with areas of overlapor superimposition. These cities are constructed or formed by a series offragments codified by responses to the specific narratives of black and whiteculture. However, these dual cultural narratives are distinct and in theirdistinction are not equally legible, so that most of the narratives andfragments of black Selma recede and become “invisible.”
The dual structure of the city in fact provided for the construction ofseparate sites of memory, and spaces of appearance. The sites of memoryfor Selma’s white culture are the spaces of the public realm. The political,social and culture spaces formed by the morphological structure of the cityare coincident with the conveyed meanings of the courthouse (the DallasCounty Courthouse), the public square and the main street (Broad Street)and the entry into the city (the Edmund Pettus Bridge).
This is the “city” which is legible in maps, images and texts. Theequivalent spaces of the black city contain narrative structures which aremore disparate, not supported by a morphological structure, and in factare superimposed upon an urban form that never intended to support them.For example, the major political and social space in the black city is foundin the street, Sylvan Street, which connects two of the city’s major blackchurches (First Baptist and Brown’s AME Chapel).
This street does not read as a space of public assembly, yet within the dualnature of southern urbanism, where entrance is denied to the more formalpublic realm, this is precisely its role. The dual structure of the urban fabriccreates spaces where this is a discontinuity between site, form and meaning.This phenomenon forces certain spaces to derive meaning from a use super-imposed onto them, while allowing other spaces to derive meaning directlyfrom the form of the city.
The segregated school house, the separate “colored” entrance to a movietheater, the unpaved street, the shotgun house, the separate cemetery and theinaccessible public building are but a few of the examples of the types ofmnemonic fragments still extant in the fabric of American cities. Withinthem lie the formal devices of hierarchy of scale, material and impliedpermanence useful for the conception of architectural intervention. In con-temporary society many of these devices with which “invisibility” was builtlie obscured and unseen, bearing a muted witness to an era recalled by onlya few. Left obscured, these fragments, their memories, and the narrativesderived from them are once again marginalized. These elements form acritical part of our cultural history which needs to be preserved.
It can be argued that the challenge of the late twentieth century Americanarchitect/urbanist is to be able to discern the “sites” of memory and fromthem “build” the mnemonic city by creating those interventions thatincrease the opacity of specific cultural fragments. With increased“visibility” these fragments can provide the narratives that alter the
Dallas County Courthouse, Selma,Alabama. (Author’s photo.)
Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma,Alabama. (Author’s photo.)
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perception of the history of the city. This task is significant because withinthe urban fabric of cities in the American South lie sites seminal to under-standing the evolution of the American Civil Rights Movement and thesocial, political and cultural transformations which emerged from it. Assuch these cities provide a unique opportunity to examine the strategiesand methodologies for discerning, analyzing and interpreting the fragmentsand narratives of black and white culture. Unfortunately, for a variety ofreasons, many of these sites are now so difficult to discern that we may saythat they are “invisible.” Their “invisibility” contributes to an incompletereading of the history and culture of these cities. Legible, these fragmentsconstitute the basis for the mnemonic city, a city of memory.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 84th Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1996.
Brown’s Chapel and First BaptistChurches, Sylvan St, Selma,Alabama. (Author’s photo.)
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MAPPING EAST LOS ANGELESCOMMUNITYAesthetics and cultural politics in
an other L.A.JOSÉ GÁMEZ (2000)
INTRODUCTION
During the 1980s and early 1990s, scholars in both Europe and LatinAmerica began to look to the Chicano experience in the United States as ameans of understanding global processes of differentiation and ethnic identi-fication.1 This interest in Chicano identity is due, in part, to its positionwithin processes of cultural production; cultural practices tied to the politicsof Chicano identity have made visible the conditions of internal colonizationand of postcolonial resistance through a variety of media including art,literature, and urbanism.
As the largest Mexican-American city in the U.S., Los Angeles—particu-larly East Los Angeles—has become an integral part of the social identityof many Chicanos and Latinos. Here, place and identity intersect creatingboth a real and an imagined geography that has served as the place of andinspiration for a range of critical practices. These conscious and creativeexplorations have contributed to the production of distinctly Chicano andLatino cultural landscapes. In this sense, the politics of Chicano identityhave helped to translate, re-inscribe, and re-claim the (post)colonialcenter—the modern metropolis.2
This paper explores three areas of Chicano cultural production rootedin East Los Angeles in order to illustrate their importance to understandingsof contemporary Latino L.A.: street muralism, the spatial narratives of Ascoand Frank Romero, and the architectural investigations of James Rojas andthe team of Margaret Crawford and A.D.O.B.E. L.A.. By revisiting thesepast manifestations of an other Los Angeles, this paper will illustrate howthe politics of identity can inform the contemporary city.
CHICANO SOCIO-SPATIAL IDENTITY
Writer and poet Rubén Martínez has described his life in Los Angeles as a“blend of cultures, languages, and ideologies (Anglo/Latino, Spanish/English, individualist/collectivist)”—as a life located in both the North andSouth and neither simultaneously.3 For Martínez, L.A. is shaped by social andspatial divisions that are rooted in global political geographies and realizedin local cultural landscapes. Los Angeles and the American Southwest havebeen understood as Atzlán, the Chicano cultural homeland; Los Angeleswas once a Mexican territory and became an American city via militaryoccupation and cultural domination. The same is true of much of what is
1 See: Hector Calderón and JoséDavid Saldívar, eds., Criticism in theBorderlands: Studies in ChicanoLiterature, Culture, and Ideology(Durham: Duke University Press,1994) 1.
2 See: Homi K. Bhabha, TheLocation of Culture(London: Routledge, 1994).
3 Rubén Martínez, The Other Side:Notes from the New L.A., MexicoCity, and Beyond (New York:Vintage Departures, 1993).
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now considered the southwestern region of the U.S. As an occupied territoryand, later, as an annexed state, California became a colonized space—aspace overtaken by American westward expansion. The local Mexicanpopulations therefore became internally colonized peoples.4 In this sense,Los Angeles became and continues to be a cultural and physical borderlandin the sense described by Martínez.
In many ways, this need to negotiate cultural worlds provides a tie tothe Chicano movement in both art and politics. As an outgrowth of the1960s era of social struggles, the Chicano movement, or El Movimiento,was ideologically aligned with the civil rights movements in the U.S. as well asinternational student and Third World liberation movements.5 Although itshared common goals with a wide range of struggles, the Chicano move-ment aimed to address the marginalized condition of Mexican-Americangroups in the United States.
While few printed documents spell out a specific Chicano art manifesto,the outlines of an aesthetic can be found in a variety of sources includingartists’ statements, oral histories, and the influential publication, El planespiritual de Atzlán (“The Spiritual Plan of Atzlán”), that emerged from theChicano Youth Conference held in Denver in 1969.6 In these documents,one finds a political vision clearly tied to grass-roots artistic production;artists were called upon to help disseminate information and to helpdefine the cultural identity of the Chicano communities. This link betweencultural identity and manifestations of that culture in material formprovides a key to understanding Chicano socio-spatial practices as theyapply to architecture and the city. Chicano art provides evidence of clearlymotivated cultural practices: Chicano art, by definition, seeks to bring tolight colonial legacies and forces of marginalization by drawing upon andre-defining the cultural landscape of the city. In this sense, Chicano artactively embraces the politics of identity in order to engage a wide range ofurban audiences.
To be clear, it is not the production of the urban barrio per se that thispaper takes as its focus; rather, it is the conscious expression of Chicanoidentity as a representational practice that lies at the center of this investi-gation. However, Chicano art often draws its strength from everydaybarrio life in which “art objects are embedded in a network of culturalsites . . . that express the community’s sense of itself, the aesthetic displayprojecting a sort of visual biculturalism.”7 This bicultural expressivenessillustrates the cultural hybridity necessary to navigate the contemporarypostcolonial metropolis. The location of Chicano culture within a border-land between the social worlds of the U.S. and Mexico is its greatestasset—one that has drawn the attention of scholars and cultural theoristsworldwide.
In the words of Guillermo Gomez-Peña, an internationally respected art-ist and cultural critic, the “strength and originality of Chicano-Latino con-
4 See: Edward Murguia,Assimilation, Colonialism, and theMexican American People (Austin:University of Texas Press, 1975); seealso Anne McClintock, “The Angelof Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Post-colonialism,” Colonial Discourseand Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader,edited by Patrick Williams andLaura Chrisman (New York:Columbia University Press, 1994)291–304.
5 See: Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “TheChicano Movement: The Movementof Chicano Art,” ExhibitingCultures: The Poetics and Politics ofMuseum Display, edited by IvanKarp and Steven D. Lavine(Washington DC: SmithsonianInstitution, 1991) 128–129.
6 See: Shifra M. Goldman andTomás Ybarra-Frausto, “ThePolitical and Social Contexts ofChicano Art,” Chicano Art:Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, edited by Richard Griswolddel Castillo, Teresa McKenna, andYvonne Yarbro-Bejarano (LosAngeles: Wight Art Gallery/University of California Press, 1991)83–95.
7 Guillermo Gomez-Peña, “A NewArtistic Continent,” HighPerformance 9.3 (1986): 27.
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temporary art in the US lies partially in the fact that it is often bicultural,bilingual, and/or biconceptual.”8 This type of cultural flexibility allowsChicano and Latino artists to operate within what both Gomez-Peña andcultural theorist Homi Bhabha have described as a third-space of culturalexpression that confronts the postcolonial present.9 The border, in thissense, becomes a site for intervening into the present that “demands anencounter with ‘newness’ that is not a part of the continuum of the past andpresent. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of culturaltranslation.”10
MURALISM AND THE (IN)VISIBLE CITY
The urban mural is one example of such insurgent cultural translation.While not solely tied to the Chicano movement, the urban mural developedas a medium of expression that helped to reclaim the public realm of thecity and contributed to a larger struggle to overcome racism and poverty.Urban murals, as components of a political visual voice, became one of themost enduring modes of insurgent cultural translation available not onlyto Chicano communities in Los Angeles but also to marginalized com-munities in general.11 Influenced by the Mexican muralists of the 1930s, theChicano movement called for a monumental public art easily accessed ineveryday life. This was often translated into the appropriation of availablesurfaces for the dissemination of information and images. By mixing long-standing symbolic iconography rooted in cultural tradition with images tiedto local settings, murals provided cultural commentaries tied to contem-porary struggles. As Coco Fusco, an artist and cultural theorist, has pointedout,
Symbolic action expressed via artistic creation . . . has become theprimary arena for innovative self-definition among politicallydisenfranchised peoples. This syncretic fusing of different forms of beliefand practice has enabled disempowered groups to maintain theirtraditions while endorsing various cultural recycling methods that infuseold icons with new meanings.12
Murals, as representations of political identity, have also helped to shapedebates within the Chicano community. In the work of artists such as JudithBaca, urban murals serve as symbolic reminders to greater Los Angeles of another L.A. often subsumed under a mythologized Spanish heritage.13 Herwork has attempted to create a unified identity that confronts dominantcultural (mis)representations and re-inscribes an often overlooked Mexicanpast into the contemporary urban realm. But for others, attempts to defineunified notions of identity are themselves limiting. Willie Herrón’s mural,The Cracked Wall, illustrates that the Chicano community is not easilydefined (see Figure 1). Herrón’s mural, located in a back alley rather than
Figure 1. Willie Herrón’s TheCracked Wall (photo by RamónRamírez).
8 Ibid., 27.
9 See: Homi Bhabha, The Locationof Culture (London: Routledge,1994).
10 Ibid., 7.
11 See: Alan W. Barnett,Community Murals: The People’sArt (London: Associated UniversityPresses/Cornwall, 1984).
12 Coco Fusco, English is BrokenHere: Notes on Cultural Fusion inthe Americas (New York: New Press,1995) 33–36.
13 A similar project to memorializeAfrican American, Asian Americanand Latino urban histories in LosAngeles has been Dolores Hayden’sPower of Place Project. See: DoloresHayden, The Power of Place: UrbanLandscapes as Public History(Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press,1995).
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along a public avenue, was intended not as a gesture towards the city atlarge but rather as a commentary internal to the Chicano community andas a reminder of local problems such as gang activity, drug abuse, andprovincialism. In this sense, Herrón did not seek a homogeneous unity;rather, he sought to draw the community together around a set of issuescritical to the development of Latino Los Angeles. In so doing, muralists likeBaca and Herrón initiated a dialog that has contributed to both the physicaland social shape of east L.A..
WALKING IN L.A.: ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE
The internal critique begun by Herrón in The Cracked Wall carried overinto his work in the collaborative art group Asco during the early 1970s.14
Active from 1971 to 1985, Asco was the first and most influential Chicanoconceptual/performance art group to come out of East Los Angeles. Util-izing improvisation, performance, and guerrilla theater, Asco transformedthe city into their canvas; through a series of performances beginning withStations of the Cross on December 24, 1971, Asco began their culturalassault on institutions shaping the barrio. Staged unannounced along aone-mile stretch of Whittier Boulevard in East L.A., Stations of the Crossappropriated and re-deployed Catholic iconography in order to challengelocal institutional power structures while simultaneously locating thepolitics of identity within the space of the city. The choice of WhittierBoulevard itself was not haphazardly made; Whittier connects the eastside to downtown Los Angeles and has often been called the symbolicheart of East L.A.. Additionally, Whittier was the site of the ChicanoMoratorium—a Vietnam protest rally that ended in police violence and thedeath of Rubén Salazar, an active Chicano journalist with the Los AngelesTimes.
Asco returned to Whittier Boulevard several times over the followingyears and each new performance continued to explore the connectionsbetween the politics of identity, space, and place (see Figure 2). Addition-ally, each new performance introduced investigations into variousmedia—film, muralism, and photography—thereby providing numerousopportunities to appropriate and re-articulate the image of the city.Through the use of site-specific performances, film, and guerrillatactics, Asco put the politics of identity of East Los Angeles in general, andWhittier Boulevard specifically, into play within a broad discursivelandscape.
While created prior to the present state of media technologies, Asco’splace-based interventions are early examples of what cultural theorist ArjunAppadurai has labeled the ideoscapes of contemporary cultural flows—the “concatenations of images . . . and counter-ideologies of movementsexplicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it.”15 Chicanourban art, in this sense, served to mobilize landscapes of images that
14 Asco consisted of HarryGamboa, Jr., Gluglio “Gronk”Nicandro, Willie Herrón, and PatisseValdez.
15 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjunctureand Difference in the GlobalCultural Economy,” ColonialDiscourse and Post-Colonial Theory:A Reader, edited by Patrick Williamsand Laura Chrisman (New York:Columbia University Press, 1994)331.
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challenged notions of a unified Chicano identity, of established artisticpractices, and mainstream perceptions of the East Los Angeles. In doingso, East L.A. became a symbolic and physical center in the productionof Chicano identity and served as evidence that public space is tied tosocio-spatial action.
POST-ASCO TACTICS: COLLECTIVE URBANISM
The influence of Asco’s urban theater spread as other groups, among themLos Four, took on the politics of identity in Los Angeles.16 Grupos, orcollaborative artistic groups, are in many ways a legacy of the Chicanomovement that persists to this day; grupos were often formed around localarts centers and aimed to promote grassroots artistic practices includ-ing social and spatial action. Los Four grew out of this tradition byincorporating street imagery into their work, particularly graffiti, asa means of bringing the politics of everyday life into the realm of artisticproduction.
After the group’s demise in 1983, Los Four co-founder Frank Romerocontinued to paint scenes of East Los Angeles in order to bring the messageof Chicano struggle to outside audiences. This agenda remained a centralpart of Romero’s work and provided a lens onto the politics of identity inLos Angeles for both Chicano and mainstream art audiences. For Romero,Whittier became a paradigmatic site of cultural resistance; two of his paint-ings, The Closing of Whittier Boulevard and The Death of RubénSalazar, represent clashes between the dominant society of Los Angeles andthe Chicano community in East L.A. (see Figure 3). As with the previousefforts of Los Four, Romero intended to further the agenda of the Chicanomovement by introducing the politics of identity into established artisticcircles. However, the importance of place remained; by addressing site-specific events, Romero maintained a dialog with East L.A., contributed tothe on-going development of Chicano identity, and connected the space of
Figure 2. Left: Asco performing FirstSupper (After a Major Riot) in 1974(image copyright held by HarryGamboa and reprinted courtesy ofthe artist).Figure 3. Right: Frank Romero’s TheDeath of Rubén Salazar (imagecopyright held by Frank Romero andreprinted courtesy of the artist).
16 Los Four were contemporaries ofAsco and the group was active from1973 to 1983. The members of LosFour were: Carlos Almaraz, Robertode la Rocha, Gilbert “Magu” Luján,and Frank Romero.
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the gallery to the streets of the barrio. In doing so, the often de-politicizedcontext of artistic display was disrupted through the introduction of thepolitics of identity.
Interestingly, Romero did not participate in either of the events hedepicted in The Death of Rubén Salazar or in The Closing of WhittierBoulevard; each event occurred in the early years of the Chicano move-ment while Romero’s paintings were executed some fifteen years later.17
Here, Romero drew upon the collective memory of East Los Angeles forhis inspiration. In this sense, the works of Asco, Los Four, and Romeroare not only related but are, in many ways, successive projects within aparticular family of resemblance—entities within an on-going set of culturalnegotiations.18
EVERYDAY PRACTICES AND THE OBJECT OF STUDY
By delving into social and political issues, Chicano artists beganthe process of re-writing the history of Los Angeles in order to includepieces of a story previously left out. This was not simply a process ofhistorical revision: this was a spatialized project that took the urbanrealm as a part of its tactical base. The city became the site, subject,and text for critical intervention. In this sense, the city is not a rigidplan; rather, it is a set of collective inheritances to be continuallyre-articulated.
In this light, the socio-spatial “praxis” and “material force” of Chicanoand Latino communities illustrate processes of urban transformationand provide ways to re-think contemporary urbanism.19 For urbanplanner James T. Rojas, East Los Angeles is an enacted landscape wherethe “identity of place . . . is created through the culturally related behaviorpatterns of the residents.”20 Through his work as a graduate student inthe Department of Architecture at M.I.T., Rojas illustrated the meansby which the city is tailored to meet the cultural preferences of Mexicanand Mexican American communities in East Los Angeles. This processof place-making through enactment involves various forms of architecturaland urban props—murals, fences, vendor carts—that are incorporatedinto the existing urban fabric and help to create distinctive cul-tural landscapes. Although unpublished, Rojas’ master’s thesis hasbeen widely influential within architectural, urban design, and urbanplanning circles (particularly in academia) where both faculty andstudents have drawn upon his work as the basis for further research. Rojasprovided not only a reading of a Chicano cultural landscape but also anew academic terrain largely overlooked by schools of architecture andurbanism.
The importance of Rojas’ work can be gauged by more recent researchinto Chicano Los Angeles; by 1994, this line of work had entered the main-stream of artistic, architectural, and academic practices. Rodolfo F. Acuña, a
17 The Closing of WhittierBoulevard was painted in 1984 andThe Death of Rubén Salazar waspainted between 1985 and 1986.
18 See: George Lipsitz, TimePassages: Collective Memory andAmerican Popular Culture(Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1990).
19 Mike Davis, “ChinatownRevisited?” in Sex, Death, and Godin L.A. (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1994) 35.
20 James T. Rojas, “The EnactedEnvironment: The Creation of‘Place’ by Mexicans and MexicanAmericans in East Los Angeles,”Master’s Thesis, Department ofArchitecture, M.I.T., 1991, 14.
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Chicano Studies Scholar whose work has chronicled the history of East LosAngeles, included a section on Chicano urbanism in his book, Anything ButMexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles, that is based largelyupon the work of Rojas.21 Similarly, the collaborative art and architecturegroup, A.D.O.B.E. L.A. (Architects and Designers Opening the Border Edgeof Los Angeles), has also taken the cultural landscapes of L.A.’s Latinoneighborhoods as the objects of both academic and professional pursuits.22
Through continued investigations into the cultural trans-formation of urbanspaces and through design practices that actively engage Chicano and Lat-ino communities in Los Angeles, A.D.O.B.E. L.A. has both continued theline of inquiry begun by Rojas as well as the tradition of the grupo—acentral component of the Chicano art movement.
Further illustrating the growing influences of non-traditional archi-tectural investigations within mainstream circles was the inclusion ofA.D.O.B.E. L.A.’s work in two major architectural and urban design exhib-itions: Urban Revisions: Current Projects for the Public Realm, held at theMuseum of Contemporary Art (M.O.C.A.) in Los Angeles and HouseRules, which was held at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus,Ohio, and later published in the architectural journal Assemblage.23 UrbanRevisions intended to focus attention on a number of selected urban designand planning projects from around the country addressing a range of social,cultural, economic, ecological, and political concerns. In response toM.O.C.A.’s call, A.D.O.B.E. L.A. submitted a proposal that highlighted anabsence from the exhibition: “vernacular design on behalf of culturalsurvival.”24
Conceding the oversight, M.O.C.A. invited A.D.O.B.E. L.A. to intervenein the main exhibit. In response, A.D.O.B.E. L.A. created pieces that workedthemselves into the gaps of the larger exhibit in order to metaphoricallyillustrate the appropriation of urban landscapes common in many Latinocommunities in Los Angeles: gallery spaces were tagged with cultural mark-ers; East L.A.’s ubiquitous vendor carts were parked between project dis-plays; and an urban map detailing the overlaps of toxic waste sites, sites ofunder-employment, and Latino neighborhoods, served to remindM.O.C.A.’s visitors of an other urban reality.
House Rules grappled with the problem of re-thinking the American idealof the single-family detached home through design interventions and theor-etical speculation. Here, A.D.O.B.E. L.A. was paired with urban theoristMargaret Crawford, further illustrating the infiltration of Chicano politicsinto the main-stream. Using a hyper-realistic architectural model depicting atypical Californian suburban bungalow transformed to meet the culturalneeds of Mexican Americans in East L.A., the project by A.D.O.B.E. L.A.and Crawford illustrated cultural practices of appropriation whilechallenging accepted architectural representational standards. Additionally,the Crawford/A.D.O.B.E. L.A. project added critical theoretical depth to the
21 See: Rodolfo F. Acuña, AnythingBut Mexican: Chicanos inContemporary Los Angeles(London: Verso, 1996) 11–12.
22 A.D.O.B.E. L.A. was established in1992 as a collaborative and activistgroup of architects, artists, anddesigners in Los Angeles whosemembers have included Ulises Diaz,Ignacio Fernandez, Gustavo Leclerc,Alessandra Moctezuma, ElipioRocha, Leda Ramos, and RosaVelasco.
23 See: Assemblage 24 (1994); seealso: Elizabeth Smith, ed., UrbanRevisions: Current Projects for thePublic Realm, exhibition catalog(Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press,1994); Richard M. Carp, ed., Saberes poder/Interventions (Los Angeles:Los Angeles Museum ofContemporary Art, 1994).
24 Carp n. pag.
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work of Rojas by illustrating how the “heroic bricolage” described in thework of Michel de Certeau can be found in East L.A..25
CRITICAL PRACTICE AND SPACE
Both the M.O.C.A. and Wexner Center exhibits indicate the extent to whichthe margins have entered into the center of theoretical debates. Largelyoverlooked in both theory and design, the politics of identity have madein-roads primarily via cultural critique.
The power of making visible the previously invisible exposes not onlyformerly silenced voices but also the mechanisms by which silence is main-tained. However, as with any marginalized position working from withinthe center itself, the project of speaking the unspoken is simply not enough.The charge must be one of “developing a vigilance for systematic appro-priations of the unacknowledged social production of a differential” withinthe practices of the center.26 This calls for a continual re-reading of pastcultural productions in an on-going effort to keep culture in motion—to freecultural productions from reification.27
As a practice, the revisiting of past works such as those of Asco, Romero,Rojas, and Crawford/A.D.O.B.E. L.A. serves to maintain in motion anunderstanding of the politics of identity that seeks to reclaim histories whilepreserving the power that critique holds. Therefore, the practice of re-visiting past forms of cultural production remains a necessary project, giventhat the ability to consume and maintain space as transparent and/orordered is tied to operations of power. As Dolores Hayden has stated, “[o]neof the consistent ways to limit the economic and political rights of groupshas been to constrain social reproduction by limiting access to space.”28 Inthis sense, the re-enactment of place through both symbolic and physicalmeans is a vital part of the continued struggle towards visibility and to staveoff cultural disappearance. In this on-going battle, creative and imaginativepractices are now important aspects of cultural expression. As ArjunAppadurai states, the “image, the imagined, the imaginary—these are allterms which direct us to something critical and new in global cultural pro-cesses: the imagination as a social practice.”29 This is not to say that theworks described above present true images of urban life; rather, they providemomentary glimpses of another reality. In this sense, the works of Chicanoartists such as Asco, Los Four, and Romero as well as more recent works byRojas, A.D.O.B.E. L.A., and Crawford provide ways to examine the publicrealm that avoid reductions to zero-degree cultural categories implicit inmany contemporary urban and architectural practices. These views framethe city as something more than the site of nostalgia or cultural consump-tion. Here, the city provides an important zone of interaction—a space ofcultural hybridity within which to explore the politics of identity. Bylooking to various forms of cultural production, both formal and informal,one finds that murals, architectural props, spatial practices, and artistic
25 Margaret Crawford andA.D.O.B.E. L.A., “Mi casa es su casa,”Assemblage 24 (1994): 12.
26 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,Outside in the Teaching Machine(New York: Routledge, 1993) 63.
27 See: Renato Rosaldo, Cultureand Truth: The Remaking of SocialAnalysis (Boston: Beacon, 1989).
28 Dolores Hayden, The Power ofPlace.
29 Appadurai 326.
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representations emerge as important tools in the development of an aes-thetic and an ability to exhibit culture from within a marginalizedcommunity.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 88th Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2000.
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CELEBRATING THE CITYCOMMUNITY ALAN J. PLATTUS (1987)
The urban festival provides a bridge between the ordinary city of everydayexperience and the extraordinary city—projected in part by the festival—of idealistic and technological urbanism; of utopian hopes, projects, andillusions. The extraordinary city provides a glimpse of the city as it mightbe—for good or ill—as certain groups, certain constituencies within thecity, would like it to be. We are quite familiar with some of those momentsof heightened, intensified, highly concentrated urban vision. They are oftenkey episodes in the most ordinary histories of architecture: for example,Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition of 1893. Such events may be arrièreor avant-garde, and are usually both. They may serve as harsh urban reality;that is certainly one of their principal functions. But they have often done sodialectically, in a way that reveals as well as conceals, that—as the Russianliterary critic Mikhail Bakhtin has argued—liberates as well as represses oroppresses. Festivals—both the singular, one-time-only special events, andthe reiterated festival calendar (now much reduced from its peak in thelate middle ages, but certainly still with us) which charts the rhythms ofour seasonal religious and social life in cities—provide an index for boththe continuity of tradition fundamental to the existence of cities and thedisjunctions of change, programmed and spontaneous. They are then, notsurprisingly, among the most significant vehicles for understanding the city,but also for more active interpreting, and therefore ultimately shaping thecity. To paraphrase Clifford Geertz’s famous description of the Balinesecockfight, they are stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—and about ourcities.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 75th Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1987.
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Parade of Fools, Ann Arbor,Michigan, April 1, 2007. (Photo byRebekah Modrak.)
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SKID ROW, LOS ANGELESCOMMUNITY CAMILO JOSÉ VERGARA (2007)
Making toys, furniture, artificial flowers, storing and processing fish, andserving the homeless are the main activities of L.A.’s Skid Row. As onelearns more about the individual complexity of each of these businesses,their interdependence, and their relationship to the missions and the streetpeople, the more extraordinary this urban economy seems, thriving as it hasfor decades among the misery, disease, and despair.
Skid Row has been the largest public display of human misery in theUnited States and it has been so since I started documenting the area in1995. Numbering in the thousands, derelict people have been concentratedin a small area of about fifty square blocks. The missions came to the areafirst. The Fred Jordan Mission is over forty years old, and the Union RescueMission, now in a new building, has been here for ninety years. Many of thehotels built long ago to accommodate travelers became S.R.O.s after thetrain station was relocated, providing another cheap place to live; someoffer a bed for as little as twenty five dollars a night. The missions werefollowed by soup kitchens, health facilities, and methadone clinics. Peopleknow to drive to this part of the city to bring food and clothing for thehomeless, and their charity gives further impetus for the down-and-out tocongregate here.
Now, in addition to corporate and government buildings, old industrialbuildings have been transformed into lofts, galleries, restaurants, and hotels.L.A.’s old downtown is becoming the city center officials had proudlydeclared unnecessary.
Since the fall of 2006 the climate in the streets of Skid Row has changedwhen the L.A.P.D. started to increased searches and arrests of the homeless;now people are kept moving from corner to corner. I witnessed manysearches and arrests in Skid Row, but none impressed me more than one inMay of 2007 when I heard a loud police siren, then “Wake up!, Wake up!”came blaring from the loud speakers of the patrol car. Surprised, I lookedand saw a policeman standing in front of a sleeping person on South FourthStreet. The person under the blanket had overslept. It was 9 a.m.
When I asked who was pushing the homeless a woman explained “thecity, the police, the maintenance people.” I asked: “Where are they going?”She replied: “They are going to jail. They are going under the bridges, by theL.A. River. They are going to the missions, but some don’t want to gothere.”
The police finally have gained control of Skid Row. I had the feeling that Iwas seeing its last days. In a decade Skid Row will perhaps become L.A.’sequivalent of Greenwich Village. I heard a Whole Foods is coming todowntown.
Omar Avenue at Boyd Street, 2007.
San Julian at Sixth Street, 2007.
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Fifth Street at Stanford Avenue, 1996.
Fifth Street between Towne Avenue and Crocker Street, 1994.
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Southeast corner of St. Julian and Sixth Street, 2003.
441 Towne Avenue, 2007.
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Gladys Avenue south of Sixth Street, 1999.
Towne Avenue between Fourth and Fifth Streets, 2006.
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II URBAN FORM
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INTRODUCTIONFurther thoughts on the three urbanismsDOUGLAS KELBAUGH
It is an article of faith that we design the built environment in an ever-changing social, cultural, economic, technological, and ecological milieu.Contemporary urban development has responded to these changing factorsin ways that might loosely be called “market urbanism.” This term is usedhere to refer to current conventions and modes of land acquisition, pro-fessional planning and design services, government regulation, financing,and construction for the thousands of real estate development projects thatspring up in places and at times determined by macro and micro marketforces and by the decisions of private developers. This market-drivenredevelopment is kin to what Robert Fishman refers to as “reurbanism”in the Foreword, although his two exemplars—Battery Park City in Man-hattan and Millennium Park in Chicago—are of a higher and more exaltedorder.
Most of these projects are small or unremarkable, or both. However,their accumulation inevitably changes the face of America in ways that arenot planned, organized, or self-conscious. Thus, the recent conversion ofdowntown office buildings into hotels and condominiums, or factoriesand warehouses into residential lofts, has transformed many urban centers.Post-World War II suburbia has likewise been transformed by the tsunami ofsubdivisions, gated communities, arterial strips, and retail malls.
There are, however, three contemporary paradigms of urbanism that areself-conscious: New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism, and, to a lesser extent,what I call Post Urbanism. These three approaches or attitudes (other thanNew Urbanism, it is hard to call them movements) represent the cuttingedge of theoretical and professional activity in Western architecture andurbanism.
I would like to contend that all three paradigms are basic and somewhatinevitable conditions and that each has its merits and demerits, but not inequal proportion—at least for most American cities at this point in theirevolution. This essay examines their overlaps and oppositions, methodolo-gies and modalities, strengths and weaknesses, in hopes of sketching theoutlines of a more integrated position.
Although the essays assembled in this section do not all fit smoothly orcompletely in these three categories, the taxonomy helps structure the con-versation about urban design. Indeed, for better or worse, we’ve dividedthe section into subsections under these three titles. We invited several pro-vocative urban designers/writers to punctuate the papers. The collection
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attempts to characterize the dialogue over the last decade about urbanism ingeneral and urban form in particular.
THE FORMAL/CLASSICAL PARADIGM
New Urbanism is by far the best known of these three paradigms. It is themost organized, with the Congress for the New Urbanism (C.N.U.) to pro-mote and defend its tenets. It is also the one with which I am most familiarand aligned, albeit with reservations and criticisms.
The Charter of the New Urbanism, ratified in 1996, aspires to trulyutopian goals. The aspirations are an explicit mix of both noble ends andpractical means: to equitably mix people of different income, ethnicity, race,and age; to build public architecture and public space that makes citizensfeel they are part of, and proud of, a common culture and community; toweave a tighter urban fabric that mixes land of different uses and buildingsof different architectural types; to sponsor and integrate transit, revenuesharing, planning, and governance at the metropolitan scale; and to beeconomically sound and ecologically responsible at the scale of the building,neighborhood, and region. Rarely, it must be said, are its ideals fullyachieved, especially in a single project or community.
As these ambitious, lofty principles indicate, New Urbanism seeks tocounter the physical fragmentation, social dislocation and polarization, andfunctional compartmentalization of the modern city. It envisions a struc-tural relationship between social behavior and physical form, and maintainsthat good design can have a measurably positive effect on the sense ofplace and community. Its basic model is a compact, mixed-use, diverse,transit-friendly, walkable city with a hierarchy of buildings and places thatpromotes face-to-face social interaction.
In more specific terms, New Urbanism’s Charter advocates mixed-usecenters where low- and mid-rise buildings form a continuous street wall,and where offices and affordable housing can be located above retailshops. It is not dense by European or Asian standards, but it is denser thanconventional American sprawl. Its idealized urban hierarchy runs the gamutfrom background housing and private yards to foreground civic and insti-tutional buildings, with public squares and parks. The built environmentis organized along the urban “transect,” which, like the ecological transect,subdivides and codifies a prototypical cross-section of development fromnatural countryside to urban core. The continuum has six zones of graduallyincreasing building density and height, with a seventh zone for specialdistricts.
To engage with these practices, the C.N.U. has popularized a set of alter-native principles and practices throughout North America, Australia, andparts of Europe. Among these are models for Transit Oriented Develop-ment (T.O.D.) to reduce auto-dependency and Traditional NeighborhoodDevelopment (T.N.D.) to encourage mixed-use.
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In terms of historical antecedents, New Urbanism is reminiscent of theCity Beautiful movement, and it embraces open spaces and housingtypologies that recall the Garden City tradition. Typically, its architecture isalso historically derivative—in a style that is, in a word of its own coinage,Neotraditional.
The New Urbanist vision also seeks to influence society beyond physicalplanning and design. For instance, its adherents have sought to reformcontemporary financial and banking practices that encourage developersto build and “flip” projects for quick profits. They seek the patientcapital of investors who would stay in a project for the long haul. Andthey lament the way Wall Street, through real estate investment trusts,has limited the architectural palette to a limited number of standard“product” types.
THE INFORMAL/VERNACULAR PARADIGM
By comparison, Everyday Urbanism is not as tidy, doctrinaire, or utopian asNew Urbanism. Nor is it even an established movement. Nevertheless, it hasa body of literature and a clearly stated goal: to celebrate and build onordinary life, with little pretense about the possibility of a perfectible orideal environment. Its proponents argue for “elements that remain elusive:ephemerality, cacophony, multiplicity and simultaneity.”
Everyday Urbanism is informal and bottom-up, as opposed to formal andtop-down, and unlike New Urbanism, it downplays, and even denies, therelationship between physical form and social behavior. Its advocates fre-quently celebrate the ability of indigenous and migrant groups to respond inresourceful and imaginative ways to ad hoc conditions and marginal spaces.Its aim is to help people adapt and improvise, often in spite of physicaldesign and planning.
In practical terms, proponents of Everyday Urbanism support suchactivities as the appropriation of space on sidewalks and in parking lots (aswell as on vacant lots and in private driveways) for informal commerce
Above left: Denver’s former StapletonAirport is being converted into a4,700 acre New Urbanist communitywith 12,000 homes, master-plannedby Calthorpe Associates. (Photocourtesy of Calthorpe Associates.)
Above right: Mixed-use buildings atStapleton designed in a background,contemporary architectural style, andbuilt to the sidewalk to define acontinuous street wall with residentialand office uses above retail shops—a traditional but still compellingconfiguration that should be thenorm in urban developments. (Photocourtesy of Calthorpe Associates.)
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and festivities. It champions the vernacular architecture and street life andart of vibrant, ethnic neighborhoods such as those of Los Angeles. Aninternational example might be Curitiba, Brazil, with its populist ethic andlow-tech, bus transit system.
Despite its grassroots quality, however, Everyday Urbanism should notbe confused with conventional real-estate development. It is more per-sonalized, politicized, and democratic than the standard “product” built andfinanced by mainstream developers and banks. Its very ability to fly belowthe organized financial radar and work in the gaps and on the margins hasallowed it to empower disadvantaged and disenfranchised people andcommunities.
THE AVANT-GARDE/INVENTIVE PARADIGM
It must be said that no one formally labels themselves a Post Urbanist;Post Urbanism is not even a widely used term. Nevertheless, I use it hereto refer to the avant-garde paradigm that has grown out of what hasbeen called the post-structuralist or critical architectural project of thelast several decades. With its embrace of dynamic global informationand capital flows, this urbanism is critical of most traditional normsand conventions, although sometimes in a playful, satiric way. Relativistic,predictably unpredictable, and without formal orthodoxies or prin-ciples, it favors bold form—either broken and fractal, or continuous andflowing.
At its purest, Post Urbanism argues that shared values or metanarrativesare no longer possible in a world increasingly fragmented and composedof heterotopian ghettoes of the “other” (e.g. the homeless, the poor,minorities) and mainstream zones of fantasy commerce, informationexchange, and free-range tourism. These liminal and exciting zones oftaboo and fantasy and 24/7 zones of unfettered consumerism are viewedas liberating because they allow “for new forms of knowledge, new hybridpossibilities, new unpredictable forms of freedom.”
Espousing ever wilder and more provocative design, Post Urbanismalso aspires to engage an increasingly sophisticated, celebrity-consciousconsumer of the built environment. Urban works born of these ideas includethe mega-forms of Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and some less stridentproposals of Steven Holl. Frank Gehry’s proposals for Atlantic Terminal inBrooklyn and Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, as well as Daniel Libeskind’sDenver Art Museum complex, are other examples.
In formal terms, the abstract architectural language and topologicalexplorations of Post Urbanism are often one of surface and skin. There islittle direct reference to the physical context, even if it’s contemporary.A variety of avant-gardist shock tactics may also be deployed, no matterhow modest the building program or unimportant the site. However, it issometimes difficult to know if a project is neo-avant-garde or truly avant-
Parking lots, sidewalks,driveways, and vacant lots areproductively taken over byinformal markets in EverydayUrbanism. (Photo courtesy ofMargaret Crawford.)
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garde—that is, whether surprise and spectacle is employed for its own sake,or whether the principal motive is to inspire genuine belief in the possibilityof change.
Nevertheless, Post Urbanists have described their discordant and excep-tional insertions into the city as examples of open, democratic urbanism.And they criticize New Urbanist communities as stultifying and irrelevantin light of modern lifestyles and technology, especially digital mediaand what I call the Electronic Now. For them, New Urbanism’s desirefor orderliness embodies nostalgia for a romanticized past that neverexisted. Meanwhile, the ad hoc liveliness of Everyday Urbanism, while lessscenographic and predictable, would lack aesthetic cohesion and ambitionfor them.
Despite their theoretical and aesthetic sophistication, however, it isquestionable whether Post Urbanist works give back as much as they takefrom the city around them. The projects themselves are typically self-contained, if not self-centered, with little faith in the work of others tocomplete a fragmented urban fabric. Meanwhile, sprawling auto-centriccities like Atlanta, Houston, and Las Vegas are sometimes held up as modelsof a liberating mobility.
METHODOLOGIES AND MODALITIES
Underlying these paradigms are three very different methodologies. NewUrbanism is clearly the most precedent-based. It aims to extrapolatefrom enduring architectural principles and typologies, as well as historicalexamples and traditions as they intersect contemporary environmental,technological, social, and economic practices. It is also the most normative,with its goals and principles carefully inscribed in the C.N.U. Charter, andadapted to local conditions through the relatively standardized tool of thecommunity design charrette.
Politically active, the C.N.U. has also built coalitions with other move-ments such as Smart Growth, and other organizations such as the UrbanLand Institute, U.S. Green Building Council, and the A.I.A. These links havegiven it traction and clout as a national organization, as seen in the post-Katrina replanning of the Gulf Coast.
New Urbanists believe that a coherent hierarchy of architectural types,street types, and public spaces can best sort out and make legible the com-plex mixture of land uses and buildings that cities have always possessedand are now requiring. They have thus lambasted the post-World War IIzoning that separated and compartmentalized land uses, as if, in KenGreenberg’s words, it could only juggle one ball at a time.
To be sure, mixed-use urbanism, with its walkability and chanceencounters, is now the one and only urban approach that everyone, fromLeon Krier to Rem Koolhaas, seems to embrace. This is a major, pervasive,and positive sea change. However, as single-use zoning is phased out, a new
The BMW plant by Zaha Hadidovertly expresses flows of industrialassembly. Its Post Urbanistarchitecture is visually dynamic andaggressive, with laminar formsinvading the site and surrounding theexisting buildings like solidified lava.(Photo courtesy of Zaha HadidArchitects.)
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way to create urban order is needed. A new appreciation for architecturaltypology, New Urbanists believe, can provide this foundation. Thus, inplace of zoning codes focusing on function and bulk, they advocateform- and typology-based codes promoting normative architectural andurban forms.
New Urbanist emphasis on typology partly derives from a desire todignify the many background buildings needed to make a coherent city.Builders and designers are freed to refine details and building form ratherthan overhaul or re-invent them. A typology also provides familiararchitectural vessels into which new functions can be poured, helping topreserve the memory of the city. And it makes future architectural andurban form more predictable. Indeed, without agreed-upon designtypologies, the effective practice of urban design and planning is almostimpossible.
Everyday Urbanism is far less normative and doctrinaire. Where NewUrbanism grew out of concern for precedent and typology, it emergedfrom the community design movement that has stubbornly survived sincethe 1970s in a few cities, and recently been revived in others. It viewsthe design professional as a student of the popular and the quotidian ratherthan the ideal and elite, and a participant more than a leader of publicdialogue.
Everyday Urbanism’s concern for citizen control makes it the mostopen-ended and populist of the three urbanisms. And because it is aboutcelebrating the ordinary rather than starting over with a new and pre-sumably more sophisticated model, it is also the most modest, incremental,and compassionate of the paradigms, with the strongest commitmentto social and economic justice. However, if the New Urbanist roman-ticizes the past, the Everyday Urbanist overestimates the power of thecommonplace.
These are flaws that Post Urbanism seeks to take on directly by accepting,and seeking to express, the powerful techno-flow of a global world, bothreal and virtual. Rather than seeking accommodation, its projects are boldand experimental rather than normative, and often relish the chance toviolate design guidelines, zoning codes, existing typologies. Post Urbanistsalso don’t tend to engage the public as directly in open dialogue—perhapsbecause they feel the traditional “polis” is increasingly obsolete, and its civicinstitutions too calcified to promote new possibilities. Celebrated in themedia as solo artists or lone geniuses, they cultivate Howard Roarkishpersonas, despite the reality that large multidisciplinary teams are neededto realize their designs.
Perhaps the quintessential Post Urbanist is Rem Koolhaas, the vanguardDutch designer and brilliant provocateur. He has proclaimed, perhapsas a trope but irresponsibly in any case, that urbanism is dead; that thereis no longer any hope of achieving urban coherence or unity. Like the
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talented and less nihilistic Steven Holl, he has dropped typology in favor oftopology.
Rigorously consistent within their own architectural vocabulary andphysical site, Post Urbanist projects often seem to be designed within aninvisible envelope, with almost zero attention to offsite relationships. Forthis reason, they tend to be perceived as confrontational, even brazen. Likemid-twentieth-century Modernist projects, they want to make a radicallynew start and are comfortable and even like and depend on being at oddswith their surroundings. But unlike Modernism, form is now increasinglyun-tethered from a sense of common, shared values and is free to bearbitrary, even bizarre. Yet, in spite of their hubris, many a Post Urbanistbuilding is a spatial and formal tour de force. They can be sophisticatedforeground architecture and icons of great formal skill and elegance,however convoluted, enigmatic, or haunting their shapes.
However, if New Urbanists are overly optimistic about urban centersand neighborhoods as aesthetically consistent wholes—beautiful in thetraditional Viennese or Parisian sense—Post Urbanists may be criticized astoo willing to settle for the city of internally unified but disparate fragments.Where New Urbanists want to be normative at too many scales, PostUrbanists want to be free at too many scales—from the baluster to thebuilding to the bioregion. And, if New Urbanism tends to hold too highlythe best practices of the past and Everyday Urbanism overrates a prosaicpresent, the Post Urbanist is overinvested in endlessly exciting topology andan audacious future.
It must be said that the differing clientele for the three paradigms mayexplain some of these proclivities. Everyday Urbanists often work fornonprofit and community groups with limited resources and politicalpower; thus, their commissions and projects are more modest, sometimesbuilt with volunteer labor. New Urbanists often work for land developers,especially on the suburban greenfield projects for which they are bestknown; however, their lesser-known but numerous urban redevelopmentprojects, including Hope VI, may be sponsored by government agencies orpublic/private partnerships. Post Urbanists projects are typically the resultof prestigious competitions and commissions by wealthy and powerfulinstitutions, corporations, and patrons who seek high profile, iconicbuildings.
These different client groups have different missions and audiences,ranging from subaltern minorities to middle-class consumers to urbanecognoscenti and glitterati. In this sense, it is no surprise that the threeparadigms lead to different physical outcomes. However, this is not totautologically imply that they are solely the result of different clientele. Theparadigms do seem to represent and resonate as deeper, more intrinsicmodes of thought, design, and production.
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OUTCOMES
New Urbanism, with its Latinate clarity and order, achieves the mostaesthetic unity and coherent sense of community, in my opinion. Itorchestrates different uses at a human scale in familiar architectural typesand styles. However, its formal harmony is usually achieved in historicalstyles that lack authenticity and tectonic integrity.
Such skin-deep pastiche is more understandable for speculative housing,which must sell in the marketplace or bankrupt the developer/builder. Itis less excusable for nonresidential buildings, especially public structuresthat are allowed to break the design code, but all too rarely rise to first-ratedesign.
Many New Urbanists claim that the issue of architectural language orstyle is irrelevant or overblown. But clearly it does matter to design pro-fessionals and academics, judging from the ferocity of the debates. And ifstyle is of little consequence to developers (and their public), why isn’t theremore contemporary architecture in their projects? Clearly, architecturalstyle is important because it embodies and expresses values, meanings, andattitudes that are deeper than outward and visible form.
By contrast, Everyday Urbanism has trouble achieving any aestheticcoherence, day or night, micro or macro. But it is egalitarian and lively.And while Post Urbanist site plans look exciting, with their laser-likevectors, fractal geometries, jumbled fragments, and sweeping circulatorysystems, when realized, they are often overscaled and empty of pedestrians.Tourists in rental cars experiencing the city through their windshields maybe better served than actual users, for whom there is less human-scalenuance and architectural detail to reveal itself over the years, especially topedestrians. Ironically, Post Urbanism suggests local citizens are tourists intheir own city, just as tourists have become citizens of the world.
Everyday Urbanism is, in a sense, already ubiquitous in the informalsquatter settlements of global cities, where the working- and under-classesseek a stake in the urban economy. But it doesn’t make much sense in thecities of Europe, where a wealthier citizenry has the luxury of punctuating amature and dense urban fabric with Modernist commercial and institutionalbuildings as counterpoint to the traditional architecture. And the heavymasonry fabric of European cities sets off the new, highly glazed, gravity-defying buildings of Post Urbanism better than North American cities,which are more spatially open and sporadic, and where glass curtain-wallbuildings already dominate. Because our cities lack the horizontal viscosityof European cities and are often underprogrammed and made empty byparking lots, New Urbanist infill usually adds the greatest value.
NAGGING QUESTIONS
What can be said then about the possibility of a more integrated approach tourbanism in America, one that might merge the best of these three
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approaches while avoiding their weaknesses, and be more sustainable thanany of the three on its own? Is there any hope for integrating these threeparadigms into a richer and more lasting urbanism?
Everyday Urbanism is too often an urbanism of default rather thandesign. It is a bottom-up approach that is “too much bottom, not enoughup” in Michael Speaks’ words. Can it raise its design expectations andstandards as its clientele becomes more mainstream?
New Urbanism is too often formulaic, realized in banal and cloyinglyhistoricist architecture. It often fails to deal with either regional or economicissues, such as jobs/housing balance. Can it move beyond “the post-modernnotion of the city as solely a place to live, not to work,” and embrace a moreraw and potent mix of uses, including industry?
Post Urbanism is too often an urbanism of trophy buildings, of which acity needs and can absorb only so many. Can it produce good but quietbackground buildings that are more urbanistically sensitive and archi-tecturally contextual?
Certainly, Americans can expect a more physically ordered and archi-tecturally ambitious commons than Everyday Urbanism offers and a morehumane one than Post Urbanism promises. Although Europe may delightin Post Urbanist avant-gardism and the developing world may embracethe informality of Everyday Urbanism, wouldn’t the typical Americanmetropolis benefit most from New Urbanism at this point in its history?Arguably, the unevenness of American urbanism would also benefit from“some rules that prove the exceptions,” just as European cities are enrichedby Modernist “exceptions that prove the rule.”
For most North American cities, New Urbanism represents the respon-sible middle path, less glamorous than Post Urbanism and more ambitiousthan Everyday Urbanism. But can it learn from the other two paradigms andtheir cultures? Despite being the most comprehensive and successful designand planning movement of its generation, New Urbanism must evolve if it isto remain responsible and responsive. Like all movements, it will ultimatelyossify and lose its meaning and value as it runs the inevitable and ever fasterhistorical course from archetype to type to stereotype.
There are a number of serious questions that New Urbanism needs toaddress if it is to evolve into a more integrated paradigm. Can its exemplaryurban principles be realized in contemporary architecture, especially thepublic and institutional buildings, and employ the talent and skill of PostUrbanist architects? Can it live up to its egalitarian ideas of social diversityand affordability as seriously as Everyday Urbanists? And can it fullyaddress ecological challenges and develop a bio-urbanism?
Last, is New Urbanism flexible enough to align with and harness theemerging forces of the global economy? Or will it rely too heavily ontop-down formal templates, form-based codes and regulations, outdatedtechnics, and moral mandates? As the late Jane Jacobs pointed out in Dark
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Age Ahead, sprawl will densify and diversify, and inner cities will reboundand redevelop, only if underlying economic and social forces make itan inevitable, natural, sustainable, and voluntary process. Otherwise,New Urbanism will become another failed utopian vision and movement,a misfortune in a field littered with broken dreams and promises.
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EVERYDAY URBAN DESIGNEVERYDAYURBANISM,LANDSCAPEURBANISM, ANDINFRASTRUCTURE
Towards default urbanism and/orurbanism by design?JOHN KALISKI (2007)
Whatever happened to “Everyday Urbanism?” Is it an organized urbandesign movement? Does it actively influence urban policy and shape cities?I ask these design-oriented questions because this is an ill-defined area ofinquiry left open in the book, Everyday Urbanism, co-edited by John Chase,Margaret Crawford, and me.1 Certainly there is no “Everyday Urban DesignSchool.” Everyday urban design is also not taking over planning depart-ments. I know of few people who have constructed explicitly “everyday”design practices. Still, one can argue that the concept of the everydayremains a notion that all designers reckon with at some point in theirprofessional life. However, this hardly constitutes a design movement;everyday urban design is better described as an attitude that needs betterdefinition.
When Douglas Kelbaugh wrote “Three Urbanisms and the PublicRealm” in 2001, he claimed there were three competing urbanisms: NewUrbanism, Post-Urbanism, and Everyday Urbanism.2 While he stated thatother forms of urban design were relevant including “environmentalism,regionalism, historicism, etc,” the first three were the ones that mostsuccinctly encapsulated for him the millennial moment. In contrast, theeveryday as expounded in Everyday Urbanism was grounded in a reactionagainst the determinism of any defined urban design practice.3 We wereseeking means to observe and remain open to the diversity of cities. Wewere interested in the neglected places and experiences of cities thatother urbanisms ignored. We thought these could be a starting point toconstruct a practice of inclusive, non-dogmatic urbanism. Given our interestin exploring the complexity of the whole city, championing of the rolenon-experts play in ameliorating neglected urban environments, and oursense that professional designers would do well to acknowledge the vitalityof the tactics of the everyday to produce urbanism, I am not surprised thatKelbaugh reached the conclusion in his essay that our efforts were poten-tially “urban design by default rather than by intention.”
Despite the critique, we were pleased Kelbaugh put us in the same leagueas people who have changed urban design. Time has demonstrated thathe was one of the few commentators who trucked faith in our ideas. Mostcritics of Everyday Urbanism dismissed the ideas as irrelevant to profes-sional design practices.4 While Kelbaugh was an articulate advocate for theidea that three urbanisms were wrestling with each other, in truth his match
1 John Chase, Margaret Crawfordand John Kaliski, editors, EverydayUrbanism (The Monacelli Press,New York, 1999).
2 For this essay I am utilizing thefollowing version of this article:Douglas Kelbaugh, “ThreeUrbanisms and the Public Realm”(from Proceedings, 3rd InternationalSpace Syntax Symposium, Atlanta,2001).
3 Our first collective act as like-minded individuals was to helporganize a symposium for the LosAngeles Forum for Architecture andUrban Design. “Urban Design,Urban Theory and Urban Culture”sought to broaden discussion ofurban design practices in the contextof “Urban Revisions,” a 1994exhibit at the Los Angeles Museumof Contemporary Art curated byElizabeth Smith.
4 Dell Upton, “A World LessOrdinary,” Architecture, February2000, pages 54–55. In this reviewUpton states that EverydayUrbanism is, “best read as essays inarchitectural ethics, meant tosensitize designers to the intellectualand political contradictions inherentin their professional positions ratherthan to recommend specific designpractices.”
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was never a contest, just a good narrative that highlighted the preeminenceof New Urbanism.
New Urbanism, Kelbaugh’s middle-way, was the champion in 2001 andsix years later is the near hegemonic approach to urban design in the UnitedStates. It is demanded by publics, adopted by developers, and accepted bydecision-makers. Its preeminence amongst planners is simple. It providesstraightforward place-making principles that are imageable, reassuring,and communicable. New Urbanism’s appeal is also related to its fleet-footedness. New Urbanists quickly adopt concepts from outside theircanon, a smart tactic that creates constant renewal within the movement.For example, Andrés Duany, the keenest New Urbanist of them all, recentlyproclaimed the need to consider “opt-out zones” in hurricane-ravagedNew Orleans.5 In these free zones, New Urbanism’s bread and butter—codes—would be forgiven. Presumably landowners and developers, freedfrom the restrictions of government, will feel incentivized to rebuild.
Notwithstanding Duany’s right to utilize anything that works, I recall themoment in 2000 when a team of professionals working with students in adesign charrette sponsored by the University of Michigan proposed just suchan approach for a shrinking area of Detroit, the Briggs neighborhood nearthe old Tiger Stadium.6 Our belief then, like Duany’s now, is that in certaincases it is useful to free individuals from the miasma of constraining regula-tion, a tactic of self-help set loose to revitalize a community. Despite ourconvictions we were not surprised when the Mayor at that time, DennisArcher, walked right by our project and enthused about the certainty ofthe picket fences, traditional infill house forms, and prescriptive patternlanguage proposed by a team led by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.
When I reminded Duany of this incident (and the possibility that perhapshe had evolved into a closet everyday urbanist), he explained to me, “(y)oursis but one of the tools, but an important one and increasingly so.”7 So, areeveryday practices becoming a treasured hammer in New Urbanism’stoolbox? To a small extent, yes.
Despite the interest of New Urbanists in some aspects of the everyday,holding a sustained interest in the everyday makes it difficult to claim asingular position in urban design. Starting and ending points in everydayplanning and design remain always contingent upon the variable situation athand. The consequence of this is that I am compulsively programmed tostate in response to questions regarding my underlying principles acknow-ledgement of New Urbanism followed by the negative sounding phrase,“but I am not a New Urbanist because . . .” Why can’t I find constructivelanguage to respond to the same question, for instance, “I am an everydayurbanist because . . .”? Can one construe everyday urbanism as inspirationfor a set of urban design principles without being forced into essentialistproclamations? The following thoughts are an attempt to frame a practiceof city design through an acknowledgement of the everyday.
5 See Andrés Duany, “Restoring theReal New Orleans,” Metropolis,February 2007.
6 See Michigan at Trumbull:Turning the Corner (A. AlfredTaubman College of Architectureand Urban Planning—University ofMichigan, Ann Arbor, 2000), pages6–11 and pages 32–39. The studentteam was led by myself, KelliKavanaugh, Doug Kelbaugh,Patricia Machemer, James Singleton,and Andrew Zago. Andrew Zagoand I concentrated on developingzoning game theories that wereperformance oriented as opposed toprescriptive and working with thestudents tried to animate the land useimplications of the approach throughtime.
7 February 22, 2007 e-mail fromAndrés Duany to John Kaliski.
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Everyday urban design begins with respecting and honoring the dailyrituals and cycles that shape communities. The forms and places of com-munities are therefore most justly formed through incremental designprocesses implemented through time. In everyday contexts designers areasked to facilitate the portraits that communities desire to draw for them-selves. In this regard a framework of democracy becomes the most cogentmeans to shape citizens’ as well as designers’ ideas regarding the space of thecity. The ideas contained in these discourses are most often memorializedthrough codes. The incremental legal changes that shape everyday environ-ments, like an organic urbanism, are far superior to either acts of bookburning or wholesale clearance. Designers, working with communities, alsobenefit from the scrutiny of public debate. While some good designs areconstrained, on balance, weak ideas are strengthened.
With regards to design, awareness of the everyday as a motive forceencourages each individual to learn equally from the traditional as wellas the new, the present, and the ubiquity of the present in the past and thefuture. Precedence can thus meld with innovation. Consequently the NorthAmerican everyday urban designer is simultaneously accepting and criticalof automobility, suburbia, single-family houses, shopping malls, sprawl, andall the other accretions of contemporary urbanisms, believing that eachaddresses a human need and that all remain a subject for betterment asopposed to obliteration. Reform thus is built into or anticipated by each actof urban design. Under these conditions urban design becomes a specificand singular opportunity to nurture daily life—hardly an “urban design bydefault.”
While one might question openness to all urban experiences in a harshworld that demands ready and predictable solutions to pressing needs,I prefer the beginning everyday stance described above. I believe that itleads to the possibility of specific design subtlety and complexity. I remainconfident that this leads to urban design where each project is necessarilydifferent, shaped by individual circumstance, not connected by commondesign tropes, themes, or practices, but stitched together through carefulobservation and evolution of highly specific situations and conditions. Eacheveryday urban design realized is unique unto itself.
While it is useful to have a framework to describe the potentials of urbandesign shaped by the everyday, are there specific places and principles thatexemplify the approach? With a sense of speculation I recently turnedto Archinect, a web-based design community, and asked this virtual worldwhat they felt were the “designed” places that best exemplified the everydayand everyday practice.8 There was a wide range of response: examplesproffered included Jon Jerde’s orchestrated shopping centers as well asLouis Kahn’s monumental central court at the Salk Institute. Some bloggersfelt the everyday was best exemplified by informal spaces or pathwaysto and about local scenes. One person mentioned a specific bench in
8 See www.archinect.com,“Discussions.” I want to thank allwho participated in the post andthread for their generous and openthoughts.
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Montserrat, Spain; another, leftover space just off a sidewalk where peoplegather to talk. Rem Koolhaus’ architectural work was discussed as wellas Covent Garden in London, downtown Culver City, California, DouglasLoop in Louisville, Kentucky, Jackson Square in New Orleans, and PioneerCourthouse Square in Portland, Oregon. Moore Ruble Yudell’s studentcenter at the University of Cincinnati was nominated, as was The Grove, ashopping center in the middle of Los Angeles incorporating architectsKoning-Eisenberg’s renovations of the historic 3rd and Fairfax Farmer’sMarket. The vitality of developing world favelas and the rawness of Down-town Los Angeles’ skid row were each seen to have qualities that, if notalways comfortable, were certainly related to the range of everyday experi-ences that need to be learned from.
While no canon of everyday design was fixed through this discussion, thethread on Archinect also featured a less evolved discussion of everydayurban design principles. In this regard the range of places that werementioned demonstrated a core principle of inclusiveness. Another principlethat came up in the posting was the idea of both acknowledging and antici-pating uses of time in urban design and architecture. Others emphasizedthat designing the informal and formal spaces and land in-between struc-tures is of greater importance than the buildings themselves. Jane Jacobs’notions of incremental city making were mentioned as well as more inten-tional urban tactics, such as the scripting of spaces. All of these principlessuggest that there is a nascent theory of everyday urban design thattranscends narrowly drawn urban ideologies or fetishized place making.The broadness of response solicited on Archinect constitutes a criticalrecognition that everyday urbanism, within the context of the design act,constitutes a true middle ground, because unlike its new urban or post-urban cousins, all possibilities can be vetted with equanimity.
Everyday equanimity forces one to eschew the notion that there should bea formal “Everyday Urbanism” or “Everyday Urban Design” movement.Yet everyday urban design could nevertheless be construed as an approachto a broad-based and inclusive critical practice with case studies andapproaches that seek to promulgate more humane and liberal approaches tothe production of the city. Notwithstanding an aversion to fixed theories oroutcomes, there are givens that distinguish design practitioners interestedin the everyday from their colleagues who adopt more focused approaches.Amongst these are three key concepts that relate to the open approachjust suggested: interest in present contexts as starting points, acceptance ofdemocratic design discourses to reform these starting points, and applica-tion of design intelligence to addressing the concerns and needs of everydaydesign discourses.
Communities necessarily start with the present. Even within extra-ordinary situations without any pre-existing pattern of human inhabitation,environmental factors establish an almost infinite network of present clues
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to guide any prospective urbanism. The consequent urban program basedupon the here-and-now emphasizes an ideal of betterment, reform, and theretrofit of an existing situation. The urban designer influenced by the every-day imagines the present, as opposed to precedent, as the first source forinspiring a better future.9
Communities are also made up of competing interests that have varyingvisions for urban life. Democracy is the increasingly accepted tool to debateand shape neighborhood, community, city, and region.10 Democratic urbanform making demands urban design nimbleness. The individual urbandesigner is asked by publics to contribute a broad palette of ideas andapproaches. The process is more akin to the decorating of individualdomestic environments for highly particular clients, each with a differentopinion, than many designers steeped in universal approaches would care toadmit. In short people want their Downtowns, and their suburbs, and theirtransit, and their freeways, and their cars, and their Main Streets and theyexpect urban designers to use collaborative talents to illustrate, educate,and frame unique approaches to each new situation. Urban design in thesecircumstances is an opportunity on the part of communities to utilizedesigners, as opposed to design ideologues or ideologies, and through themedium of design allow for the illustration of alternative points of urbandeparture.
In essence, what the everyday demands is not so much design leaders asdesigners who deploy design intelligence, the visualization of urban optionsfor the citizenry at-large in order to facilitate decisions that reflect the con-sensus of an open and democratic community. In the seven years since thepublication of Everyday Urbanism, a book that described how practices ofeveryday life are related to and can influence understandings of urbanism,this is what I as a designer have been attempting to realize. Returning to theoriginal question, whatever happened to “Everyday Urbanism,” urbandesign within the context of everyday urbanism is never an organizedmovement but a critical, humbling, and creative attitude towards practiceopen to any designer interested in the ecumenical practices and productionsof the contemporary city.
9 This concept establishes a crucialdifference with New Urbanism thatat its root utilizes precedent as thesource for an inspired future.
10 See John Kaliski, “DemocracyTakes Command: New CommunityPlanning and the Challenge to UrbanDesign,” Harvard Design Magazine,Spring/Summer 2005.
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WITHOUT ENDEVERYDAYURBANISM,LANDSCAPEURBANISM, ANDINFRASTRUCTURE
Mats, holes, and the promise oflandscape urbanismKAREN M’CLOSKEY (2005)
The authority of nature has been usurped by the authority of landscape.1
Though no longer appealing to an idealized nature as the measure ofmorality and counterpoint to the city, landscape has, in a sense, replacedthe word nature in that it is used as the measure of freedom, and as anemancipator from architecture. For architects, the widespread adoption oflandscape terminology and ecological metaphors is a means to expandthe techniques by which architecture is produced, providing alternatives toconventional master planning, which is perceived as the great failure ofmodernism. One way this shift has become manifest is in the emergenceof the “field” of landscape urbanism, which positions landscape “as themost relevant medium for the production and representation of contem-porary urbanism.”2 While reflecting many positive changes, including morereciprocal relationships among design disciplines, the current framing oflandscape urbanism has not gone far enough beyond the simple replacementof master planning with the equally generic term landscape. In other words,landscape as a representation of urbanism is more developed than landscapeas a production of it. In tracing the lineage of landscape urbanism, therecurring notion of the “hole” becomes evident.3 This paper positionsAlison Smithson’s essay “The City Center Full of Holes” (1977) as a directantecedent to contemporary landscape urbanism, suggesting that, thoughwe have adopted her use of landscape infrastructure as a holding strategy forunpredictable futures, we have not yet fully advanced her conception oflandscape as a healing salve to decentralizing post-industrial cities. I brieflyoutline the role of “holes” as they relate to landscape and will argue whythey must be delineated more specifically if landscape urbanism is toproductively combine both its architectural and landscape architecturalpredecessors.
While covering the same geographic territory as landscape architecture orurban design, landscape urbanism is described as an interdisciplinary model,which positions landscape as the generator, rather than backdrop, of urbandevelopment. Rather than relying on the formalistic solid/void of oldermodels where void and, by extension, landscape is a residual of architecture,landscape urbanism suggests the opposite, wherein the public landscapeinfrastructure organizes and shapes urban development. Charles Waldheim,who coined the phrase landscape urbanism in 1996, positions Tschumi’sParc de La Villette as its progenitor, suggesting an architectural lineage that
1 See Anne Whiston Spirn, “TheAuthority of Nature: Conflict,Confusion, and Renewal in Design,Planning, and Ecology” in Bart R.Johnson and Kristina Hill, eds.,Ecology and Design: Frameworks forLearning (Washington: Island Press,2002). Spirn describes the dogmaassociated with appeals to nature asgiven or original, which promulgatea “nature” apart from culturalconstruction.
2 See footnote 27 in CharlesWaldheim and Marili Santos-Munne,“Decamping Detroit” in GeorgiaDaskalakis, Charles Waldheim andJason Young, eds., Stalking Detroit(Barcelona: Actar Press, 2001), p.110. For an excellent review of thisbook, see Grahame Shane. “TheEmergence of LandscapeUrbanism,” Harvard DesignMagazine (19, Fall 2003/Winter2004): www.gsd.harvard.edu/hdm.
3 For a related discussion on erasureand void, see James Corner,“Landscraping” in Daskalakis,Waldheim and Young, pp. 122–125.
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draws landscape out of its position within landscape architecture andregional planning and more closely aligns it with architectural critiques ofthe 1970s and 80s.4 In the primary texts outlining the theoretical impetus forlandscape urbanism, several authors distance themselves from landscapearchitecture in two ways: first, landscape architecture’s legacy of thepicturesque, which foregrounds formal and pictorial representations; andsecondly, from the environmental determinism of the 1960s and 70s, whichgave ecology a central role, as evidenced strongly in the work of IanMcHarg. In Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape,Alejandro Zaero-Polo states, “the [landscape] discipline never developed ameans of producing complexity away from imitation, and never evolvedbeyond the picturesque.” 5 Though this is a common and reductive senti-ment, there is no doubt that both landscape and architectural practicestoday increasingly emphasize diagrammatic processes and organizationsover pictorial representations, using ecology as a paradigm for connectivityand indeterminacy.6 The conflation of cultural and natural processes, andthe incorporation of humans into ecological systems, are very promisingdevelopments that position landscape urbanism as a viable, less formulaicand more site-specific alternative to New Urbanism or the generic city.Waldheim points out that this strategy is particularly suited to the post-industrial, decentralized or so-called Shrinking City, where inward vacancyand outward expansion are its defining characteristics.7
The greening of the depleted city centre may even be the most obviouscharacteristic of the future city centre.
Alison Smithson 8
The inversion from conventional planning using architectural solids to agreen infrastructure of holes was introduced by Alison Smithson in 1977, inher essay “The City Center Full of Holes.” Alison and Peter Smithson’swork has recently been positioned as a progenitor to contemporary archi-tects’ interest in flexibility, indeterminacy and landscape. The Smithsonswere instrumental in prompting a shift from fixed functionalism to one inwhich time was recognized as a primary factor in design, and Team X mem-bers criticized many practitioners of their day as being stuck in a static anddeterministic “Euclidean Groove.” 9 The concept of mat building, outlinedby Alison Smithson in 1974, focused on flexible frameworks for accom-modating growth and change and challenged the separation of architectureand urbanism. Her essay “How to Recognize and Read Mat-Building”became the basis for a recent Case Series book on Le Corbusier’s VeniceHospital.10 The last essay in the book, by Stan Allen, eloquently lays out theshift from mat building, which uses architecture as the primary method ofordering, to what he terms mat urbanism, which uses infrastructure and
4 Charles Waldheim, “LandscapeUrbanism: A Genealogy,” Praxis 4(2002): 10–17.
5 Alejandro Zaero-Polo, “OnLandscape” in Mohsen Mostafaviand Ciro Najle, eds., LandscapeUrbanism: A Manual for theMachinic Landscape (London:Architectural Association, 2003), p.133. See also essays by ChristopherHight and Michael Hensel in thesame publication and Waldheim,Praxis.
6 See Julia Czerniak, ed., Case:Downsview Park Toronto (Munich,London, NY: Prestel, 2001).
7 In addition to Praxis, seeWaldheim and Marili Santos-Munne,in Daskalakis, Waldheim and Young,pp. 105–121.
8 Alison Smithson, “The CityCenter Full of Holes,” ArchitecturalAssociation Quarterly 9/2, 3 (1977):p. 11.
9 Alison Smithson, ed., Team XPrimer (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press,1968), p. 20. The term “EuclideanGroove” was used by Aldo vanEyck.
10 Hashim Sarkis, ed., Case: LeCorbusier’s Venice Hospital(Munich, London, NY: Prestel,2001).
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landscape as organizing frameworks. Yet in 1977, just three years after thepublication of her “Mat-Building” essay, Alison Smithson’s seemingly over-looked essay “The City Center Full of Holes” is the first to explicitly proposea landscape strategy to address the depopulation occurring in post-industrial cities. This was, at the time, a unique proposition for architects.
If Smithson’s infinitely extendable mat inadvertently leads to expansivedevelopment and sprawl,11 then “The City Center Full of Holes” addressesits corollary: vacancy and abandoned infrastructure. While she laments thedeteriorating urban fabric, she doesn’t propose to fix it with architecture.Instead, she recommends that the holes appearing in cities be landscaped as“holding operations” for future development.12 Using abandoned railroadright-of-ways and areas adjacent to freeways, she proposes that theseinfrastructures be appropriated to provide connective tissue from the citycenters to dispersed regions beyond. Positive associations with large scaleconnective landscapes, well-known to the English via garden cities, wouldencourage the acceptance of wildness in small vacant city sites withoutnegative allusions to abandonment. Smithson states “If we can see what todo with the disused railway yards, using them as connective places, wemight begin to indicate to people how to behave towards small vacant sites,interstical [sic] places.”13 These derelict sites and outdated infrastructuresbecome conduits for the future reorganization of the post-industriallandscape. Therefore, sustainability in this context refers to the constructionof provisionary uses and infrastructures which hold together disparateand changing urban circumstances. Though Smithson did not directlycombine the “mat building” concept with the “green holes” concept, thepart-to-whole relationship of the mat is akin to the site-to-system con-nectivity of the strategy of holes. The “Holes” essay is an outgrowth ofearlier writing by the Smithsons and other Team X members, who differen-tiated between fixes, such as roadways and associated greenways, and moretransient uses:
If this distinction between the changing and the fixed were observed therewould be less need for elaborate control over things for which no goodcase can be made for controlling, and legislative energy could beconcentrated on the long-term structure. 14
This framework was seen to sustain an infrastructure able to absorb social,cultural, and environmental changes but it also sustains our (architects’)relevance to large scale practice, after the so-called fall of the masterplan.
This strategy has been the basis for several of O.M.A.’s large-scaleprojects. For example, in the planning framework for the new town ofMelun-Senart (1987), Koolhaas describes their approach as outlining whatshould not happen rather than what should.15
11 “If on the one hand, theSmithsons were among the first torecognize the potential ofinfrastructure to influence the futuredevelopment of the city, they alsounwittingly endorse the conceptualapparatus of modern sprawl”. StanAllen, “Mat Urbanism: The Thick 2-D” in Sarkis, p. 124.
12 Smithson, “The City Center Fullof Holes,” p. 11.
13 Ibid., p. 13. Though Smithsondid not speak to environmentalconcerns as the basis for her thesis,she does footnote the necessity ofnatural resource conservation. Also,on the necessity for framingecological function within aestheticconvention, see Joan Nassauer,“Cultural Sustainability: AligningAesthetics and Ecology” in JoanNassauer, ed., Placing Nature:Culture and Landscape Ecology(Washington: Island Press, 1997).
14 Smithson, Team X Primer, p. 68.
15 “This project is more a discourseon what should not happen atMelun-Senart than on what should.”Rem Koolhaas et al., S,M,L,XL(New York: Monacelli Press, 1995),p. 974.
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A system of bands . . . is inscribed on the site like an enormous Chinesefigure. We propose to invest most of the energies needed for thedevelopment of Melun-Senart in the protection of these bands, inmaintaining their emptiness. 16
By Team X’s definition, these bands would be fixes. O.M.A.’s ambition is torender more flexible measures absent in the solid/void of master plans, whilebeing able to retain the projective order of the plan. Even so, the landscapeis described by Koolhaas as “void” or “empty” and the criteria by which it isgenerated remain largely hidden; the Chinese figure self-contained.
They no doubt had criteria by which the bands were determined, butthese were not elucidated. Without being specific about how they aregenerated, implemented, maintained or connected, the holes, like the voidsof the master plans, appear to be another formal device unrelated to thespecificities of the site.
As mentioned earlier, Waldheim distinguishes landscape urbanism fromlandscape architecture’s roots in regional planning, yet still acknowledgesthat one of the most pressing issues facing contemporary designers is “therelationship between natural environments and processes of urbanizationglobally.”17 To this end, Ian McHarg’s work has been criticized due to hisneglect of cities and dogmatic belief that ecology was the only relevant basisfor design.18 McHarg, founder of the Landscape Architecture and RegionalPlanning department at the University of Pennsylvania and author of thehighly acclaimed book Design with Nature (1969), was unquestionablynarrow in his view of designers as mere objective collectors of data, yet herecognized the underlying geologic and hydrologic aspects of landscapeprocess which could give rise to defining appropriate locations and uses.McHarg’s mappings, comprised of transparent overlays each containing adifferent value with both social and natural characteristics, provided thebasis for the location of design interventions and resulted in gradations ofgrey which “revealed” areas best suited to certain types of development.The blackest areas represent “no-build” zones and resemble O.M.A.’sMelun-Senart.
In the examples shown, Smithson, Koolhaas and McHarg all use theinstrumentality of the hole as a way of guiding action. For Smithson, theways in which the landscape could be framed were essential to a landscape’sfunction. Knowing that the entire network could only be selectively main-tained or occupied, the appearance of the landscape and its performanceare inseparable.19 For Koolhaas, the holes provide an infrastructure of pro-tection, but still present landscape generically. And for McHarg, the instru-mentality of the hole is based on the materiality of landscape and naturalprocesses, though he neglects the design repercussions at the site or humanscale. Despite McHarg’s reductive conception of design, he was concernedwith the connectivity of systems and performative aspects of landscape as
O.M.A.’s diagram of Melun-Senart,in S,M,L,XL, Rem Koolhaas et al.(New York: Monacelli Press, 1995),pp. 980, 981. Reprinted withpermission from O.M.A.
16 Ibid., p. 981.
17 Waldheim, Praxis, p. 10.
18 Ibid., p. 12. Also, see AnneWhiston Spirn, p. 36.
19 I am referring to Julia Czerniak’sintroduction to the Downsview Parkcompetition where she states that theprojects, in general, privilegedperformance over appearance. See“Appearance, Performance:Landscape at Downsview” inCzerniak, pp. 12–21.
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material. He also emphasized the use of mapping as a generative tool. Thishad a great influence on his students, such as James Corner, without whomthere would be no “landscape urbanism” as it is currently defined.20 Cornerhas made a significant contribution to the conceptualization of landscape bydevising methods of representation to better explain the processes of changeinherent to landscapes, with conflating natural and cultural systems, andwith describing mapping itself as the most creative and formative act.21
The approaches taken by Smithson, Koolhaas and McHarg—aesthetic,programmatic and material—should not be considered exclusive or com-peting interests but must be creatively incorporated together.
While I am encouraged by the aspirations and collaborative frame-work of landscape urbanism, our fear of repeating the mistakes of themodernist master planners and apprehension regarding the reductivistnature of environmental determinism risks leaving landscape urbanismwithout criteria. In describing the influence of ecological thinking on land-scape practice, Corner states that “There is no end, no grand scheme . . . justa cumulative directionality toward further becoming.” 22 While it is trueecological processes have no goal, that is not necessarily the primarycharacteristic towards which we should strive. Complete openness can be asreductive as complete control. I share the ambitions of this work, but amconcerned about the generalizations and flattening out of precedent. Right
McHarg’s mapping ofphysiographic obstructions inorder to determine roadalignment, in Design WithNature, Ian McHarg (NewYork: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,1992 edn.), p. 37. Reprintedwith permission of JohnWiley & Sons.
20 It was Corner’s phrase“landscape as urbanism” to whichWaldheim has acknowledged hisdebt. See footnote 1 in Waldheim,Praxis, p. 17.
21 James Corner, “The Agency ofMapping: Speculation, Critique andInvention” in Denis Cosgrove, ed.,Mappings (London: Reaktion BooksLtd., 2002), pp. 213–252.
22 James Corner, “Ecology andLandscape as Agents of Creativity”in George F. Thompson andFrederick R. Steiner, eds., EcologicalDesign and Planning (New York:John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997),p. 81.
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now, there is an over reliance on bracketing landscape as urbanism primarilythrough park design—Central Park to Parc to La Villette to Downsview andFresh Kills—but parks are only one necessary aspect of urbanism. Instead,we should construct a much broader history of precedents and begin toincorporate, albeit in reconstituted relationships, the criteria of dwelling,
McHarg’s successional diagrams ofdune development, in Design WithNature, Ian McHarg (New York: JohnWiley & Sons, Inc., 1992 edn.), p. 8.Reprinted with permission of JohnWiley & Sons.
Phasing Diagrams of Fresh Kills“Lifescape” by Field Operations, inPraxis 4: Journal of Building +Writing (New Orleans, Cambridge:Praxis, Inc. 2002), p. 25. Imagecourtesy of PRAXIS, Writing +Building.
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working, transportation and recreation set forth in the C.I.A.M. functionalistcity, critiques of which began with the Smithsons and Team X over fiftyyears ago.
Landscape urbanism will in future, with its temporal and politicalcharacteristics, set the scene (albeit momentary) for democracy in action. 23
Just as the modernists and New Urbanists are criticized for tying archi-tectural form to social betterment, we cannot assume that adopting a land-scape model, even if it is not a formal one, is any more likely to democratize,as suggested in the above quotation. As it stands now, landscape is stillrepresentative in many descriptions and projects—representative of free-dom, democracy or ameliorative to architecture. Architects have alreadyanswered the call of Team X, which was to move beyond the “Euclideangroove.” Now we have to take on their other challenge of disciplining dis-persal “so that any resultant development does not become absolutelystructureless.”24
NOTE
This essay was written in 2004 and I have left its content unaltered thoughthe discourse supporting landscape urbanism has been advanced sincethen. The essay is framed within the context of how landscape urbanism hasbeen positioned by those involved in developing programs of landscapeurbanism within schools of architecture. In particular, I am referring toCharles Waldheim, founder of the Landscape Urbanism concentrationat University of Illinois, Chicago and current Director of LandscapeArchitecture at the University of Toronto, and Mohsen Mostafavi andCiro Najle’s involvement with the post-graduate certificate in landscapeurbanism at the Architectural Association and work as editors of LandscapeUrbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape. Since then, Waldheimhas published The Landscape Urbanism Reader (New York: PrincetonArchitectural Press, 2006), which includes essays from fourteen authorswhose diversity positively expands the historical and theoretical frameworkof landscape urbanism. While the term is useful for describing collaborativepractice, and individual project examples and essays demonstrate itspotential and complexity, the question about its efficacy as a “disciplinaryrealignment” remains when considering its pedagogical implications.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 93rd Annual Meetingof the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2005.
23 Mohsen Mostafavi, “Landscapesof Urbanism” in Mostafavi andNajle, p. 9.
24 Alison Smithson, Team XPrimer, p. 64.
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BOSTON’S NEW URBAN RINGEVERYDAYURBANISM,LANDSCAPEURBANISM, ANDINFRASTRUCTURE
An antidote to urban fragmentationGEORGE THRUSH (1996)
The premise of this paper is that clear spatial order and hierarchy arenecessary if we are to attain meaningful social, political, and culturaldiversity in our cities, and in the space between them and the suburbs. Weshould not expect, simply because buildings look different from oneanother, and because the landscape between them seems fractured anduncontrolled, that we are representing the heterogeneity that today is takenin architectural discourse to be synonymous with political pluralism. We arenot. Our contemporary urban and suburban landscape is often a homog-eneous assemblage of meaningless commercial difference. If we want aheterogeneous landscape capable of representing real differences in culture,politics, and social order, we need, paradoxically, a strong, centered, spatialorder that can lend hierarchy to public life. What follows is a proposal totransform the metropolitan area centered on Boston, Massachusetts, intojust such a meaningfully heterogeneous landscape by means of an urbandesign strategy called the New Urban Ring.
The New Urban Ring is a proposal to assemble a ring of space (composedlargely of under-used parts of the city such as railroad right-of-ways, turn-pike air-rights, some neighborhood streets, bridges, tunnels, bikeways, andeven parts of the airport) around the central core of Boston to serve thefollowing purposes: 1) to provide a circumferential transportation system tolink the existing radial subway and transit lines between the city center andRoute 128; amid the neighborhoods, nearby suburbs, and under-developedindustrial land; 2) to provide a continuous boulevard for pedestrians,cyclists, and other citizens to move through, rather than between neigh-borhoods; 3) to act as a catalyst for urban development in the area betweenthe city and the suburbs, and thereby allow the urbanity of the city to growto metropolitan dimensions, rather than allow it to continue to wither inthe face of competition from edge cities, and suburban sprawl; and 4) toprovide a place for civic representation; for public buildings, spaces, andmonuments to accrue meaning and express difference by virtue of theirrelationship to one another.
The objective of the New Urban Ring is to address large-scale urbandesign, and regional forces. This scope mimics that of earlier utopianschemes, but with an important difference. The New Urban Ring engagesthis metropolitan scale while allowing for the kind of deference to localhistorical urban fabric that so often eluded earlier utopian schemes. Indeedthe very act of making a figure-ground drawing of a 25 square mile area
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centered on downtown Boston (Figures 1 and 2) speaks to the desire toaddress both scales.
The New Urban Ring is in some important ways a proposal to resist thecommercial forces that make our society and its built environment increas-ingly homogeneous. If we desire that meaningful difference in our society bereflected in the built environment, we must find a way to make differencerecognizable. The New Urban Ring is a proposal to establish a shared realm:a datum around Boston that conforms to and reinforces the city’s urbanmorphology. In relation to this “common ground,”1 differences in ethnicity,race, politics, style, and ideas will be more recognizable, and therefore moremeaningful.
Many architectural, social, and political critics, including RichardSennett,2 Mike Davis,3 and Mickey Kaus,4 have discussed the ways in whichwe avoid the social, cultural, and political pluralism promised by Americancities, and create artificially homogeneous communities instead. They makedistinctions between public and private life (Sennett), actual and pseudo-public places (Davis), and “social” versus “civic” spending by the govern-ment (Kaus). Sennett and Davis speak to the fact that architecture and urbandesign are often complicit in this descent into individual isolationism, andthe concomitant loss of public life. Kaus attempts to re-define publicexpenditures in terms of public, rather than individual, good. Thesecritiques rely on making distinctions between economic identity on the onehand, and political or civic identity on the other.
HOMOGENEITY AND HETEROGENEITY
When we look around us at even the most successful of today’s urbandevelopments we see commercial culture as the only source of our collectiveidentity. From the waterfront developments of The Rouse Corporation tothe “Eisner-ization of America” (to call it “Disney-fication” seems unfairto the real Walt Disney, who had nothing to do with creating the currentconfusion between fantasy and reality) and the increasingly eerie similarityof experience that one finds in such formerly disparate places as George-town (Washington, D.C.), Harvard Square (Cambridge, MA), HalstedStreet (Chicago, IL), and a host of other increasingly “mall-like” new urbandistricts, the shops, wares, people, food, habits, and activities of theparticipants all seem remarkably alike.
This phenomenon is the source of a very real fear about the increasinghomogeneity in our society. It is often taken to be the most pressing problemin our rapidly changing culture. We buy the same products; watch the sameTV shows; eat the same fast foods; experience the same landscape—indeed,the latent heterogeneity of American society seems to be evaporating despitethe fact that the country is composed of more different kinds of people thanever. Meaningful differences between people and places seem to be dis-appearing in the face of rampant commercialism and burgeoning communi-
Figure 1. Regional Figure/ GroundDrawing: Boston, Brookline,Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea &Everett 1996, George Thrush.(Drawing by Salvatore Raffone.)
Figure 2. Regional Figure/ GroundDrawing with New Urban Ring:Boston, Brookline, Cambridge,Somerville, Chelsea & Everett 1996,George Thrush. (Drawing bySalvatore Raffone.)
1 Common Ground: A TurbulentDecade in the Lives of ThreeAmerican Families, Lukas, AnthonyJ., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.
2 The Fall of Public Man, Sennett,Richard, New York: W.W. Norton &Co., 1974.
3 City of Quartz, Davis, Mike,London: Verso, an Imprint of NewLeft Books, 1990.
4 The End of Equality, Kaus,Mickey, New York: Basic Books,1992.
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cation technologies that further minimize the importance and characterof actual, rather than virtual, place; the effects of which we have not evenbegun to understand. But it is in the nature of capitalism to standardizeproducts, increase market share, and reduce difference in the world. Wealso know that capitalism also widens gaps in income5. These are notnew observations, but if we are serious about trying to forge prescriptiveconnections between the form and content of our society in our roles asdesigners of the built environment, they are not observations that we canafford to ignore.
But by fretting about the physical and spatial results of our economicsystem (which the electorate shows no signs whatever of wanting tochange), many critics miss the opportunity to resist the cultural andspatial homogenization of our society through non-economic, or civicmeans.
The idea behind the New Urban Ring suggests that it is not the afore-mentioned commercial homogeneity that is the problem so much as itsopposites: excessive heterogeneity, psychological isolation, lack of meaning-ful contact with others, and impoverished civic life. This lack of civic com-monality threatens us much more than the fact that we will soon all buyeverything we own from “The GAP”. Because, while it is disturbing thatwe all may one day wear the same tasteful plum colored shirts and khakipants, it is more disturbing that we may take this to be the total measureof our social worth. Mickey Kaus, the author of a strategy for the renewalof American Liberalism titled, provocatively, The End of Equality,advocates many political measures that might replace what he calls“money liberalism” (or government efforts to try to balance privateeconomic fortunes) with “civic liberalism” (a more direct strategy ofrenewing civic life and civic obligations).6 but they are all means by whichwe might resist the superficial heterogeneity of capitalism with someelements of a more substantive homogeneity associated with a morecohesive society: a more cohesive society that might, it almost goes withoutsaying, actually see benefits to the community as clearly as we now seebenefits to ourselves.
Because our political discourse is so dominated by discussion of indi-vidual rights (to have abortions, to desecrate the flag, to own and shootguns, to smoke pot, to not pay taxes, to build on wetlands, etc.) we donot discuss what we would like to have as the common property of thecommunity. Is the promise of America truly “the right to be left alone”(what Isaiah Berlin would call negative liberty)?7 Or is there an affirmativegood that resides in his conception of its opposite, “positive liberty”? Isthe freedom to support something as a society not also a very importantfreedom? Finally, is there a way to revise our public life so that it is bothaccepting the kind of difference that Richard Sennett describes,8 while at thesame time retaining the strength of our shared political will? If the answer is
5 The End of Equality, pp. 7–16.
6 Kaus describes the failure of whathe calls money liberalism, or thetraditional liberal agenda that “seeksto prevent income differences fromcorroding social equality by thesimple expedient of reducing theincomes differences—or, moreaccurately, suppressing the incomedifferences continually generated in acapitalist economy.” In its place, heoffers civic liberalism, which“pursues social equality directly,through government action, ratherthan by manipulating the unequaldistribution of income generated inthe capitalist marketplace.” Thisdistinction between money liberalismand civic liberalism holdstremendous opportunities forprogramming a re-designedlandscape for America’s cities. TheEnd of Equality, p. 18.
7 Four Essays on Liberty, Berlin,Isaiah, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1969, pp. xxxvii–lxiii(Introduction).
8 “The Passive Body,” Sennett,Richard, GSD News, Winter, 1995,Harvard University Graduate Schoolof Design, p. 28.
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yes, and if spatial order can be said to play a role in the construction of suchpublic life, then the urban design program of the New Urban Ring is a callfor such an affirmative step. It holds the possibility to serve as what wemight call the footprint of an improved social order.
Various rings for Boston have been conceived by different peopleat different times along a number of different routes, but they all sharea similar animus. They are all responses to what Alex Krieger callsthe lack of “rims” to connect the “hub and spoke” structure of theBoston region.9 This article will describe the history of that spatial order,its political and social ramifications, and the accompanying transport-ation strategies that have evolved to serve the region. In keeping withthe rationale for the New Urban Ring itself, the essay will first addressthese issues with respect to the city, then the suburbs, and finally the NewUrban Ring.
The New Urban Ring derives its strength from synthesis. It joins theregional scale of transportation planning to the human scale of urbandesign; it relates the importance of spatial order to political identity; and itfocuses its energy on the crucial space between city and suburb, the mostvexing segment of the “middle landscape.” So to understand the importanceof this proposal for Boston, we must first look at the forces that have pulledthe region apart and how, by weaving it back together, a new metropoliscould be born.
BOSTON’S GEOGRAPHY: ISOLATION AND IN-FILL
The evolution of Boston as a geographical entity is interesting in its ownright. What began as a “hilly peninsula, almost completely surrounded bywater”10 has been transformed through landfill over the past three and onehalf centuries into a much larger, flatter, and more contiguous land mass(Figure 3). One can follow the evolution from the original Shawmutpeninsula; to the early town with its active waterfront; to the thickened“neck” connecting the peninsula back to Roxbury; to the enlargement ofCharlestown and the beginnings of the long process to in-fill the Back Bay;to the enlargement of East Boston, the completion of the Back Bay, and theconstruction of Fan Pier; and finally, the completion of the in-fill at FortPoint Channel, Charlestown, and East Boston for what is now LoganAirport. But much of the city’s original form came from civic divisions thatremain to this day. Charlestown, Cambridge, Brookline and Boston Proper,South Boston, and East Boston, can all trace aspects of their distinctivenesstoday to the physical separation of their pasts. All of these places existed inBoston’s earliest days, but they were more a series of islands than part of acohesive city. And it was due to their separation that the system of spokesconnecting them to the hub of the original Shawmut peninsula was born.When there were large bodies of water separating these communities,ferries and bridges were the only way to connect them. Over time these
Figure 3. City of Boston EvolvingLandmass, 1630–1995 fromMapping Boston by Krieger, Alexand Cobb, David, p. 118, M.I.T.Press, 1999 (copyright The Muriel G.and Norman B. Leventhal FamilyFoundation, cartography byMapWorks, Herb Heidt and ElizaMcClennan, Norwell, MA).
10 Boston: A TopographicalHistory, Whitehill, Walter Muir,Cambridge, MA: Belknap/ HarvardUniversity Press, 1968, p. 1.
9 “Ring Dreaming and Making,”Krieger, Alex, from Catalogue #2:The New Urban Ring, Thrush,George, Boston: NortheasternUniversity, 1994, pp. 12–16.
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initial radial routes from the center of Boston Proper became the primaryroads in the adjoining communities as well.
As the city grew, however, the watery voids that separated the landmassesbegan to shrink. A prolonged series of landfill projects began to constructthe Boston that we know today. But the system of radial arteries livedon. Moreover, they became even more important than ever as orientationdevices, because even as the city became a more contiguous piece of land,its neighborhoods remained quite distinct. They were created at differentmoments during this evolution of landmass and shoreline, and independ-ently of one another, so they often shared little in the way of orientation,density, and urban morphology. In a 1986 design studio at Harvard’sGSD, Mario Gandelsonas directed his students in describing some of thiscomplexity through a series of drawings which are very helpful in makingthis point about the city’s inherent morphological contradictions (Figures4–6).
So, from a physical standpoint, Boston was conceived as a collection ofparts: both with respect to the parts of the city that remain separated fromthe “hub” by water, such as Charlestown, East Boston, and to a lesserextent, South Boston; and with respect to its internal “islands” of Roxbury,Dorchester, Brookline (politically distinct but virtually surrounded byBoston), and Allston/Brighton. Landfill has subsequently made whole thatwhich was separated at the start, though it has never fully succeeded inre-connecting the fabric of the region.
PAROCHIALISM IN POLITICS
The physical distinctions that describe Boston’s neighborhoods and nearbysuburbs are reinforced by political distinctions that mark their ideals andprejudices. The city has had a long history of conflict between localand regional interests. Perhaps the best known, and most easily recognized,is the ongoing friction between Catholic voters (traditionally Irish,Democrat, and urban) and their Protestant counterparts (traditionallyEnglish, Republican, and suburban). This has evolved over time, but whatis remarkable is the extent to which one can still describe the area’s politicsin these terms.
After the great migration of the Irish to Boston in the middle of thenineteenth century, they quickly began to emerge as a political force in thecity. In a town that had been politically dominated by Protestants sincethe time of the Puritans, the political rise of the Irish was seen as a threat.The result was that, since the Protestants continued to control State politicsfor some time, they sought to limit the power of their urban brethren bylimiting the political power of the city. The most powerful tool in thisrepressive arsenal was (and remains) something called “Home Rule,” a Statelaw under which the City of Boston must gain the approval of the legislaturebefore levying any new taxes.11 By controlling the city’s ability to raise
Figures 4–6. Diagram of Boston,1986 from “The Order of theAmerican City”, Gandelsonas,Mario Assemblage #3, 1987,p. 65 (figures 2a–c).
11 The Rascal King: The Life andTimes of James Michael Curley(1874–1958), Beatty, Jack, NewYork: Addison-Wesley, 1992,Chapter 7, p. 263 and p. 269.
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revenue, the Protestant suburbanites limited the potential power of theCatholic Irish. But this mutual animosity also caused Bostonians and theirpolitical leaders to resist other, more beneficial regional alliances that mighthave served the metropolitan area much better than the latent parochialismand separatism that emerged.
American politics is filled with ethnic and religious conflicts like these,but in Boston they were particularly destructive to planning and designingthe built environment because this conflict between the city and all of itsneighbors restrained inter-municipal cooperation and regional planning.Due to its inherently fractured and separated physical character, thearea known as “the Boston Region”—which is actually no larger than anaverage-sized metropolis—could not be planned like one. So, in a placewhere cooperation between small political entities was essential, there wereprofound political obstacles to coordinating the physical planning of the cityas a whole.
REGIONALISM IN TRANSPORTATION, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND RECREATION
The most important precursors to the regionalism of the New Urban Ringwere Arthur Shurtleff and the Boston Society of Architects’ (B.S.A.) Com-mittee on Municipal Improvements. The Committee’s proposal for anInner and Outer Boulevard was remarkably like today’s proposed NewUrban Ring. It consisted of circumferential (or ring-like) boulevards thatwould cross municipal, class, and racial boundaries. Shurtleff’s analyticaldrawings of both existing and proposed radial and circumferential routesthroughout the region offer the evidence that such boulevards werenecessary then, and remain so today. To reinforce the similarity of con-ditions which support the need for the New Urban Ring (in any of itsvariants) today, refer to the images of the contemporary city with overlaysof the B.S.A.’s 1907 plan, its 1994 plan, and the author’s alignments ofthe New Urban Ring. While they are all different, each alignment takesadvantage of the same latent morphology in the region, and each connectsradial routes through circumferential connections. Each of these urbanboulevards has the added regionalizing effect of crossing economic, ethnic,class, and racial boundaries.
Perhaps the most profound regionalization of Boston’s transportationplanning and infrastructure came in the 1970s under the leadership of FredSalvucci, then Governor Michael S. Dukakis’ Secretary of Transportation.This is important because it is the regional scale of transportation infra-structure that can serve as the armature for the regionalized urbanism of theNew Urban Ring. He certainly benefited from the previous administration’sdecision (with his encouragement) to abandon the so-called “Inner-Belt”expressway that would have so fractured Boston’s physical landscape as tomake it nearly irreparable. But Salvucci inherited a Metropolitan TransitAuthority whose range was limited to fourteen municipalities, and as such
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had little regional impact. He left with the Massachusetts Bay Transporta-tion Authority serving seventy-eight cities and towns, and extending far outinto suburban Boston. The key to his overall regionalization efforts was theBoston Transportation Planning Review of 1974, which ultimately led tomany important improvements in this area. The most critical improve-ments were the extension of the Red Line subway route; the Orange Lineextension/Southwest Corridor Park; the purchase of commuter rail lines tothe north and south of the city from the Boston-Maine and Conrail respec-tively; and finally, most influentially, the depression of the Central Arteryand the construction of the Third Harbor Tunnel.12
SUBURBANIZATION: POLITICS REDUX
The regionalization of the Boston area’s transportation infrastructuremade the entire region much more accessible. It became possible tocommute between the city center and the more distant suburbs. There wereeven steps taken toward making “inter-modal” stations, such as those atQuincy and Alewife, that offered automobile commuters the chance toexchange their cars for public transit while still well outside of the city. Theresuscitated transportation network also took the concerns of inner-citypedestrians to heart for the first time since the advent of the large-scalehighway systems after World War II. Special attention was given to thequality of stations and, in the case of the Southwest Corridor Park,an entirely new pedestrian sequence was created alongside the newOrange Line.
But there remained an aspect of even these enlightened transportationplanning efforts that continued to segregate the region. For even as the area’sradial connections between inner city and suburb were being strengthened,the circumferential connections through the often under-developed“middle-landscape” of nearby suburbs and disenfranchised urban neigh-borhoods were being ignored. The interests of the suburban commutersto downtown were being served at the expense of the even greater needs ofthe residents of the space “in-between.” So it became clear that some sort ofring, or belt, or loop was needed; something that approximated the scaleand connectivity of the Inner Belt, but that served instead as more of a urbandevelopment generator, much as Route 128 had for the suburbs a generationearlier.
THE NEW URBAN RING: AN ANTIDOTE TO URBAN
FRAGMENTATION
So the mission of the New Urban Ring is a complex one. It is to resistthe latent parochialism of the Boston region from both a political andbureaucratic standpoint and to take advantage of the opportunities forregionalism. The intersection of these goals could create the physical land-scape for a new kind of politics, one that political writer E. J. Dionne calls
12 From an interview with ClaireBarrett, former Member of M.B.T.A.Board of Directors, 8/22/95.
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the need for a strong political middle:13 a political movement that couldharness that great deal about which Americans do not disagree. This will notbe easy. As Dionne notes, “conservatives and liberals are suspicious of anethic of the ‘public good’ for very different reasons. Conservatives whodislike government see the revival of a civic politics as a way of invoking oldlanguage to justify modern big government. Liberals, fearful of too muchtalk about virtue and community, fear that civic talk will mean the creationof a homogeneous community. When liberals hear talk about ‘the commongood’, they often think of Jerry Falwell.”14 Mickey Kaus, another astuteobserver of the contemporary political scene, is more specific in his descrip-tion of exactly how we might physically achieve this “common good.” His“civic liberalism” is a program for required national service, national healthcare, the draft, public day care, and civic celebrations; all as a means ofencouraging the racial and class mixing that traditional “money liberalism”has failed so miserably to produce.15
But the program and alignment for Boston’s New Urban Ring is designedspecifically to make a place for Kaus and Dionne’s vision of a renewedpublic sphere. Of course it must also serve as the kind of infrastructure thatcan create jobs, provide transportation, and play other more prosaic roles incontemporary life. In addition, it should serve as an especially safe placein the city, where travel through previously unwelcoming neighborhoodswould now be possible. Perhaps most importantly, it would allow for therepresentation of Boston’s rich (and parochial) character along a regionalroute. As discussed earlier, the commercial (or artificial) heterogeneity ofhaphazard development patterns could be replaced by a heavily structuredpublic sequence where key sites would have tremendous opportunities forreal civic, rather than commercial, meaning. Physical homogeneity couldmake cultural and political heterogeneity possible.
URBAN DESIGN STRATEGIES
In order for all of these opportunities to find their way into the realexperience of the city, however, different ring typologies would have to bedeveloped to accommodate the widely varied spatial conditions found inthe Boston area. There would be three basic cross-sectional typologies.One would be a single, complex boulevard, along the lines of Vienna’sRingstrasse, that would include dedicated lanes for rapid transit, amplepedestrian paths, and controlled vehicular lanes (Figure 7). The secondwould be a two, or even three, road system of parallel streets thatwould allow the separation of truck service and automobile traffic from thetransit- and pedestrian-based central boulevard. Such a system would createthe possibility of two-sided building types like supermarkets which could sitdirectly on the street front on the central boulevard, while retaining ampleparking access from one of the secondary circumferential streets. Finally, insome of the tighter existing conditions, the Ring might continue with only
14 Ibid., p. 333.
15 The End of Equality, pp. 7–16.
13 Why Americans Hate Politics,Dionne, E. J., New York:Touchstone, 1991, Chapter 13,pp. 329–355.
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allées of trees and building setback and height regulations to help transformexisting streets into parts of the New Urban Ring.
Another way that the Ring could be apprehended is as an episodic seriesof nodes, rather than as a continuous spatial corridor. In this configuration,the character and definition of the nodes (presumably at key transportationtransfer points) would be especially important. In either case, however, theRing could perform a critical role in the spatial orientation of both visitorsand residents alike, helping to form a mental map of one’s surroundings;something which has always been notoriously difficult in Boston—even forlong time residents. By making constant reference to a single center (thedowntown core, or center of the Ring), both the physical and politicalstructures of the city are reinforced.
Building regulations would, of course, depend on the selection of eitherthe continuous or episodic structure for the Ring (and there is no reason whyboth could not be employed along different portions of the Ring). For thecontinuous type, building setbacks, height limitations, and colonnadedimensions would be part of the visual guidelines used to inform develop-ment along the alignment. This type of urban design strategy would workbest with a surface transportation system, such as a trolley or dedicatedbus line, because its visibility along the route would be important formaintaining the Ring’s “continuity.” The episodic, node-based Ringwould rely more on landmarks, towers, and other identifiable elementsvisible from a great distance, and as such would be able to work with asubway type transportation system, because the stations would occur atthe specified nodes and their route beyond the nodes would be of lessimportance.
REGIONAL MASTER PLAN
Many neighborhood-specific proposals could grow from the New UrbanRing. The idea has tremendous power because it need not, andindeed could not and should not, be implemented all at one time. Insteadit can serve as the backbone of a regional “master plan” that wouldencourage development in the Boston region that would be integrated,progressive and morphologically appropriate, without being unnecessarilynostalgic in the process. Using the New Urban Ring as a regional “masterplan” would do more for maintaining the oft-cited and presumablymuch-loved “character” of Boston than any collection of historical stylisticguidelines.
Such a plan could have a major impact on many important projects thatare being considered right now. The location of a “megaplex,”16 either as awhole or, more preferably, as a series of parts connected by the New UrbanRing, is one example, but there are several others. There are tremendousdevelopment opportunities along the Conrail railroad right-of-way inCambridge and Somerville; vast tracts around Sullivan Square; large
Figure 7. The Ringstrasse, Vienna,Austria.
16 A combination of a largeconvention facility and a domedfootball stadium currently underreview by the Massachusetts StateLegislature.
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portions of Charlestown’s waterfront that are now underutilized; CentralSquare in East Boston has the potential to be one of the city’s most beautiful;and all the way from South Boston to Roxbury, there is un-used or under-used land looking for a vision of how it might all work together.
THE FUTURE
A 1989 state transportation study reviewed circumferential transit. In 1994,Harvard, M.I.T., and The Boston Globe convened The Boston Conferenceon “the accessible region” at which a national jury admonished the cityand state to get together and “build the Urban Ring,”17 and in 1996, theMassachusetts Bay Transportation Authority will commission a study of theidea. But the power of this fundamentally urban design proposal must notbe allowed to dissolve into merely a question of ridership estimates based oncurrent conditions.
The New Urban Ring is a proposal that could repair and re-make theregion by re-connecting its citizens, ideas, beliefs, and activities intoa greater whole. But it will not happen merely because designers thinkit is a formally attractive idea. Citizens must be persuaded that thereis more to American life than pure individualism; more than separatismand commerce. If we desire a heterogeneous public life in place of thecommercial homogeneity that we currently endure, the space betweenBoston’s downtown core and its nearby suburbs offers the perfect placeto try to build it. We need not build it all at once. But we need to start(Figure 8).
NOTE
As of 2007, the transit connections envisioned in the New Urban Ring havebeen extensively studied as a prelude to some form of implementation, butbecause the region still lacks a regional planning authority, the larger andeven more critical physical and economic development aspects of the pro-posal have not yet received similar attention.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beatty, Jack. The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley
(1874–1958). New York: Addison-Wesley, 1992.Berlin, Isaiah. Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.Davis, Mike. City of Quartz. London: Verso, an Imprint of New Left Books,
1990.Dionne, E. J. Why Americans Hate Politics. New York: Touchstone, 1991.Kaus, Mickey. The End of Equality. New York: Basic Books, 1992.Kennedy, Lawrence W. Planning the City Upon the Hill. Amherst: The University of
Massachusetts Press, 1992.Krieger, Alex. “Ring Dreaming and Making” from Catalogue #2: The New Urban
Ring, Thrush, George. Boston: Northeastern University, 1994.
17 “Turning Point”, The BostonGlobe Magazine, October 30, 1994,p. 29.
GEORGE THRUSH
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Lukas, Anthony J. Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three
American Families. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.Palmer, Thomas C. “Turning Point”, The Boston Globe Magazine, October 30,
1994.Schneider, William. “The Suburban Century Begins”, The Atlantic Monthly, June
1992.Sennett, Richard. “The Passive Body”, GSD News, Winter, 1995. Harvard University
Graduate School of Design.Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,
1974.Whitehill, Walter Muir. Boston: A Topographical History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/
Harvard University Press, 1968.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 84th Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1996.
Figure 8. Boston’s New UrbanRing, with two case study areasbuilt-out in Boston University/Cambridgeport and MelneaCass Boulevard, Roxbury; 1996,George Thrush. (Drawing bySalvatore Raffone.)
BOSTON’S NEW URBAN RING
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INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE NEWEVERYDAYURBANISM,LANDSCAPEURBANISM, ANDINFRASTRUCTURE
SOCIAL COMPACTWILLIAM R. MORRISH AND CATHERINE R. BROWN(1995)
Infrastructure is a metaphor for a much bigger set of issues or a muchdeeper reckoning about the future. It’s a metaphor for how we care aboutand cope with the future. It’s not just concerned about structures.Structures are important. They provide a service that has value. But thehighways, bridges, dams and water systems are also a means by which werelate to each other as humans and this fragile and beautiful planet. It’sthese built systems that create our hoped-for protection—and connec-tion. I believe a starting point for any kind of strategy on infrastructure isto think about the built environment with as much discipline and passionas the most concerned bring to the question of the natural environment.
Nancy Rutledge ConneryExecutive Director
National Council on Public Works
Throughout his 1992 election campaign, President Clinton spoke of theneed to establish a new compact between the national leadership and itscitizens in a common quest to rebuild America’s economy as well as itscommunities, emphasizing infrastructure development as one of the primarytools for accomplishing both. Before long, infrastructure became the buzzword of the day, tossed about as casually in the media as it was at cocktailparties. When the Clinton Transition Team contacted us regarding ourthoughts as urban designers on the role and function of infrastructure in theremaking of community, we found ourselves reexamining some funda-mental questions. What is infrastructure? How can an expanded under-standing of it maximize the benefits of new infrastructure dollars for human,plant, and animal communities?
Unfortunately, we found that infrastructure is often narrowly equatedwith public works. Each community has a public works department respon-sible for the planning, design, and maintenance of the “practical” aspects ofcity services, such as transportation, water supply, sewage, garbage disposaland, in many cities, parks and recreation. To describe infrastructure aspublic works, and to define public works as those utilitarian functionswhich merely support the economic productivity of the community, hidesthe broader possibilities of infrastructure as the repository of culturalimagination, the network for community connections, and a vivid display oflocal ecological resources.
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INFRASTRUCTURE AS A REPOSITORY OF CULTURAL IMAGINATION:
MEANING AND BEAUTY
Builders of the post-World War II landscape have separated function fromform in infrastructure, regarding the city’s network of transportation,power lines, water supply, sewage, and garbage disposal as mere utilitariansystems rather than cultural artifacts or forms of public art. This split isclearly illustrated by Le Corbusier’s central text on urbanism, The RadiantCity, published in 1933. One of the book’s infrastructure diagrams is par-ticularly telling. In it, Le Corbusier illustrates how he and many otherdesigners have selectively edited infrastructure out of the new urban utopia,treating it as a mere utilitarian system to tap for needed services. In hisscheme the landscape is green, the sun bright, and the highway skillfullyhidden in foliage. Infrastructure blight—electrical lines, sewers, powerplants, and factories—is drawn below the picture frame, tied to the housesin this idyllic landscape by neutral thin lines. The messy, ugly workings ofinfrastructure are stowed out of sight like the power plant of a transatlanticship, which performs the dirty job of transforming natural material intohead, clean water, and power below the water line of the ship. With theunsightly clutter of infrastructure hidden beneath the drawing, the resi-dential landscape takes on the contours of a 19th century park, a tranquilplace to re-create oneself far from the modern world’s assaults upon thewell-being of the inhabitant.
A ROOM WITH A DIFFERENT VIEW: CONSEQUENCES OF THE SPLIT
As in Le Corbusier’s drawing, we have designed and planned our post-World War II American cities under the illusion that infrastructure was autility to be placed out of sight and separated from the landscapes thatnurture us spiritually as well as economically. The results have been mixed.We assumed that the landscape had an ever-increasing capacity to absorbgrowth and remain a pristine scenic backdrop. Since the 1950s, many sub-urbanites have believed that they could escape the ugliness of the urbaninfrastructure and environmental degradation of the city and start over inthe woods and wetlands of the surrounding suburban communities. Land-use planning would protect their “room with a view”—their uninterrupted“view” of the sun, their patch of green, and the purity of their water. Infra-structure would be constructed outside the picture frame. Thus, most sub-urban comprehensive plans are based on the separation of two worlds: theutilitarian and the natural. Utilitarian structures were conceived as benign,single-function service systems that by-passed homes as they supplied theneeds of economic productivity. They could leave untouched the natural,or aesthetic, environment where homes are established, children are raised,and families recreate. This bisection was successful as long as these systemsremained inconspicuous and little in number, and there was enoughundeveloped land to buffer subdivisions from infrastructure.
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But the newness of the suburban landscape has begun to wear off andthe older infrastructure of the inner city is collapsing. In the suburbs,wetlands have been drained and channeled into storm sewers; woodlandshave disappeared. Small county roads are being expanded into trunkhighways to meet increased demand. New thoroughfares are treated asmere functional conduits whose sole purpose is to move goods, services,and people fast and efficiently. Today, the infrastructure, which wassupposed to remain in the alley at the rear of the house, has crept intofull view in the front yard, fracturing, destroying, and homogenizing alandscape which was supposed to be a safe, comfortable refuge fromthe grittiness of the city.
WHERE DO WE LOOK FOR ANSWERS?
The city and suburb are beginning to find that degraded and degradinginfrastructure is an issue they have in common. Both are learning thatinfrastructure is a cultural utility, a civilizing amenity, not a necessaryevil to be placed “below the picture frame.” Infrastructure is the visibleunderpinning of civic life, which can instruct citizens about their valuesand relationships to each other and highlight the connections betweenthe city, suburb, and the hinterland whose natural resources sustain it.Infrastructure can—and should—make those lines of connection clearand vivid.
To build infrastructure that participates this deeply in the imaginativelife of its community requires a fundamental shift in our attitude towardthe landscape. In his book Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, JohnBrinckerhoff Jackson, the noted scholar of American landscape, says thatthe most magnificent city complexes “recognize the need to integrate infra-structure, or civil engineering, with landscape, or architecture.” Beautiful
Consequences of the split view ofinfrastructure: “From the backyardinto the front yard.”
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and brilliant schemes are created when “they both reorganize space forhuman needs, both produce works of art in the truest sense.” To do this weneed to recognize the inseparability of landscape and infrastructure. In“The Word Itself,” one of the essays in the book, Jackson writes:
A landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a syntheticspace, a man-made system of spaces superimposed on the face of the land,functioning and evolving not according to natural laws but to serve acommunity—for the collective character of the landscape is one thing thatall generations and all points of view have agreed upon.
He points to Holland, an engineered landscape largely reclaimed from theNorth Sea, or Frederick Law Olmsted’s design for the Boston Fens asexamples of this synthetic landscape whose “organizations of space havebeen so well assimilated into the natural environment that they are indis-tinguishable and unrecognized for what they are.” For Jackson, infra-structure not only provides the backdrop for culture but the very ingredientsthat make it possible:
In the contemporary world it is by recognizing this similarity of purposethat we will eventually formulate a new definition of landscape: acomposition of made-made or man-modified spaces to serve asinfrastructure or background for our collective existence; and ifbackground seems inappropriately modest we should remember that inour modern use of the word it means that which underscores not only ouridentity and presence, but also our history.
INFRASTRUCTURE AS LANDSCAPE: THREE BACKGROUNDS FOR OUR
COLLECTIVE EXISTENCE
In order for infrastructure to become the background for our collectiveexistence, identity, presence, and history, we believe that infrastructure mustfulfill broader cultural, social, and ecological functions. The infrastructurein these human-made landscapes should serve multiple goals. Chief amongthese goals is enriching our sense of place, by bridging our commonwealthand enhancing the workings of ecological systems.
INFRASTRUCTURE: ENRICHING OUR SENSE OF PLACE
Traditionally, we have conceived of infrastructure as a neutral gray utility,as objects and spaces devoid of cultural expression or celebration out of afear of distracting the motorist or drawing attention to the messy plumbingof the city. Sometimes we neglect exploring the cultural possibilities of infra-structure under the misguided policy, “If it looks good, it costs too much.”We must remember that these pieces and systems perform the essential
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“cultural workings” of our society. They enrich our sense of who we are andcharacterize the places we inhabit.
We need, then, to give priority to infrastructure projects that improveformal, spatial, and aesthetic connections and create a heightened senseof place for our citizens. Beautiful infrastructure that is inspired by andresponsive to the physical and topographic features of the locale is primaryto creating community identity and a personal sense of orientation. One ofAmerica’s most outstanding examples of the rich layering of cultural andfunction in infrastructure is Philadelphia’s Fairmount Waterworks, built in1815. Among the country’s first urban water systems, the steam-driven
Three infrastructure backgrounds toour collective existence: “Enrich,connect and enhance, place,ecology and commonwealth.”
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plant pumped water from the Schuylkill River into the homes of Phila-delphia residents. To house these waterworks, the city chose a group ofGreek Revival temples, designed by Frederick Graff, a utilitarian acropolisset into Fairmount Park that symbolized the new democratic urban land-scape amid the park’s natural systems.
Though newer facilities have been built to meet the city’s increaseddemands for water, the waterworks stand today as a historic landmark, aninfrastructural “ruin” that provides a tangible reminder of the cultural valuesthat have shaped the city. Following the Fairmount Waterworks, our wholeweb of infrastructure—roads, water mains, pumping stations, garbage-transfer facilities, and water treatment plants—need to be more broadlyconceived as not only service system, but as armatures for culture. As such,they have three functions: to provide a repository for collective memory,to establish an orientation and path-finding framework, and to providea clear curriculum of civic instruction on how to use and value thisinvestment.
Where do we go from here?
Garrison Keillor once joked, it’s “remarkable that all the towns in Iowawere named after their water tanks.” Keillor, in his way, underscored thebasic legacy among American cities throughout the 19th and 20th centuriesof building public temples and parks to house infrastructure. Not only didthey define the public realm and symbolize democracy’s collective power,but these landmarks remind us of our daily struggle to shape the forces ofnature into the landscapes which provide the foundation for our moderncities, as in New Orleans, for example, where city water pumps battle roundthe clock to prevent the groundwater from flooding the slim crust ofelevated land upon which the city’s character is defined.
Just as it provides the lines of continuity between the past and the presentand provides the foundation upon which our future rests, infrastructurecan also shape a spatial framework for cognitive path-finding to helpcitizens find their way across a metropolitan landscape. In the past we haveused historic monuments, civic buildings, parks, and prominent topographicfeatures as visual landmarks that help us orient ourselves in the cityand mark sub-districts within a larger metropolitan area. More recently,however, we have given little thought to the usefulness of infrastructure—the highways, power lines, and waterworks—as signature landmarks thatcan guide us through the complex web of places in urban landscapes.
The city of Phoenix has taken steps to capture this opportunity. As partof a proposed $1 billion infrastructure development, the city asked us in1987 to assist the Phoenix Arts Commission in constructing a unique urbandesign plan which used public works to improve the physical quality ofthe community. The city’s goal, according to the Phoenix Public Arts Plan, isthe construction of
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. . . a series of sites linked to the spatial and public infrastructure systems ofPhoenix. This approach allows for not only the provision of sites suitablefor artists’ works, but also for the creation of a public orientation system.The public art “system” idea helps a person locate oneself within theexpansive urban landscape partly by creating a heightened sense oforientation. This can be created by responding to the context of naturaland built landscape, climatic conditions and the historic/cultural traditionof the desert Southwest. Collectively individual works of art and the publicart system as a whole can help the citizen to better understand andcomprehend both the city and the region.
This plan has resulted in several public artworks, including the trans-formation of a new cross-town expressway into a desert parkway heavilyplanted with native vegetation; a standard highway overpass into a newneighborhood gateway; and a garbage-truck transfer station into a publiclandmark and environmental education center. Infrastructure is now part ofPhoenix citizens’ “mental map.” These cognitive landmarks help themdefine themselves and the place in which they live.
These infrastructure facilities were also designed to be didactic—instruct-ing citizens about the meaning, value, and function of the systems thatsupport their communities. Incorporating instructional devices establishes aconnection between the community and the engineered utility, transformingbasic facilities into attractive public places in which citizens experience keylessons of public responsibility. That connection provides a common set ofexperiences that facilitate a clearer understanding of how we, as individuals,are related and how our actions are connected to maintaining the qualityof the place. For example, Phoenix citizens have learned that the city’sinfrastructure legacy dates to the irrigation canals of the Hohokam thatcrisscrossed the valley floor nearly 1600 years ago. Today, these irriga-tion canals provide the basis for linking neighborhoods and the city withthe basic life-giving force of the area’s water. In a city dominated bystreets and highways, these canals and water systems have become newfocuses of community activity and development, and a framework for a newcommunity map.
The city of Phoenix has extended this kind of civic instruction intoone of the most banal of urban infrastructures—a garbage-transfer andrecycling center—with impressive results. “I would like this facilityto become one of the features visitors come to Phoenix to see,” says RonJensen, director of the city’s Department of Public Works. Supportedby the Phoenix Arts Commission, artists Linnea Glatt and Michael Singer—with the help of consulting engineers Black and Veach—transformed thisstandard landfill project into an educational landmark. Described asa multi-functional marketplace, the facility not only serves as a site forsolid-waste transfer, recyclable materials sorting, and vegetation recovery
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and mulching, but also hosts educational and demonstration projects forthe public.
Designed as much more than the standard single-use dump, Phoenix’snew waste facility includes a desert landscape built upon a mound of dis-carded concrete sidewalk and demolition material; recycling displays thatchronicle the history of waste disposal; a solid-waste library; amphitheaterfor films and lecture; and an elevated walkway that allows visitors to view
Phoenix Public Art Works “culturalinfrastructure.”
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waste operations. In 1992, the public got its first glimpse of the facility ata black-tie event called “Dance at the Dump,” fulfilling a goal outlined in aproject brochure: “Unlike most recycling or transfer facilities that operatein an ‘out of site, out of mind’ context, this facility will encourage visitors toview the entire operation.”
Though the costs for this innovative and imaginative investmentare comparable to those of building a standard landfill transfer station,the payoffs are much greater in the long term. For one thing, the facilityteaches more responsible “refuse” habits. By teaching citizens how tobe better consumers of the service, the system is more efficiently used andmaintenance costs are reduced.
Furthermore, visitors learn about the impacts of their waste behavior onthe larger eco-community. Site landscaping and connections between thebuilding and the surrounding mountains remind visitors about howgood waste management can help to reduce degradation of the area’sfragile desert. An adjacent storm-water recharge landscape, currentlyunder construction, teaches lessons about desert water harvesting.And by making this facility a civic showpiece rather than a dumpingground, the city multiplies the land-use possibilities of surrounding sites.The waste complex, for example, could serve as an anchor for newprivate and public development centering on education, recycling, and theenvironment.
INFRASTRUCTURE: BRIDGING OUR COMMONWEALTH
In our earnest efforts to provide the needed infrastructure to service avital economy, we’ve often forgotten that infrastructure is one of the mostvisible fruits of a community’s collective labor. As a result, we’ve pursued awasteful, inequitable course that squanders this collective infrastructureinvestment, subdivides what we share, and abandons poorer communities.Starting in the 1950s and ending in the 1980s, we focused our naturalresources on building an infrastructure system for our cities across ournation. In some areas, these systems exist with underutilized excess capacity;in others, aging infrastructure is in rapid decline. Instead of building uponthis foundation, since 1980, we have diverted system maintenance fundingto capitalize on new infrastructure at the outer limits of urban centers—atthe expense of our networks in our existing city. We’ve stretched ourresources to such an extent that gaps have begun to appear in the fabricof not only our inner cities, but our first- and second-ring communities,as well.
The future costs of this neglect are staggering. Infrastructure is a publicresource that requires continual maintenance. Recent federal reports statethat deferred maintenance has contributed to America’s economic decline.By some estimates, more than $3 trillion are needed nationwide to upgradeour existing systems. Not surprisingly, few citizens are aware of the magni-
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tude of the investment we have made—in money, energy, and socialupheaval—to construct and maintain existing infrastructure in our cities.We have so successfully placed it out of sight that we have lost contact withits fundamental role in shaping our collective existence.
In cities such as Cincinnati, Ohio (population 350,000), however, greaterawareness of this investment is changing urban attitudes and policies. Aspart of a recent public assessment of the city’s infrastructure, city officialsand business leaders calculated the replacement cost of that infrastructure as$10.2 billion in 1990 dollars. This major community investment—bridges,park systems, river-front esplanades, storm-water channels, and water-filtering stations, not to mention more linear miles of retaining walls thanany other American city to keep neighborhoods on the hills overlookingthe Ohio River from sliding down its banks—provides civic identity andensures Cincinnati’s competitive edge as a regional marketplace. Awareof its valuable heritage, Cincinnati has begun to rebuild a stronger sense ofcommunity by leveraging its infrastructure heritage.
One of the most positive results of this public effort was the enlistment ofthe larger community in the making and maintaining of public works. Withthe help of neighborhood groups and individual citizens, a city commissionof business and community leaders recently inventoried city facilitiesand procedures. The commission’s final report presented more than 100recommendations, including an earnings tax proposal that voters passedas one of the first steps towards rebuilding the city’s infrastructure andneighborhoods. This community involvement proved so valuable thatcitizen committees are now appointed on an ongoing basis to advise avariety of city departments. The lasting benefit of this civic exerciseis an engaged public, involved in the long and difficult task of makingpublic infrastructure contribute to community revitalization, fromeconomic prosperity and social vitality to the physical quality of the city’sneighborhoods.
The success of these efforts rests on the recognition that infrastructureis created by our collective efforts and represents our collective wealth.As such, it becomes the public domain that we own and share. Therefore,infrastructure should be designed as bridges to link us rather than walls todivide us.
But this hasn’t happened. In our eagerness to use infrastructure primarilyto maintain the wealth of central marketplaces, we have ignored the possi-bility of using those same systems to reinforce and access the “common”wealth of an interconnected city. As Cornell West describes,
We must focus our attention on the public square—the common good thatundergirds our national and global destinies. The vitality of any publicsquare ultimately depends on how much we care about the quality of ourlives together. The neglect of our public infrastructure and sewage systems,
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bridges, tunnels, highways, subways and streets—reflects not only ourmyopic economic polities, which impede productivity, but also the lowpriority we place on our common life.
Already, many city residents have lost control of their streets to commutertraffic and their trees to disease and pollution. In the outer suburbs, residentsfind that they have lost their cherished natural resources, the woodlands,fields, and streams that enhance the quality of their lives and underpin thebasic economic value of their home investments.
In their place, they find woodlands cleared and streams channeledinto box culverts for warehouse discount stores, office parks and massivehighway rights-of-way, whose traffic spews heavy metals and noise intothe air. As we lose these features, we lose our sense of security, orientationand, most importantly, our sense of community. The resulting isolationmakes it easy to abandon established neighborhoods for “safer” placesever farther out on the metropolitan fringe, thereby despoiling even moreopen space.
Where do we go from here?
Infrastructure systems must improve both the functional and physicalsense of connection between neighborhoods and the larger community.We should give priority to infrastructure projects that address basicinequities between inner city and suburban neighborhoods. Despite thefact that inner-city residents are taxed at higher rates to maintain thebasic core of water and power systems that serve the outer edges, theyare increasingly segregated from the growing range of jobs, goods, andservices available to middle- and upper-middle-class residents in suburbanareas. Dispersed employment centers in the suburbs are poorly servicedby transit, restricting job access to low-income families without auto-mobiles. Yet, highways subdivide inner-city neighborhoods to accommo-date job commutes for suburban workers crisscrossing the metropolitanarea via the central core. The narrow utilitarian focus of past infrastructurehas created invisible barriers between economic classes and ethnic groups,reinforcing in some cases and causing in others a de facto form of classsegregation.
To balance the existing investment disparity between city and suburb,new development growth should be forced to pay the true cost of infra-structure at the expanding metropolitan edges rather than simply theconstruction price tag. Before we consume more raw land, we shouldsuccessfully capture the full potential of our existing investment. We shouldgive priority to new infrastructure projects that build on past investmentsand seek to reunite the segmented parts of the commonwealth—projectsthat link and integrate development with compact, mixed land-usedevelopment.
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Transportation planning should begin with the premise that we mustreduce travel time to work, through consolidating destinations and pro-viding convenient access to alternate modes of travel. We must recognizethat there is no such thing as truly free parking (even if the driver does notpay for the privilege). Instead we must promote projects that underwriteemployer-based transportation programs, to incrementally change workerhabits and locational decisions. “The key to integrating our thinking abouttransportation and land use,” says planner Joel Woodhull of SouthernCalifornia’s Rapid Transit Development, “is to focus on access ratherthan mobility. Mobility means going faster and farther. Access meansgetting to more places conveniently. With access, the focus is on places.Mobility focuses on paths, often to the neglect or even the destructionof places.”
We should encourage infrastructure projects that evolve out of publicparticipation. Traditionally, the supply side of the economy—businessesand manufacturing—has been seen as the primary client of infrastructuredevelopment so that we’ve produced industrial systems rather than a publicrealm for community. The primary users of infrastructure, however, areaverage citizens. Federal programs should encourage projects whichincorporate their needs and demands while improving service and thequality of place.
Public participation, if properly orchestrated from the beginning, doesnot add cost. On the contrary, in the long term it increases the effectivenessand acceptance of the system as a cultural amenity and minimizes thepossibility of protracted citizen protests and environmental lawsuits.Countering our municipal funding crises, public participation producessolutions that leverage each dollar to improve both service and quality ofplace. And public involvement produces educated users of the system,reducing abuse and decreasing maintenance costs, while it builds thelong-term commitment necessary to support both construction andoperating costs.
Finally, to assist this dialogue we need to develop a new vocabulary forinfrastructure that enlarges functional engineering terms to include wordsthat describe the cultural and social life of a community and its qualitiesof place. Because we have viewed infrastructure as the servant of industryand national defense, the terms for its planning and design are technical andstandardized. To create infrastructure that bridges the diverse social patternsand needs of our metropolitan commonwealth, we need a language thattransforms “arterial streets” into community avenues and “detentionponds” into neighborhood parks.
INFRASTRUCTURE: ENHANCING ECOLOGICAL FUNCTION
Until now, we’ve favored the conventional simple engineering approach,in which infrastructure denies the richness of natural systems, ultimately
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stripping away complex wealth from the landscape. The engineeringapproach creates a single-use network that moves goods, services, andpeople over the land through capital-intensive concrete and steel conduitsthat neither give nor receive much support from the landscape throughwhich they pass. Unfortunately, we have crisscrossed the American land-scape with such simple systems in our attempt to create a standardizednational system of support for our nation’s participation in the globalmarket. In the process we have ignored the diverse physical and culturalfeatures of regional geography in our construction of a rational infra-structure system.
On the other hand, an alternate complex design approach mimicsecological function and the spirit of the landscape, and builds what J.B.Jackson, in “The Word Itself,” calls “synthetic organizations of space [that]have been so well assimilated into the natural environment that they areindistinguishable and unrecognized for what they are.” This system seeks touse the ecological features, functions, and character of the landscape tobenefit both society and natural systems. Designed to be integrated into thelandscape, complex systems are also multiuse, providing twice the benefitfrom a single investment.
Using this new definition of infrastructure, even the most mundane and“un-public” of urban functions—the sewage-treatment plant—can becomea beautiful ecological civic landmark. In 1990, the village of Alvo,Nebraska, hired Minneapolis artist and engineer Viet Ngo to createa sewage-treatment system. Using a serpentine form inspired by NativeAmerican earthworks, Ngo created a sewage-holding pond covered witha carpet of duckweed. As plant-massings drive from the pond’s intake pipeto the outflow in an adjacent lake, they metabolize excess algae whileabsorbing and bio-concentrating harmful chemicals. “We chose it because itcosts less and we believed it would be environmentally kind,” says BarbaraHollinger, village vice chairperson, in a 1991 Artnews article on theproject. “The results have just been excellent, cleaner and clearer inappearance, and it’s prevented any algae’s growth. And it totally transformsthe area. It no longer looks like your typical sewage lagoon at all—it’sbeautifully artistic.”
This project and others like it clearly point to a new type of artisticecological engineering that provides public service while adding beauty andfiscal value to our civic investment. We have created infrastructure to turn“straw into gold,” to control nature and make it the supporting foundationfor our lives. As we collect the gold, we should not forget to maintain thefields that grow the straw. Even in a global “information” market, we stillneed living forests to supply the timber for our houses and replenish the airwe breath with oxygen.
If natural resources are fundamental to our lives, then the maintenanceof natural systems should be the starting point for the creation of future
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infrastructure. Without clean water, air, healthy forests, and unspoiled land,the infrastructure will cease to run and thereby sustain our existence. Therecognition that our infrastructure facilities and natural systems are inter-dependent, and that long-term viability of the systems is necessary in orderto support social and economic stability, changes the way we define theword landscape.
Infrastructure is more than a utility. It is a foundation for our sense ofbeing and place and carries within its veins the lifeblood of many differentcommunities—the neighborhoods and habitats for human, plant, and animalpopulations. Ultimately, there is no economy without a living nature.Without it, infrastructure ceases to function, the marketplace withers anddies, and individuals lose the common ground of community.
Where do we go from here?
Whenever possible we should choose multi-functional systems over single-use systems, favoring projects that function ecologically and use naturalsystems as extensions and components of an infrastructure. For one thing,they are more economical in the long term. Multi-functional systems tendto require the acquisition of land, but those additional property costs canbe off-set in the long-term municipal maintenance costs of concrete andsteel systems. Moreover, lands bordering a green system command higherproperty values. We should encourage the development of this kind of infra-structure that serves economic growth at the lowest long-term municipalcost.
We should favor projects that enrich and connect existing communities ofplants and animals. Highway and pipeline corridors move people and oil,but they can also provide pathways for plants and animals on their cyclicalmigrations. Biologists believe that these pathways will become increasinglyimportant as the climate band shifts, driving the movement of many speciesnorthward. Corridors connecting species-rich patches may become vitalto preserving our existing bio-diversity. We should, therefore, promote pro-jects that improve the “living” viability of the natural systems, projects thatuse native plant materials and provide protection against the invasion offoreign plant materials that undermine local plant and animal habitats.Native vegetation planted along the East Coast interstate system, forexample, could have stalled the spread of the destructive kudzu vine thathas used the highway corridor as an expansion route on its devastatingnorthbound rampage to engulf and damage power lines and bridges,thereby increasing local maintenance costs.
We should develop infrastructure projects that protect and replenishnatural systems. Water quality is rapidly becoming the number oneenvironmental issue for both the public and private sector. Just howmuch environmental health and economic recovery are connected is perhapsbest illustrated by the struggling economies of Eastern Europe. A 1992
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Environmental Science and Technology article estimated that 70 percentof Czechoslovakia’s waters are heavily polluted; 30 percent cannot evensupport fish. Much of the country’s water is unusable for industrial con-sumption, not to mention damaging to plants and animals.
Just as people cannot survive drinking water contaminated with mercuryand other persistent contaminants, industry cannot thrive without largerquantities of clean water. Incentives should be given to infrastructure pro-jects that clean their wastes as much as possible on site and recharge localwater resources. Excellent models found abroad, and to a limited degreein the United States, make effective use of the natural systems that usehyper-accumulator plants to clean polluted water and soils.
We must use every means to encourage infrastructure projects thataggressively recycle products and reclaim places. Newark, New JerseyMayor Sharpe James instituted an aggressive recycling program that bothcleans up the city and unites citizens in a common civic mission. Plasticsare collected and recycled into new public benches for neighborhood parksand streets. The public works department in Phoenix shreds thousands ofdiscarded tires, recycling them into a new road-surface material to replaceasphalt. This recycled material has the added advantage of increasingtraction and reducing solar heat gain on road surfaces.
As we recycle our waste into new products, we should also reclaim theused sections of urban areas and the riches of their natural systems buriedlong ago by early metropolitan expansion. In Minnesota, the Romose-Washington Metro Watershed District is working with the MinnesotaDepartment of Natural Resources, the City of St. Paul, the University ofMinnesota’s College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, andresidents of the Phalen neighborhood to revitalize this older, inner cityneighborhood on the outskirts of downtown St. Paul. The strategy was:
1 To create a neighborhood commercial transit center and park to serve asa new focal point for this mid-density ethnic community.
2 To remove a deteriorating, crime-ridden 1960s shopping center andreclaim the pre-development wetland beneath the site.
3 To daylight piped and buried portions of Phalen Creek that run throughthe community and rebuild this ecological waterway system.
Not only would the waterway provide recreational green space within thePhalen community, it would also enhance habitats for herons and waterfowlthat use the area as a flyway. At the same time, this low-cost ecologicalwater-management and treatment system would filter and clean waterupstream, improving the quality of the water that ultimately flows into theMississippi River.
In our haste to built metropolitan landscapes, we have buried manystreams, wetlands, woodlands, and other natural systems. The Phalen neigh-
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borhood project demonstrates that just as we recycle our aluminum cans,we can also reclaim from underneath the architectural solid waste of pastdevelopment. Furthermore, we can reclaim the natural systems that willhelp us manage our waste while rejuvenating local economies, the socialfabric, and the beauty of our neighborhoods.
We believe that the role of infrastructure in President Clinton’s new com-pact is to create the systemic framework for each community’s mission: tonurture economic productivity, cultural expression, and social equity whilepreserving and replenishing natural resources. Infrastructures can becomethe vessel to carry forward the dreams of a new compact into physicalreality, supporting a diversity of animals and beings across large, complexmetropolitan regions. The collective wealth of our community’s infra-structure binds us together and provides a public landscape within whichwe, as individuals, find our identity and common ground between eachother and supportive natural processes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Appleyard, Donald, Kevin Lynch, and John Myer. The View From the Road.Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1964.
Braunfels, Wolfgang. Urban Design in Western Europe: Regime and Architecture,
900–1900. Trans. K.J. Northcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.City of Phoenix, Department of Public Works. 27th Avenue Solid Waste Management
Facility, 1991.Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York:
W.W. Norton & Co., 1991.Forman, Richard T. and Michael Godron. Landscape Ecology. New York: John
Wiley and Sons, 1986.Illich, Ivan. H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness. New York: Heyday Books, 1985.Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. “The Word Itself.” In Discovering the Vernacular Land-
scape. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.—— . “The Public Landscape.” In Landscapes, Ervin Zube (ed.). Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1970.—— . The Necessity for Ruins. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.Kastner, Jeffery. “The Duck Weed Factor—Devil’s Lake, N.D.” ARTnews 90:2
(February, 1991).Le Corbusier. The Radiant City. New York: Orion Press, 1963.Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams. New York: Chares Scribner’s Sons, 1986.Morrish, William. “The Urban Spring: Formalizing the Water System of Los Ange-
les.” In Modulus 17, David Gobel and Mary Mead (eds.). Charlottesville: Uni-versity of Virginia Architectural Review, 1984.
Morrish, William and Catherine Brown. “Western Civic Art: Works in Progress.”Places 5:4 (1988): 64–77.
Morton, H.V. The Fountains of Rome. New York: MacMillan Publishing Co.,1966.
National Council on Public Works Improvement. Fragile Foundations: A Report on
America’s Public Works, February, 1988.
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Reich, Robert B. The Work of Nations. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.Smale, John. Infrastructure Commission Report. City of Cincinnati: Department of
Public Works, 1987.Spirn, Ann Whiston. The Granite Garden. New York: Basic Books, 1984.Stodola, Betsy (ed.). Public Art Works: The Arizona Model. City of Phoenix: Phoenix
Arts Commission, 1993.West, Cornell. “Learning to Talk Race.” The New York Times Magazine (2 August
1992): 24–26.Woodhull, Joel. “How Alternate Forms of Development Can Reduce
Traffic Congestion.” In Sustainable Cities: Concepts and Strategies for Eco-City
Development, Bob Walter (ed.). Los Angeles: Eco-Home Media, 1990.
This article was originally planned for Productive Park, a publication producedby the Architectural League. Portions have been published in “Beautiful Infra-structure,” On the Ground, winter/spring 1995, and in Patrick Condon, ed.,Sustainable Urban Landscapes: The Surrey Design Charrette (Vancouver, 1996).
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WHATEVER HAPPENED TO MODERNITY?NEW URBANISMDANIEL SOLOMON (2007)
This essay is a stew that began to cook some time ago with a beautifulexhibition of women’s fashion at New York’s Metropolitan Museumentitled Chanel, curated, designed and sponsored by the current director ofthe House of Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld. This exhibition dealt powerfully withthe question of modernity and the relationship of modernism to a longcultural legacy that predated it.
It brought into focus for me the most perplexing questions about themovement called New Urbanism that I have been part of, about the stunningsuccesses New Urbanism has had, and about its equally stunning failures.The set of ideas and practices that carry the banner of New Urbanism havea history much longer than the name. Similar ideas about the relationshipof urban land to hinterland, of the city to its transportation infrastructure,the city to its own history and the role of public space in the culture of thecity came together long ago. In their earlier incarnations they were resistedand ultimately crushed by the collision of the same rigid orthodoxies—modernist and revivalist—that marginalize New Urbanism today and makeit in the eyes of many the domain of maudlin saps—aesthetic and politicalreactionaries whose ideas about the city are discredited upon arrival becauseof the imagery in which they are clothed.
In the decades since the 1920s, modernity and the isms it has spawnedhave taken many forms. In America, the term modernism in relation toarchitecture and town planning has a more specific and prescribed meaningthan it does in other places and other disciplines. There was somethingradical in the canon of modernism as it was initially applied to Americanarchitecture and town planning that modernist aesthetics in other pursuitsdid not share. The person most clearly identified with this radicalism wasWalter Gropius, as Director of the Weimar Bauhaus and later in his roleas program director of Harvard’s School of Architecture beginning in1937. In the nearly seventy years that modern architecture has been taughtat Harvard, variations on its curriculum became the norm at schools ofarchitecture, and ideas hatched at Harvard became an almost universallyshared and rarely questioned set of received opinions among Americanarchitects. In that seventy years there have been many people of extra-ordinary and diverse abilities who have taught in Harvard’s GraduateSchool of Design, and their individual accomplishments are indisputable.For the purpose of this essay, however, I want to focus not on the many fineachievements of people on the Harvard faculty, but on an influence of theschool that has been pernicious. I want to make the case that the way inwhich modern architecture is introduced at Harvard is one important source
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of the debilitating style wars that now swirl through the world of urbanismcausing debilitating havoc.
Gropius’ idea of education for modern architects represented a kind ofrevolution that shared its most basic idea with Mao Tse Tung’s CulturalRevolution or the revolution of the Taliban. The idea is that young peopleneed to be protected from the corrupting influence of knowledge. Gropiusdid everything he could to insulate young architects from architecturalhistory and from the traditional mimetic and representational skills of theBeaux Arts. Following his lead, American architectural education became awidespread cult of unlearning.
Gropius tossed architectural history as it had traditionally been taughtout of the professional curriculum, but at Harvard modernism needed somenew theoretical grounding. To fill the bill, he launched his colleague, SigfriedGideon, on the writing of two extraordinarily influential books, Space, Timeand Architecture and Mechanization Takes Command. For my generationof architecture students, even 3000 miles from Harvard, Space, Time andArchitecture occupied the position next to our bosoms that Mao’s LittleRed Book did for the Red Guards.
The thesis of Space, Time and Architecture goes something like this: theway people see and perceive things changes with the times. As evidence,Gideon invokes the standard art-historical view of the relationship betweenRenaissance humanism and the discovery of the laws of perspective. Hethen claims a similar relationship among a series of modern phenomenaincluding the theory of relativity, cubism, steel frame construction and highspeed transportation. The term space/time is his shorthand for a modernrevolution in the perception of architecture and cities, equivalent to thediscovery of perspective.
In the sixty-nine years since the Gropius anschluss at Harvard, thingshave become more sophisticated without really changing. Architecturaltheory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design is taught by ProfessorMichael Hayes and his survey course is required for all first year students.The syllabi I have for this course begin with Space, Time and Architecture,even though it is safe to say that most architectural historians now regardit as an ingenious work of propaganda as pseudo-history. Perhaps to insu-late his students from this heretical view, Professor Hayes tells his fledglingshow to read Gideon by providing in the syllabus a handy “Premise forInterpreting Gideon.”
. . . modern architecture plays a significant role in an ongoing cognitiverevolution—that extended process of intellectual transformation wherebya society whose life habits and perceptual apparatuses were formed byother, now anachronistic, modes of production are effectivelyreprogrammed for life in the new industrialized world.
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To paraphrase Professor Hayes’ paraphrase of Gideon in other and simplerwords, he is saying that if people don’t like the mechanization and abstrac-tion of our brand of modern architecture, don’t worry: it’s their fault. Asa modern architect and an initiate into the true workings of historical pro-cess, you have an obligation not to listen to them. The infuriating smugnessof this self-validating Gropius/Gideon pedagogy was bound over time tocreate merciless backlash. This is not smugness just as an unattractivepersonal habit, but smugness as a theory and a world view.
Right after Gideon in the syllabus, now into the second week of graduateschool, comes an introduction to the Frankfurt School for Social Researchwith special emphasis on Theodor Adorno and his Philosophy of ModernMusic, published in its final form in 1949. If Gideon is the foundation for asystem of ideas, Adorno is the keystone.
The thrust of Adorno’s essay is to compare and contrast false modernityand true modernity, represented respectively by the music of Igor Stravinskyand that of Arnold Schoenberg. For Adorno, Stravinsky was the prisoner ofhistorical sentiment, his music filled with primitivism, references to folktunes, marches and classical structure. Schoenberg, on the other hand, wasthe true adventurer in the modern spirit since his twelve tone system is apure abstraction, an invention of the mind incapable of reference to any-thing outside itself. What’s more, Schoenberg’s harsh dissonances are anappropriate art for the harsh, dissonant turmoil of modern life as opposedto Stravinsky’s “neo-classical objectivism,” a construct of what he called“premature harmonies, ignoring the persistence of social contradictions.”May God spare architecture students from suffering anything as indulgentas “premature harmonies.”
Most of the Marxist intellectuals of the Frankfurt School, like Karl Marxhimself, were Jewish. Though they were assimilated and secular, theyretained an element of Judaism in their thinking, and they freely appro-priated the Jewish doctrine of the Messiah, giving it a new name—TheRevolution. Until the revolution came, society would remain in a funda-mental state of disorder. The function of art is to reify or give expression tothis state of disorder and thereby raise social consciousness and hasten therevolution. Therefore all worthy art must have an element of negativism ordissonance about it. Art that does not suffers from “premature harmonies.”Sorry everyone, no joy allowed until after the revolution.
One of the forms of “premature harmony” that Adorno attacked mostviciously was American jazz, which he pronounced “yatz,” and associatedwith the German word “hatz,” a pejorative for the baying of a blood-hound. He wrote the long vituperative essay On Jazz in 1933, never havingheard any jazz in live performance, but continued revising it and making iteven nastier after he came to this country in 1940. In jazz, he saw AmericanNegroes as complicit in their own oppression. He dismissed the great jazzof the 1950s as watered-down Delius and Debussy, but he found one thing
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positive (that is in Marxist terms—negative) in the lead instrument of thebebop of the 1950s—the saxophone. He observed that the saxophone isa metal horn played like a woodwind. It therefore has a kind of sexualambiguity or Zwischengeschlechtlichkeit, and since this androgyny repre-sents a critical challenge to the established sexual order of society, thesaxophone is OK.
Newly minted graduate students in architecture at Harvard are taken intheir second week on this through-the-looking-glass journey into the topsy-turvy world of Marxist aesthetic theory, where positive is negative, negativeis positive and the redeeming quality of a saxophone is its androgyny. Infairness to Professor Hayes, his course goes on to present other contendingpoints of view, and some, like those of Robert Venturi and Colin Rowe,are more congenial to New Urbanism. But these later readings are a bit likecomparative religion as taught at Notre Dame, unlikely to win largenumbers of converts to Islam or Buddhism.
The institution has a point of view and Professor Hayes’ message tofledgling architects at Harvard, and to those unfortunate enough to beelsewhere, is clear: populist hostility to an abstract modernism is philistineignorance to be ignored; references to vernacular building, the imperativesof place or classicism are inadmissible and dissonance not harmony is theorder of the day. By the third week of school, the seeds of hostility to NewUrbanism are well sown at Harvard.
If Michael Hayes’ tune has a familiar ring to it, it is because youcannot listen to a Charlie Rose interview of a star architect without hear-ing echoes of it. These ideas are completely pervasive in architecturalculture whether or not those who believe in them have any idea of theirsource. From the studiously unpretentious language of Frank Gehry to itsopposite in the many big words of Peter Eisenman, what unites the pur-veyors of the blobs to those of the wiggles and the shards is a set of ideasthat comes from Sigfried Gideon and Theodor Adorno out of MichaelHayes.
The Hegelian view of history says that revolutions breed counterrevolu-tions of equal and opposite force. If this is true, it explains why after seventyyears of the Gropius curriculum in schools of architecture, an institution likethe Institute for Classical Architecture should suddenly appear on the sceneand flourish with such remarkable vitality.
There is no question that the I.C.A., many of its members, and thearchitecture department at Notre Dame are doing something important anddesperately needed after the modern academy’s seventy year assault onarchitectural knowledge. Recovery of the knowledge that helped make theworld civil for centuries is unquestionably a good thing. But the I.C.A. istinted in a way—notice I say “tinted,” not “tainted” or “stained”—that setsit apart, I think a long way apart, from a strategy for contemporaryurbanism.
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I.C.A. announces events all the time and the subject matter is usually some-thing about a fabulous collection of Dresden porcelain or a tour of a 200room mansion owned by Doris Duke or someone like her on a thousandacre estate in Santa Barbara or Newport. Last year, I found myself by flukeat the annual Driehaus Awards dinner in Chicago, surrounded by I.C.A.members at the event sponsored by Notre Dame. The room, way up in ahigh-rise, was, thanks to American building technology of the 1920s, thelargest perpendicular Gothic interior I’ve ever seen, next to WestminsterAbbey. It was twice the size of any similar room at Cambridge or Oxford.There was a sprinkling of people I knew from the Congress for the NewUrbanism (C.N.U.) and elsewhere, but mostly it was a big crowd of surpris-ingly young strangers. I later learned that the youngest of the young wereactually Notre Dame’s architecture students attending on assignment. Theyoung women—whatever their talents, accomplishments and politics—wereabsolutely radiant with a fragrant, pre-Raphaelite innocence that I thoughthad been expunged from the world forever by Coco Chanel and her gener-ation twenty years before I was born. Astonishingly for an architecturalgathering, there was not an unstructured black jacket in sight. Except for theconspicuously frumpy presence of the C.N.U. Board, the hundreds of mostlyyoung men seemed to frequent the same excellent tailor as Prince Charles.Where in the world, I wondered, do these people shop?
The highlight of the evening was the awarding of the Driehaus prize tothe English neo-classical architect Quinlan Terry. He accepted the awardand said the following:
We must build in the manner of our forefathers, in brick and limemasonry. If we do so, the natural orders of architecture will re-emerge:the Doric, the Ionic and the Corinthian.
He said this with a straight face to enthusiastic applause while standingon the 12th floor of a high rise surrounded by the architectural treasuresof Chicago Loop from William Lebaron Jenny and Louis Sullivan to FrankGehry’s Pritzker Pavilion across the street, surely one of the great publicspaces in America. That this skillful and intelligent architect, Quinlan Terry,neither saw nor acknowledged any contradiction was clearly a matter ofchoice. It is the same choice to resist assimilation into the larger culturefor the sake of traditional values that the Shakers or the Hasidic Jews ofBrooklyn make. It is a choice that is perfectly OK for an architect, like amusician joining an early music consort, but not for an urbanist. Urbanismis engaged with the history of the city and the gears of history, like a goodbicycle, have many speeds forward, but also like a bicycle, no reverse.
Many people outside of New Urbanism think that we are all just likeQuinlan Terry, trying to ride our bicycle backwards and like him, unwillingto engage with what is around us. What is around us are the forces of
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technological change, of population pressure, of environmental degrad-ation, of global warming, of hegemonic urban sprawl. The Driehaus Awardsdinner was a gathering of a committed sub-culture, which is attractive tosome young people, but I think not very many.
Where do the other young people go, and why?Most of them do not choose to decontextualize their own lives, in fact
they regard being with it and plugged in to the way things are going as a highvirtue. We can thank Rem Koolhaas’ newest book Content for defining thevery look of with it and for contextualizing the work of town planners andarchitects in current events more vividly than any New Urbanist has done.At the same time he portrays the dark side of globalization in a more terrify-ing way than almost anything I have ever seen. The single exception was theextraordinary program on Frontline on the scale of what can only be calledslave labor in China under the ironic name of Communism. Rem under-stands and actually diagrams how China’s sweat shop economy has suckedthe economic life out of Europe and the U.S. and he knows the enormoussocial consequences.
Rem puts his dark insights about the world and his own work right on thecover of the book—Big Brother Skyscraper, Sweat Shop Economy. To mewhat is simply amazing is the gleefulness with which he casts himself in therole of Prince of Darkness, according to his own vision of hell. He recordsfor our amusement some light-hearted banter with Prada fashionistas aboutthe desperate poverty of Lagos, and he sneaks in some Larry Flynt stylephotographs of female genitalia. Naughty, naughty, I guess is the point.
His design for the CCTV Building in Beijing is not only a dazzling symbolof oppression; it is the very instrument of oppression. CCTV’s control ofinformation is vaster and more insidious than its co-conspirator Google,which eradicated the existence of Tank Man from the internet in China.
Imagine a situation in which 97 percent of the residential fabric of NewYork and Chicago including the most vibrant neighborhoods were demol-ished in ten years and the population was forcibly relocated to sterile newsuburbs through a massively corrupt system of expropriation. Imagine thatoccurring with the television, press and an internet police force forbiddingany murmur of protest. Without any exaggeration, that is exactly what ishappening in Shanghai and Beijing today and it is what Rem’s buildingcelebrates.
To achieve the symbolic and terrifying about-to-topple cantilever of theCCTV Building, Koolhaas enlisted ARUP Engineers. In a little essay he calls“Post-Modern Engineering,” he discusses how ARUP used their computa-tional might to analyze the indeterminate redundancies and concentrationsof loads on the exposed truss-work that holds up the monstrous cantileverand to derive the irregular patterns of the trusses. He wonders about whathappened to the scientific rationalism that would have been revolted by theexercise and he asks wistfully, “Why don’t they just say NO?”
CCTV Building, Beijing, China. RemKoolhaas. Rem Koolhaas, Content(Köln: Taschen, 2004).
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The cadences of Winston Churchill during the fearful days of 1940 cometo mind: “a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted,by the likes of perverted science.”
So, from its early days as the cultural arm of Bolshevism, avant-gardism,after almost eighty years wandering in the wilderness, has found steadyemployment as an agent of the dark side of globalization. Do not think for aminute that Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV is an aberrant exception in this regard.
The social housing shown by the Museum of Modern Art in its 2006exhibition entitled On-Site celebrated what curator Terence Rileyconsiders the vitality of new architecture in Spain, including avant-gardisthousing where the Spanish put their Algerians, Turks, Africans and Arabs:dwellings and play space for the next generation of train bombers. Thesocial housing in On-Site is exactly the opposite of what we New Urbanistswere able to accomplish through HUD’s HOPE VI program, where immi-grant populations and our own poor were integrated into classic Americanneighborhoods. HOPE VI is where the aesthetically conservative strain ofNew Urbanism found a high social purpose.
But New Urbanism finds itself in a loony situation. On one hand there isa powerful modernist establishment comprised of the best universities andmuseums throughout the world, the professional architectural pressand most newspaper and magazine critics. For them town building andarchitecture are history-less and a-political subjects. Reference to anythingprior to the modern period is culturally inadmissible and belief in socialpurpose is just not hip. There are of course exceptions to this—Yale as aschool and architects from Lou Kahn to Rafael Moneo—but the exceptionsare just that: exceptions to the juggernaut of modernist right-think. On theother hand, opposing the juggernaut is this now thriving neo-classical
Edificio Mirador, Madrid, Spain,designed by MVRDV with BlancaLleo de Arquitectura. Terence Riley,On-site: New Architecture in Spain(New York: Museum of Modern Art,2006).
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movement that does little to dispel the impression that it is willfullyoblivious to the technical, demographic and political changes that dis-tinguish our time from other times.
We New Urbanists have our own agenda about the city which seemsbarely connected to this cultural debate, but we find ourselves in thecross-fire of an intolerant modernity on one hand and a revival of classicalknowledge that has so far failed to separate itself from a longing for theriding-to-the-hounds society that was eradicated in World War I.
I would like to focus on a pair of my own cultural heroes who seem to meto point the way around the cultural schism that threatens the great causeof urbanism and urban reconstruction.
Let’s consider Coco Chanel. She is most often associated with a quint-essential modernist object—the supremely beautiful, elegant andunchanging sixty-year-old design for the bottle of Chanel #5. At firstglance this design appears to confirm Adorno’s conception of the modern,in its abstraction and rejection of narrative reference. Before Chanel #5,perfumes all had names like Night in China, Harem Musk or Dark Fan-tasy. The Chanel #5 bottle rejects all that in favor of an abstraction, a bitof pseudo-science implying the formulation and testing of Chanel’s 1through 4, which of course never existed, and also love of the beautifulform of the Helvetica #5. But Chanel was not selling perfume bottles: shewas selling perfume. Perfume is all about sexuality, and smell—the mostanimal of the senses—packaged in a bottle. It is the abstraction of thebottle that makes the sensuality of the contents all the more vivid andmeaningful.
The bottle of Chanel #5 is, like her clothing and like her life, a splendidcontradiction and a seamless synthesis of opposites. Chanel was not onlythe most original, gifted and prolific designer of her generation; she was abusiness genius on the scale of an Andrew Carnegie. She started in a found-ling home, absolutely penniless, and she built an industrial empire, all of herown conception, the first and probably history’s most powerful womanC.E.O. But she never concealed or was in the least embarrassed by the fact
New dresses designed by CocoChanel. Harold Koda et al., Chanel.(New York: Museum of Modern Art,2005.)
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that she began her career as a demimondaine whose rich lovers competed forher sexual favors with gobs of money to back her first ventures.
Karl Lagerfeld says splendidly, “Chanel was a mystery and a paradox.Reality is bearable only if it is made up of such things.”
In her cosmos it was inconceivable that femininity and feminism couldbe considered different ideas. She wanted to dress a woman so that shecould enter a room on equal terms with the army general, the bishop and thehead of state, as confident and reassured by her dress as they. Her version offemininity was simultaneously egalitarian and aristocratic, simultaneouslyathletic and erotic.
She dressed a woman to go the opening of the Paris Opera in such a waythat you knew she was capable of climbing a tree. She believed in physicalease as the predicating condition for elegance. She referred to classicalantiquity in clothing made of industrial mass-produced fabrics like jersey,and she absolutely mastered the traditional crafts of the milliner and thetailor. The October 1926 Vogue called her classic “little black dress” the“Chanel Ford, the frock that all the world will wear.”
Chanel’s two main ideas—her conception of women and her idea of therelationship of abstraction to life—are completely congruent with those of afriend and collaborator of hers, the great choreographer George Balanchine.It is not overstating the case to say that Balanchine united a classicaltradition and modernism with more originality, more force and more endur-ing success than any other artist in any discipline. In this regard, hiswork, his contribution and his life story are one and the same. If one tries todraw some lessons from the synthesis he brought about, it is worth know-ing how Balanchine became Balanchine, because his story is as rich withcontradictions as Chanel’s.
His career began at the age of ten when he was accepted into the ImperialBallet School in St. Petersburg, part of the court of Tsar Nicholas II. In theFrenchified court of the Tsars, classical ballet, which evolved from fencingexercises in the court of Louis XIV, was preserved and perfected. Balanchinewas raised at court, often appearing in the fabled Maryinsky Theater withits greatest stars.
After the tumult of World War I and the Revolution, he found himself,age twenty-one, undernourished and unemployed in Paris. Then fatefully,the 20th century’s greatest genius at recognizing genius, Serge Diaghilev,invited him to audition. Diaghilev audaciously made this superbly trainedclassical dancer and the most supremely elegant of all 21-year-olds the BalletMaster of his world famous Ballets Russes. His first assignment was tocollaborate with Igor Stravinsky and Henri Matisse, no less, on a reworkingof the ballet Le Chant de Rossignol. Matisse did the sets, the costumes andthe make-up and arranged red and white chrysanthemums in the hair of theprincipal ballerina, Alicia Markova. Coco Chanel hosted the cast party afterthe opening and Stravinsky played the piano at the party.
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The other Ballets Russes artists that young Balanchine was thrown inwith included Picasso, Prokofiev, Tchelitchew, Jean Cocteau, Kurt Weill,Lotte Lenya—an unbelievable list. He went from the court of the Tsar toDiaghilev’s court of modernism at its absolute pinnacle of excellence.
Michael Hayes begins the education of architects with Adorno’s sourdiatribe against Stravinsky, and it is revealing that Stravinsky found hisnatural collaborator, George Balanchine, in the most sensual of the arts—ballet. Just like the bottle of Chanel #5, the most characteristic and famousof the Stravinsky/Balanchine ballets strip away all narrative reference:no story telling and no sets, costumes that refer only to the dancer’s
bodies. There is nothing on the stage but the life force of the music and thegeometries he makes of the dancers themselves. And Balanchine’s dancerswere better schooled in classical dance, more disciplined than any dancecompany had been before. Balanchine’s grand abstractions demandedmore from the corps de ballet than had ever been asked of it before—moreathleticism, more musicality, more speed. When his vision exceeded whateven his own superbly trained corps could do, he would arrange his soloistsin formation and use them like a chess master attacking with his bishops.Balanchine was a modernist who extended the tradition of classicism heinherited. He was also a modernist who was not a slave to modernity. Hecarried the whole history of ballet in his head and did all kinds of things withit—narrative story ballets, huge spectacle ballets, movies and Broadwaymusical comedy, which he helped revolutionize.
Over their long careers, Stravinsky and Balanchine managed a trick thatarchitects and town planners should be able to do and one that is strictlyforbidden in the dictat of Harvard aesthetic theory. They were able toengage popular culture in its own terms, excel within it, and never com-promise their own standards.
When things got slow in 1941, Balanchine even took a job with RinglingBros. choreographing elephants. He asked Stravinsky to collaborate withhim, and Stravinsky had only one question, “Would the elephants be
Dance choreographed byBalanchine. Costas, Balanchine:Celebrating a Life of Dance.(Windsor, Connecticut: Tide MarkPublications, 2003.)
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young?” Balanchine assured him that they would be young and beautifuland the collaboration proceeded.
Chanel and Balanchine were such complete masters of their disciplinesthat they could draw upon its entire history as situations demanded. Neitherwas ever prevented from doing anything that interested them by an ideologyor an aesthetic canon that made some things off limits. A question to ask is,were there ever people in the world of architecture and urbanism who wereas cosmopolitan, as eclectic, as simultaneously modern and as embracing ofhistory as Chanel and Balanchine?
The fact is that modernity as a driving force in architecture and townplanning predates the rigid prescriptions of Harvard modernism by half acentury at least. During that long span of time there were classically trainedarchitects in many places, fascinated by implications of new technologiesand the problems and possibilities of the new industrial city. Cities andcity dwellers suffered in many ways from the 1850s through the 1920s, butone thing they did not suffer from during those years was the systematicunlearning of their historic craft by architects and builders. That camelater.
There is a list of architects during this proto-modern period who werecosmopolitan eclectics in a way that seems appropriate as role models forcontemporary urbanists. Of this list, the one who for me stands out as themost gifted and the most interesting is Otto Wagner, architect to FranzJoseph, the last Hapsburg emperor. He perhaps more than any other repre-sented the contribution that architecture should make to urbanism and asteacher what architectural training should consist of, so that generations ofarchitects can contribute to urbanism as the conditions of the city change.
Wagner was a schooled classicist who consciously placed himself in
Development of the Quays of theDanube Canal, New Aspern Bridge,Regulation of the Stubenviertel.Otto Wagner, Sketches, Projectsand Executed Buildings (London:Architectural Press, 1987).
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO MODERNITY?
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competition with Michelangelo, Palladio and Bernini, without copyingthem directly. But he considered it his mission as an architect and as ateacher to move from classicism to a modern Nutzstil, a classically basednegation of revivalism that was directed at appropriate expression of theprograms and building methods of the times. He was fascinated both bythe spatial order of the traditional city and the new infrastructure of theindustrial city.
Otto Wagner, architect to the emperor, died of starvation and influenzain 1918, seven weeks before the armistice. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire brought about a completely new political and economicsituation in Vienna, and it was Wagner’s pupils, the Wagnerschuler, whohad exactly the right skills to adapt and to build magnificently in the newMarxist/Leninist Viennese Social Democracy that emerged in the ruins. EvaBlau’s splendid book The Architecture of Red Vienna tells this amazingstory.
After the war, the new socialist government, controlling only the historiccity center and not its surrounding countryside, had an urgent need to housea dispossessed urban proletariat. And they had to be housed quickly andeconomically in the midst of the remaining glories of the baroque imperialcity—but in a way that celebrated their status as the backbone of the neweconomy and the new political regime.
Who better than the Wagnerschuler to bring about this synthesis of newcircumstance and the historic city? To this day, the social housing of RedVienna is one of the glories of the world and it represents a synthesis, neverequaled, of classical architectural principles, urbanism and the modernspirit.
The architecture of Red Vienna put in a brief appearance in the UnitedStates. The 1920s garden apartment movement in New York reached itsapogee in a series of social housing projects in the Bronx, sponsored bygarment workers’ unions for their members. The planning, programmingand decorative language of these enduringly beautiful buildings are straightout of Red Vienna and even today, they are some of the most livable dwell-ings in the city. Abruptly, however, the garden apartment movementcame to an end as the high modernist form of Euro-modernism seized theAmerican stage in the early 1930s, and we all know the rest of that story.
Simultaneously the architecture of Red Vienna itself came to an evenmore abrupt and symbolic end in 1934 with the routing of the socialistadministration and the shelling of the most famous icon of Red Vienna, KarlMarx Hof, by right-wing militias called the Heimwehr.
It is significant that that the Wagnerschuler ethos was eradicated bythe same cultural forces that New Urbanism is battling today. In Europe itwas wiped out by neo-classicism from the left in Russia, from the right inGermany and Austria, and by the adoption of conservative vernacular in theform of Heimatstil by the political right. In America the cultural wipe-out
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was at the hands of hegemonic modernism, emanating first from the newMuseum of Modern Art and slightly later from Harvard.
At the same time this cultural wipe-out was occurring with respectto architecture and the city, the very same attitude that the Wagnerschulerembodied was flourishing in other art forms and is still flourishing to thisday in some of them. That attitude consists of a fascination with what is newand promising in the moment that one is living through and simultaneousreverence for the historical past of one’s discipline—simultaneous fidelity tothe highest standards of excellence and an absence of dogma—a playful,creative eclecticism that allows one to do many things and perform in manysituations. Chanel lives; Balanchine lives; cities will be better if we can live aswell.
Karl Marx Hof, Vienna, Austria,designed by Karl Ehn. (Photos byDaniel Solomon.)
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THE TOWN OF SEASIDENEW URBANISM Designed in 1978–1983
by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co.ANDRÉS DUANY AND ELIZABETH PLATER-ZYBERK(1986)
This essay comprises an excerpt from the presentation of the new town ofSeaside at the 74th Annual A.C.S.A. Meeting in 1986, followed by anappraisal by Andrés Duany twenty-five years after its design.
DESIGN
The site and the program were perceived to approximate the size andcomponents of a small town, permitting the turning away from themethods of contemporary real estate development toward those oftraditional American urbanism. To this end, the retail center is conceivedas a downtown commercial district, the conference facility doublesas town hall and a portion of the recreation budget is dispersed to createsmall civic amenities throughout the town. Civic character is furtherreinforced by reserving sites for public buildings such as a chapel, a primaryschoolhouse, a fire station and a post office, to be shared by adjacentcommunities. The program is expanded to include a service station and aworkshop district.
A study of towns throughout the American South indicated that a com-munity of genuine variety and authentic character could not be generatedby a single architect. Building is, therefore, given over to a multitude ofdesigners. The public buildings are to be freely designed by architectsselected for their known sympathy with the regional vernacular. The privatebuildings will be commissioned by the individual citizen/buyers subjectto the provisions of a Master Plan and Zoning Code. These documents areintended to generate an urban environment similar to that of a smallsouthern town of the period prior to 1940.
The Code has been tested several times in university design studios andhas proven workable. It is envisioned that the town of Seaside will besubstantially built out in ten to fifteen years, depending on economicconditions.
In designing and administering the plan and Code, D.P.Z. abdicatesdirect responsibility for the design of individual buildings and acts as themunicipal authority.
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SITE
The site is 80 acres located in Walton County in Northwestern Florida,adjacent to the settlement of Seagrove Beach. It straddles County Road 30-Aand fronts 2300 feet of beach to the south.
PROGRAM
The given program calls for a new vacation resort of some 300 dwellingsof different types, 100–200 units of lodging, retail and offices, a commercialcenter, a civic/conference facility and a recreational building.
EXISTING CONDITIONS
The layout of Seaside responds to pre-existing natural and manmadeconditions as follows:
• Two large gorges providing access to the beach determine the location ofthe central square and the easternmost street.
• The most wooded areas are preserved along the diagonal avenue and inopen areas around the tennis club and city hall.
• High ground determines the location of the clubhouses and the smallsquares.
• A central square opens to the south, increasing the building frontage onthe ocean.
• The existing grid of Seagrove to the east is received and extended toprovide multiple access points and social continuity.
• The new street grid is left open to the north allowing access to the inlandlake at some future time.
STREETS
The vehicular network structures the master plan. In addition to providingaccess to all parts of the town, it has the following characteristics:
• Geometric perfection at the center which disintegrates toward the edgesas a result of circumstance, a formal organization common to most of thetowns studied.
• A concentric layout which increases the number of buildings with anocean view and allows a majority of the streets to terminate at the shore.
• The provision of on-street parking throughout, minimizing the need forparking lots and reducing vehicular speed.
WALKWAYS
The public pedestrian areas consist of walks at both sides of every street,squares at important street intersections and larger squares related to publicbuildings. In addition, an extensive system of footpaths through the blocks
The public pedestrian areas consist ofwalks at both sides of every street,squares at important streetintersections and larger squaresrelated to public buildings. Inaddition, an extensive system offootpaths through the blocks makeswalking more convenient thandriving.
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makes walking more convenient than driving. These paths provide a second-ary level of urbanism related to outbuildings at the rear of residential lots.A boardwalk along the length of the beach secures the public nature of theshoreline.
PRIVATE LAND
The proportion and dimension of lots are specifically related to theirintended building type. In order to provide a relatively neutral urban fabricand to facilitate marketing, many lots are standardized, but others do notavoid the idiosyncratic characteristics which generate unusual buildings thatserve as landmarks. There is a gradual downsizing of residential lots towardthe center of town in order to increase density.
PUBLIC BUILDINGS
The major public buildings (town hall, tennis club, school and chapel) arelocated inland to activate those areas farthest from the shore. These build-ings are bound to the central square by corresponding public spaces: thetown hall is connected by a secondary square, the tennis club by a majoravenue and the chapel by a market square. Pavilions at the beach termini ofeach north–south street belong to the residents of these streets. The southernportion of the central square will contain small public outbuildings respond-ing in an ad hoc manner to changing needs in the early years of the town.
The plans of the public buildings as shown in the drawing are hypo-thetical, since most have not yet been designed. Public buildings are notsubject to the Code except for the provision that they be painted white,to insure public identity despite a size which is often less than that of privatebuildings.
PRIVATE BUILDINGS
The private buildings may be houses, apartments, shops, offices, lodging orworkshops. Building forms will be generated by the provisions of the Codeas interpreted by many designers. Building uses are not strictly controlled asin conventional codes, but loosely determined by a conjunction of specifiedbuilding form and urban location.
PUBLIC SPACES
The proportions of the squares, avenues, streets and alleys at Seasideare derived from exemplary types found in the town studies. There islittle possibility of unsatisfactory spatial results because nothing isinvented. The variety of types is controlled by a combination of right-of-waywidths of the plan and the height assignments of the Code. The varietyis intended to be sufficient for residents to be oriented without resource tostreet signs.
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ZONING CODE
The Seaside Code applies to all privately owned lots. It is a highly distilleddocument controlling only those aspects of building form which directlyaffect the public realm. The Code is graphic rather than written, so thatthe owner/designer may understand its provisions without professionalassistance and not perceive it as a tiresome obstacle to building.
There are eight building types. Three are for mixed use, three areprincipally residential and one is for workshops. The Code employs theconventional tools of zoning but with substantial variation. Principal amongthese are the following:
• Variances are granted on the basis of architectural merit.• A specified minimum percentage of the lot frontage must be built out in
order to maintain the spatial definition of the street.• Picket fences are mandated for some lots with deep front yards for the
same reason.• Porches in residential districts and arcades in commercial districts must
be built to a specified percentage of the frontage.
This is essential to the southern town as a type, and a positive influence onthe social utilization of the street.
• Outbuildings at the rear of lots are encouraged. These create a secondarylevel of urbanism tied to the footpaths and tend to generate rentalapartments dispersed within single family areas. This is intended toprevent homogeneity of age and income common to moderndevelopments.
• The location of parking within the lots is specified with precision toprevent parking lots from causing discontinuities in the street frontage.
This drawing approximates howSeaside would be completed if thebuilding envelopes were all filled tothe maximum.
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• Minimum and maximum heights of roofs and porches are specified tocontrol the spatial proportion of the public spaces and to determine thedegree of formal variation in streets.
• Towers of small footprint (200 sq. ft.) are encouraged everywhere so thateven the most landlocked house may reach for a view of the sea.
• Boundaries between zoning types occur at mid-block rather thanmore conventionally along streets. This allows streets and squares tobe perceived as coherent spatial entities with similar building types on allsides.
The above is excerpted from the original published in the Proceedings of the 74thAnnual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1986.
SEASIDE AT TWENTY-FIVE (2007)
Seaside is very similar to and also very different from what we thought itwould be.
Seaside as built is very similar physically to the plan of twenty-five yearsago—perhaps more than any of our plans since. The deviations that didoccur, such as the drastic proliferation of the “temporary retail” shacks onthe gulf front, are not at all bad. Indeed, they are possibly better than the
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open square that we originally proposed. Also different is the Athenaeum,which was coded to be similar to Jackson Square in New Orleans, but whichhas emerged as a layout more akin to the lawn at the University of Vir-ginia—it is neither better nor worse, just different. Generally, over time, asthe house lots became more expensive, the building envelopes envisioned bythe Code became more filled out. The early houses were smaller and articu-lated into pavilions; the later ones are boxier and in my opinion, conduciveto better urbanism.
Even the hard-to-implement parts of the plan: the live-work units, thepublic school, the chapel, have been achieved. Perhaps the most difficult ofall, the Krier Tower, is today closer to reality than ever.
Much of the outcome of today’s Seaside is due to the personality of thefounders as surely as to any of the technical aspects of the plan and Code.Robert and Daryl Dans were true architectural connoisseurs and Seasidenow has a series of brilliant architectural pieces that exceed the Code stand-ards. The Rossi, Stern, Chatham, Gorlin, Mockbee, Machado-Silvetti, Hall,Berke, Massengale, Solomon and Merrill buildings (I am listing only thebetter known names—not just the better buildings) caused Seaside tobecome a kind of architectural Mecca, quite independent of the urbanism.This was not expected and it is not necessarily for the better. These may bethe best buildings, but they have not necessarily led to the best urbanism.Despite the constraints of the Code, these buildings are almost always tooidiosyncratic to be the background buildings that the town thrives on. Bethat as it may, through their publication, they did make Seaside more visible,which raised the sales prices, which in turn permitted the better workman-ship. Too bad for affordability, though. Way gone are the days of the housethat I sold for less than fifty thousand dollars!
Another unexpected improvement to the plan: Robert, and particularlyDaryl, became great incubators of local commercial talent. Seaside hasspawned scores of private businesses, some starting as humbly as a barbecueor a flea market table, now the backbone of the town center. It is a credit tothe Seaside plan that it had the capacity to absorb them. Regarding capacityto grow which is essential to urbanism: we did envision that Seaside wouldexpand to the north, and when the much bigger Watercolor came along, soinfluenced by Seaside that it is completely compatible, it was able to attach.So today, this little patch of provincial Florida has more first-rate archi-tecture than anywhere else in Florida—not excluding older and larger cities.
This, however, has not been Seaside’s only influence. Seaside’s inceptionintercepted the then-emerging development pattern of high rise coastalcondominiums and row houses with the inland areas abandoned to under-valued second-rate uses and parking lots. The scars of that early disease arestill visible nearby. What the Seaside model achieved is to extend the valuepreviously confined to the waterfront in depth. This resulted in a morehuman and ecological pattern, and also great wealth: a wealth that has been
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distributed not just among Robert and his siblings but broadly among real-tors, restaurateurs and most hearteningly, the contractors and theircraftsmen.
Robert and Daryl Davis’s fanaticism gradually raised the standard ofcraftsmanship, proving bit by bit, over the years, that people will pay forquality design and construction. The crews with which Seaside first startedits buildings could hardly hammer a nail or hang sheet-rock straight—theusual. Twenty years later the construction crews, not only at Seaside butthroughout the Panhandle, have become masters unsurpassed anywherein the U.S. This excellence has created wealth for the working people, asthey charge well for it. The very latest houses at Seaside are built like shipsor cabinets. This workmanship has decanted to the subsequent towns ofRosemary Beach and Alys Beach—where design and craft are, if possible,even better.
That Seaside’s influence became widespread was certainly not expected.I remember hearing Leon Krier early on saying that it would be a veryimportant project. And important it became if influence is the measure. Theinfluence has been helped along by a much-criticized part of Seaside: that itis “not a real town”—that it is a resort and that the houses are available forrental. Yet it is precisely as a result of the rental program that hundreds ofthousands of people have been able to experience what it means to live in acompact, diverse and walkable community. Living in a place is crucial tounderstanding urbanism; because unlike architecture, urbanism cannot beproperly assessed from photographs, not even from a short visit. It requiresgetting up in the morning and walking out to find the coffee and bread andpaper and then having the independence all day long of family memberswith plenty to do, then shopping for dinner and staying up, in some casesvery late, at the square.
The Type III buildings (live–worktownhouses) in the center of Seaside.Photo courtesy of DPZ.
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Many suburban people (developers included) have taken the experienceback home and implemented what they lived and learned. This wasmade easier because as a resort, Seaside attempts an ideal. After all, no onedisplaces themselves for vacation to live as one does daily.
Resorts are compelled to be better, utopian even. We continue to designthem because they are the closest that we urbanists have to experimentalsites. The idealism of a resort can give clarity to a concept. Seaside withsequential residents has become a propaganda machine. A full-timecommunity of everyday living cannot be quite as effective. The criticism thatSeaside is a resort we understand, but on balance I approve of its destiny as ademonstration project.
Least expected was the way that Seaside took over our lives. Robert andDaryl have lived in Seaside for two decades and defined the modern roleof town founders, inducing the software of society and culture as well as thehardware of buildings and infrastructure that mere developers supply.They also proved that it is better business to do one such project for thirtyyears than three conventional ones for ten each. This has influenced thedevelopment industry to no end.
As for the planners, the whirlwind of New Urbanism has taken over ourlives as well. Without Seaside we may have become architects of a differentsort. We like to remember the many designers that Seaside has touched. Theprocess of sequential building design enabled by the Code has involvedscores of young architects whose careers are better for it. For us as teachersthis has been particularly satisfying.
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THE IMPACT OF IDEOLOGY ONNEW URBANISM AMERICAN TOWN PLANNING
TONY SCHUMAN AND ELLIOTT SCLAR (1992)
DEMOCRACY’S CHALLENGE
CITY AND REGION IN DISEQUILIBRIUM
We may have reached the limits of development guided by market responsesto the ideals of a privatized society. Accumulating evidence suggests thatthe ownership of a single-family detached dwelling accessed by privateautomobiles and situated in self-governing communities located at a safedistance from the economic and social woes of the center city is no longereconomically viable for increasing numbers of people. Recently, the CityManager of Hartford, Connecticut, proposed the dispersal of inner citypublic housing residents to surrounding suburban communities.1 The NewJersey Supreme Court ordered municipalities to provide a “fair share” ofaffordable housing in their region (the Mount Laurel decisions). The formerMayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in filing for municipal bankruptcyprotection, declared, “The system isn’t working.”2
The disequilibrium between central cities and their surrounding regions isreaching crisis proportions. It may be seen as the spatial dimension of aneconomic reorganization to a service economy accompanied by a decade ofconservative administrations whose fiscal policies have widened the gapbetween rich and poor.3 While the wealthy have been able to insulate them-selves from the distressed and tense urban centers—“the secession of thesuccessful”4—the suburbs are not immune from the consequences ofunplanned development. The impact of environmental destruction, pollu-tion, congestion, and chaotically dispersed land use has raised the cost ofdoing business and diminished the quality of daily life.
Renewed interest in more tightly planned communities from developers,design professionals, and the public at large attests to a widespread dis-satisfaction with suburban sprawl.5 The Traditional NeighborhoodDevelopment advocated by architects Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and AndrésDuany and the Pedestrian Pocket concept developed by Peter Calthorpehave received careful attention from both popular and professionaljournals.6
While the present regional discontent may provide a window ofopportunity for comprehensive planning efforts, any optimism must beguarded. The historical record suggests that only a commonly perceivednational emergency can induce Americans to challenge their deep-rootedideological antipathy to government intervention in urban and regionaldevelopment.
1 Johnson, K. “Take our Poor:Angry Hartford Tells Suburbs.” TheNew York Times, 1, 85. February 12,1991.
2 Moran, M. Interview on NationalPublic Radio, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.Station. August 23, 1991.
3 Phillips, K. The Politics of Richand Poor: Wealth and the AmericanElectorate in the Reagan Aftermath.New York: Random House. 1990.
4 Reich, R. “Secession of theSuccessful.” New York TimesMagazine. January 20, 1991.
5 Peterson, I. “PlannedCommunities are Multiplying.” TheNew York Times, Section 10: 1,11. April 21, 1991.
6 Boles, D. “Reordering theSuburbs,” in ProgressiveArchitecture, May 1989. 78–91.Kelbaugh, D. Editor. The PedestrianPocket Book. New York: PrincetonArchitectural Press. 1989.Langdon, P. “A Good Place to Live,”in The Atlantic Monthly. March,1988. 38–60.
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This paper traces the evolution of the contradictory pulls of ideologyand circumstance on American town planning from the 1909 National Con-ference on City Planning, where the terms of debate were first framed, totwo current developments in New York City—Roosevelt Island and BatteryPark City. These two projects offer competing paradigms for future urbandevelopment and exemplify a century-long ideological struggle over the roleof government in guiding metropolitan development.
FRAMING THE DEBATE
By the time the first National Conference on City Planning was held inWashington, D.C. in 1909, the paradigmatic debates that would charac-terize the profession to the present day were already well formed. While the43 Conference participants were united in their enthusiasm for the develop-ing “science” of city planning, their views as to the goals and mechanismsfor this new field were extremely diverse. Despite general agreement thatthe planning function ought to shift from private civic and commercialorganizations to public commissions, there was considerable disagreementabout what this public role ought to be.
At issue were two sets of questions. The first asked whether the disciplineof planning should focus on improving the physical appearance of cities oron improving the conditions of daily life for their inhabitants. Was the goalof planning a more beautiful city or, in the words of English planner T.C.Horsfall, “a more beautiful life?”7
The second set of questions asked whether the problems of urban lifewere due primarily to the systemic failings of a political economy based onprivate investment or to the individual moral failings of the population.Those who subscribed to the latter view sought relief through building codesand zoning regulations to control the physical fabric of the city, and muni-cipal reform to curb the political power of clubhouse machines.8 Thoseconcerned with identifying and dealing with the under-lying systemic causesof congestion sought more drastic measures. Benjamin C. Marsh, ExecutiveSecretary of the Committee on Congestion of Population, blamed con-gestion on land speculation and exploitation and insisted that these evils“must be checked by the only competent power—the government.”9
For him, planning was nothing less than “democracy’s challenge to theAmerican city.”
PLANNING IN TIME OF CRISIS
INDUSTRIAL HOUSING FOR WAR WORKERS
Although even conservative housing reformers were convinced that somedegree of government intervention in urban development was necessary,they believed this should go no further than modest regulation of marketactivity. Only a national emergency—the impact of inadequate housing
7 N.C.C.P. (National Conference onCity Planning]. Proceedings of theFirst National Conference on CityPlanning. Facsimile edition. Chicago,IL: American Society of PlanningOfficials. p. 77. 1909.
8 The profession of social work,which developed in parallel andoverlapping step with the planningprofession, had a similar split. Thosewho viewed the problems of the pooras moral failings advocated upliftand education. Those who viewedthe problem as systemic advocatedcommunity organizing.
9 N.C.C.P. (National Conference onCity Planning]. Proceedings of theFirst National Conference on CityPlanning. Facsimile edition. Chicago,IL: American Society of PlanningOfficials. p. 105. 1909.
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conditions on industrial production during World War I—allowed theprogressives a brief opportunity to expand the acceptable boundaries ofgovernment control of development.
Even under this duress it took a series of dramatic appeals by representa-tives of private industry—shipbuilders and munitions manufacturers—toimpel the government into direct provision of housing.10 On June 13, 1918,the Secretary of Labor announced the war-time production measure, statingthat “The Government will build, own, control and rent the houses untilafter the war” (emphasis added).11 Reflecting the prevailing sentimentagainst permanent government involvement, the enabling legislation gaveexplicit instructions that “such property shall be sold as soon after the con-clusion of the war as it can be advantageously done.”12 With this mandate,the U.S. Housing Corporation was created in July 1918 to implement theconstruction program.
The magnitude of the task was impressive: housing was needed for292,649 workers in 71 different cities or districts.13 In assuming responsi-bility for this undertaking, the government had no long term vision forthe future of these communities beyond recouping as much of its invest-ment as possible after the war. The planners, on the other hand, underthe leadership of Town Planning Division director F.L. Olmsted, Jr., saw theprogram not only as an emergency measure, but as a demonstration ofthe potential of comprehensive town planning. They envisioned thedevelopments as “model communities in the sense that they are beingstudied and will inevitably be copied by the architects and builders of thefuture.”14 In the planning stages this discrepancy between the planners’expansive goals and the government’s more restricted ones posed noproblem. On the contrary, the government’s overriding concern withrecouping their investment and salvaging materials after the armistice ledto the decision to build permanent housing of good quality rather thanquick temporary shelters.
Since the appropriations did not come through until August 1918, only asmall part of the construction program was implemented. After the armisticeon November 11, 1918, only 22 of the initially projected 83 projects werecarried through to completion, with 15 more built on a curtailed basis. Thequality of these projects, however, did not escape notice. A contemporaryreview in Architectural Forum grasped the significance of this commitmentof government funds to community development: “The opportunity for theindividual to live in surroundings of decency and amenity, so often deniedto the man without financial backing, becomes now a matter of nationalpolicy.”15 Communities such as Fairview (in Camden, New Jersey) andHilton (in Newport News, Virginia) along with residential districts suchas those in Bridgeport CT and New Brunswick NJ remain socially andeconomically viable neighborhoods, often in the face of grave deteriorationin surrounding areas.
10 Testimony by leaders such asHomer L. Ferguson, president of theNewport News Shipbuilding andDrydock Company, turned the tide.The Newport News Daily Press ofMarch 9, 1918 carried this accountof his testimony before the Senatecommittee investigating shipyardconditions:
In his stirring appearance before thecommittee, Mr. Ferguson describedhousing conditions in NewportNews as insufferable and he calledfor immediate action by theGovernment . . . [He] testified to thealarming conditions at the shipyardwhere, because of inadequatehousing, they were unable to employenough men for a single shift, eventhough the yard could and should beoperating day and night to turn outthe ships so urgently needed. Finally,he warned that such conditionsprevailed at all the shipbuildingcenters of the nation—and for thesame reason.
11 United States HousingCorporation. Report of the UnitedStates Housing Corporation. Vol. Iedited by James Ford. p.22. 1920.
12 Ibid., p.1.
13 Ibid., p.7.
14 Ibid., p.44.
15 May, C. “Yorkship Village: ADevelopment for the New YorkShipbuilding Corporation, Camden,N.J.” Architectural Forum, June.1918.
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THE DEPRESSION ERA GREENBELT TOWNS
Despite continuing opposition to government intervention in the housingmarket, the Depression afforded progressive town planners a secondopportunity to implement their broader vision of balanced regional growth.This time the economic crisis was so severe—a fourth of the work force wasunemployed in 1932—that they were able to go far beyond the scope of theWorld War I housing projects. Funded under the Emergency ReliefAppropriation Act, the program was intended first and foremost to provideconstruction jobs for relief workers. Between 20,000 and 30,000 workersparticipated in the construction of the three new towns built under theprogram. Greenbelt, Maryland, alone employed over 13,000.16
As in the war worker housing effort, the planners involved in the green-belt program were interested in pursuing a broad agenda. Guiding the oper-ation was Resettlement Administration chief Rexford Guy Tugwell, whoseintellectual affinity with the Garden City ideals of Ebenezer Howardincluded a belief in planning as a device to implement broader social andeconomic restructuring of society. Tugwell’s version of the Garden City didnot propose fully independent cities but rather a network of suburbs locatednear major cities on which they depended for employment. Other features ofHoward’s “social invention” survived intact: single ownership of land, con-trolled land values through government ownership and leasing, the estab-lishment of the city as an independent legal and political entity, and thegreenbelt itself. In the greenbelt towns, housing was seen as only one aspectof a broader problem. By building independent self-governing cities for thepoor, the R.A. confronted the more basic problem of disenfranchisement.The original greenbelt program called for construction of 19 satellite townsclose to major cities. As in the earlier case of industrial housing, conservativepressure imposed limits on the scope of development. Just three of thetowns were actually built—Greenbelt, Maryland, Green Hills, Ohio (out-side Cincinnati), and Greendale, Wisconsin (outside Milwaukee). The R.A.retained ownership until Congress ordered divestiture following World WarII, with sale preference given to snug residents and veterans groups.
The greenbelt towns are frequently cited as the high point of compre-hensive planning in the United States.17 Ironically, although successfulgovernment-led effort failed to launch serious regional planning movementin the United States, the lessons were not lost on the British. The greenbeltprogram provided the blueprint for the English postwar new town effort.18
PLANNED FAILURE: THE FEDERAL NEW TOWNS
The prosperity of the decade following World War II seemed to make theplanning debate a moot issue. For the first time, home ownership appearedwithin reach of every working family. A suburban boom fueled by cheapoil, industrial jobs, and V.A. and F.H.A. mortgages transformed a nation ofrenters into a solid home-owning majority. By the mid-1960s, however, a
16 Christensen, C. The AmericanGarden City and the New TownsMovement. Ann Arbor, MI: U.M.I.Research Press. 1986.
17 Arnold, J. The New Deal inthe Suburbs: A History of theGreenbelt Towns Program,1935–1954. Columbus, OH: OhioState University Press. 1971.Christensen, C. The AmericanGarden City and the New TownsMovement. Ann Arbor, MI: U.M.I.Research Press. 1986.Stein, C. Toward New Towns forAmerica. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T.Press. 1951.
18 Hall, P. Cities of Tomorrow: AnIntellectual History of UrbanPlanning and Design in the TwentiethCentury. London: Basil Blackwell.pp. 164–165. 1988.
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combination of social, political, and environmental problems forcedanother look at the need for planning. Central cities were becoming enclavesof lower income minorities; suburbs were frustrated by the proliferationof jurisdictions; and there was growing concern for the environmentalconsequences of suburban sprawl.
A legislative response to these concerns emerged in 1970 as Title VII ofthe Urban Growth and New Community Development Act. Part A of thelegislation directed the President to prepare a national growth report toassist in formulating a national growth policy; part B expanded the programof loan guarantees and grant assistance for new communities, making thisaid available to public as well as private developers. In 1970, PresidentRichard Nixon, in his State of the Union message to Congress, asserted that“the Federal government must be in a position to assist in the building ofnew cities and the rebuilding of old ones.”19 On the surface it appeared thatthe Title VII program represented the culmination of a 60-year campaignfor regional planning under government leadership. Here was a program tochannel national growth explicitly based on the English new towns model.Yet by 1975 the program was a shambles and a moratorium was placed onTitle VII contract approvals. H.U.D. had funded 13 separate projects withloan guarantees up to $50 million. Of the eight projects started under TitleVII and at least partially occupied by December 1976, H.U.D. was obligedto acquire five. One was phased out as a conventional subdivision, anotherblocked by a lawsuit. Only the Woodlands, outside of Houston, Texas, washolding its own.20 H.U.D.’s own internal evaluation revealed that the pro-gram staff was thin on management, finance, construction, and marketing.21
As a result, H.U.D. relied on projections by the developers and their con-sultants with regard to regional growth rates, market share, and land valu-ations. Moreover, neither H.U.D. nor the Administration had formulatedany national growth policy to guide the staff ’s work in selecting developersfor Title VII new communities.
Ironies abound in this story of a new initiative gone awry. As long as thegovernment built new communities for purposes other than planning (e.g.emergency war worker housing, depression work relief) it employed thefinest planning minds in the nation who did careful research before com-mitting federal funds. When at last the government sponsored a planningprogram as such, it turned over effective control of the process to thedevelopers themselves. In the end, despite the good intentions of the bill’ssponsors to encourage innovative and balanced development, Title VII wasa pipeline of federal funds to private real estate companies whose motiveswere often no different from conventional land speculators. In the process,the reputation of government-assisted planning got a black eye.
One arena where the federal regulations did make a notable impactwas in the racial and economic integration of the federally funded newcommunities. Although not all projects embraced the concept with equal
19 H.U.D. (U.S. Dept. of Housingand Urban Development). NewCommunities: Problems andPotentials. Washington, D.C.: U.S.Dept. of H.U.D., 23. 1976.
20 According to a 1976 study,H.U.D. was acquiring FlowerMound (near Dallas, Texas),Jonathan (Minneapolis, Minnesota),Newfields (Dayton, Ohio), ParkForest South (Chicago, Illinois), andRiverton (Rochester, New York).Development was continuing onHarbison (Columbia, SouthCarolina), Maumelle (Little Rock,Arkansas), Shenandoah (Atlanta,Georgia), and Soul City (Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina). Anenvironmental lawsuit enjoinedfurther development at Cedar-Riverside (Minneapolis, Minnesota).Gananda (Rochester, New York) wasbeing phased out as a conventionalsubdivision. St. Charles, Maryland(Washington, D.C.) was continuingdevelopment but was begun as aconventional subdivision in 1964(H.U.D. 1976).
21 H.U.D. (U.S. Dept. of Housingand Urban Development). NewCommunities: Problems andPotentials. Washington, D.C.: U.S.Dept. of H.U.D. p. 34, 1976.
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enthusiasm, the results, especially with respect to income mix, weresignificant.22
CONTEMPORARY PLANNING STRATEGIES: TWO MODELS
The Plan for New York City, published in 1969, described two new com-munities planned for Manhattan—Roosevelt Island and Battery Park City.The projects shared several important characteristics. Both involved inno-vative site assembly—the recycling of a derelict island in one case and thecreation of landfill in the other. Both projects contained a mix of uses. Theresidential populations of both projects were described as a roughly evenmix of low–middle- and upper-income residents.23 As built, however, thetwo projects could not be more different. While Roosevelt Island has heldto the original intentions as a heterogeneous community, Battery Park Cityhas become an exclusive upper-income enclave.
This shift represents more than a dramatic retreat from the democraticpremise of the initial proposal. Battery Park City is emblematic of the pri-vatization of planning activity that attended the ideological shifts of the1980s. The public authority abdicates control over land-use decisions infavor of deal-making and negotiation.24 The process is justified by the eco-nomic efficiency of the market-place. In the face of these same pressures,however, Roosevelt Island continues to pursue its original mandate. Atstake are two competing views of urban life and social structure.
ROOSEVELT ISLAND
Occupying a narrow 147-acre strip of land in the East River betweenManhattan and Queens, Roosevelt Island is a remarkable community inmany respects. Many of these reside in the accomplishments of its physicalplan. It is accessed by the only commercial mass transit aerial tramwayin the country. Vehicular traffic has been substantially curtailed. It isthe only large-scale residential project in the country with an undergroundgarbage collection system. The island is barrier-free and provides a sub-stantial number of units for the physically challenged. The landscapingincludes 4l acres of parks and a 4½ mile pedestrian promenade at water’sedge.
The provision of such recreational facilities and generous open space isnot uncommon in upper-income suburbs or luxury condominiums. Whatis distinctive about Roosevelt Island is its ability to deliver on its originalcommitment to a “diverse community.” The General Development Planwritten in 1969 established a precise unit break-down by income, withspecific provision for the elderly and physically challenged: 30 percent low-income; 25 percent moderate-income; 20 percent middle-income; and 25percent market rate units.25 In addition to this income mix, Roosevelt Islandhas maintained an integrated racial composition, with a 23 percent minor-ity population. Significantly, the median income for Black households on the
22 A survey which comparedH.U.D. new towns with 13non-federal communities found only2,000 subsidized units out of222,000 in the non-federalcommunities compared with 27percent of all housing units in theTitle VII projects. Moreover, thesatisfaction of residents in subsidizedhousing in the new communities wasfound to be substantially higher thanfor residents in subsidized housingelsewhere (H.U.D. 1976, AppendixD).
23 C.P.C. (New York City PlanningCommission). The Plan for NewYork City. New York: Dept. of CityPlanning. 1969.
24 Fainstein, S. “PromotingEconomic Development: UrbanPlanning in the United States andGreat Britain.” Journal of theAmerican Planning Association. 57.1: 22–33. 1991.
25 A.K.R.F. [Allee, King, Rosen, &Fleming, Inc.]. Roosevelt IslandSouthtown: Final EnvironmentalImpact Statement. New York:Roosevelt Island Operating Corp.1990.
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island is higher than for White ones, suggesting that the island is a residenceof choice for middle-income Blacks.26
In Northtown I, the first phase of development, completed in 1977, all2,142 units received some form of public subsidy. The low-income unitswere dispersed throughout a large (1,000 units) apartment complex so thatonly management knows which tenants require the deeper subsidy. In 1984,however, when development resumed after an interruption caused byNew York’s fiscal crisis and the Urban Development Corporation’s nearbankruptcy, the flow of federal funds for housing subsidies virtually driedup. The developer for the second construction phase, Northtown II, wasdesignated because they had access to enough Section 8 rent subsidy certifi-cates to make 20 percent of the project affordable to low-income house-holds. While this permitted the new development to maintain its mixedincome character, conventional market wisdom concentrated all the subsid-ized units in a single, detached building, with four other new towers devotedto luxury rental units. For the first time, low-income households were segre-gated by place of residence, leading to some stereotyping of “the Section 8kids.” In response to this experience, the Roosevelt Island Operating Cor-poration is exploring ways to disperse the subsidized units throughoutSouthtown, the final phase of development.27 In the absence of federalfunds, and with only modest assistance available from city and state sources,Southtown will depend on an internal cross-subsidy where low- andmoderate-income units are subsidized by fees from developers of luxuryapartments. Because the housing market is still mired in a deep recession, nocontracts have been signed for Southtown. The present stalemate illustratesan inherent dilemma in linking the supply of “affordable” housing to thedemand for luxury units.
BATTERY PARK CITY
Battery Park City is a mixed residential and commercial development on 92acres of landfill in the Hudson River stretching north from Battery Park atthe southern tip of Manhattan. The current development plan is actually thefifth proposal for the site, and the only one whose residential component isentirely based on market rate housing. Although earlier proposals for thesite also emphasized luxury housing,28 by the time the Plan for New YorkCity was published in 1969, the housing mix had become equal thirds oflow– middle- and upper-income units.29
Battery Park City got off to a slow start. The landfill was not completeuntil 1977, and by then the city was mired in a recession. In 1979 RichardKahan, the newly appointed head of the Battery Park City Authority(B.P.C.A.), hired architects/urban designers Alexander Cooper and StantonEckstut to produce a new master plan. To convince the N.Y. State legislatureto continue its support, this plan had to reconfigure the developmentnot only in its physical dimension but in its legal framework and financing
26 Ibid., C-10
27 Russo. A. Planner, RooseveltIsland Operating Corp. Personalinterview. 26 August. Stein, ClarenceS. 1978. Toward New Towns forAmerica. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T.Press. 1991.
28 Deutsche, R. “UnevenDevelopment: Public Art in NewYork City.” In Out of Site: A SocialCriticism of Architecture, edited byDiane Ghirardo. Seattle, WA: BayPress. 1991.
29 C.P.C. (New York City PlanningCommission). The Plan for NewYork City. New York: Dept. of CityPlanning. Vol. 4.26 1969.
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strategy as well. The new legal approach was to have the N.Y.S. UrbanDevelopment Corporation condemn the site and convey the title to B.P.C.A.By transferring ownership to an independent public benefit agency thismaneuver exempted the project from New York’s planning and zoningregulations, and from public scrutiny as well.
The economic strategy was to attract private financing by eliminating allsubsidized housing, offering tax abatements, and relocating the commercialbuildings to the center of the project opposite the World Trade Center. Thusthe much praised physical character of the Cooper/Ekstut site plan—thereintegration of the landfill into the Manhattan grid—was as much arediscovery of New York’s history of incremental private development ofsmall land parcels as it was a romantic invocation of its most livableneighborhoods.
The physical aspects of the plan have received a great deal of criticalacclaim. The New York Times hailed it as a “triumph of urban design.”30
Writers wax enthusiastic over its public parks and promenades.31 But if theexterior spaces are indeed handsomely designed and inviting, the residentialconstruction is less convincing in both physical and social terms. Despite thestreet and avenue organization of the Master Plan, Battery Park City lacksthe heterogeneity of Manhattan’s culturally diverse neighborhoods likeChelsea or the Upper West Side. It has no side streets to speak of and lacksthe row houses to leaven the scale of the large apartment buildings. Theapartments themselves are relatively small, both in the number and size ofrooms, leaving the exterior styling an empty gesture to New York’s grandold apartment buildings.
Demographically, the development reflects the flat profile of thenarrow stratum that benefited from the 1980s surge in the financial servicessector: the new households are young, wealthy, and childless.32 Thereare few neighborhood services, and families with children had to organizeto get a playground built. The social justification for all this private luxuryin a publicly aided project is that Battery Park City spins off profitsthat the City uses to rehabilitate low-income housing in poor neighborhoodslike the South Bronx and Harlem. Excess Battery Park City revenuesare used to guarantee Housing New York bonds issued by the N.Y.State legislature. Proceeds from the first $210 million in bonds havealready been applied to rehabilitate 1,850 units in the South Bronx andHarlem.33
The public/private partnership which generates funds for subsidiesthrough market development reinforces uneven spatial development in theprocess. The mostly uncritical praise which Battery Park City has receivedfor the excellence of its “public” spaces masks both the exclusion of thepublic from the decision-making process and the ways in which differentgroups are affected by the broader development process involved.
30 Goldberger, P. “Public SpaceGets a New Cachet in New York.”The New York Times. Section H,35. May 22. 1988.
31 Gill, B. “The Skyline: BatteryPark City.” The New Yorker. 20August. 1990 Hiss, T. “At Land’sEdge, a Contentment of Light andShape.” The New York Times.Section C, 1.18. October 19. 1990.
32 According to a 1988 tenantsurvey, 85 percent of the residentshad incomes over $50,000 and 37percent over $100.000. Less than 12percent of the population was under19 years old or over 65, and over 88percent of the units contained onlyone or two people. 73 percent of theapartments are studio and onebedroom (B.P.C.A., 1988).Curiously, in two tenant surveys, theB.P.C.A. has not collected data onthe racial composition of theresidential population.
33 B.P.C.A. Annual Report. NewYork: B.P.C.A. 1988. Internalmemorandum. April 6. 1987.
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CONCLUSION
The transfer of funds from Battery Park City to the South Bronx parallelsthe Regional Contribution Agreements (R.C.A.s) that compromise the NewJersey M.L. Laurel decision. The R.C.A.s permit municipalities to buy theirway out of 50 percent of their obligation to provide their “fair share” oflow- and moderate-income housing. The result benefits willing receivercities like Newark, Camden, and New Brunswick, but in the processreinforces the very economic and racial spatial stratification they weremeant to redress.
Whether manifest in the bankruptcy of Bridgeport, Connecticut, or theexplosion of pent-up racial rage in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn,New York, the spatial segregation of American society is an economic andsocial time bomb. The failure to develop a strong and systematic approachto town planning and hence orderly regional growth has left us with apattern of regional development in which speculators erect scattered sub-divisions for individuals who seek personal solutions to the crises of urbanlife by fleeing cities and segregating themselves in small, homogeneousenclaves.
Although a consensus is emerging among planners and civic-mindedmembers of the business community that more compact socially and eco-nomically mixed communities are a necessity, it is not clear that thisconsensus can produce a politically effective coalition. The willingness toconcentrate on the aesthetic qualities of new developments regardless oftheir socio-economic composition dilutes the strength of this consensus.Projects such as Seaside, Florida, offer scenographic and tightly concen-trated plans that exploit the social appeal of the town center. In the main,however, these new (or borrowed) town planning models do not addressissues of equity. Their seductive appeal only fosters the illusion of solvingproblems by avoiding them.
Only a public authority can assure a balanced resolution to the efficiency/equity dilemma. Government has both the responsibility and the resourcesto take a long-range view of social and spatial development. Money spentafter the fact to clear up the social and economic problems of sprawl andisolation does not add value to the products of America; it only slows therate at which they deteriorate. Town planning history teaches that societieswith a long-term perspective will be both more efficient and more equitablethan those that choose to place ideology before experience.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 80th Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1992.
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NEW URBANISM AS A COUNTER-PROJECTNEW URBANISMTO POST-INDUSTRIALISM
ELLEN DUNHAM-JONES (2000)
New Urbanism’s unusual combination of neo-traditional styling andprogressive attempts at social reform has made strange bedfellows outof its liberal and conservative critics. Bashed from the left as conservativenostalgia and bashed from the right as liberal social engineering, NewUrbanism has an uncanny way of attracting uncommon enemies andadvocates.1
Urbanism, “new” or otherwise, is far too complex to advance purelyright- or left-wing agendas, and critiques of New Urbanism that attempt todispose of it neatly on ideological grounds tend to be grossly oversimplified.New Urbanism has been able to attract a surprisingly diverse followingprecisely because it cannot be easily reduced to a single agenda, as its criticsclaim. As a forum and a model, it merges popular, pragmatic, critical,idealistic and subversive strategies, allowing for many interpretations.
I find myself attracted to New Urbanism not for its traditionalism, butfor its radicalism; not for its capitulation to market forces, but for itscritical defiance of them; not for its formulaic responses, but for its trulymulti-disciplinary approach. I admire New Urbanism’s commitmentto a political process of mobilizing and empowering communities tochallenge the pattern, regulations and financing of seemingly out-of-controlsprawl.
Where many of my academic and architect colleagues see Ludditereactionaries resisting progress by indulging in nostalgic simulations ofthe past, I see committed reformers critical of the status quo debating andsharing multiple strategies and scales of alternative forms of development.In a post-industrial world dominated by the placelessness of digital mediaand global transactions, I see New Urbanism as a counter-project to post-industrialism.
How do we determine if such a position is reactionary or revolutionary?Assuming continued advances in computer and telecommunication tech-nologies, post-industrialism promises peace and harmony through globaleconomic interrelationships and unlimited access to information. These, inturn, will presumably lead to abundant good equitably distributed, laborlessleisure and self-determination. This view portrays the decentralized anddematerialized post-industrial world as a very progressive place.2 Architectslike Frank Gehry and Bernard Tschumi make extensive use of digitallymediated design processes that expressively endorse the promise of a post-industrial future of unlimited possibilities. Similarly, Rem Koolhaas and
1 For liberal critiques of NewUrbanism, see the comments byMargaret Crawford, Detlef Mertins,Michael Hays and Michael Sorkin inthe CD-ROM proceedings ofExploring (New) Urbanism,Proceedings (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Graduate Schoolof Design, Department of UrbanPlanning and Design). From thepolitical right, see for example theon-going defense of sprawl andcritiques of New Urbanism in thelibertarian journal Reason. Theirrecent articles are summarized in“Sprawl Brawl,” Reason Online(April 8, 1999).
2 Various writers and futurists havecontributed to this rosy picture:Daniel Bell, Marshall McLuhan,Alvin Toffler, George Gilder, ThomasFriedman and William Mitchell, etc.
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Peter Eisenman embrace the freedom represented by the speed, mobilityand malleability of digital, nomadic, post-industrial culture. Koolhaasargues for a “lite urbanism” that ridicules traditional preoccupations withmatter and substance.3
But post-industrialism has a dark side as well. The pace of innovation indigital technologies has been matched by an ever-widening income gapbetween rich and poor. As the economy has become more integratedglobally, it has become increasingly decentralized locally. In U.S. metro-politan areas, 60 to 85 percent of real estate development during the pastthirty years has occurred on suburban peripheries.4
The resulting landscape of decentralized, disconnected pockets of officeparks, malls, strips, condo clusters, corporate campuses and gated com-munities clipped onto suburban arterials reflects the values and policies ofmobile capital, the service economy, post-Fordist disposable consumerismand banking deregulation. This pattern, expanding at the periphery in everlower densities, further exacerbates the spatial segregation of rich andpoor, consumes open space, requires more and more driving and degradesair, water, land and habitat in the process.
New Urbanists see the environmental and social impact of the post-industrial landscape as regressive. They have turned away from this futureto promote diverse, compact, mixed-use, mixed-income, transit- andpedestrian-oriented communities. While their critique and concern for socialand environmental goals may indeed be viewed as progressive (thoughhardly new), the prevalence of neo-traditional styling in New Urbanistprojects that perpetrates the cultural dominance of traditional elites meansthey are generally viewed within architectural discourse as conservative.
Can New Urbanism open itself more to the progressive aspects of post-industrialism? Can it recognize the positive impact of the global and thedigital, and use these to induce more inclusive expressions of design, placeand power? I will argue that New Urbanism’s continued development as aprogressive force would benefit from a greater recognition of its role in theshift from industrial to post-industrial culture and development. Instead ofproviding a retreat from the post-industrial present, New Urbanism’s prom-ise lies in creating stronger interchanges between physical neighborhoodsand digital networks, in not simply countering post-industrialism buturbanizing it.
NEW URBANISM VERSUS SPRAWL
During the 1970s and 1980s, while the American economy was hard atwork producing sprawling beltway boomtowns and Edge Cities, archi-tectural discourse focused on divergent theories and their associated styleswhile professional journals highlighted the individual buildings of stardesigners. New Urbanism emerged in the early 1990s as one of the feworganized forums for an ongoing discussion of alternatives to conventional
“Layers” from a photographicseries titled “Welcome Home”exploring loneliness in newsubdivisions around Atlanta,GA. (Photo by Lee Hughey.)
3 Rem Koolhaas et al., S. M. L. XL.(New York: Monacelli Press, 1995),971.
4 From 1980 to 1990, cities withstrong downtown markets retainedabout 40 percent of office growth,while weaker downtown marketslost up to 85 percent of office growthto their suburbs. See William C.Wheaton, “Downtowns Versus EdgeCities: Spatial Competition for Jobsin the 1990s,” Working Paper 45(Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. Center forReal Estate, 1993).
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suburban development. Various approaches coalesced and diverged, fromreconfiguring suburban patterns into new mixed-use towns to infilling under-developed locations in existing cities. Some proponents were motivatedmore by the environmental advantages of walkability and transit-orienteddevelopment. Others were more inspired by the social benefits of the renewedemphasis on well-designed public spaces. All recognized a common enemy inthe regulations and development practices that perpetuated sprawl.
The movement grew as it took on the rewriting of regulations and thepartnering with various agencies and disciplinary groups including theDepartment of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Pro-tection Agency, Fannie Mae, the Urban Land Institute, the Institute ofTransportation Engineers, the U.S. Green Building Council and the NationalResources Defense Council. The involvement of diverse professionalsfocused increasing attention on the non-physical aspects of city design, suchas community-building programs, affordable mortgage policies and finan-cing structures. Initially recognized for its concern with greenfield newtowns, New Urbanism has expanded its attention to urban and suburbaninfill, most notably through work on HOPE VI public housing projects.5
If sprawl is the post-industrial landscape of private investment, theinsistent now, speed, disposability and the temporary contract, NewUrbanism counters that by emphasizing that which is public, pre-existingand enduring. New Urbanism urges people to slow down, to get to knowtheir neighbors and to become more connected with their environment.
New Urbanists have proposed a now-familiar alternative pattern thatrecasts the isolated office parks, strip malls and subdivisions into mixed-use,walkable, transit-served districts and neighborhoods oriented around publictown centers. Wide cul-de-sacs and wider arterials are replaced with griddednetworks of narrow streets that calm and distribute the flow of traffic.Sidewalks, street trees and architectural codes governing the basic profileof the building front treat the space of the street as a figural public spaceor outdoor room. Front porches, or stoops (depending on the regionalarchitectural history of a place), are intended to enable sociability amongneighbors; the close mixing of lot sizes and building types is intended toencourage socioeconomic diversity. Densities from eight to forty dwellingunits per acre are sought both as means of increasing social interaction,preserving unbuilt land and wildlife habitat, and supporting shops andtransit service.
This is more than an alternative template. New Urbanist developmentsseek to build on the existing identity of a place, rather than allowing it to bedetermined by ever-changing stores and short-term uses. Unique landscapes,whether streams, forests or wetlands, are preserved and made into identify-ing or recreational features. Regional building types, materials, landscapeand planning strategies are called upon to further link the present to thatwhich has endured in a place. Codes and covenants are intended to sustain
5 Despite the inclusion of projectsexecuted in a variety of styles, scales,densities and locations in books likePeter Katz’s The New Urbanism(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994),and The Charter of the NewUrbanism, Michael Leccese andKathleen McCormick eds. (NewYork: McGraw-Hill, 1999), theneotraditional small town has firmlyestablished itself as the dominantmodel of New Urbanism in the eye ofthe public, the architectural pressand many C.N.U. members.
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this character, emphasizing predictability instead of post-industrial flux andchangeability.
STUCK IN THE PAST OR MOVING INTO THE FUTURE?
New Urbanism arose out of its founders’ reformist impulse to improvesituations through design solutions. They reject the design autonomy soughtby post-structuralist theorists and neo-avant-garde designers. Instead ofcritiquing culture, New Urbanists engage and redesign it. Moreover, theyfervently believe that design is not autonomous but synergistic: Eachindividual design decision matters in terms of how it triggers social,environmental and economic effects within the urban whole.
This belief in the power and meaningfulness of design has helpedattract many designers to the movement, myself included. It has helped toempower designers and non-designers alike to refuse to accept sprawl’s logicof autonomous development as inevitable. Instead, through the power ofdesign, new development becomes an opportunity for radical re-imagining.From Seaside to the New York Regional Plan Association’s aerial views ofconventional versus reconfigured development patterns, the early NewUrbanist designs were startling precisely because they so radically brokewith conventional expectations.
Even more revolutionary is the New Urbanists’ willingness to work onregulatory and procedural issues in order to empower their designs andfundamentally change the rules of the game. Based on their successes withmixed-income neighborhoods, the Department of Housing and UrbanDevelopment hired the New Urbanists to write the design guidelines for theHOPE VI public housing revitalization grants—a $5 billion program aimedat deconcentrating poverty. Similar partnerships with the EnvironmentalProtection Agency expanded the Smart Growth Network while partnershipswith the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the U.S. Green Building
Three views of an exurban highwayinterchange: at the present, as it willlook with current developmentpatterns, and how it could look if re-oriented around its village center andrail station. (Source: New YorkRegional Plan Association, 1996.)
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Council and the Natural Resources Defense Council have resulted in newstreet standards with greater attention to pedestrian safety and comfort, aswell as the development of L.E.E.-N.D., a new system for ranking environ-mental benefits at the neighborhood scale. Model ordinances for TraditionalNeighborhood Developments, form-based codes like the SmartCode, andcomprehensive plans are inspiring policy changes across the country, mostnotably along the Mississippi Gulf Coast where New Urbanists were invitedby the Governor to assist in planning the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina.Often overshadowed by the architectural media’s attention to individualprojects, this collective work by the Congress for the New Urbanism toreform the rules of development continues to effectively challenge the statusquo. It could not have happened without the New Urbanists’ strong convic-tions about the need for change, the possibility of change and the viability oftheir alternative.
Sadly, however, in fighting for change and winning over converts, NewUrbanist principles have increasingly stiffened into rules. Types havebecome models.6 The elasticity and ingenuity of design is increasingly beingsacrificed to the need for formulas, easy answers and a recognizablemarketing image.
There is an odd disconnect between what is exciting about the ambitiousNew Urbanist agenda and the places New Urbanists claim as successes.While the agenda looks forward to a world of vital neighborhoods anddiverse communities, the places themselves seem increasingly frozen in avery singular image of the past; there seems to be little recognition of thevalue of ongoing change. Even where regional characteristics help par-ticularize the architecture, there is a generic quality to designs that drawalmost exclusively on white upper middle-class traditions, and the quietgentility and formal civic behavior associated with them.
As New Urbanism has become more successful, its designs have becomemore reactionary and less revolutionary. What happened to the spirit ofinvention and discovery that the changing of the regulations was meantto empower? Has New Urbanism become a part of the machine it set out toresist, simply another formula to replace the earlier one?
New Urbanism is premised on the idea that designers armed with strongknowledge of good precedents can translate the movement’s simpleprinciples into a masterplan and images from which to generate designcodes in a relatively short time—during a seven- to ten-day charrette, forexample. The expectation has been that the charrette introduces urbanvariety through the inclusion of many hands, and that the execution of thedesign by many builders over a period of time will introduce architecturalvariety.
However, as New Urbanism moves into the mainstream, productionbuilders and financing entities seek to undertake projects in ever largerincrements. Developing in larger increments means more repetition of
6 In his Dictionnaire of 1832,Quatremère de Quincydistinguished between the type, ofwhich many permutations arepossible, and the model, which isrepeated precisely. The shift frominterpretable design codes to patternbooks, discussed later, exemplifiesthis change.
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models, rather than development of typological variations.7 The bigger NewUrbanism gets, the more it repeats itself.
Seaside is an expensive resort hotel. It cannot be the poster child for NewUrbanism. But, in fact, it got so many things so right. It is infused with arespect for tradition and feeling for place, but never allowed those lessons tosquelch a love of design and innovation. Even though a non-coded commoninterest in Victorian architectural language settled into the place, it stillspeaks in varied voices. Akin to post-Fordist mass customization, eachhouse riffs jazzily on familiar themes. There is a far greater balance betweenindividual expression and a unified communal identity than in many laterNew Urbanist developments.
Conversely, at projects like Celebration, the use of pattern books,intended to raise the quality of the work of production builders while keep-ing costs down, has resulted in far greater uniformity than at Seaside.Designers’ efforts to tweak, change, customize and improve the world nolonger seem welcome. I worry that as New Urbanism becomes more focusedon formulaic recreations of the past, it will lose its commitment to designand fall short of providing for the post-industrial future.
New Urbanism needs to think more creatively about how to use newtechnologies to create a future that rises to its challenge of simultaneouslyaddressing the larger scale of the region, where characteristics of theland and ecosystems might dictate broad development patterns, and thesmaller scale of the neighborhood, in which varying degrees of variety andindividual expression might be encouraged.
GRASPING THE POST-INDUSTRIAL FUTURE
Perhaps New Urbanism has written off the promise of a post-industrialfuture too quickly. Do the digital and the global have to work againstplacemaking and result in decentralized, economically segregated, con-sumerist sprawl? Certainly not, and this is where there remains room fordesign innovation.
Many New Urbanist developments are heavily wired and are alreadyattracting the digerati who can choose to live anywhere. New Urbanismoffers people working all day at computer screens easy opportunities totake a break from technological interfaces. People-filled places and naturalhabitats are a short walk away, accessible without using a car. Many ofthe increasing number of telecommuters are likely to embrace the social,environmental and transit possibilities of New Urbanism.8
But New Urbanism could go much further in imagining how tele-commuting, computer software and digital networks might more radicallyreconfigure buildings, neighborhoods and regions.
As sociable, local neighborhoods become overlaid with highlyused global information networks they are likely to foster ever-moreflexible, hybrid building types—such as new combinations of retail and
8 Some research indicates that thegrowth in telecommuting is expectedto be greatest in people whotelecommute three to four days aweek and visit traditional offices onanother day. These workers cannotreally choose to live anywhere; theystill must live within commutingdistance of their workplace. NewUrbanism’s stress on the availabilityof transit may be an especially strongattraction to this group of part-timecommuters. See “AlternativeWorkplace Strategies,” WhartonReal Estate Review, 1:1 (Spring,1999). William J. Mitchell predictsthat the emerging wired generationwill gravitate to precisely this kind oflively twenty-four-hourneighborhood. William J. Mitchell,E-topia (Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T.Press, 1999).
7 There are notable exceptions.Hedgewood Properties is thedeveloper and production builder forVickery, a Greenfield T.N.D. inCumming, GA, with almost norepetition of house designs andunique public spaces distinguishedby their preserved trees. The result isa place with both a strong identityand surprising variety.
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services, entertainment and education facilities, and living and working.Like the now-ubiquitous wifi-coffee shop’s successful combination of high-tech and high-touch, we may soon see more organic farms incorporated intobusiness centers. This mixing and integrating of activities is consistent withNew Urbanist principles and in many cases can be easily woven into trad-itional neighborhoods, but it requires new approaches to flexible buildingdesign, development financing and land-use regulation.
Taking full advantage of the new technology and economy requires awillingness to further adapt neotraditional typologies, even to develop newones. For example, New Urbanists have done a better job at integratingretail and residences than workplaces and residences. More thought couldbe given to converting office parks into mixed-use urban neighborhoods,using skinny floorplate buildings with incubator office space in neigh-borhood centers, and designing live–work units that allow for the runningof a small business (with dual entries, accommodation of delivery servicesand variously sized office suites/workshops). And just as New Urbaniststhink about the benefits of the corner store, they could consider providingneighborhood-based telecommuting, delivery-coordination and businesssupport centers.
While analysis of regional vernacular building materials and typologiescan go a long way toward helping New Urbanists design in relation toclimate and place, New Urbanists would also do well to consider the newerdigital tools that allow designs to be more specifically responsive to theirparticular places. Innovative uses of geographical information systems,computational fluid dynamics modeling and traffic modeling programs canbe used to better understand the specific wind, sun, drainage and transporta-tion patterns of places. Such digital information can be extremely useful indesigning plans and green building designs that are more place-specific andenvironmentally responsible.9
Some New Urbanists are already finding innovative ways to use digitaltechnology to empower local voices in the process of design and construc-tion. Peter Calthorpe recently posted growth scenarios for Salt Lake City onthe internet and got 17,000 citizens to vote their preferences.
In recent decades, many sectors of the industrial economy have employedcomputation to better coordinate supply and demand and producemore consumer-responsive high-quality, automated, small-batch, variedproduct lines. Sophisticated market monitoring and analysis enabled thiskind of “mass customization” to be linked to consumer preferences.Though these techniques have been used to develop niche markets wherefashion serves to differentiate consumer identity and exacerbate classand economic differences, they might also be put to the service of NewUrbanism.
In a small step toward “mass customization” in housing construction,Armonics, an Indianapolis-based New Urbanist architecture firm, used
Sales Center at New Town at St.Charles, MO, a new urbanistcommunity designed by DuanyPlater-Zyberk & Co. (Photo by StevenPatterson.)
9 To help Los Angelenos establishneighborhood centers, MarcFutternan wrote a program called“Ped-GRiD” that layers informationabout pedestrian activities onto aG.I.S. database. Analyzing diversedata such as how many beds in ahospital, traffic counts and parks,Ped-GRiD can predict whichlocations will better supportpedestrian activity and wherecommunity-building developmentshould be directed. He hopes tomake the technology available toindividuals, who could then uploadtheir own information to thedatabase and conduct their ownresearch as a form of teledemocracy.See Dan Damon, “Driven toDespair,” Guardian-Online (July 15,1998).
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digital software to expand and diversify the number of builders involved in alarge housing project. They adapted “Expedition,” a program commonlyused for construction management, to enable them to monitor numerouscontracts (fifty-seven in all, ranging from $2,000 to $2.8 million) on a200-unit HUD HOPE VI housing project. Many of the contractors werefrom the local area and consisted of one- or two-person teams. In additionto contributing a significant amount of variation in finishes and details tothe completed homes, this process recirculated dollars in the community andprovided opportunities for disadvantaged businesses.10
New Urbanism is not a one-size-fits-all model. It is a forum for sharingstrategies about a variety of models that implement the principles of itscharter. As such, the Congress of the New Urbanism is already a post-industrial information exchange. The challenge for New Urbanists is tocontinue seeking ways of looking not just to the past, but to the future,to open design back up to the positive, innovative and inclusive aspects ofpost-industrialism.
New Urbanism’s critique of the destructive and regressive aspects ofpost-industrialism and sprawl provides the movement with tremendousstrength. New Urbanism’s privileging of local places, connecting to exist-ing conditions, face-to-face communication, communal interaction andpreservation of unmediated landscapes and natural habitats, resonates espe-cially effectively at a time when these seem threatened by post-industrialforces.
However, as a counter-project to post-industrialism’s doctrine of speed,mobility and malleability, New Urbanism should be wary of being overlycommitted to replicating the slow, the fixed and the enduring. Themore perfect the recreation of the past, the more inflexible it becomes fordealing with the future, with diversity and with less perfect neighboringconditions.
New Urbanism was initially proposed as a forum for promoting demo-cratic tolerance for difference, not a tyrannical consensus. Instead of theabsolute order and lockstep conformance of perfectly unified 1970s-vintageplanned urban developments, New Urbanism was premised on a somewhatlooser process of incorporating multiple voices into the system, with theintent of producing more variety—albeit within strict constraints at theinterface between public and private space.
In confronting the realities of working with production builders’,NIMBYs’, public agencies’ and consumers’ and bankers’ expectations ofpredictability, New Urbanism has lost much of that original flexibility,diversity and choice. New Urbanists would benefit from remembering thatthere is a virtue in the inclusion of the imperfect and the unfixed; a bit ofpeeling paint and the occasional purple house remind us that we are notslaves to consensus and conformity.
Similarly, a fervent and creative embrace of post-industrial opportunities
10 Since the original publication ofthis article, several New Urbanistshave collaborated with modular andmanufactured housing producersboth as a means of reducing costs(such as the Katrina Cottage “starterhome” designed by Marianne Cusatoand sold as a kit-of-parts fromLowe’s Home Improvement Stores)and as a means of providingcustomizable variety withintypological continuity.
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and tools may help New Urbanism avoid becoming a slave to consensus andconformity. Enriching the interface between neotraditional neighborhoodsand the internet may provide the opportunities for New Urbanism to betterconnect the past with a progressive and diverse future.
This article was originally published in Places, Spring 2000, Volume 13, Number 2,and the author is grateful to the Design History Foundation for permission forrepublication. It has been updated with slight modifications.
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INTEGRATING URBANISMSNEW URBANISM Growing places between New Urbanism
and Post-UrbanismCARL GIOMETTI (2006)
Thinking has its strategies and tactics too, much as other forms ofaction have. Merely to think about cities and get somewhere, one of themain things to know is what kind of problem cities pose, for all problemscannot be thought about in the same way. Which avenues of thinking areapt to be useful and to help yield the truth depends not on how we mightprefer to think about a subject, but rather on the inherent nature of thesubject itself.
Jane Jacobs1
The city is the culmination of the human condition, a manifestation ofutopian ideas and practical policy. The ideas guiding the city down different“avenues of thinking” are as diverse as the people who reside in them. Thecity has the power to absorb and reflect whatever theory is being thrust uponit. In the end, the city will evolve, sometimes for the better, sometimes not;but it will emerge fresh, ready for the next idea. New Urbanism and Post-Urbanism describe current ideas of the existence of a city. This paper willoutline a possible “next idea”; keeping some of the thoughts of each, whilediscarding those that no longer apply. The two schools of thought oftenappear at odds with each other; however, when treated as ingredients theyactually make up a more complete idea of urbanism. The recent MichiganDebates on Urbanism created dialog among many seemingly disparate ideasof urbanisms. What always emerged, despite whatever disagreements theparticipants may have had, was recognition that there is no right answer todesigning a city; we can only hope to ask the right questions.2 Negotiatinga place between New Urbanism and Post-Urbanism may or may not leadto any new solutions, but it may raise better questions as to how we canform a more integrated urban theory.
NEW URBANISM
The most popular of the recent urban movements is New Urbanism. Itstheoretical foundation relies upon creating lively neighborhoods thatpossess diverse styles of living. Constructed upon Jane Jacobs’s idea of“organized complexity” a city, neighborhood, or town is a complex organ-ism consisting of interconnected parts.3 The New Urbanist theories conc-erning “community,” as both an idea and a physical object, have beenmainstreamed into planning practice.
1 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Lifeof Great American Cities (NewYork: Random House, 1969).
2 Robert Fishman, Post Urbanismvs. Re-Urbanism: Peter Eisenman vs.Barbara Littenberg and StevenPeterson, Michigan Debates onUrbanism, Vol. III (Ann Arbor, MI:The Regents of the University ofMichigan, 2005).
3 Jane Jacobs, The Death And Lifeof Great American Cities (NewYork: Random House, 1969).
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The practitioners of New Urbanism have expanded beyond theory andmany explicit design “manuals” exist on how to execute the ideals of theNew Urbanist. These manuals have shaped a multitude of plans throughoutthe country. Unfortunately, New Urbanist developments are typicallyenormous, over-planned communities with little variance in architecturalor economic style. Even Peter Calthorpe, a well-known proponent ofNew Urbanism, questions whether New Urbanism has become a style ratherthan a set of open-ended principles.4 Reasons for this may arise fromthe difficulty of executing a project of truly spontaneous diversity. Diversityis only achievable by differentiations in several urban qualities, particularlytime. Certain roles, such as lower income housing and local retail, are diffi-cult to fulfill in new construction.5 It has proved problematic to create trulymixed-use, mixed-income developments. These sorts of purposes willbe brought about by the evolution of an area, not cataclysmic creation.In order to fund new construction for the low- and middle-classes,where profit margins tend to be small, it must be executed on an enormousscale (this business model is often referred to as the Wal-Mart model).As Modernism demonstrated, large urban renewal projects are inappro-priate and in conflict with ideas of neighborhood and economicgrowth. Therefore, New Urbanism copes with projects that are just asarchitecturally sterile and economically unsustainable as its Modernistpredecessors were. These projects attract labels of being “nostalgic”or “old-fashioned” and disappoint those, like Peter Calthorpe and otherfounders of the Congress for New Urbanism, who see their ideas goneawry. A healthy city is not nostalgic. It may contain elements thatrepresent a previous period but imitation of the past produces stagnationand devolution.
From a theoretical perspective, New Urbanists seem “too ready to returnto the old city.” Critics point to those such as Leon Krier for an extreme caseof the historical approach to urbanism. Although Krier is a fringe element,his positions are worth noting. While they may seem absurd under mostcircumstances, his schemes must serve as a warning to whole-heartedlyaccepting historical models of urbanism. This point is the most relevantcriticism for New Urbanism. Historical models are useful as lessons forthe future, not determinations of it. Moreover, no lesson has beenmore valuable than understanding the sensitivity needed when makingchanges to the urban fabric, as each building serves is own particular,and often unrecognizable, purpose; and regardless of whichever period ofurbanism one aligns with, a good neighborhood is a terrible thing todestroy.
POST-URBANISM
If there is to be a “new urbanism” it will not be based on thetwin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of
4 Robert Fishman, New Urbanism:Peter Calthorpe vs. Lars Lerup,Michigan Debates on Urbanism,Vol. II (Ann Arbor, MI: The Regentsof the University of Michigan,2005).
5 Jane Jacobs, The Economy ofCities (New York: Random House,1969).
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uncertainty . . . Since it is out of control, the urban is about to become amajor vector of the imagination.
Rem Koolhaas 6
The center is not the center.Jacques Derrida7
If New Urbanism is looking to a city’s past for guidance, Post-Urbanism islooking beyond the present for its direction. “Post-Urbanism” is a termcoined by Douglas Kelbaugh to represent those who believe that urbanism isan idea of the past or will soon become of the past.8 Unlike the term “NewUrbanism” which represents specific, agreed-upon ideals, Post-Urbanismrefers to a group of people practicing design around a shared philosophicalfoundation. He aligns the writings of Rem Koolhaas, among others, to thisclassification. Adjectives shared among these philosophies are disconnected-ness, placelessness, and the notion that there is no context. Cities are nolonger centers but a “gray” area lacking edges or boundaries. Those whofit the classification of “Post-Urbanist,” beside Koolhaas, include namessuch as Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, and Daniel Libeskind; although mostseek to refrain from any association as such. They earned the moniker ofbeing “post-” or “anti-” urban by designing buildings that act to differenti-ate, a sculptural reaction against the urban fabric. Armed with the phil-osophies of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, their architecture exploits theloaded adjectives used repeatedly in postmodern discussion. A building isnot bound by its function or its geography. There is no such thing as con-text, nor is there anything to be referred. This ideology is the zeitgeistmentality, the current spirit of the age. Buildings respond to technologicalachievements that allow people to become more connected, while removingthe necessity for physical proximity. At first, it may seem difficult to discernhow a design philosophy that preaches the destruction of contexts isnecessary in an urban philosophy.
Post-Urbanism is necessary for the creation of the unique, the departurefrom communal context. If New Urbanists’ developments resemble the“Wal-Mart model” of architecture, Post-Urbanists are the Gucci ofarchitecture. Post-Urbanists are the trendsetters, the icons, and signaturepractitioners. Their rejection of context has given its architects incredibleproficiency at creating places. Put another way, in their rejection of theideological “centers” of architecture, they end up creating even strongerones. Across the world, cities display the place-making effects of having aPost-Urbanist building. Bilbao, Chicago, and Los Angeles all have a Gehrybuilding—an abstract, entirely unique piece of architecture that is used forits iconic value. These buildings are the points of reference that Kevin Lynchchampioned.9 The “post-urban” object, as it is described here, can be tracedthroughout time: it possesses permanence. It is a representation of an urban
7 Jacques Derrida, “TheDecentering Event in SocialThought” in Social Theory: TheMulticultural and Classic Readings,Charles Lemert (Boulder, CO:Westview Press, 1999).
8 Douglas Kelbaugh, Repairing theAmerican Metropolis (Seattle, WA:University of Washington Press,2002).
6 Rem Koolhaas, “What EverHappened To Urbanism?” inTheories and Manifestos ofContemporary Architecture, CharlesJenks & Karl Kropf (Chichester,West Sussex: Academy Editions,1997).
9 Kevin Lynch, The Image of theCity (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T.Press, 1960).
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condition at a particular point in time.10 However, like its counterpart, Post-Urbanism is not without its shortcomings as well.
Columbus, Indiana has long been visited for its unique array of archi-tecture. It boasts buildings by Eero Saarinen, Harry Weese, I.M. Peiand Richard Meier, among many others. Each building stands outas an extraordinary architectural achievement. However, despite thequantity and quality of the numerous designs, the town remains architec-turally stagnant, but in a rather odd way. By constructing individualpieces that each demands its own attention, the city becomes a virtualgallery of architecture, something meant only to be experienced in acertain environment, a Disneyland of architecture. Absent is any archi-tectural contrast in quality, where Saarinen’s church might emerge andstand gracefully among a real urban fabric and truly create a place. Instead,it is engaged in a battle with every other building for dominance overthe area. This conflict is akin to placing two Eiffel Towers right next toeach other. In this case, it is more like placing fifty together. The overabundance of defining elements diminishes their effectiveness to anull value. To use Robert Venturi’s language “. . . the exception hasbecome the rule.” The context of Columbus is to have no context,the Post-Urbanist dream. The absence of an urban fabric preventsthe city from developing community and architecture from gaining anidentity.
AN URBAN TYPOLOGY
To begin the formulation of a theoretical intermediary between these two, alanguage is useful to guide the dialog of the city and define roles within theurban whole. Aldo Rossi undertook the task of analytically dissecting acity and defining the role of each of its parts. He argued that the city is acollection of two principal types of architecture: dwellings and primaryelements.11 The satellite picture of Paris (right) defines these two elementsbetter than a textual definition.
There is a collection of buildings and block layouts, which are all slightlysimilar to each other, generally describable as “ordinary.” Departures fromthis understood pattern are present, signified with architecture of a differentscale, quality, or aesthetic. While it may seem problematic to rely on astructuralist dialect to describe the chaotic forces apparent in a city, Rossi’ssystem has some distinct advantages. Rossi articulated this condition: “Inorder to study the irrational it is necessary to take up a position as a rationalobserver. Otherwise, observation and eventually participation give way todisorder.”12
One of the strengths of Rossi’s idiom is that while dissecting differentparts of a city into its components, the actual application of his typologies isan open-ended system. That is, the idea of dwellings and primary elements ismore ephemeral than it is explicit. The syntactical structure, like a city
Satellite image of Paris.
10 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture ofthe City (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T.Press, 1982).
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
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itself, can evolve through time while still maintaining its pertinence andapplicability.
Dwellings are the present representation of a city, an item that is notunique but responds to the entirety of a superior structure. The dwellingbuilds what is to be the urban fabric. Lars Lerup employed a French word,meme, to describe the way dwellings are constructed. Meme is reproductionthrough imitation. He states, “Memes help affect our values. They do notexactly determine our values, but direct and constrain them.”13 It is thisprocess by which the urban fabric is created and sustained. The values of thecity are established by the vernacular and the dwellings arise out of the needto “summarize the city’s image.” The dwelling embodies the values of theculture that it houses. For example, the suburban dwelling exploits mobilityand privacy, creating “American distance” between people.14 The dwellingis reliant on the whole, constructed image to fill the spaces along the street.It is a created perception of what is normal to a city. New York has itsbrownstones, Chicago its bungalows, San Francisco its cascading rowhouses.
Rossi titles the second of the two principal city typologies as the primaryelement. The primary element is the artifact of a city, the “element(s) capableof accelerating the process of urbanization in a city.” It is a complete entityunto itself: it does not require an immediate aesthetic relation to itssurroundings. In fact, primary elements are most often considered suchbecause of their disassociation with previously established patterns.
The idea of the primary element gaining its distinction by emerging fromthe dwelling demands a brief mention of the relational architecture. Oftenarchitecture is judged solely on its artistic achievement, its ability to dissentfrom the ordinary. After all, how often will a building achieve notoriety forits ability to “fit in”? This criterion limits the title of “good architecture” tothat of primary elements, those buildings that depart from the context.However, the ability of a piece of architecture to satisfy its role within theurban form should be given equal, if not greater merit. Jane Jacobs firstdescribed the value of the “plain, old brick building” in terms of its socio-economic function. It provides cheap rent, encouraging small businesses andthe eventual development of an interconnected neighborhood. Old buildingsare small business incubators and can be more valuable than any signaturepiece of architecture.15 The dwelling establishes the field from which theprimary element will depart. A place cannot be unique without the ordinary.These plain buildings will never appear on the cover of architecturemagazines, but a theory of urbanism that does not value the vernacular of anarea is simply incomplete.
Re-engaging the two presiding theories now creates a more completepicture of what is urban. New Urbanism describes the life of a dwelling, thecommon everyday interconnectedness that allows a city to function. Theapproach to understanding this condition is similar to that of Bernard
13 Lars Lerup, After the City(Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press,2000).
14 Ibid.
15 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Lifeof Great American Cities (NewYork: Random House, 1969).
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Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects but brought to a contemporarycontext. Dwelling spaces are not artistic expressions; they respond to otheruniversal ideas. The Dogon village Rudofsky studied is the result of social,economic, environmental, and a slew of other forces. The interpretation isthe responsibility of the whole population. Perhaps this is a reason for NewUrbanism’s widespread acceptance outside of the planning and architecturalprofessions. It is responding to the commonly held ideals that shape theuniversal nature of our environment.
Post-Urbanism is then sufficient to explain the primary element, theparticular, artistic interpretation. It produces artifacts that will eitherquestion or celebrate the execution of the universal. This is the architect’srealm. The ability of a city to provide opportunities for the particularto emerge is incredibly important, especially when discussing the growthof a city.
THE GROWTH OF A CITY’S ARCHITECTURE
The joint resolution between New Urbanism and Post-Urbanismis more than a theoretical compromise. The interplay between thetwo can test a city’s architectural life. The appearance of context-creating and context-departing buildings tracks the rise and fall of anurban area.
For an area to grow into a city it must have some original structure: inother words, it must have a collection of people. Upon the incorporationof a town or village, the existing structures become its dwelling. At thispoint the goal of the city must be to grow worthy of a primary element.While it exists in this “seedling” form, it draws architectural resourcesfrom outside areas. It does not possess the maturity to develop its ownarchitecture. When a city begins to diversify its fabric, it earns a primaryelement. That is, when an aspect of its culture grows unique to that of agreater whole, a piece of architecture will be constructed to serve asan artifact, freezing that uniqueness in time.16 The evolutionary processof creating dwellings to earn new unique elements is perhaps the mostexplosive innovating force in the architecture of a city. However, thisprocess is not without precedent.
For some time, economists have understood this model as “importreplacement.”17 For example, an area is developing an industry around theproduction of coasters. The local craft of making coasters is sought afterworldwide. While the town is the center of the coaster-making world, itlacks industries to create drinks to place on the coasters, so must importthem. Eventually, a perceptive businessman thinks that perhaps the peoplein this town would like to have their own glasses to place upon their worldfamous coasters. Therefore, he builds a shop making various glasses thatwork in conjunction with the coasters. His business becomes popular andthe town no longer needs to import glasses to place on its coasters. It has
16 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture ofthe City (Cambridge, MA: TheM.I.T. Press, 1982).
17 Jane Jacobs, The Economy ofCities (New York: Random House,1969).
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absorbed an import, diversified its economy, and is now searching foranother import. The next import could be cup holders or perhaps papertowels to clean the unfortunate spill. If this process continues and com-pounds, as it does in growing cities, the town will be developing new indus-try after new industry, perhaps even over achieving its original businesses.This growth, however, did not occur until it produced something other thanits beloved coaster. The ability of a city to import new types of architecturalelements into its own model and then replace it with another import is ameasurement of a city’s vibrancy. Every populated area will possess its owndwellings, but its ability to depart from this context, or “original industry,”will determine its architectural achievement.
Every large city has experienced this type of architectural growth duringsome period of prosperity. Chicago during the late 1800s and early 1900swas departing from its bungalow context more rapidly that perhaps anyother city at that time.18 London, Paris, Rome, and many others all hadsimilar periods. All, at one point, were smaller, less diverse towns that grewbecause they were able to create unique primary elements and then rapidlybuild on the strength to construct another one. Because of their role as thesymbol of a culture’s pervasiveness, the creation of primary elements is alsoa good indicator as to the health of a city.
Returning to Chicago, in the early part of the 1900s, the Loop was thecenter of all economic activity in the American Midwest. The city grew atincredible rates, as evidenced by the rapid construction of primary elements.Architectural imports were absorbed and replaced quickly. The TribuneBuilding competition gathered ideas from throughout the architecturalspectrum where they battled each other for primacy on Chicago’s turf.German architect Mies van der Rohe took his ideas of Modernism to thecity, and created some of the best artifacts that remain of this period. As inmost cities, the growth eventually slowed, and Chicago ceased to replaceits architectural imports with new ones.19 Architects began to copy eachother and created memes. That is, instead of new artifacts being created,the process stalled. From this point, the city began to attempt to build thevernacular support for new unique elements.
Often excluded from these histories is the role of the dwelling, theneighborhood. During this same period, Chicago was increasing inpopulation faster than any city previously had. The influx of peopledemanded the expansion of the dwelling space. Immigrants of all nationsstitched themselves into the urban fabric, popularly known as the American“melting pot” effect. Ethnic neighborhoods each began their own,more localized process of city vernacular. The strength of a context has adirection correlation to the amount of meaningful opportunities to departfrom it.
18 Carl Condit, Chicago, 1910–1929: Building, Planning, and UrbanTechnology (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1973).
19 Carl Condit, Chicago, 1930–70:Building, Planning, and UrbanTechnology (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1974).
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FORMULATING STRATEGIES
Armed with the joint theories of New and Post-Urbanism, it is necessary tolook how they may shape the future, not simply explain the past. Recently,few topics have received as much attention as suburbia. Cities havestruggled for years to cope with the transition into becoming a region. At thetime Rossi authored The Architecture of the City he set forth three scaleswith which to study a city. The levels were:
1 The scale of the street, including the built areas and empty spaces thatsurround it;
2 The scale of the district, consisting of a group of blocks with commoncharacteristics;
3 The scale of the entire city, considered as a group of districts.20
In the present day, a fourth scale must be added:
4 The scale of the region, an area made up of a city and its subordinateareas.
By adding this new level, Rossi’s hierarchical system of describing an areastill pertains. Certain suburbs are dwelling areas, the bedroom communities,each imitating the other with slight variation, the meme. Others, due tosome unique circumstance, become centers. Whether it is a center of retailor entertainment or whatever functions it specializes in is irrelevant. Thecenter-suburb is the primary element for the suburban region.
The individual suburb can be analyzed using the same criteria. Inaddition to the various social and environmental arguments, suburbandevelopment has been criticized for its lack of place. It is an endless, undulat-ing row of strip developments and detached single-family houses. Onlyrecently, and mostly thanks to New Urbanism, have areas such as the sub-urban central business district (C.B.D.) or transit-oriented development(T.O.D.) come to exist. These developments enclose areas of density anddiversity in a suburban setting, a “pedestrian pocket.”21 They begin todevelop street life and other urban characteristics. These developmentscould perhaps represent the maturity of the suburb. The suburb creates anartifact by growing a portion of city life. Suburbs have always been charac-terized as a sort of thief to the city. Businesses relocate to suburban locationswhile people move outward in search of open space. Rather than labelingthe suburb as detrimental to a city, it is more appropriate to view it assomething that is benevolent to the urban area. Therefore, it is the ultimateachievement for a suburb to create its own center, sub-city life in a suburbansetting.22
This idea changes the role of the architect in suburbia. Rather thanattempting to change the patterns of life set forth by universal values, the
20 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture ofthe City (Cambridge, MA: TheM.I.T. Press, 1982).
21 Douglas Kelbaugh ed., ThePedestrian Pocket Book: A NewSuburban Design Strategy (NewYork: Princeton Architectural Press,1989).
22 Lars Lerup, After the City(Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press,2000).
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architect should seek opportunities to create suburban primary elementsplaying the role of the Post-Urbanist. Reworking Rossi’s words, a primaryelement is that which will accelerate the suburbanization of an area: that is,an element that recognizes its own local identity while paying homage tothe greater whole. Through this acceptance, the suburb can reinforce theidentity of the city and region. The relationship of architecture and city tothe modern suburb is still in its infancy; perhaps maturation will bringgreater understanding as to the opportunities that exist.
The city and its relatives are constant interplays between the particularand the universal. It is a field for theories to battle at any scale, whether itis that of a park or that of a region. As Douglas Kelbaugh noted while hewas moderating the Michigan Debates, the series gave birth to new types of“urbanism.” He attributed this to the complexity that is inherent whendiscussing a subject such as the city. Cities are guided by urbanisms withall varieties of suffixes and prefixes, each one bringing a different under-standing to the organized complexity that is a city. The most valuable“next” idea will be the one that continues to meld different thoughts andobservations into a more integrated urban theory.
I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships theflesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky, I cannot knowyour name. Nor can you know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together theconstruction of a city.23
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank all my friends from Miami University for manyextended nights discussing the nature of architecture, cities, and life. I wouldalso like to thank my family, especially Alison, for waiting two years for thispaper.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 94th Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2006.
23 Lebbeus Woods, “Manifesto”,in Theories and Manifestos ofContemporary Architecture, CharlesJenks & Karl Kropf (Chichester,West Sussex: Academy Editions,1997).
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REM KOOLHAAS’S WRITING ON CITIESPOST URBANISMPoetic perception and gnomic fantasy
WILLIAM S. SAUNDERS (1997)
Rem Koolhaas, in his writing about cities, dares much, falters much, andachieves much. If he dared less, he would falter less and give less. His achieve-ments—astute, unconventional, poetic perceptions of urban realities—attimes entail their own limitations: forced, melodramatic pseudopoetry.Koolhaas is eagerly self-contradictory, extremist, promoting many selves,determined above all to maintain freedom of thought, to be unboxed andunboxable. On the one hand a fiercely tough realist, despising nostalgia orany other wishful thinking, he is, on the other, a fantast, a surrealist, alsofierce about his right to create ex nihilo, fierce in his conviction that a worldconstructed to satisfy human desire can and should supersede the naturalworld that common sense calls real. Koolhaas the poetic realist has more tooffer us, in his writing, than Koolhaas the fantasist; this latter Koolhaas can,in fact, display some of the megalomania that Koolhaas sees in Le Corbusierand believes is endemic to most highbrow architecture.
Koolhaas the poet of perception and Koolhaas the pseudopoet offantasies mingle throughout his writing from Delirious New York toS,M,L,XL.1 The sharper, more perceptive, and instructive Koolhaas (thefocus of the last part of this essay), like a journalist (as he once was), focuseson the concrete (this place, this history) and not the abstract or categorical(Bigness, Urbanism). However, he is a poetic journalist in that he realizeshis material with feeling and intuition, giving us dreams that ring true.Koolhaas is at his unreductive best in the essays “Globalization,” “FieldTrip,” and “The Terrifying Beauty of the Twentieth Century,” the poem“Learning Japanese,” and especially the essays “Atlanta,” “Singapore,” and“Generic Cities,” in which most generalizations spring directly from specificexperiences and observations, rather than in essays like “Bigness” and“Whatever Happened to Urbanism?” which make absolute, monolithic, andultimately simplistic claims (even on behalf of complexity).
Koolhaas’s poetic/gnomic perception of cities can be seen to follow aline of representations including, in the English language, William Blake’s“dark, Satanic Mills,” Charles Dickens’s London, and T.S. Eliot’s TheWaste Land. It is a mistake to approach this kind of writing demanding thekind of careful historical accuracy that one would expect of conventionalor academic historical writing. Disputing the details would be pedantic, forKoolhaas, like these other writers, wants to register the larger under-lying truths and is willing to take poetic license with history, aslong as those larger perceptions are on the mark and being effectivelyserved.2
“Luna Park at Night, Coney Island,N.Y.” Koolhaas has failed todemonstrate convincingly hints of thesublime in the mere extravagance ofthis fantasy world. (Courtesy of theMonacelli Press, from Delirious NewYork, p. 40.)
1 Delirious New York: ARetroactive Manifesto forManhattan (New York: MonacelliPress, 1994; originally published byOxford University Press, 1978).Rem Koolhaas et al., S,M,L,XL,(New York: Monacelli Press, 1995).
2 In a conversation with GeorgeBaird published in Summer 1996GSD News, Koolhaas remarks thatit would be pedantic to includefootnotes in much of his writingbecause it is more like dreams thanhistory.
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All this does not mean, however, that poetic writing cannot or should notbe measured for any kind of truthfulness—that, following Roland Barthesor Jacques Derrida or Jean Baudrillard, the vitality and interest of the visionor language, not its truthfulness, are all that matter (since knowing “truth”can only be a wishful illusion). There is bad poetry as well as good in Blake,Dickens, Eliot, and Koolhaas, and the quality of the poetry depends on itsresponsibility to realities beyond the writer’s psyche, even though the bestmeasure of this quality might be not “factuality” but rather the presence orabsence of the author’s self-deception, his ability to distinguish, among hisown words, phony rhetoric from careful articulation of genuine experiences.So much of surrealist art (which has been highly influential on Koolhaas)is embarrassingly bad because it assumes that dreams are automaticallyprofound.
Koolhaas overreads and romanticizes many of the urban phenomenathat he at the same time so sharply and originally perceives: Coney Island,skyscrapers, Manhattan(ism), congestion, Radio City Music Hall, the BerlinWall, and so on. Koolhaas the contrarian, determined to be unconventional,reverses expectations that Europeans will view America condescendingly.Hating European snobbery and effeteness, he goes, at times, to an oppositeextreme and becomes a gullible, bedazzled idealizer of the American andassociated phenomena: blankness, the ordinary, the unself-conscious, theself-indulgent, the ugly, the crude, the banal. In “The Terrifying Beauty ofthe Twentieth Century,” he calls edge-city conditions “ridiculously beauti-ful” and speaks of “the arbitrary delusions of order, taste, and integrity.”3
About a late modernist development in Holland hated by many, he writes,“The Bijlmer offers boredom on a heroic scale. In its monotony, harshness,and even brutality, it is, ironically, refreshing.”4 Although one can under-stand becoming jaded with postmodernist architecture and with the burdenof European tradition to the point of angry revolt, this last response haspushed revolt into unreason.
As an iconoclast of pretensions, a despiser of moralism (from his sense ofwhat is more truly moral), and a Nietzschean who prefers vital evil to con-formist goodness, Koolhaas can be devastating but salubrious. Who else hassuch a biting sense of how architects can fool themselves into feeling heroicand powerful?
Who does not long feel an acute nostalgia for types who could, no morethan 15 years ago, condemn (or was it liberate, after all?) whole areasof alleged urban desperation, change entire destinies, speculate seriouslyon the future with diagrams of untenable absurdity, leave entireauditoriums panting over doodles left on the blackboard, manipulatepoliticians with their savage statistics—bow ties the only external signof their madness? 5
3 S,M,L,XL, 206.
4 Ibid., 871.
5 Ibid., 199.
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Who else resists knee-jerk negativism about figures like John Portman andcan therefore see complexity where others see only stereotypes to scorn?But it is in the name of this worldly realism that his romanticization, evensentimentalization, of the banal is justified, and the achievements, howeverlocalized, of recent “highbrow” architecture and urban design (for instancethat of Rafael Moneo and the city of Barcelona) are neglected.
In Delirious New York, Koolhaas’s basic romanticization is of fantasyitself. Built form that plays out fantasies of wished-for states of mindor lifestyles is glorified for its putative freedom, and in the process, thedeprivation of more reliable fulfillment than that self-indulgent fantasy canprovide is overlooked. In this way, Koolhaas participates in a key weaknessof poststructuralist thinking: Without a belief in the knowability of other-ness, desire becomes onanistic, and inner life lacks imagination’s graspingfor fulfilling engagement with the nonself. This confusion of freedom withcaprice (the Italian capriccio perhaps conveys the sense of footloose fantasybetter), this linked assumption that a predetermined (designed) environmentis a limitation, not an enablement or a vitalization, has skewed and crampedKoolhaas’s entire intellectual career. “Architecture is monstrous in theway each choice leads to the reduction of possibility. It implies a regime ofeither/or decisions often claustrophobic, even for the architect.”6 Quitethe opposite might be true: each good architectural choice leads to theexhilarating sense that the next choice has a measure of necessity to it, as thearchitectural work suppresses the architect’s mere capriciousness: the workfrees the architect from his or her determined, habitual, and merely privateself. This reflects a very different Nietzschean idea—Amor fati—you are freewhen you love what fate provides you. “Private meanings . . . insulatedagainst the corrosion of reality”7 have romantic appeal for Koolhaas.He describes Theodore Starrett’s 1911 proposal for a one-hundred-floorbuilding: “each compartment is equipped to pursue its private existentialjourney: the building has become a laboratory, the ultimate vehicle of emo-tional and intellectual adventure.”8 The equation of adventure with privatejourneys is symptomatic.
Coney Island, like other amusement parks, appears in some historicaland novelistic accounts (like Maxim Gorky’s) not only as an amusing,dazzling fantasyland of “harmless” escape, but also as a place of delusionsexploiting, for handsome profits, the stupidity, base desire, and gullibility ofthe lower and middle classes. But Coney Island looks to Koolhaas like agreat liberation from the shackles of Western rationalism, a “revolution,”9
and an expression of “genius.”10 Instead of appearing as humanly grotesqueand cruel as it must have been, Coney Island’s Midget City becomes anabstraction to Koolhaas, a springboard for philosophizing: “ ‘a miniatureMidget City Fire Department responding [every hour] to a false alarm’—effective reminder of man’s existential futility.”11 The lake at Luna Park,at the end of the Shoot-the-Chutes, according to Koolhaas’s inflated
6 Ibid., 344. A colleague hassuggested that claustrophobia mightbe evident in much of Koolhaas’sthinking.
7 Delirious New York, 104.
8 Ibid., 91.
9 Ibid., 76.
10 Ibid., 70.
11 Ibid., 49.
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interpretation, “invites descent into the regions of collective unconscious.”12
When Koolhaas refers to “the arguments respectable culture will mobilize todenigrate its probable replacement: the potentially sublime is criticized forbeing cheap and unreal,”13 he has failed to demonstrate convincingly thatthere are hints of the sublime in the extravagance of this fantasy world. (Thesublime, I would argue, entails an extraordinary degree of felt contact withsuprapsychic otherness.) What he has done is demonstrate the enchantingescapism of these ingenious inventions.
Writing about Manhattan and the creation of skyscrapers in DeliriousNew York, Koolhaas continues to press on his material a highly unifiedvision that has both the power of myth and the distortion of melodrama.Like the figures that resonate most as heroes (and sometimes also monsters)in his dreams—Wallace Harrison, Hugh Ferriss, Raymond Hood, JohnPortman, the governors of Singapore—Koolhaas is captivated by the Pro-methean desire to remake reality and supersede nature. Manhattan’s grid, as“a conceptual speculation,” “claims the superiority of mental constructionover reality . . . the subjugation, if not obliteration, of nature is its trueambition.”14 “Manhattanism is the only program where the efficiencyintersects with the sublime.”15 The reality is surely more mundane: the gridwas chosen for its simplicity and efficiency; the early skyscrapers weremotivated, in their program, their multiplication of floorplates, and—mostimportant here—their more extravagant skins, by business interests.Architecturally, Manhattan put an exciting, even exhilarating, flourish onthe making of money; the Great Gatsby flair served mammon; ostentationdominated more than Nietzschean vitalism.
Koolhaas, from Delirious New York to S,M,L,XL, has the notion thatmultiple fluid programmatic uses, compacted into large areas, create a con-dition of maximum potential for desirable life. However, this notion, like hisconcept of freedom, is based on a questionable assumption: that proximityby itself creates significant interaction—that some kind of precious vitalityis automatically obtained when working, shopping, leisure, and residingoccur in propinquity. The just as likely (if not more likely) scenario is that, inany conditions of vast scale and great congestion, people experience a life-inhibiting, demoralizing anonymity and isolation; they mill around eachother unseeingly. He writes of the edge-city condition around La Défensethat it “mysteriously works, or, at least, is full of people”16—there’s a bigdifference between the two.
A particularly flagrant romanticization/existentialization of bigness inDelirious reads, “The Monolith spares the outside world the agonies ofthe continuous changes raging inside it” (p. 101, emphasis added). There islittle reason to believe that Manhattan skyscrapers ever were significantlymixed-use, that office pods for the humanly dead transactions of the greatgray corporate world were not, as is obvious in the World Trade Center,these buildings’ overwhelming activities. Rockefeller Center a richer
12 Ibid., 39.
13 Ibid., 67.
14 Ibid., 20.
15 Ibid., 174.
16 S,M,L,XL, 205.
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environment? Certainly. The Downtown Athletic Club, with its fluidbuilding sections and mixed programs, scene of “eating oysters with boxinggloves, naked, on the nth floor”17 a setting for maximum creative living?Certainly not, unless your idea of such living is a rich man’s hedonism.
The weakening of Koolhaas’s tough-minded realism with romanticfantasy is evident in repeated stylistic tricks. Single sentences form wholeparagraphs to suggest their great weight of meaning: “Coney Island is afetal Manhattan.”18 The pulp-fiction device for conveying immediacy and“drama”—the “historical present” verb tense: “Hood meets secretly withhim at midnight”—appears frequently. Most surprisingly, the hokeynessof mystical/magical thinking, the most extreme form of unrealism, alsoappears: “The Carnarsie Indians, the original inhabitants of the peninsula,have named it Narrioch—‘Place without Shadows’—an early recognitionthat it is to be a stage for certain unnatural phenomena.”19 And, finally,we get forced, sloppy generalizations: “The sphere appears throughoutWestern architectural history, generally coinciding with revolutionarymoments.”20
One of the weaker moments in S,L,M,XL is “Bigness.” In that essay,Koolhaas is at his most abstract, apocalyptic, and megalomaniac, pro-claiming the death of architecture, falling in too easily with the forces ofhyperdevelopment (capitalism at its most rapacious), making absolutisticstatements like “Bigness is ultimate architecture”(p. 495) and “Bigness isthe last bastion of architecture”(p. 516). The essay displays the “Paranoid-Critical Method” that Koolhaas accuses Le Corbusier of using: “The realityof the external world is used for illustration and proof . . . to serve the realityof our mind.”21 In his ideas about Bigness, Generic Cities, and globalization,Koolhaas commits the logical fallacy of presenting part of the truth as thewhole, presenting certain conditions—such as those in new Chinese cities—as the conditions. Whereas it is possible to understand why certain aspectsof architecture as traditionally understood—attention to detail, crafts-manship, and relatively small spatial and formal gestures—might becomeirrelevant or impotent at huge scales, it is another thing to assume that noarchitectural refinements or subtleties are possible at that scale (considerRockefeller Center), to neglect that interiors of even the largest buildingsstill could contain refined architectural detail, and to avoid considering thatvast quantities of building will be done at small scales for the foreseeablefuture.
Koolhaas believes that the blandness, blankness, and “neutrality” of hugearchitecture is liberating because it is programmatically indeterminate,whereas it can easily be seen as oppressively dulling and depersonalizing. Hewould like to think that the characterlessness of huge buildings dialectically“exacerbates specificity.”22 Perhaps his most prominent epigram is, “Wherethere is nothing, everything is possible. Where there is architecture, nothing(else) is possible.”23 Again, this is an unfortunate confusion of freedom with
17 Ibid., 155.
18 Ibid., 30.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 71.
21 Delirious New York, 238.
22 S,M,L,XL, 511.
23 Ibid., 199.
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caprice. Koolhaas says of generic edge-city towers that “the least thesethings represent is an enormous freedom: freedom from formal coherence,freedom from having to simulate a community, freedom from behavioralpatterns.”24 Freedom as freedom from, not freedom for; freedom as arbi-trariness, action without engagement.
Strong and distinctive architecture could be defined as that which arousesand challenges us to meet it with an equal inner strength. The best buildingsdo not dominate us; they enliven us. But can any of us, turning our thoughtsto examples of what Koolhaas thinks of as huge, blank, and therefore lessrestricting architecture, imagine any such structure or complex—EmpireState Plaza in Albany, the World Trade Center in New York, edge-city officecomplexes—as anything but enervating, with little spontaneous humaninterest or content?
In addition, it is important to ask whether, in fact, Bigness does and willdominate new “urban substance” except in extreme situations like those inChina, where the population explosion forces the rapid creation of newcities (conditions, admittedly, that are expected to become more common inthe developing world). In the developed world, there has been a significantpopular reaction against large buildings; many developers want to createsmaller, more intimate scales in their attempts to meet market demand.However nostalgic and fake, New Urbanist development, as espoused byAndrés Duany and others, and endless suburban “colonial” tracts are whatAmerican consumers predominantly prefer to any vibrantly congestedmegastructure.25 Finally, it is worth seconding Richard Ingersoll’s point26
that Bigness means surrender to “bidness” (Texan for “business”) morethan, as Koolhaas says, “surrender to technologies; to engineers, con-tractors, manufacturers; to politics; to others . . . a realignment with neutral-ity.”27 Big bland structures communicate not “neutrality,” but indifferenceto anything but making money.
Before I turn to Koolhaas’s enormous contributions to an understandingof new urban conditions, “Bigness” brings me to one last aspect of Koolhaas’swriting: the general absence of people except as abstractions, as atoms ina spectacle of larger, impersonal forces. Koolhaas’s view of people is as iffrom a great height, so that they appear as ants, flowing in masses, engagedin generic activities—shopping, working, recreating, and residing—mobsat Coney Island, crowds moving on escalators and ramps. (Koolhaas ismoonstruck by circulation in itself.) When he confesses the “primitive factof simply liking asphalt, traffic, neon, crowds, tension, the architecture ofothers, even,”28 the impersonal dominates. Those individuals that do appearin his writing—for example, Portman, Hood, and Ferriss—are dramatized,mythologized, and made larger than life. Seldom is there a sense of the dailyexperiences of ordinary people or the consciousness of individuals—the onlyreal locus, one might argue, of life—the kind of sense one gets in JaneJacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
25 Koolhaas shares, withoutqualification, the diagnosis of theessayists in Variations on a ThemePark, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York:Hill and Wang, 1992) and culturaltheorists like Jean Baudrillard andGuy Debord, that authenticity isincreasingly elusive in anenvironment of more and moresimulacra. But Koolhaas retainsmore hope than these thinkers in thepossibility of honestly expressing, inbuilt form, the conditions ofmodernity, however blank thearchitectural results might be.
26 Richard Ingersoll, “Bidness,”ANY 10: 5.
27 S,M,L,XL, 514.
24 Sanford Kwinter, ed., RemKoolhaas: Conversations withStudents (Houston: Rice UniversitySchool of Architecture; New York:Princeton Architectural Press, 1996),40–41.
28 Ibid., 208.
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When Koolhaas describes the relocation of hundreds of thousands ofSingapore shantytown inhabitants into high-rise apartments, there isonly a generalized sense of the violence of this act and of people’s apparentadaptation to this extreme change. He speaks with exhilaration else-where of “chickens on the fortieth floor” of housing near Hong Kong, with-out seeming to consider the nasty implications of this for health andhappiness.29
A Sartrean nausea with the human and certainly the humanistic appearsin many of Koolhaas’s essays. He associates humanism with the soft, senti-mental, and deluded. The Nietzsche in him wants something much morefierce, even at some cost. This side of Koolhaas likes and wants to playwith the heartless Big Boys: the developers, the mad Corbusier who wouldflatten all to create endless sterile Villes Radieuses, John Portman trying tomake Atlanta a monument to his self-proclaimed genius, the governors ofSingapore wiping out hundreds of thousands of poor people’s dwellings.Koolhaas is drawn to their daring, extremism, and power. This Koolhaasloves the clean impersonality of machines and sees in the Rockettes’ linedance “an exhilarating surrender of individuality to automatism.”30 Hepresents the impersonal and anonymous as comforting, a retreat from socialstress: “Bigness . . . offers degrees of serenity. . . . Bigness is impersonal: thearchitect is no longer condemned to stardom.”31 This Koolhaas includes inthe same book a picture of a hand (his, probably) imperiously peeling awayblocks of old Parisian urban fabric from a model,32 even after referring to“the harshness, the shock, the obvious insanity”33 of Le Corbusier’s similarattempts. This Koolhaas is fascinated by pornography, the subjugation ofwomen in male fantasies. And this Koolhaas is Faustian, Promethean, eagerto create alternatives to nature, to be God’s rival.
“Sick unto death” with intellectual and moral conventionality and self-righteousness, this Koolhaas might be sick also with that side of himself thatis morally fastidious, overly sensitive, highly cultured, an inheritor of theDutch refinement represented by the Vermeer picture of a woman playing aharpsicord that is placed, for ironic contrast, among images of his antigen-teel, antibourgeois Villa Dall’Ava in Paris.34 This Koolhaas, like the Marquisde Sade, Jean Genet, and Henry Miller, is drawn with excitement to therealm beyond morality, quickened by the horrifying, dramatizing it as hisdiction on the erasing of old Singapore—“a convulsion of uprooting”35
(emphasis added)—makes evident. In S,M,L,XL, this Koolhaas includespictures, from Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s film Un Chien Andalou, of awoman’s eyeball being sliced36 and seems sympathetic to Georges Bataille’sideas of the “ ‘sacred’ animal world based on disorder, cruelty, excess”37
to which he refers just before he proclaims, “The [Berlin] wall suggestedthat architecture’s beauty was directly proportional to its horror.”38 ThisKoolhaas is fascinated by what he loathes: he spends many hours inter-viewing people in Atlanta architectural firms whose practices appall him.
“Asian City of Tomorrow,” SingaporePlanning and Urban Research(S.P.U.R.) Group. Koolhaas’s ideal ofthe culture of congestion. (S.P.U.R.,Reprinted in S,M,L,XL, p.1056.Courtesy of the Monacelli Press.)
29 Rem Koolhaas, “Understandingthe New Urban Condition: TheProject on the City,” GSD News(Winter–Spring 1996), 14.
30 Delirious New York, 214.
31 S,M,L,XL, 512–13.
32 Ibid., 1108. Several pictures ofhands holding models in S,M,L,XLare quite similar to iconic images ofLe Corbusier’s hands doing thesame. Koolhaas also imperiouslyappropriates quotations as if theywere part of his own writing, with noidentification of writers or sourcesexcept in footnotes, and he italicizesothers’ words without saying “myitalics.”
33 Ibid., 1102.
34 Ibid., 142.
35 Ibid., 1037.
36 Ibid., 233, 235.
37 Ibid., 232.
38 Ibid., 226.
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Koolhaas’s possible need to break from an enervating Dutch refinementmight also help explain his attraction to the ordinary, the ugly, the banal—his wish to exist prior to evil as a simple, lowbrow guy. (His S,M,L,XLdictionary quotes Jodie Foster: “My dream in life is to wear sweats and goto a mall.”39) This part of Koolhaas shares attitudes with Robert Venturiand Denise Scott Brown of Learning from Las Vegas, with the Pop artists,and with the poststructuralists who reject the high-/low-culture distinction.Whitman-like, he celebrates “the spontaneous urbanism of the masses.”40
Most startlingly, we see his longing for lost Eden in the essay “Last Apples”:“When we realized that we identified 100% with these programmatic enter-prises that intervene drastically in the cultural and political landscape ofEurope, we wondered whether—paradoxically by playing with the real fireof Bigness, even in Europe—it could be again possible to become innocentabout architecture, to use architecture to articulate the new, to imagine—nolonger paralyzed by knowledge, experience, correctness—the end of thePotemkin world.”41 This confession of a momentary wish to be free ofresponsibility, to be swept away by larger forces, contains an underlyingsadness at the impossibility of being spontaneous, childlike, ignorant,American.42
This brings us to the need to see the other sides of Koolhaas: the Euro-pean, the refined, the highbrow, the man revolted by crudity, cruelty, andpower. He is—and this explains his lasting interest—a man of many selves.
Koolhaas participates to some extent in a mode of contemporaryhistorical/cultural thinking that seems to predominate in recent “culturalstudies” of cities—writing of unrelenting negativism and cynicism, one thatstares down and exposes the worst in the harshest possible light, that seescorruption, greed, and callousness as pervasive in the recent developmentof cities. These writers include Mike Davis on Los Angeles (City of Quartz,1990), David Harvey on Baltimore and Thatcher’s London (in ArchitecturalPractices in the Nineties, 1996), and Neil Smith and Christine Boyer onNew York (in Michael Sorkin’s Variations on a Theme Park, 1992). On thesurface, the tone of this writing is cool and factual, but the conditions beingpresented are quite disturbing. There are heavy black ironies in just “statingthe facts.” Beneath the surface are shock, disgust, rage, and despair. Overall,the attitude is one of radical political toughness.
The strength of this writing is its determination to see the underbellyof misleading appearances, no matter how unpleasant the experience. (Itsweaknesses are two: it has no lightness—it lugubriously neglects wholerealms of positive experience, such as the harmless pleasure one can take inDisneyland; and it offers no hope, no constructive, realistic resistances oralternatives.) Koolhaas shares this determination; he presents historicalnarratives (such as the story of John Portman building in Atlanta) that areneutral on the surface and caustic just beneath. But unlike these writers,Koolhaas’s responses are often multiple, including awareness of whatever
39 Ibid., 70.
40 Delirious New York, 70.
41 S,M,L,XL, 668.
42 Cynics will read this as arationalization for wanting to chasethe big bucks of developers.
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might be impressive, heroic, and creative in what is also grotesque (likeSingapore’s tabula rasa). He espouses “lite urbanism”43 and is, as a writer,often playful and humorous;44 self-important seriousness is what he thinkswe should have learned, from the heroic modernists, to avoid. AndKoolhaas is not merely cynically detached; he dares to hope that one canparticipate meaningfully, if modestly, in the forces of contemporary urbandevelopment. For that very reason, he is attacked by the bleaker urbanistsfor being opportunistic or naive: How can one expect to “inflect”—to useSanford Kwinter’s word—the course of a tidal wave? Why surf it at all?45
Koolhaas’s writing is multivocal. The same sentence can seem caustic,celebratory, and factual: “This is hideous . . . this is exciting . . . this issimply the way things are.” Since Koolhaas more often embraces “both/and” than chooses “either/or,” single perspective responses to his ideas areoff the mark; simple approval or disapproval of his “positions” will usuallyneglect that there are conflicting sides to his thinking. Yet there can beslipperiness in this complexity, a defensive maneuvering to stand on noone spot for very long, a compulsion to be “free” even if that forces self-contradiction.
To string out some of his many contradictions: Koolhaas wants to be(or is) both American and European, practical and theoretical, lowbrowand highbrow, yielding and controlling, meek and powerful, innocentand worldly, personal and impersonal, individualistic and anonymous,hedonistically or rebelliously amoral and puritanically moral.46 “A foolishconsistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (Emerson). Koolhaas, speakingof the Generic City, writes, “Strangely, nobody has thought that cumula-tively the endless contradictions of these interpretations prove the richnessof the Generic City”47—or of Koolhaas’s perceptions.
“Sometimes it is important to find out what the city is—instead of whatit was, or what is should be.”48 This, the first sentence of the Atlanta essay,encapsulates what Koolhaas does best. I will try to demonstrate belowthat many, if not most, of his perceptions of new urban conditions andproductions are exceptionally clear and convincing: one has that “I knewthat was true, but never could put it into words” feeling. His attitude ismore one of fascination than of evaluation. Koolhaas’s “poem,” “LearningJapanese”49—a series of detailed anecdotes and sociological observationsfrom his first trip to Japan, boldly uncensored—illustrates how Koolhaas,when he focuses, as poets usually do, on immediate experience, writesmore vividly and allows the violation of (or indifference to) any totalizingpolemical ideas.
Similarly, “The Generic City” is a playfully messy soup of astute observa-tions presented in an unpredictable diversity of tones. Koolhaas’s primarymotivation seems to be provocation and the subversion of conventionalperceptions. Although he hardly mentions any specific places—as a socialscientist interested in proof would—we know full well what he is talking
43 S,M,L,XL, 971.
44 See especially the exuberantsarcasm of sections 9 and 11 of “TheGeneric City” in S,M,L,XL.
45 Sanford Kwinter, “The Building,the Book, and the NewPastoralism,” ANY 9:22. It is worthnoting that Koolhaas has said, “Wehave been careful to approach . . .new alignments with powerful forcesin moral terms. . . . We are involvedin operations that we think deservesupport . . . We have no projects inChina, because so far I haven’tdiscovered a single project I wouldlike to be involved in personally.”Nancy Levinson, “The Future City:A Conversation with RemKoolhaas,” Graphis 304 (July–August 1996): 75.
46 George Baird has set forth hisown set of four “paradoxes” inKoolhaas’s work. See “RemKoolhaas in Conversation withGeorge Baird,” GSD News (Summer1996): 49.
47 S,M,L,XL, 1256.
48 Ibid., 832.
49 Ibid., 88–110.
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about and when he is on or off the mark. He is mainly on. The nature of theoverwhelming similarities of cities worldwide is his focus. His hard-nosed(or nose-thumbing) main point is that these similarities express currentauthentic articulations of life and that any individual identities of cities—derived from clichés and artificial resuscitation of their histories—arerelatively inauthentic. The reality is not now the historical identity butthe packaging and selling of that identity: “Paris can only become moreParisian—it is already on its way to becoming hyper-Paris, a polishedcaricature.”50 More “authentic” urban activities now occur at Paris’speriphery.
He begins with the argument that I have criticized above: “The strongerthe identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, inter-pretation, renewal, contradiction.”51 The alternative that Koolhaas does notconsider—that strong identities can and should provoke strong responsesand that the lack of identity provokes mere caprice—leads him into cele-brating the Generic City as, in principle, the stage for freedom. However, bythe third page of the essay, Koolhaas has begun forgetting this principle anddescribing the Generic City for what it is, not only refreshingly authentic,but also hideously dead. “It is a place of weak and distended sensations, fewand far between emotions. . . . The Generic City is sedated. . . . The serenityof the Generic City is achieved by evacuation of the public realm. . . . Itsmain attraction is its anomie.”52 This helps us realize that for Koolhaas, thecity of efficiency, dedicated only to business, is nothing like his Manhattanof the teens, twenties, and thirties or like Fumihiko Maki’s metabolist city ofthe sixties, places of fertile chaos, maximum interaction, and existentialintensity.
The remainder of the essay, aside from a few moments of melodramaticexaggeration, is witty, sharp, and often original diagnosis. Consider theseobservations:
(1) The Generic City (I will abbreviate it as G.C.) is unified by “controlledneatness, a moralistic assertion of good intentions” (p. 1253). Surely weare familiar with the demoralizing “Stay off!” hygiene of litter-free and overmanicured lawns surrounding corporate towers. (2) (Bad) public art isprevalent in the G.C. as a feeble attempt to revive streets. (3) “Decks,bridges, tunnels, and motorways—a huge proliferation of the paraphernaliaof connection—[are] frequently draped with ferns and flowers as if to wardoff original sin” (p. 1254). Planting and landscaping are the G.C.’s patheticattempt to “beautify” by returning the natural/real to the city—with thelaughable effect of making nature seem fake. (4) Each G.C. has a quartercalled “Lipservice,” which turns the city’s history into a consumer com-modity—an observation that pervades Variations on a Theme Park aswell, but without Koolhaas’s biting humor: “History returns not as farcehere, but as service: costumed merchants (funny hats, bare midriffs,veils) voluntarily enact the conditions (slavery, tyranny, disease, poverty,
50 Ibid., 1248.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 1250–51.
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colony)—that their nation once went to war to abolish” (p. 1257).(5) “Each Generic City has a waterfront, not necessarily with water . . . Heretourists congregate in droves around a cluster of stalls” (p. 1257). (6) Hotelsand airports are becoming cities unto themselves, now providing places forbusiness and leisure activities, as well as shopping. (It’s a sign of flexibilitythat Koolhaas’s feeling here is that this “implies imprisonment” [p. 1260],in contrast to his glorification of huge mixed-use structures in “Bigness.”)(7) The typical colors and shoddy postmodern design and constructiontechniques of building in G.C.s are presented in satirical detail: for example,new building depends more than ever “on the curtain wall industry, on evermore effective adhesives and sealants that turn each building into a mixtureof straitjacket and oxygen tent . . . a triumph of glue over the integrity ofmaterials” (p. 1261). (8) Atria—big empty spaces—are used as substitutesfor impressive architectural substance.
This list of sharp observations could continue for another page. Theyhave their inherent revelatory value, but they also help dispel the commoncritique of Koolhaas that he yields to contemporary urban conditionsuncritically. The key distinction, of course, is between accepting as real andaccepting as desirable. It is Koolhaas’s driven, often solitary pursuit of anawareness of what is newly real in cities and his insistence on opposing ourneed not to see these realities that leads to the mistaken sense that he likes allof what he sees.
Nothing could prove this as well as the final paragraph of “GenericCities,” in which Koolhaas imagines the production of the G.C. as the play-ing in reverse of a Hollywood Bible story movie—from a wild, teeming,diverse, chaotic bazaar to that scene evacuated, barren, and lifeless. ForKoolhaas, the city as it should be is the first; as it is, painfully, the second. Ina public conversation with George Baird, Koolhaas tried to clarify this keyissue: “Alignment doesn’t mean, for me, that we take an uncritical positiontoward the phenomena that interest us. It’s possible to want to respond to atendency that seems triumphant, without necessarily being euphoric aboutit. In our work, we try to combine criticism of a phenomenon with an abilityto work within and parallel to it.”53 Reasonable people certainly can anddo disagree with Koolhaas about how helpless design professionals are toinfluence the dominant modes of development and about how significantexceptions to those modes are, but it is also possible to see reason inKoolhaas’s assertion that unless you accept most of the terms the worldpresents you, you cannot hope to have any effects at all.
“Atlanta,” presented as a talk in 1987 and revised in 1994, seems to bethe seed of the 1994 “Generic Cities” essay; Atlanta is a prime example of aGeneric City. In the halls of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD),discussions of this essay center on whether Koolhaas likes or dislikesAtlanta: some are unsure, others sure but with opposite conclusions. Thereality, I think, is that the terms like and dislike are not pertinent in this case;
53 “Rem Koolhaas in Conversationwith George Baird,” GSD News(Summer 1996): 50.
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Koolhaas is, rather, intensely interested in Atlanta, feels mainly wonderabout it, and whatever evaluations he has change subtly from sentence tosentence. Certainly, there is plenty of sarcasm: “Atlanta has culture, or atleast it has a Richard Meier museum” (p. 835). “In a book on John Portmanby John Portman, John Portman writes, ‘I consider architecture frozenmusic’ ” (p. 839). But in presenting most details on the city, his tone is,“That’s just the way it is; it’s what we have to work with.” The realizationthat Koolhaas loves his cities congested and chaotic like Piranesi’s Rome webring in largely from outside this essay’s context.
Again, astute observations proliferate: “[Atlanta’s] strongest contextualgivens are vegetal and infrastructural: forests and roads. Atlanta is not acity; it is a landscape” (p. 835). “Atlanta has nature, both original andimproved—a sparkling, perfect nature where no leaf is ever out of place.Its artificiality sometimes makes it hard to tell whether you are outsideor inside: somehow, you’re always in nature” (p. 836). “The vegetal isreplacing the urban: a panorama of seamless artificiality, so organized,lush, welcoming, that it sometimes seems like another interior, a fluidcollective domain, glimpsed through tinted glass, venetian blinds, and theother distancing devices of the alienated architecture—almost accessible,like a seductive fairy tale” (p. 855). Koolhaas’s sensibility here surelydeserves to be called poetic, catching telling complexities of experience(“glimpsed through tinted glass”), of feeling (“you’re always in nature”—metaphorically), or of attitude (“seamless artificiality, so organized, lush,welcoming”). “No leaf is ever out of place,” however, conveys the under-tone of stewing emotions: hatred, amusement, chagrin, horror, disgust, andso on. Other cutting observations: Portman’s reinvention of the atrium is “acontainer of artificiality that allows its occupants to avoid daylight for-ever—a hermetic interior, sealed against the real” (p. 841); designers of thenew downtown towers don’t care about the towers being a complementarygroup—they want them to compete; postmodern architecture, dominantbecause it can be made quickly and cheaply, makes inspiration an outdatedconcept.
Perhaps the most interesting and complex of Koolhaas’s responses in“Atlanta” is to the new breed of architects he encountered on a tour ofAtlanta firms. These are the architects of postmodernism,
a new form of professionalism, of architectural education, not one thatcreates knowledge or culture, but a technical training that creates a newunquestioning, a new efficacy in applying new, streamlined dogma . . .[These architects] no longer create order, resist chaos, imagine coherence,fabricate entities. From form givers they have become facilitators. InAtlanta, architects have aligned themselves with the uncontrollable, havebecome its official agents, instruments of the unpredictable: from imposingto yielding in one generation. Working on the emergence of new urban
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conditions, they have discovered a vast new realm of potential andfreedom to go rigorously with the flow, architecture/urbanism as a form ofletting go. (pp. 847–9)
These comments are amazingly multivocal. “Technical training . . .unquestioning . . . dogma . . . facilitators”—clearly these are caustic words.But what about that last sentence? Doesn’t it show admiration and a touchof envy? One must here articulate and critique Koolhaas’s “position” care-fully. Yes, there is some envy and ironic admiration for architects who havethe chance to create huge swatches of urban substance. Yes, these architectsare the “realists” who have no illusions about where “the flow” is andthe possibilities of resisting it. Yet when one looks back at Koolhaas’sdescription of the work they are doing, it is unequivocally negative: “Themodel was a complete inversion of metropolis as we know it—not thesystematic assembly of a critical mass but its systematic dismantlement, aseemingly absurd dispersion of concentration. Alarmingly, it suggested thatthe elements that had once made the city would now cease to work if theygot too close together [congested]” (p. 848). Then when Koolhaas refers totheir “vast new realm of potential and freedom” (that misguiding wordagain)—unquestionably, the market and the developers, not the architects,are calling the shots—his realism turns mushy. (A truer statement of hisbelief appears in “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?”: “The only legitimaterelationship that architects can have with the subject of chaos is to take theirrightful place in the army of those devoted to resist it, and fail.”54 He ismultivocal.
Not content with convincing us that new urban conditions exist,Koolhaas, despiser of nostalgia, wants us to be excited by their potential, toengage us. So he sometimes romanticizes: “Each site in Atlanta is exposedto a theoretical carpet bombardment of ‘centers,’ possibilities hoveringsomewhere, waiting to be activated by a mysterious process—only vaguelyrelated to money” (p. 852), but the not-so-mysterious show runs for themaximization of profits—what else? Of Portman’s renderings for a newexurb: “Is this the reappearance of the sublime? . . . A post-cataclysmicnew beginning that elaborates revolutionary forms in liberated relation-ships, justified, finally, by no other reason than their appeal to our senses?”(p. 856). Koolhaas’s inclusion of question marks here connotes his aware-ness that his speculations have turned footloose. We have seen thismelodramatic streak in Koolhaas’s other writing, and it is not absent fromeven his best essays.55
Koolhaas’s Singapore essay, one of his most recent and connected to amultiyear project (started in 1996) of studying urban conditions in Asiawith Harvard GSD students, might be his finest. Like Delirious New York,it is a richly informative and detailed historical narrative. But unlikeDelirious, it contains very little pseudopoetic inflation. It expresses a poised
“Razed plane (in Singapore) as thebasis for a genuinely newbeginning.” “Heroic . . . Promethean. . . courageous . . . merciless”scraping of old urban fabric.(Courtesy of the Monacelli Press, fromS,M,L,XL, p.1030.)
54 S,M,L,XL, 969.
55 See also, in “Atlanta,” his forcedcomparison of Portman’s atria withpanopticons: “Everyone becomeseveryone else’s guard—architecturalequivalent of Sartre’s No Exit, ‘Hellis other people’ ” (S,M,L,XL, 841).No, if anything, the atrium spectacleis a kick even to traveling salesmen,at least more so than its alternative.
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and balanced set of attitudes, primarily a resistance to positive or negativejudgments for the sake of preserving, in focus, the simple being of its sub-jects. To preserve the being of Singapore, however, is for Koolhaas apolemical act, an assertion against the western intellectual’s knee-jerk scornfor its ways: “Our refusal to read Singapore on its own terms is frivolous:our most sophisticated reflections on the contemporary condition of the cityare completely disconnected from the operational.”56 The essay is not free ofjudgments about Singapore, but Koolhaas makes a constant effort to makesure they are not blinkering.
Needless to say, the most salient fact about Singapore since 1960 is itsradical urban renewal: its near total destruction of the old and its rapidmodernization. This “delirious transformation” excites Koolhaas as“heroic,” “Promethean,” “courageous.” The power and unstoppable driveof the government seem intoxicating. But its cruelty also makes it appalling.Koolhaas sees both. The bureaucrats of Singapore achieved somethingmonumental: “saving” the population from living in filth, disease, andpoverty. The price paid was loss of certain freedoms. But Koolhaas is carefulto keep open the possibility that the people might have willingly gone alongwith their losses: “It is difficult to identify what precisely is unfree, howand where the exact repression occurs, to what extent its magnetic field—the unusual cohesion of its inhabitants—is imposed, or more ambiguously,the result of a ‘deal,’ a perceived common interest” (p. 1015). This is “theAsian factor”—the relative lack of the western insistence on individualautonomy, the ability to put the good of the group first—that makes com-parisons with urban renewal in the United States invalid. Singapore raisesquestions for Koolhaas that are being raised more and more urgently bypolitical theorists writing on the United States: “whether democracy pro-motes or erodes social stability; whether free speech is worth the culturaltrash it also produces” (p. 1017).
Although lacking a sense of individual lives, Koolhaas has an uncom-promised sense of the violence that must have been done to nearly 270,000families between 1965 and 1988: “The leap from the Chinese shophouse—typology that packs store, factory, family living quarters together in a singleblock around a courtyard—to Singapore’s high-rise containers is . . . merci-less . . . because the new inhabitants, cut off from connective networksof family relationships, tradition, habits, are abruptly forced into anothercivilization” (p. 1021). Koolhaas’s vision might never be more clear andbalanced than here: “The entire operation ambiguously combines the ful-fillment of some basic human needs with the systematic erosion of others—tradition, fixity, continuity—a perpetuum mobile where what is given istaken away in a convulsion of uprooting, a state of permanent disorienta-tion” (pp. 1035, 1037). “Tradition, fixity, continuity”—there is no sarcasmabout these words this time. When Koolhaas writes of a leftover remnant ofold Singapore, he does so with respect for its “authentic subversiveness . . .
“[T]he process of erasure couldbe spread over time in asurreptitious way—an invisiblereality. We could graduallyscrape . . .” Mission GrandAxe, La Défense, Paris, France,Competition, 1991. Daring,power, “harshness,” and“insanity” and in one designplan. (Photograph by HansWerlemann from S,M,L,XL,pp. 1108–9. Courtesy of theMonacelli Press.)
56 S,M,L,XL, 1013.
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against the overwhelming quantity of hygienic newness around it. . . . Itseems ‘tropical’ in the sense of dirty, lazy, corrupt, drugged—absolutelyother” (p. 1039). There can be no doubt toward which end of the con-tinuum from hygiene to dirtiness the romanticizer of Coney Island prefers.He bemoans the city’s having “adopted only the mechanistic, rationalisticprogram and developed it to an unprecedented perfection . . . by sheddingmodernism’s artistic, irrational, uncontrollable, subversive ambitions—revolution without agony” (p. 1041). Koolhaas is an existentialist. Hevalues authenticity and the gritty mess of spontaneous life even as he seesthose values becoming more and more inevitably out of reach.
When Koolhaas writes, in the Singapore essay, about the ideas and workof Fumihiko Maki and the other Japanese metabolists in the sixties, hefinally clarifies for us what ideal he has been implicitly holding all along:an architecture/urban planning that accepts the need, at least in Asia,for radically large-scale, efficient, low-cost new building (to house theexploding population) but without sacrificing spontaneity, community, andheterogeneity—all that “the culture of congestion” meant in Delirious NewYork. There is no criticism or ambiguity in the paragraphs on Maki’sKoolhaas-like ideas.57 And when Koolhaas looks at some of Singapore’slarge-scale mixed-use projects built after its housing need had beenaddressed, he sees actual built form that approximates to his realistic idealof “a modern-movement Chinatown” (p. 1067), built in a now authenticway and fostering maximum urban vitality. Beauty, form, detail, dura-bility—all these are outdated and irrelevant in this program-driven, ever-in-revision architecture. I doubt if one could find a passage in Koolhaas ofsuch unmitigated approbation as this:
In the late sixties, Singapore architects . . . crystallized, defined, and builtambitious examples of vast modern socles teeming with the mosttraditional forms of Asian street life, extensively connected by multiplelinkages, fed by modern infrastructures and sometimes Babel-likemultilevel car parks, penetrated by proto-atriums, supporting mixed-usetowers: they are containers of urban multiplicity, heroic captures andintensifications of urban life in architecture, rare demonstrations of thekind of performance that could and should be the norm in architecture butrarely is, giving an alarming degree of plausibility to the myths of themultilevel city and the megastructure that “we,” in infinitely more affluentcircumstances, have discredited and discarded. (p. 1073)
Only the ingenuous “alarming” and “myths” hedge this approbation; “we”are clearly fools to have dismissed this model. It seems likely that Koolhaas’sexperiences of Maki’s book and these projects were prime influences inhis intellectual career. The questions provoked by his sarcasm about “we”who have rejected these models remain unanswered: Do “circumstances”
57 There is also, in the words ofMaki that Koolhaas quotes, a level ofabstraction that matches Koolhaas’sin “Bigness,” a vision of the city as“a dynamic field of interrelatedforces,” “‘a pattern of events’ morethan . . . a composition of objects,”in which people are seen from aregrettable distance, “pumpingthrough like life blood” (ibid., 1044,1049).
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elsewhere allow this sort of project to work? (And does this sort of projectreally work? Has that been carefully studied?)
No sooner has Koolhaas suggested that Singapore has provided idealmodels for urban megastructures than he draws back, determinedlyrealistic, to see once again what is lost in the larger context of these isolatedgains. “The resistance of these assembled buildings to forming a recogniz-able ensemble creates, Asian or not, a condition where the exterior—theclassic domain of the urban—appears residual, leftover, overcharged withcommercial effluence from hermetic interiors, hyper-densities of trivialcommandments, public art, the reconstructed tropicality of landscaping”(p. 1075). Koolhaas supports designing interiors as if they were exteriorpublic realms, but he is unwilling to shut his eyes to what the outside thenbecomes.58
But more; eyes opened wider:
Singapore reveals a cruel contradiction: huge increases in matter, theoverall effect increasingly unreal . . . doomed to remain a Potemkinmetropolis. That is not a local problem. We can make things, but notnecessarily make them real. Singapore represents the point where thevolume of the new overwhelms the volume of the old, has become too bigto be animated by it, has not yet developed its own vitality.Mathematically, the third millennium will be an experiment in this formof soullessness (unless we wake up from our 30-year sleep of self-hatred).(p. 1077)
Is this a stunning reversal? A call for history’s revival in the present? Awaffling? No, I think it is, rather, Koolhaas as poet of perception winningthe struggle with his other selves. Creation ex nihilo, the putative freedomof the tabula rasa, a constantly misleading idea during Koolhaas’s career, isnow seen to end as well as start with emptiness. Places fabricated out ofwhole cloth to support some predetermined pattern of activity seem unreal.Much that is uncontrolled must enter in, organically, or the creation has nootherness, is forced and phony. Now that the delirium of “building-out” isover, Singapore is trying to remake its image as place of fun and leisure,adding beaches to its shoreline, making its landscape “stand for” “thetropical,” adding Chinese ornamentation to its high rises. In such imposedidentities, Koolhaas now finds no identity at all: “Singapore is a city withoutqualities” (p. 1077). The capricious Barthesian sign isn’t enough; China-town and the megaprojects must somehow be integrated.
So what would it mean for “us” to “wake up from our 30-year sleep ofself-hatred”? It would mean, above all, being able to think as Koolhaas hasdone in this essay—rigorously looking to find the world as it newly is,perceiving it freshly, without wishful illusions. It would mean learningto make do with what is or what is about to be, such as the creation of
58 Koolhaas’s characterization isyet more harsh in a talk he gave atHarvard in the spring of 1993:“Singapore was . . . a petri dish ofChinese Stalinist modernismfollowed by Chinesepostmodernism.” Rem Koolhaas,“Architecture and Globalization,”GSD News (Winter–Spring 1994):48.
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“countless” Chinese cities based on the model of Singapore. And in makingdo, Koolhaas would like to think that one might enable some degree ofmaking real, or else he would have given up making architecture and doingurban planning. In a talk he gave at Harvard in the fall of 1995, he said, “Weare increasingly confronted with utterly irrational problems, problems thatwe no longer have the luxury of refusing . . . We should be able, when giventhe impossibly difficult problem of designing in two weeks a city for threemillion people, to respond with vigor and skill.”59 He is very skeptical, butnot hopeless, that architects and urbanists can avoid making Potemkinvillages.
This essay was originally published in the Journal of Architectural Education Vol. 51No. 1 (September 1997).
59 Koolhaas, “Understanding theNew Urban Condition,” 13.
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“BIGNESS” IN CONTEXTPOST URBANISM Some regressive tendencies in
Rem Koolhaas’ urban theoryJORGE OTERO-PAILOS (2000)
Rem Koolhaas’ views on urbanism have been taken up as a “renewedcommitment to the American city.” Bill Lacy, executive director and jurorof the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which Koolhaas received in 2000, laudedthe architect during the award ceremony for his ability to “continuallyblur the line between urban design and architecture.” “Bigness,” the mostpopular of his theories, states that beyond a certain scale buildings can beconsidered autonomous urban sectors, independent of the context in whichthey sit. Although Koolhaas situates Bigness formally and historically as anextension of the American City Parks tradition, a more careful comparisonof the two reveals that Bigness ignores the democratic components of itsalleged precursor.
Koolhaas speaks of urban planning as a thing of the past. Since buildingshave a life span of about twenty years, to think of urban planning in terms offormal relationships articulated architecturally in space is obsolete. Contextis also seen as a thing of the past. To insist on the right of certain buildings toexist, to insist on the relevance of context, is to apply outdated conceptualstructures that increase the rift between the discipline of urbanism and thereal forces shaping the present. Moreover, old theories of urbanism, inso-far as they are the wrong tools for looking at the present, are consideredrepressive veils keeping us from an authentic experience of the real. History,context, and specificity are all seen as concealing reality.1 In calling for afresh look at the real, Koolhaas appeals to models of nineteenth centuryobjectivity.2 The reality, he claims, is that what we call cities today arereally a series of “city islands” grafted onto the larger field of the “un-city.”Koolhaas proposes the theory of Bigness as a response to the need to developnew taxonomies and models that will help us understand and operate in thecontemporary metropolis.
However, Koolhaas does not provide a systematic and comprehensivetheory of urbanism, nor does he explicitly describe the research method-ology that led him to the conclusions he draws from Bigness. This factoraccounts in part for his failure to influence the urban planning profession.It also makes it difficult to synthesize his views into a simple summary. Hisreflections are purposefully impressionistic and fragmentary. Even thoughhe alludes to the forces he considers central to urban transformation, hedoes not deal with them in any significant depth. For example, the familiarfactors of exploding demographics and of the late-capitalist economy are
1 “The irony is that the obsessionwith history and specificity hasbecome an obstacle in therecognition of these new realities.”Rem Koolhaas, as quoted inAlejandro Zaera Polo, “The DayAfter: A Conversation With RemKoolhaas,” in El Croquis, n. 79(1996), p. 19.
2 “To disentangle the resultinglandscape requires the combinedinterpretative ability and 19th-century classificatory stamina ofChampollion, Schliemann, Darwin,and Freud.” See Rem Koolhaas,“The Terrifying Beauty of theTwentieth Century,” in RemKoolhaas et al., S,M,L,XL (NewYork: The Monacelli Press, 1995),p. 206.
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deployed but without any scientific evidence to map the specific channels ofinteraction between these factors and urban tissue. Koolhaas argues thatthese developments challenge the disciplines of architecture and urbanismand point towards a new kind of synthetic practice guided by the generaltheory of Bigness.
THE CITY AS ISLAND: RESURRECTING A DEFUNCT MODEL
In modern times our understanding of urbanism was probably firstarticulated by Ildefonso Cerda, who in 1867 coined the now commonword “Urbanización” (urbanization). Cerda argued that the extension ofinfrastructural services associated with city living (such as sewage, gaslighting, and the telegraph) to the country gave rise to new bureaucraciesand professionals whose competencies extended well beyond urbancenters. Cerda’s process of “urbanización” accounted for the increasingphysical, social, and political homogenization of the rural and theurban.3
Since his school days, Koolhaas has been fascinated by the loss of theclassical “closed” city to the more open urban form of the contemporarymetropolis. In a rather short but telling essay entitled “Imagining Nothing-ness” Koolhaas credits his teacher O.M. Ungers for describing the possi-bility of resurrecting the traditional city within the larger metropolis.Ungers’ realization that most European historic centers “float” in largermetropolitan contexts, gave Koolhaas the insight that:
In such a model of urban solid and metropolitan void, the desire forstability and the need for instability are no longer incompatible. Theycan be pursued as two separate enterprises with invisible connections.Through the parallel actions of reconstruction and destruction, such acity becomes an archipelago of architectural islands floating in a post-architectural landscape of erasure where what once was a city is now ahighly charged nothingness. 4
Koolhaas uses the traditional Nolli plan analysis of urban tissue as solidand void, figure and ground, to describe the metropolis. His descriptionis more figurative and projective than objective and researched. It is aconclusion more than an observation. The fact that he would allow himselfto consider the great expanse of metropolitan fabric as a void in spite of itsvibrant reality and presence denotes, to say the least, a value judgment.Elsewhere, he would make this estimation more explicit: “If you look at ourproject for Melun-Sénart, there were explicit judgments of contemporaryarchitecture: it is mostly ‘merde’ [shit].”5 But he does not simply mean thatthis architecture looks bad. For him, it is bad. It is a form of institutional andsemantic oppression. The coercive aspect of architecture is something hefeels is constitutive of its mission.
3 See Ildefonso Cerda’s TeoríaGeneral de la Urbanización(Madrid, 1867), Vol. 1, parte 1,Introducción, p. 1.
4 Rem Koolhaas, “ImaginingNothingness,” in S,M,L,XL, p. 201.
5 Alejandro Zaera Polo, “FindingFreedoms: Conversations with RemKoolhaas,” in El Croquis, n. 53(1992), p. 24.
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In 1993 Koolhaas describes his 1971 visit to the Berlin Wall as theexperience that was to make him a “serious student.” He senses “anenormous reservoir of resentment against architecture, with the newevidence of its inadequacies—of its cruel and exhausted performance—accumulating daily; looking at the wall as architecture, it was inevitableto transpose the despair, hatred, frustration it inspired to the field ofarchitecture.”6 Sixteen years later, his competition entry for a city atMelun-Sénart, France, reconciles the two ideas that marked his studentdays: his contempt for architecture and his fascination with the closedtown. A field of what is described as “nothingness” eliminates thesprawling metropolis and contains a series of neatly encapsulated urbanislands. But in reality this “void” is a complex system of parks where, asshown in his explanatory sketches, city dwellers are presented as exercisingor toiling the land. Nature returns as the mythic edge of urbanity, and asits cure.
THE SICK CITY
Koolhaas’ formal sanitizing of the city with parks, or “voids” as he callsthem, is a strategy with roots in the nineteenth century. By the mid eighteenhundreds, city bureaucracies in Europe and America, responding toalarming health reports, and to the devastation of cholera and diphtheriapandemics, studied options for improving conditions. In the UnitedStates, the idea of the urban park slowly surfaced as a way to accommodatethe need to insert new infrastructure, to store clean water, to provideincreased light and air circulation, and to furnish citizens with spaces forrecreation.
The most famous example in the United States is Manhattan’s CentralPark. Frederick Law Olmsted, famed landscape architect, superintendent ofthe park since September 11, 1857, and main strategist of the place Kool-haas now calls a “void,” won the 1858 competition to design the park withthe help of his partner, the English architect Calbert Vaux. In their eyesCentral Park was to be much more than just a work of engineering to holdfresh water in the Croton Reservoirs. The park was to be a RepublicanInstitution where the classes would mingle as a single collective in thespirit of democratic fraternity. It was to be a pleasure ground where citizenscould find an escape from the pressures of cramped living. The ideas behindCentral Park were accented by the moralistic overtones of the Americantranscendentalists who believed in a metaphysical need for individual com-munion with nature, as a way of salvaging personal autonomy from thesocial conformity spawned by the nascent commercialism of Americanculture. For the Transcendentalists, nature was the last bastion of resistanceto the city’s ferment.
Olmsted and Vaux endeavored to construct not just a fragment of thecountry inside the city, but an entire visual and formal system that would
Islands of urbanity arecontained by a series of parks.Rendering of Rem Koolhaas’competition entry for Melun-Sénart (1987). From JaquesLucan, Rem Koolhaas: OMA(Princeton: PrincetonArchitectural Press, 1991), p. 15.
6 Rem Koolhaas, “Field Trip: A (A)Memoir (First and Last . . .),” inS,M,L,XL, p. 226.
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serve as counter balance to the existing urban form. They turned vistasinward, and masked the edges of the city with plantings, in an attempt tocreate an autonomous environment. Olmsted and Vaux believed that byrelating the non-urban to the urban they were improving the whole. Theyrejected more utopian arguments about the city in favor of processes thatwould transform the existing one. Nature, though formally autonomousfrom the more urban parts of the city, could nonetheless complement andameliorate it. What was once separated was here brought together within anentirely new kind of urban form.7
THE VOID
Olmsted’s parks interest Koolhaas because they resist the stability ofthe formal language making up the traditional city. In the parks’formal indeterminacy, he finds an example of liberation from theformal coerciveness of architecture, “a kind of erasure from all theoppression, in which architecture plays an important role.”8 In Koolhaas’hands, however, the notion of form in flux is misread and radicalizedas absence of form. He describes Central Park simply as a “void” or as“nothingness.”
The danger of such reductivist essentialism becomes clear with Koolhaas’treatment of sprawl. In peripheral metropolitan areas where elite archi-tectural capital is usually at its minimum, the cycles of the economy producefast changes in the formal make-up of entire districts. The constantmetamorphosis of form in time is understood by Koolhaas as the sprawl’scomplete lack of formal presence. Through a questionable leap of logic,Koolhaas sets up a simple relation of equivalences between all entities thatare voids. The sprawl is equal to, and can therefore be turned into, a park, oran infrastructure.
Koolhaas’ treatment of sprawl as a “void” is not entirely innocent. Hissleight of hand is revealed when he describes his own projects as “voids”that resist formal stability, and thus grants himself the license to replace theexisting urban fabric with his designs. He caters to the highbrow rejection ofsprawl as valueless and meaningless, and complies with conservative publicopinion by acting as its willing executioner. He cleanses the metropolis ofthe “merde,” and substitutes it with Bigness.
His 1991 competition project for the Mission Grand Axe, La Défense,Paris, illustrates Koolhaas’ facile translation of public opinion into anendorsement of urban purges, as well as his belief that the void and thetraditional city depend on each other for survival. He writes: “This is LaDéfense, the office-city that nobody really likes but that has one undeniablevirtue . . . Its presence has saved Paris; each ‘eyesore’ realized there hasprevented an invasion of the center.” Although he singles out some “good”structures like the university or the future T.G.V. station, “everything else isplankton—the typical accumulation of undeniably inferior buildings built
An open boundary between theurban and the non-urban:Manhattan’s Central Park circa1970. From F.L. Olmsted, Forty Yearsof Landscape Architecture: CentralPark, ed. F.L. Olmsted Jr. andTheodora Kimball (Cambridge, MA,and London: The M.I.T. Press, 1973),opposite p. 200.
7 David Schuyler provides aconvincing argument that whatresulted from Olmsted and Vaux’swork was really an entirely newurban form that is typicallyAmerican. It integrates nature andurbanity over large expanses ofterritory, and re-organizes city life inaccordance. See David Schuyler, TheNew Urban Landscape: TheRedefinition of City Form inNineteenth-Century America(Baltimore and London: The JohnsHopkins University Press, 1986).
8 Rem Koolhaas, ConversationsWith Students (New York: PrincetonArchitectural Press, 1996), p. 63.
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between the fifties and the nineties that forms the index of 20th-centuryarchitecture.”9 The sprawl is not replaced with nature, but with a readymade, idealized Bigness structure, or infrastructure. In essence, he paves thenewly bulldozed site with a version of the Manhattan grid.
Today, we are no longer dealing with the same problems that faced thenineteenth century. Cholera and diphtheria are not killing large sections ofurban populations. What exactly are the diseases harbored by today’smetropolis? What does Bigness really solve? Some of Koolhaas’ descriptionsof the city’s ailments have changed over the course of his career. His earlycondemnation of the dull complacency of bourgeois urban life has givenway to a more abstracted discourse about freedom that has been emptied ofinflammatory rhetoric. What remains strong, however, is his dissatisfactionwith a loosely defined loss of reality in subjective experience, and a similarlyambiguous dissolution of social unity. Koolhaas runs through the canonicallist of reasons popularly understood to be the cause of these conditions:rising world population, higher dependency on communications tech-nologies, the impact of late capitalist forms of production and consumptionon social structures, and the “sabotaging” of the classical city by moderniza-tion. His objective is to produce an architecture that will resist the alienationof life experience and the demise of collectivity. In defense of Bigness hestates:
in a landscape of disarray, disassembly, dissociation, disclamation, theattraction of Bigness is its potential to reconstruct the Whole, resurrect theReal, reinvent the collective, reclaim maximum possibility. 10
By placing the possibility of authentic and wholesome life strictly insideof Bigness, and thinking of the city not as a whole, but as a series of mutuallyexclusive “good” and “bad” parts, Koolhaas breaks with a major aspect ofthe City Parks movement. Bigness replaces the whole with a new totalitywhich is fundamentally independent of its outside. This insistence on pro-jecting the model of the decontextualized fragment onto the existing blindsKoolhaas from discovering any new realities of the modern metropolis, andits forces of formation.
To move beyond the rhetoric of the canon, one must engage in com-prehensive research. Specifically, one must not confuse designing, andinstrumentalized observation, with disinterested attempts to describe thecomplex temporal and material substance of the real and of its contexts. It isnot possible to accept the view that metropolitan life is “bad” in the absenceof convincing evidence. It is still more dangerous to accept proposals basedon false assumptions if we consider them in the light of their implications.There is an emptying out of history and specificity in the notion of Bignessthat limits the right to live only to those willing to be equalized into same-ness. Bigness is a broad metaphysical view about history and about
9 Rem Koolhaas, “Tabula RasaRevisited: Mission Grand Axe, LaDéfense, Paris, France, 1991,” inS,M,L,XL, pp. 1090–6.
10 Rem Koolhaas, “Bigness,” inS,M,L,XL, p. 510.
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how society works, which is derived from vulgar Marxism, and whichdepicts society as a bad system that must be overthrown by attacking thelanguage, values, culture, history, and ideology of bourgeois culture. It isinteresting that today this rhetoric drives the homogenizing commercialismthat Bigness appeals to. It plays on the erroneous diagnosis of reality asdoomed, and on the nonsensical promise of liberation along the single pathof Bigness.
It is still valuable to remember that through research Olmsted and Vauxhad rebuffed the prevailing assumptions regarding city growth as inverselyrelated to quality of life. They investigated a number of complex planningissues from transportation, to expansion, to infrastructure, and to housingcosts. By analyzing the evolution of street plans from medieval towns tocontemporary metropolises they came to embrace the accelerated enlarge-ment of cities. Olmsted and Vaux explained that growth should not befeared because the growth of nineteenth century metropolises inducedmajor advances in urban conditions. The expansion of cities had precipi-tated public health reforms and the delivery of urban services which werepreviously unavailable, and which greatly diminished epidemic diseases.The abandonment of compact buildings in favor of more open, light, and airfilled arrangements had indeed made cities larger, but it had also contri-buted to making them more salubrious. Unfortunately these historical con-clusions, along with equally relevant contemporary studies, are stampedout by Bigness’ one-dimensional view of reality.
ONE WORLD
Bigness is the ideal singularity. It is Stephen Hawking’s model of the uni-verse, bounded but without edges. It is a seamless interiority. Koolhaas findsin Bigness a guarantee for uniqueness because, like the walled city, it ischaotic but at the same time establishes a boundary which contains that verychaos. For Koolhaas, each large scaled architectural project “acquires thepretension and sometimes the reality of a completely enveloping reality, andan absolute autonomy.”11 To the degree that these mega-projects separate usfrom the world “out there,” they also liberate us from it. They are worlds-in-themselves. Thus, Koolhaas proposes Bigness as an index of possible newfreedoms, and credits mega-projects with the power to transform culture or,better yet, to create new forms of culture.
Bigness permits the reformulation of the idea of singular place, of stableidentity, and of traditional community, and serves Koolhaas as a tool tobattle the forces of dispersal that he feels are eroding today’s society.12 Inrelation to his proposal for a library for the University at Jussieu, Paris, hestates:
I find that one of the most pregnant and provocative elements of thelibrary program in Paris was to re-formulate the idea of a “communal
11 Alejandro Zaera Polo, “FindingFreedoms: Conversations with RemKoolhaas,” p. 20.
12 Bigness must be read in thecontext of the many critiques of thecontemporary metropolis circulatinginside the Architectural Associationin the late sixties when Koolhaas wasa student there. Bigness plays on theidea of the building as a city that,according to Peter Cook (an A.A.professor, and member ofArchigram), had crystallized by themid 1960s into numerous theoriesand built projects. Cook argues thatthe concept captivated theoristsbecause of its clarity andhomogeneity, and because itcombined the compact characterof the much treasured Italian townwith the heroism of the Unitéd’Habitation. The concept came witha whole supporting stratum of ideas:the development of the multilevelenvironment, and the study of thebuilding as container for randomdevelopment. Bigness also addressesthe sixties debate, especially centralin British urbanism, about how toinsert the new into the old. Therewere those at the A.A. who arguedfor improving the existing throughthe careful insertion of new elements.Alison and Peter Smithson wereresearching how to introduce newlarge structures into cities withoutdisrupting existing use patterns ofassociation. On a smaller scale,Michael Webb’s experiments withmobile inflatable systems forindividual habitation were attemptsto resolve the deficiencies of the citythrough punctual insertion of newelements at the level of the user. SeePeter Cook, ExperimentalArchitecture (New York: UniverseBooks, 1970), p. 97.
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facility”, an “entity” in the midst of a complete collapse of the publicrealm,—and certainly of its classical appearance. Against the obvioushomogenization of electronic media, against the erasure of the necessity ofplace, against the triumph of fragmentation . . . 13
But Bigness is a place that floats above reality. It is an alternative world: acomplete enveloping virtuality where the horizon of the real is a man-madebubble. It is a “void” that has clear boundaries but is internally unstable. Itdetermines autonomous worlds that can pose as the Real and feign totality.Bigness is, to quote Koolhaas, “the final, most radical break: Bigness is nolonger a part of any urban tissue. It exists, at most, it coexists. Its subtextis fuck context.”14 Once inside, the outside (as with the shopping mall)becomes not only irrelevant but also inaccessible.15 Koolhaas reasons aworld where nature has expired. It can no longer operate as the mythic locusof Spirit. Inside his library project for Jussieu he envisions a network ofboulevards creating a “new public realm,” a more “concentrated” citywhere visitors drift along a hyper-urbanized environment.16 Architecture isthe only ship capable of containing humanity and of saving it from thetechnological flood.
We must insist on asking, however, who is being excluded from this ark,and why. No matter how one depicts it, the reality is that Koolhaas’ projectsare not for everyone. They are not the porous Republican Institution ofOlmsted. They have walls, they have gates, and they are owned by selectiveconstituencies. Koolhaas is always deliberately vague about precisely whatkind of community he envisions inhabiting Bigness.
Bigness closes itself off from theurban and seeks to replace it: RemKoolhaas’ photomontage of“Exodus” (1971). From RemKoolhaas et al., S,M,L,XL (New York:The Monacelli Press, 1995), p. 8.
13 Rem Koolhaas, as quoted inAlejandro Zaera Polo, “FindingFreedoms,” p. 17.
14 Rem Koolhaas, “Bigness,” inS,M,L,XL, p. 502.
15 Koolhaas quoting FredericJameson to define “Bazaar” isparticularly telling in this regard:“The Blade Runner syndrome is theinterfusion of crowds of peopleamong a high-technological bazaarwith its multitudinous modalpoints—all of this sealed into aninside without an outside, whichthereby intensifies the formerlyurban to the point of becoming, orbeing analogous to, the unmappablesystem of late capitalism itself. Theabstract system and its interrelationsare now the outside, the formerdome, the former city, beyond whichno subject position is available sothat it cannot be inspected as a thingin its own right, although it is atotality.” Koolhaas’ understandingof Bigness in terms of capitalismdenotes his desire to design a totalityso perfectly autonomous that iterases its own boundaries. SeeS,M,L,XL, p. 16, and AlejandroZaera Polo, “Finding Freedoms,”p. 21.
16 “Through their scale and variety,the effect of the inhabited planesbecomes almost that of a street; thisboulevard generates a system ofsupra-programmatic ‘urban’elements in the interior: plazas,parks, monumental staircases, cafés,shops. [. . .] Also, the life span of thestructure and that of the crust of the
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INVASION OF THE CITY SNATCHERS
“Bigness no longer needs the city;” proclaims Koolhaas, “it represents thecity; it preempts the city; or better still, it is the city.”17 Read in the light ofthe American city this break liquidates the progressive, democratic functionof the non-urban. What gave the parks of the nineteenth century theirrevolutionary power, that is, the power to contest and to transform theconventions of authority operative through the traditional city, was thatthey stood in for that which was beyond human control and design, i.e.nature. The paradox of course is that the parks were manicured environ-ments. They can and should be read as highly constructed ambiences. Yetwe cannot overlook that they are alive, and that this brings them close toeffacing their own artificiality. They have a life of their own. At the veryleast Olmsted’s parks speak a formal language that is completely antitheticalto the architecture of the city. In this sense, the parks keep open the possi-bility of a different life and social reality. They are not simply compensatoryenvironments. Bigness, on the other hand, folds the city back onto the city,thus foreclosing on one important possibility of imagining resistance to theestablishment.
We are in effect faced with a complete internalization of metropolitanlife behind a new kind of city wall. Instead of non-urban pockets in anurban field, Koolhaas gives us islands of urbanity in a sea of non-urbanity.On this count, Koolhaas fails to carry out his project to a successfulconclusion. He challenges the existing by calling it “nothingness,” butinstead of really taking a fresh new look at it, instead of investigating therich potential of sprawl as the source for a new kind of urbanity,18 hereplaces it with an idealized view of the city and its indeterminacy. Bignessinternalizes urbanity and demotes the contemporary metropolis to“un-city.”
This attitude towards the city has been a constant in Koolhaas’ workfrom the start, and not the result of some prolonged study of the city. His1972 thesis project at the Architectural Association entitled “Exodus, orthe Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture,”19 depicts London as a sick city,“a behavioral sink.” The problem of the city is really the problem of thesubject’s apathy. Urbanism meets psychology. Borrowing heavily fromSuperstudio’s “Continuous Monument” project (1969), Koolhaas designs alinear megastructure in which the subject is forced into action and denied hisor her historicity and specificity. Everything must be created anew: feelings,social and sexual mores, family structure, health care, types of community,kinds of livelihood, aesthetic forms, and personal identities. Individualsare forced into group experience. Koolhaas’ new city stands inside a doublewall meant to “enclose and protect this zone to retain its integrity and toprevent any contamination of its surface by the cancerous organism thatthreatens to engulf it.” Outside stand the menacing forces of power politics,the bourgeois home, and the Protestant work ethic. The new city offers
White urban islands float in a sea ofblack “nothingness”: Figure/Grounddiagram of Rem Koolhaas’competition entry for Melun-Sénart(1987). From S,M,L,XL, pp. 982–3.
17 Rem Koolhaas, “Bigness,” inS,M,L,XL, p. 515.
‘settlements’ are not necessarily thesame; the path and the publicdomain are analogous to thepermanence of the city, the infill ofthe libraries to that of individualarchitectures. In this structure,program can change continuously,without affecting architecturalcharacter.” Rem Koolhaas,S,M,L,XL, pp. 1326–9.
18 Other architects around theglobe are proposing new methods tovisualize the existing, to map evennon-visual elements, in order tomake their projects arise from a freshdiscovery of the site, and a deepunderstanding of the forces thatshape it. The work of UN Studio inHolland uses parameter-basedcomputer technologies to visualizethe correspondences between thevarious elements of the site and theprogram to be inserted. Then theygenerate a situation-specificorganizational structure out of theirresearch. Shayne O’Neill in theUnited States is less dependent ontechnology and more resistant togiving the program priority from thestart. His projects draw on mappingsof the site from various disciplines(from geology to air traffic) in orderto produce a composite picture of theforces of formation of the site fromwhich a site-specific response to aprogram may be modeled. SeePatrick Schumacher, “UN Studio:Arnhem Central,” in AA Files(Spring), n. 38, 23–36.
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Londoners “collective facilities that fully accommodate individual desires.”For those “strong enough to love it,” the city makes individuals “ecstatic inthe freedom of their architectural confines.” The building is not just a“social-condenser,” as Central Park is for Olmsted. It is the early promise ofinfinite confinement that Bigness would deliver twenty years later. Resist-ance is futile.
STATUS QUO
Koolhaas’ claim that he is resurrecting the Real and the Whole is false. In hismodel the particular stands in for the universal. His Bigness is an attemptto replace the world as the ultimate horizon of life with miniature cities.Inside Bigness is a program of the classical city that has been aestheticized,cleaned up, made safe, varnished, and ultimately impoverished. It proposesa “germ-free” world that is not contaminated by the same social ills of theworld outside. Koolhaas’ urban theory plays the game of naïve socialism,but fails to account for socialism’s failure. The refusal to address history andcontext leads Bigness down the double path of a bureaucracy of authenticitydoomed to self-destruction, and of a pure mirror of the world it replaces.Bigness confuses its myopic understanding of sprawl with a license to ignorethe real. Just as the nineteenth century urban park acquired moralistic pro-portions through the writings of the transcendentalists and the combinedefforts of planners and landscape architects, Bigness is polished with thewax of virtue by Koolhaas. Where morality was once measured againstnature, freedom is now held up to the standard of a new synthetic nature:Bigness.
But what is at stake in this freedom? Freedom from what, and for whom?Koolhaas’ projects, and how he describes them, provide the answers. Thefreedom that Koolhaas values most in both Bigness and capitalism is thefreedom to exclude. As such it can claim to effect connections to all that isoutside, because, once you are in, there is no outside, only the semblance ofexteriority in a perfect interiority. His Bigness is a representation of urbanitythat lays claim to reality in the name of consumer culture. By appealing tothe old rhetoric of the new, Koolhaas liquidates its very possibility.
A preliminary version of this article was originally published in the Proceedings of the88th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2000.A more complete version was later published in City: Analysis of Urban Trends,Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, v. 4, n. 3, (November 2000). It was also republishedin Italian in Il Progretto, v. 4, n. 7 (April 2000).
Bigness as infinite confinement.The outside becomesinaccessible: photomontage ofRem Koolhaas’ “Exodus”(1971). From S,M,L,XL, pp. 8–9.
19 See Rem Koolhaas, “Exodus, orthe Voluntary Prisoners ofArchitecture,” in S,M,L,XL,pp. 2–21.
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HABRAKEN AND KOOLHAASPOST URBANISMTwo Dutchmen flying over Bijlmermeer
JUNE P. WILLIAMSON (2000)
The Bijlmer offers boredom on a heroic scale. In its monotony, harshness,and even brutality, it is, ironically, refreshing.
Rem Koolhaas1
How can we design large projects without necessarily imposing uniform-ity and rigidity where variety and adaptability over time are desired?How can the big project nevertheless do justice to the small scale?
N. J. Habraken2
This paper examines the differing, though related, attitudes toward scaleexhibited by N. John Habraken and Rem Koolhaas, as exemplified by theirreactions to the residential district of Bijlmermeer in South Amsterdam.Habraken has consistently advocated for the creation and preservation offine-grained urban tissue in the built environment. He has observed anddescribed the increasing coarseness of grain that characterizes twentieth-century urban projects, particularly mass housing, using figure-groundplans of Amsterdam as a telling example of the transformation. In his1998 book The Structure of the Ordinary, the synthesis of many years ofobservation and reflection, Habraken carefully outlines his arguments aboutstructuring scale—point by point, grain by grain. Conversely, Habraken’scountryman Koolhaas argues polemically that the Extra Large is a con-temporary reality to be welcomed, not bemoaned. O.M.A.’s 1986–87 projectfor Bijlmermeer illustrates this position.
A LATTER-DAY VILLE RADIEUSE
An aerial vantage point is required to comprehend the scale and spatialorganization of the Bijlmermeer district in the southern sector of Amsterdam.One may also characterize as “top down” the planning process that ledto the design and construction of the district. The extension, on a largereclaimed sector of land to the southeast of the central city, was begun in1966 by the Amsterdam Department of Urban Development and continuedinto the 1980s. The intention was to ease overcrowding in the central cityand other low-income areas by providing housing for up to 120,000 low-income residents. The project was a revision of the final phase of expansionenvisioned in the 1930s General Extension Plan for Amsterdam from the1930s, based on the ideas and projects of H.P. Berlage.3
1 Rem Koolhaas, “Las Vegas of theWelfare State,” in Rem Koolhaaset al., S, M, L, XL (New York: TheMonacelli Press, 1995), 871.
2 N. John Habraken, “The Controlof Complexity,” Places 4:2 (1987): 3.
3 D.A. Pinder, “Urban Expansionand the Bijlmermeer Project inAmsterdam,” Housing and PlanningReview 28:1 (1972): 17–20.
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The planners carefully aligned their vision with the program of the 1933C.I.A.M. Athens Charter. The very large project, consisting of 4,420 acresof virgin land, provided an opportunity to comprehensively realize theforms and concepts of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. This “retrospective”adherence to ideas of the 1920s and 1930s is curious. When examining theoverall plan and development strategy at Bijlmermeer is it clear that the VilleRadieuse provided a very direct model.
The majority of the housing is concentrated in flats in medium-riseeleven-story linear buildings placed far apart on open land, maximizingaccess to natural light and air. Conventional streets are eliminated.Automobile traffic is concentrated on elevated high-speed motorwayswith direct exits to collective parking garages. Three new metro lines werealso planned. Industrial and recreation uses are kept distinctly separatedfrom residential areas. The housing projections anticipated inhabitantdensities higher than in other newly built sectors of Amsterdam.4 In accord-ance with Le Corbusier’s vision, the open land was intended to be freelyaccessible landscaped parkland, to provide a sense of human scale, crossedby pathways for pedestrians and cyclists. The corridors of the long blockbuildings were intended to serve as “streets in the air” where residents mightinteract socially, removed from the congestion and grime of nineteenth-century corridor roads. The fixed nature of the plan does not reflect latercalls within C.I.A.M. to address open-endedness and capacities for growthand change.
Aerial photographs of theBijlmermeer extension of the1960s and 1970s. (AVIODROMEAerial Photography, Leylstad, NL.)
4 Hugh McClintock and MichaelFox, “The Bijlmermeer developmentand the expansion of Amsterdam,”Royal Town Planning InstituteJournal 57:7 (1971): 313–316.
JUNE P. WILLIAMSON
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The majority of the buildings adhere to a relentless hexagonal geometry,so striking from the aerial perspective. This geometry is the main deviationin the scheme from the orthogonal orthodoxy of modernism. As Koolhaasnotes, the hexagonal shapes extend down in scale to the jungle gyms in thechildren’s playground.5 Only at the periphery of the masterplanned areamay low-rise buildings be found that do not conform to this monotonousformal theme. The backlash was immediate. The generation of Dutcharchitects with the most influence in the late 1960s and early 1970s wereprotagonists and followers of Team X (organizers of the last C.I.A.M. inDubrovnik, 1956), such as Aldo van Eyck and his follower HermanHertzberger; they were highly vocal critics.
In its realized form, the Bijlmermeer provides few of the advantages sug-gested by the C.I.A.M. program. The open space is barren, asphalted, andlittered with errant automobiles; the concrete walls of the corridor-streetsare covered with graffiti; and the poor immigrant inhabitants areisolated from, rather than directly connected into, the center city life ofAmsterdam.
HABRAKEN’S FLY-OVER
The critique of modernist planning by Team X was the context for N. JohnHabraken’s intellectual coming of age. His first book, Supports, waspublished in 1962 (English edition in 1972). It is a reactionary polemicagainst industrialized mass housing (which he abbreviates as M.H.) as asolution to the postwar European “housing problem.” The essence of hisargument is that M.H. eliminates the user/inhabitant from the process ofdesigning housing.
The essay was published without illustrations or specific examples.Instead, the problem is described in terms of the conditions and values thatprovide the context for M.H. solutions against which a possible alternativeis juxtaposed. This alternative, called “support dwelling,” would provideinhabitants with the opportunity for involvement in determining the formand configuration of their dwelling units, within a predetermined infra-structure. In contrast to the seductively illustrated manifestos of modernismand other utopias, Habraken provides only a hypothesis.
Habraken’s rhetoric is measured and calm. His focus is on carefuldescriptions of ideas supporting a seemingly modest and eminentlysensible proposal: the “conclusion must be that the return of consultationand involvement on the part of the users, in the most literal sense, mustbe accepted.”6 Rather than incitement to revolution, the reader is pro-vided with a text of intoxicating reasonableness. Repetition is used to“support” the hypothesis—the arguments are built up, point by point,just like the fine-grained urban tissue he was later to advocate. Some foundhis ideas naïve and over-generalized.7 Others were mobilized to concreteaction.
5 Koolhaas et al., S, M, L, XL, 866,876.
6 Habraken, Supports: AnAlternative to Mass Housing (NewYork: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 3.
7 Robert Gutman, “Simple-MindedUtopianism and AutocraticNonsense,” Landscape Architecture63:2 (1973): 166–169.
HABRAKEN AND KOOLHAAS
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In 1964, the S.A.R. (Foundation for Architectural Research) was organizedin Eindhoven, Holland to explore the architectural potential of industrial-ized support dwelling. Habraken was the organization’s director until1975. One of the first design applications of the resulting formal ideas ofsupport and infill structures was at Bijlmermeer. The low-rise Bijlmersupport system was developed in 1970 in conjunction with K. Rijnboutt, anarchitect in the Department of Public Housing of the City of Amsterdam.The dwellings are designed to be accessible from a covered pedestrian street.The building is separated into zones and margins, to structure and controlthe extent of variation possible in determining the layout of individualunits.8
Habraken extended the argument in Supports to a more general argu-ment against professionalism and towards an appreciation for the territorialcomplexity of vernacular and self-built urban areas, which he called tissues.He characterizes urban tissues in terms of graining. Finer-grained urbanenvironments are usually territorially more complex. Habraken repeatedlyuses aerial photographs or figure-ground plans of the Bijlmer compared toseventeenth-century central Amsterdam as a leitmotif in his criticism ofthe coarsening of the urban grain.9 He writes, “within areas of the same sizewe see hundreds of independent physical units in the first and only a fewin the latter. . . . The capacity for transformations in the site is of coursedirectly related to the number of configurations that can change independ-ently.” And, “density simply cannot be the rationale behind the arrange-ment. The same density can usually be reached with three or four storybuildings along residential streets. The undeniable difference of highriseprojects compared to the lowrise solution is the dramatic shift towardsfull public control of outside space.”10 In other words, the natural desire ofthose in control (i.e. professionals) to consolidate the amount of territoryover which they may exert their control has gone unchecked. But he alsoadmits, “it is . . . much less simple to develop a close and fine-grainedterritory than an open coarse-grained territory with the same housingdensity.”11
Explicit in Habraken’s argument is the ever-present propensity forchange.12 His set of values assumes the desirability of variety in the urbanenvironment. His theories propose methods and strategies for maximizingthe opportunities for individuals to exert control over the physical form ofvarious portions of the built environment. Implicit is a broad acceptanceof differing visual and form-making approaches as long as the apparatus ofcentralized control is dismantled. Therefore, Habraken does not directlycritique Bijlmermeer; instead, he addresses the centralized bureaucraticstructure of the organizations that planned and designed it. His critiqueextends a life-rope to the moribund, suggesting that fine-grained inter-ventions over time might transform the site.
8 Habraken, J.T. Boekholt, A.P.Thijssen and P.J.M. Dinjens,Variations: The Systematic Design ofSupports (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T.Laboratory of Architecture andPlanning, 1976), 126–135.
9 Habraken, “The Limits ofProfessionalism,” AA Quarterly 8:1(1976): 52–59; Habraken,Transformations of the Site (AwaterPress, 1988), plate xi; Habraken,The Structure of the Ordinary(Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press,1998), 324.
10 Habraken, Transformations ofthe Site, 182.
11 Habraken, “The Limits ofProfessionalism,” 57.
12 Habraken, The Structure of theOrdinary, 7.
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KOOLHAAS’S FLY-OVER
The principle of defining zones as a tool for designing adaptable schemesas developed by the S.A.R. group is a significant precedent for the designstrategies later reinterpreted by Rem Koolhaas.13 The notion of dissecting abuilding (or a landscape, or an urban area) into zones to be consideredindependently rather than as an integrated whole held enormous appealboth as a tool for analysis and as a methodology for design. Zoningas an analysis tool was explored in the discussion of the DowntownAthletic Club in Koolhaas’s 1978 book Delirious New York. The rhetoricof zoning in this guise, however, is completely different from the chartsand diagrams of the S.A.R.; Koolhaas delights in sexual innuendo and theplayful use of language, his text awash in irony and simulacra. “In anabstract choreography, the building’s athletes shuttle up and down betweenits 38 “plots”—in a sequence as random as only an elevator man can makeit—each equipped with techno-psychic apparatus for the men’s ownredesign.”14
The principles of zoning used as the basis for a design methodologyare apparent in the competition design for Parc de la Villette and otherO.M.A. projects from the early 1980s. This was also the primary designstrategy utilized in O.M.A.’s project at Bijlmermeer. As already noted,before it was even completed the Bijlmer district of Amsterdam had becomean embarrassment to the city. Proposals were floated to tear the slab build-ings down; in search of alternate solutions, officials commissioned O.M.A.in 1986 to propose a plan to revitalize the district.
Koolhaas and his partners were already familiar with the site; in a 1976essay entitled “Las Vegas of the Welfare State” Koolhaas had characterizedthe Bijlmer as a socialist spectacle, embodying the extreme result of thethemes of “equality, puritanism, physical and mental health, a New Age.”15
In its excesses he identified a retroactive polemic against the “postmodern-ist, anti-C.I.A.M. principles” of van Eyck, Hertzberger and other Team Xinfluenced architects in Holland whom he accused of a “fetishistic concernwith the ineffable and the qualitative” that equaled C.I.A.M.’s concern withthe objective and the quantifiable.16 The Bijlmer offered “boredom on aheroic scale,” and Koolhaas found this refreshing, just as Venturi and ScottBrown delighted in the signs and symbols of Las Vegas. When teaching atthe Architectural Association in London in 1978 he and his partners usedthe Bijlmer as a site for a studio requiring students to propose large buildinginterventions.17
In their alternate plan, Koolhaas and O.M.A. proposed to learn from theBijlmer, rather than reject it. In the 1976 essay Koolhaas had accused themajor Dutch architects of the time as having turned to an architecture of“social remedy” and described their output, such as Hertzberger’s De DreiHoven (Old People’s Home) and van Eyck’s Orphanage, as a “soft-coregulag for the vulnerable.”18 In contrast, O.M.A. proposed that the district
13 Bernard Leupen, ChristophGrafe, Nicola Kornig, Marc Lampeand Peter de Zeeuw, Design andAnalysis (New York: Van NostrandReinhold, 1997), 64–65.
14 Koolhaas, Delirious New York(1978; New York: The MonacelliPress, 1994), 157.
15 Koolhaas et al., S, M, L, XL,863.
16 Ibid., 867.
17 Catalog of work at theArchitectural Association, Londonduring the 1978–79 school year.
18 Koolhaas et al., S, M, L, XL,867.
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needed increased urbanization, not removal and replacement. Interestinglythis strategy, if not its motivation, aligns with the goals of Habraken.
They proposed to infill the site by adding new, overlapped zones ofprogramming across the barren, open space, underutilized no-man’s land.First would be added street-like bands of parking rather than centralizedgarages, followed by the introduction of an international marketplace/boulevard in the empty space below the elevated metro tracks. Thegreen space would contract into intensely landscaped bands, meanderingpaths would become direct, and a process of “typological bombardment”would introduce new uses interspersed between the housing slabs to pro-vide new focus and identity to each hexagonal courtyard within the project.But the project was not implemented, nor was the Bijlmer demolished.
COLLISION COURSE
Koolhaas’s story of his involvement with the Bijlmer ends with thedisastrous El Al freight plane crash of 1992. “Then one day a jumbo jetfell from the air and made a start with the destruction. The other side hadwon.”19 The airplane crashed dramatically into one of the housingslabs, causing the loss of 250 lives, and renewing focus on the plight of themajority immigrant population (from Surinam) who live there and onthe attempts by Dutch culture to come to terms with multiple ethnicities.Inquiries into the crash and memorials for the victims continue. One notablerecent project at the site is a memorial garden by Descombes Architects withArchitectuurstudio Herman Hertzberger.20
The ideas of Habraken and Koolhaas collide over the issue of control inthe design and planning process. The issue of control, regardless of politicalideology, was at the center of Habraken’s critique of mass housing.
View of the minarets of a mosque atBijlmermeer, built to serve theimmigrant Muslim population, withapartment slab block beyond.(Photograph by Anneli Bengtssonand Rob Kanbier, 2000.)
19 Ibid., 886.
20 “The Growing Monument,”Werk, Bauen + Wohnen 6 (1999):42–45. See also “Dal Suriname aBijlmermeer,” Space and Society 67(1994): 70–71.
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Koolhaas chooses to address ideology directly when blaming (or praising?)the welfare state for the refreshing boredom of the Bijlmer. The essentialdifference is that Habraken seeks to recreate variety within the ordinary,regardless of ideology, while Koolhaas, a member of the post-68 generation,cannot escape it. Habraken writes, “I have yet to succeed in demonstratingthe morphological differences between the public housing products ofcapitalism and those of Marxism as long as the process in both cases is notthe process of the fine-grained division of power.”21 Conversely, Koolhaasencourages the simulation of variety, rather than its actuality, through thevehicle of the spectacle. He is too cynical to accept Habraken’s line; hewrites, “Whatever variety exists is obviously a simulated variety thatattempts to reproduce synthetically an Umwelt free from all the controlsthat are responsible for its very formation.”22
SUBSEQUENT TRAJECTORIES
Since 1986, Koolhaas has increasingly embraced the ideology and ethics oflate capitalism. He has announced, “The city is no longer.”23 It seems that itis now his desire to build fast, build big, build NOW, for yesterday andtomorrow are of no concern if one has access to control today. Added to hisadvocacy of large-scale projects with centralized control is the recognitionthat current building practices do not guarantee a life span for a building ofmore than thirty years, especially in Asia. He suggests that larger spatialsizes are accompanied by shorter temporal intervals. Entire areas will bewiped out and rebuilt—as required by the forces of capital—rather thanaccrued piecemeal over time.
Habraken, meanwhile, has doggedly continued applied research intoideas growing out of the initial premises of Supports. He has retainedhis optimism about the power of careful description and the potentialfor designers of the built environment to learn through recognizing theprocesses that “structure the ordinary.” He writes:
The pedestrian realm moves into the shopping mall, the office tower, theinstitutional complex or residential apartment complex. Atria, escalators,and corridors begin to articulate hierarchy in an exclusively pedestrianthree-dimensional net form. . . . Intensive relations between form anduse, familiar to us from the historic pedestrian fabric, may be reinterpretedin the large building, the result may ultimately create richer hierarchywithin city form. 24
He has continued to pursue variable housing methodologies that utilize thepotentials of industrialized mass production. He is involved with the “OpenBuilding” group, which has piloted projects in Japan and Holland with thecooperation of industrial manufacturers. The focus has shifted to improvedinfrastructure systems that may be easily separated from the main building
23 Koolhaas, “The Generic City,”S, M, L, XL, 1264.
24 Habraken, The Structure of theOrdinary, 121.
21 Habraken, “The Limits ofProfessionalism,” 57.
22 Koolhaas et al., S, M, L, XL,871.
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support structure and selectively replaced or reconfigured. One promisingexample is the Matura infill system, which includes a matrix tile layer abovethe floor holding water, heating, and sewage piping (pressurized to runhorizontally), coupled with a baseboard for electrical conduit.25 Thesevery small elements have the capacity to radically alter how large housingprojects are conceived, designed, and delivered.
Meanwhile, the future trajectory of the Bijlmer remains indeterminate.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For sharing personal memories and documents from his library, thanks toDr. Ron Lewcock at the Georgia Institute of Technology, my academic homewhen this essay was composed.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 88th Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2000.
25 Habraken, “The Open BuildingApproach: Examples and Principles”(paper delivered at the HousingSeminar, Taipei, R.O.C., 1994).
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HETEROTOPIAS AND URBAN DESIGNPOST URBANISMDAVID GRAHAME SHANE (2000)
WHAT IS URBAN DESIGN?
Urban Design is a strange and imprecise mixture of architecture and cityplanning whose practitioners envision and construct small fragments ofcities, without being able to control the larger city or every architecturalintervention. It is interdisciplinary by nature and necessarily looks at thegeography, sociology, economy and politics of an entire city as the settingfor the design operation. It examines the culture of the city and the designertries to act in response to this perceived larger cultural environment. Theresponse may take many forms, but Urban Designers draw on architecturefor their design skills and projective abilities. Architecture is the con-structional base from which they work as they engage the city at a variety ofscales and in a variety of modes.
It is the argument of this paper that Urban Design creates fragmentsor enclaves in the city. These enclaves work as heterotopias, functioningto differentiate one area from another. Urban Design controls this dif-ferentiation and refines it further. This differentiation can be based onhistorical, ethnic or marketing strategies adopted by a variety ofstakeholders in the Post-modern city. This paper then gives a theoreticalfoundation for migrations in meaning of enclaves within a semiologicalsystem based on urban morphologies (Type A for old city enclaves, Type Bfor the mall). These meaning systems are linked to Foucault’s theoryof heterotopias. Foucault’s theories on “Disciplinary” heterotopiasare well known, based on his studies of madness, hospitals, prisons, etc.This paper argues that his category of “Illusory” heterotopias, whichhas received less attention, is important when new media shape ourperception of the city and its differences in an age of acceleratedcommunications.
HETEROTOPIAS AND THE ENCLAVE SYSTEM
One of the premises of this paper is that enclaves and armatures act asheterotopias in relation to their surrounding city. The creators of thearmature and enclaves want to differentiate their work from its surround-ings, to make it attractive, new, successful. While effective formulas may berepeated, the developers and designers have to refine and adapt for everynew project. Enclaves are differentiated from the rest of the city as newpockets of growth or old areas equipped with a new image. These fragmentsoperate within a larger, bi-polar, system of urban semiology. Each develop-ment unit combines with its neighbors to form a disjunctive urban ecologywith planned and unplanned relationships.
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Enclaves are areas of control and order in relation to the rest of the city(Figure 1). Their public order is different from the vast majority of oururban experience that may appear to be chaotic and appear to have no code.Their different nature is the inverse code, the mirror image of the normaleveryday experience of private, domestic living arrangements, with itsfortuitous mixtures and messes that defy categorization. This meant thatheterotopic enclaves were like mirror reflections of their society, bothrecognizably the same yet at the same time distorted with their codesreversed in the mirror space. In contrast to these private, domestic areas, thearmatures and enclaves of the city are disciplined and ordered by global,national or local stakeholders with a mission, whether commercial, cultural,political, sometimes medical or moral.
Enclaves and armatures participate in the semiological system of the city,whether Type A or Type B, main-street, residential or commercial enclave,strip or mall. This sign system embedded in the social life of the city formsthe nexus within which its creators imagine the purity of the enclave. Thissign system is the background against which the urban public consumes theenclave as the latest attraction. The 300-year history of Covent Gardenillustrates that this sign system shifts as the “floating signifier” changes itsposition over time. Thus what was once an efficient, single minded and pureenclave can be incorporated into the messy body of the city (Figure 2). Also,as the Covent Garden history illustrates, the same enclave under differentcircumstances can re-emerge as a heterotopic pocket of development, notonce but twice (fruit market in the 19th century, the festival mall in the 20thcentury). In this shifting situation enclave spaces may lose and regain theircritical edge, their mirror function. In a similar fashion, early malls are nowbeing recycled as low budget, community facilities, containing social servicecenters, police stations, health clinics, jails, colleges and chapels. Architectsare also cutting these early malls up and converting them into Type A villagecenters, without a residential component.
The semiological urban system of armatures and enclaves reflects thelarger social and economic life of the city. It is not hard to read Post-modernAmerican, European or Asian cities, as a system formed by a series ofenclaves of specific typologies or pathologies. Enclaves in this system act asheterotopias, spaces of high efficiency and great specialization, whichtemporarily serve as pinnacles of profit, social control, fashion or decay.Their interaction has created the dynamic inter-relationships that power thehistory of the city. Just to consider residential enclaves, clearly inhabitantsof great wealth and power can reside in both Type A and Type B enclaves,whether the Upper East Side in New York (Type A) or Beverly Hills in LosAngeles (Type B). There are also enclaves of upper middle class two income,managerial households in both Type A and Type B morphologies, withurban neighborhood associations (Type A) and suburban residents’ associ-ations (Type B) protecting their interests and family values. Another type of
Figure 1. Enclave and Image/Armature Diagram. (Drawn byD.G. Shane.)
Figure 2. London Enclave:Covent Garden Festival Mall,1998. (Author photo.)
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enclave accommodates the working class, blue collar workers and lowermiddle class administrators, living in tenements in the old city (Type A) orin small lot, semi-detached, inner city or suburban neighborhoods of rowhouses, bungalows and tract homes (Type B). Finally there is the fourthcategory of enclaves, those of great poverty and abandonment. Herebuilding demolitions and fires have eroded the Type A street structure. In theType B inner ring suburb, a similar pattern of demolition and arson hasreduced once prosperous suburbs to open fields and isolated buildings, as inDetroit.
Each of these systems of enclaves has its own set of codes, which defines itsposition relative to the others. Together these are woven into the fabric ofthe city as residential enclaves, interacting with commercial, industrial,mixed use and transportation systems. Each enclave is defined in the systemby its own specialty, which reflects its individuality against all the others. Adouble code is at work. One code defines the interior relationships of thefragment and sets up its internal consistency. Another code controls theexterior relationships, based on the reflective, mirror function. This secondcode entails a knowledge of the neighbors and their qualities, whichstretches widely across the system. At the same time, as mentioned earlier,a curious paradox remains. Both codes retain a memory trace of theiropposite. Covent Garden contained an object building at its core, whilethe isolated object building of the suburban mall contained within it thememory trace of the main street of the city.
This complex and contradictory condition is typical of heterotopias ineras of rapid change. Michel Foucault wrote that heterotopias were “Asingle real place made up of several spaces, several sites that are themselvesincompatible.” The surprising combinations gave an innovative edgeto their operations and rationalized emerging new orders, free from theinterference of the rest of society in islands of efficiency and comparativeorder.
For Foucault heterotopias were specialized enclaves in which specificknowledge is efficiently applied in a highly controlled, closed world.Foucault focused his research on the regulatory machinery of the state,prisons, hospitals, asylums etc, which provided “compensatory” disciplinefor those unfortunates who did not conform to the codes decreed by therational ordinances of a rational society. Later scholars have extended this“compensatory” category to factories and places of production.
Foucault also had a second category of heterotopias that he neverdeveloped in such an extensive survey as the “Disciplinary.” These second-ary, “Illusory” heterotopias, were much more fluid and unstable in theirinternal order. Here the “compensatory” disciplinary system was reversedand chaos reigned. Values could change in a second, codes could be flippedand the world turned upside down in an instant. Foucault’s model for thisworld was the “Theater of the Absurd” of Artaud or Ionescu, in which all
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social conventions were questioned beyond the existential minimum.Foucault cited the theater, cinemas, casinos, bordellos and the stock marketas belonging to this Illusory category (Figure 3). Other scholars haveextended this category to shopping arcades and malls—places ofconsumption.
The semiological dimension, with its “floating signifier,” was paradoxic-ally and ironically incorporated in Foucault’s sketch of a heterotopic system.Foucault specified the ocean liner as the perfect heterotopia, traveling“from port to port and brothel to brothel.” This image, linking the hetero-topia to a Modernist machine interacting with trade and empires, work andleisure, implied but did not articulate the fundamental connection betweencapitalism and heterotopias. Between metropolis and colony, betweenEuropean and colonized, an enormous, reflexive gap existed. Such differen-tiation drives desire and the consumption/production cycle in the capitalistdynamic, also fueling the Post-modern enclave and armature creationaround highly differentiated images.
In this portrait of heterotopias as specialized enclaves their dual aspecthas emerged. Enclaves and armatures operate as dual hybrids within thissystem or network of flows. They have both a regulatory side and an illusoryimage making side. On the one hand there is the legal department, whichis concerned with rules and regulations, enforcement, inspections, thedisciplining and punishment of offenders. On the other hand there is thedesigner and marketing arm which is concerned with the image of the city,the desire and manufacturing illusion. While Foucault scarcely consideredthis latter aspect, it has become increasingly important in the market drivenand highly mediated environment of the Post-modern city. Differentiation iscrucial to survival in this environment and the capacity of “Illusory” hetero-topias for marketing places, aiding in place production and advertisingimages has made these enclaves especially important to scholars of thePost-modern city.
HETEROTOPIAS AND THE “MACHINE CITY”
The fragmentary system of Urban Design has only emerged as a distinctdiscipline in the last 50 years in western and industrialized nations.Modernist city planning presumed a synoptic overview, that everythingcould be planned and designed by a central state, agency or intelligence(Patrick Geddes’ Watchtower). A long history of city making was lost inthe Modernists’ drive for progress and their abrupt break with history.Manfredo Tafuri pointed out that after the Depression of the 1930s stateplanning was the rule in Marxist, Fascist and Democratic countries(Roosevelt, T.V.A. etc). It was presumed that the city was transparent andthe centralized organ of government could control everything, like thecentral jailer in Bentham’s Panopticon (Foucault). All functions would becarefully segregated in mono-functional zones for maximum efficiency.
Figure 3. Las Vegas Enclave:The Venetian Casino, 1999.(Author Photo.)
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Communication and transport systems connected these enclaves andprivileged the center. A brief review of the utopian projects of Le Corbusier,Mies or Hilbesheimer reveals their preference for the center, segregatedfunctions, Total Design, aerial perspectives, panoptic views etc. RobertMoses, with his gigantic model of New York City, belonged to thistradition. The New Urbanists also look back longingly to such dreams oftightly planned and controlled environments.
Ebenezer Howard provided the crucial diagram for the Modernist cityin his book on The Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1904) (Figure 4). The citywas seen as a polycentric city-region, with satellite new towns set in a ringaround the “mother city,” surrounded by Green Belts. Howard foresaw thedemise of the center city and the rise of a system of self-sufficient new townsaround the periphery. The planned and unplanned decentralization of thePost-War years gave a peculiar twist to the Modernists’ utopias, one thatbroke the dream of total control and the privileged center. A polycentric,urban dispersal was prompted by many concerns, varying from fear (as adefense against atomic attack after Hiroshima) to the political (the desire tocreate a large, stable, property owning middle class). The unintended con-sequence was the draining of the inner city of population, jobs and industry.An intended consequence was the creation of enormous, peripheral, linear,“Edge Cities,” based on new media communication and transportationsystems (such as the automobile and T.V.). To the inhabitant traveling atspeed, the city became a system of more or less dense urban fragments.These urban enclaves were dispersed throughout the landscape around thehighways, railways, airports etc.
With the breakdown of Modernist total design and planning methodolo-gies (with their non-physical/statistical orientations), Urban Design emergedas a mixture of urban planning and architecture. The new discipline brokedown the Modernist city, bringing aesthetic controls to the large urbanfragments and investment packages created by the dominant system offinance, planning and functional segregation. As the city dispersed into thecity-region, new urban centers were required and the center also had to re-equipped for an altered regional role. Urban Design coordinated the internalaesthetics of these urban enclaves. Kevin Lynch in Good City Formdescribed this system of urban production as the “City-Machine,” in adiagram which showed how each part is self-contained, linked by channelsof communication, can be easily replaced and has no sense of the whole(Figure 5). These enclaves, whether planned or free-market, all containedstrong urban armatures (linear sequences/narratives) to counteract Modern-ist notions of free flowing, universal, non-specific space. They had clearlydefined perimeters and a sense of enclosure and were clearly differentiatedfrom their surroundings, neighbors or competitors. These enclaves mightcontain housing, commercial uses, industrial uses, recreational uses etc.,segregated from all others.
Figure 4. Ebenezer Howard: GardenCity Diagram. (Drawn by D.G.Shane.)
Figure 5. Kevin Lynch: City as amachine Diagram. (Drawn byD.G. Shane.)
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Lynch’s model, when combined with Howard’s earlier Garden City,produced the Post-modern patterns of ring and radial development.Here Joel Garreau’s “Edge Cities” (1991) surround the older central core(Figure 6). Many authors have pointed to the linear nature of theseperipheral cities, ranged along a spine or armature of a highway, takingadvantage of the high-speed automobile travel to restructure urbanfunctions within a regional landscape. In this city, mobility, access and traveltime replace close pedestrian proximity and public transportation in thecenter city. With the increased mobility and isolation of the population,the communications media (telephone, radio, television, the internet etc.)come to play a bigger and bigger role in making links between people,making for virtual communities. This isolation makes us very dependenton the media, allowing our perceptions of the city-region, its inhabitantsand locales, to be easily manipulated by those with a clear agenda or largefinancial backing. Mall owners have responded with a variety of themedenvironments to attract customers. Thus the image of the city in the Post-modern city takes on a meaning never intended by Lynch, but easilyunderstood by Marshall McLuhan. In this situation Urban Design takes ona mediated dimension that is rarely considered in discussing the newlyfounded discipline.
THE TRIUMPH OF THE HETEROTOPIA: THE LIMITS OF URBAN DESIGN
Urban Design emerged, in part, in reaction to the Modernist City Machinemodel to manage the aesthetics of the resulting fragments. This implied anincrease in the scale of operations of the architect, but also, paradoxically, adiminution of the power of the planner. Instead of a whole city, now onlythe enclave or the single armature might be controlled. Also abandoned wasthe Modernist idea that architecture might help create or even enforce thecreation of a better “New Man”. Post-modern Urban Designers gave up theutopian aspirations of their predecessors and accepted that they were onlya part of a larger social situation that was fundamentally beyond theircontrol. They aligned themselves largely with the corporate forces of themarket place, real estate interests, service and media interests, which werereshaping the city. The moral imperatives that had inspired the Modernistswere exchanged for the commercial and marketing imperatives that inspiredtheir new clients.
Along with this shift in allegiance amongst Post-modern Urban Designerswent an abandonment of the Modernist claim that architecture could createa “New Man” or entirely new city. Thus architecture and Urban Designtake their place amongst a number of disciplines which might be said toconstruct the city setting, whether in the center or at the edge. Good archi-tecture or Urban Design alone cannot make a city successful or safe; manyother disciplines and people are involved. The larger social and economicsetting is obviously very important along with a host of other factors beyond
Figure 6. Edge City: ModifiedModel Diagram. (Drawn byD.G. Shane.)
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the designer’s control. Contemporary Urban Design has become a risky andshifting business with many complex actors, agents and forces participatingin the creation and recreation of our cities.
REFERENCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baudrillard, J., Simulations, New York: Semiotext, 1983.Eco, U., Travels in Hyper Reality, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.Choay, F., “Urbanism and Semiology” in Jencks, C. and Baird, G., Meaning in Archi-
tecture, London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1969.Foucault, M., “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”, in Ockman, J. (Editor),
Architecture/Culture 1943–1988: A Documentary Anthology, New York:Columbia University, 1993.
Gennochio, B., “Discourse, Discontinuity and Difference: The Question of theOther” in Watson, S. and Gibson, K., Postmodern Cities and Spaces, Cambridge,MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
Hetherington, K., The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopias and Social Ordering,New York: Routledge, 1997.
Lynch, K., “City Models and City Form” in Good City Form, Cambridge, MA:M.I.T. Press, and New York: Routledge,1984.
Sassen, S., and Roost, F., “The City: Strategic Site for the Global EntertainmentIndustry” in Fainstein, S. (Editor), The Tourist City, New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1999.
Shane, D. G., “The Galleria Houston as Mega-mall” in Architecktur Jahrbuch 1998/
Architecture in Germany 1998, Munich: Prestel Publishing, 1998.Soja, E., “Heterotopologies: A Rememberance of Other Spaces in Citadel L.A.” in
Watson, S. and Gibson, K., Postmodern Cities and Spaces, Cambridge, MA andOxford: Blackwell, 1995.
Summerson, J., Georgian London, London: Pleiades Books, 1948.Venturi, R., Scott-Brown, D. and Izenour, S., Learning From Las Vegas, Cambridge,
MA: M.I.T. Press, 1972.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 88th Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2000.
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III URBAN SOCIETY
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INTRODUCTIONDOUGLAS KELBAUGH
If the design disciplines and professions can lay special claim to urban form,a much broader array of fields is concerned with urban society, the third andlast section of the book. Society is shaped by the character and interactionof human institutions, customs, laws, and policies, as well as technologyand natural circumstances such as geography and climate. It is the socialand cultural condensate of evolving civilization—complex, dynamic, andunwieldy. Society is not simple to analyze or explain, much less to designor control. The sum of countless vectors of different magnitude pushing indifferent directions, it is constantly shifting its center of gravity and trajec-tory, often in ways and with consequences that are not easily or immediatelyapparent. Nonetheless, there are some more obvious changes that seem toowidespread and inexorable to be ignored by the design fields. This third andfinal section of the book focuses on the more salient and consequentialtrends and issues, with an emphasis on how they impinge on the design andplanning of the built environment.
Societal changes seem to be both cyclic/recurring and structural/trans-formative. The former have to do with matters of fashion and style. Theseshorter-term trends are on designers’ radar, but considered too ephemeraland superficial to write or even talk about. Stylistic considerations areimportant but unacknowledged, especially in fields and mediums that aremeant to be long lasting—like architecture and urban planning. On theother hand, there is a great deal of academic and professional discourse onlonger-term change. Like the dozen or so essays in this section, design theorytends to focus on the deeper and more lasting societal changes and theirimpact on architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and planning.
If urbanism and society are inextricably entangled, what societal changesare of most interest and concern to those concerned with the built environ-ment? And what issues, dialectics, and antinomies preoccupy and shapepractices and policies? The public realm, globalism and local identity, andtechnology—the three foci in this section of the book—are of paramountrelevance. And they are interconnected in transparent and opaque waysto each other and to the other two sections of the book, urban process andurban form.
The contemporary public realm is rich if not fraught with pithy contra-dictions and polarities. There are potent questions about public and privatespace—what is public and collective and shared, and what is private andidiosyncratic? What belongs in the public and private sectors? What iseveryday public space and what is civic public space? What surveillance andintrusion rights does government have? The public realm also touches on
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issues of social class, of authenticity, and identity. Whose reality and whoseidentity, especially in a diverse society? Also social and economic justice,particularly racial and gender equity, are central to societal sustainability.Urban design aspires to make places and communities that democraticallybalance these competing interests and resolve these questions. But nosubject is off the table; the notion of “place” is challenged as a romantic,even maudlin, longing for a past that may never have existed in the firstplace. On the other hand, people are uneasy about, if not threatened by, thebreathless rate of change in their lives, and have a growing appetite for thestability of tradition and grounded place. It is a chronic and perhapsunavoidable clash between modernist, universal space and postmodernistneotraditional place, made all the more acute by forces of globalization andtechnology.
As noted in the Preface, society is fast becoming both global and urban,with 90 percent of the estimated 3 billion increase in world populationexpected to live in urbanized areas (often in mega-agglomerations that areunlike cities as we presently know them). The remarkable acceleration in theurbanization of society is both promising and challenging. In addition toproviding social benefits and amenities, cities are inherently more energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable than low-density development.The post-petroleum megalopolis—very big, very diverse, very rich, and verypoor—will need to develop infrastructure, transportation systems, andbuildings that can survive and flourish with less plentiful, more expensiveenergy, as well as rising sea levels and more severe weather events.
Cities will also have to negotiate and learn to live with the globalizationof finance, production, and distribution, as well as all the attendant eco-nomic and social recalibrations and dislocations. The growth of free-tradezones and extra-jurisdictional spaces to circumvent national laws andexploit cheap labor begs difficult ethical questions about political and cor-porate behavior, as well as physical design and planning. So too do con-tested borders and cross-border activities, both legal and illegal. Naturaldisasters, poverty, disease, social upheavals, geo-political tension, terrorism,and war will continue to ravage society, as they always have and no doubtalways will. To this long list of perennial problems must be added thedilemma of the carbon-based world economy and the resultant juggernautof climate change.
This section ends with four essays on technological issues. Technologyis so pervasive and commonplace in today’s society that we tend to eithertake it for granted or miss the forest for the trees. It is easy to forget thatchoosing which technological waves to ride and which consequences,intended and unintended, to embrace is essentially a socio-political act.The notion of technological determinism is frequently challenged by thesewritings. Like the ones on the public realm and globalism, these final essaysdelve into and try to untangle the contradictions and conundrums of techno-
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science and techno-culture, to use Frampton’s terminology. Empowered andexhilarated, but also controlled by the logic of mechanical and digitaldevices, we are chronically torn by the merits and demerits of technology.The ubiquity of electronic communication and the pervasiveness of com-puting have fundamentally altered our lifestyles and environments, not tomention transformed the public realm. The tension between the embedded/ambient and the public/monumental in urban design is both exacerbatedand relaxed by new science and technology. For instance, networks,whether digital or vehicular, strongly shape society and, in turn, the builtenvironment.
This third section in particular and the book in general are rife withdialectical dilemmas and difficult choices: technology vs. nature, modernvs. postmodern, absolute vs. relative, the built vs. the natural, universal vs.local, background vs. foreground, space vs. place, private vs. public,corporate vs. government, secular vs. religious, east vs. west, north vs.south, and rich vs. poor. The list could go on. These are both old and newdualities, dichotomies, and polarities—inevitably part of any complex, self-regulating system, including the book’s triad of urban process, urban form,and urban society. The challenge is to untether these problems from dogmaand myth, and to attempt to resolve them, whether obliquely or frontally.They will forever require adjustment and correction, which can be tem-porary and provisional, or recurring and incremental, or transformativeand cataclysmic. This collection of essays begins to sort out some of thesechallenges, to identify promising opportunities, and to posit some answers,as well as to ask important new questions.
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BIG BROTHER IS CHARGING YOUTHE PUBLICREALM
MICHAEL SORKIN (2007)
As part of his recently released plan for “New York 2030,” Mayor MichaelBlooomberg is actively promoting a scheme for congestion pricing in thebusiest parts of Manhattan. Modeled on programs in Singapore, London,and Stockholm, the system is intended to curb vehicular traffic (and to raisemoney for public transportation) by imposing charges ($8 for cars and $21for trucks) to enter the borough below 96th Street. The proposal has thesupport of virtually every bien-pensant urbanist in town, although it has metsome resistance, particularly from the outer boroughs and suburbs wherecar dependence is highest and public transport thinnest. And there aremany who suggest that the burden of the charges will fall disproportionatelyon the poor.
I certainly support radical measures to reduce traffic in Manhattan andcongestion pricing has a good track record in the cities that have tried it.But there is something disquieting about the system. The arguments that itwill be a trivial burden to the man in the Mercedes and a serious one to thebusboys in the battered banger have real merit. But what really chills me isthe means by which the system will be run. As in London, routes into thecity are to be guarded by cameras that will photograph all incoming carsand record their license numbers, information that will be used to generatebilling. And the system will presumably be capable of other levels of photo-graphic observation and is sure to be linked to other networks and data-bases administered by our anxious state.
Earlier this month, the front page of the New York Times carried a storyheadlined “Police Plan a Web of Surveillance for Downtown—Like LondonRing of Steel—A Call for 3,000 Cameras—New York Seeking More Anti-terror Aid.” These cameras would join close to 5,000 private and publicsecurity cameras already in operation in lower Manhattan. Technologicallyspeaking, the plan is identical to the apparatus for congestion pricing, bothfor its reliance on cameras and license plate scanners (and its potential toincorporate face recognition software and other suspicious algorithms) andfor the massive, largely unregulated, database it will compile. While thepolice disingenuously offer that a CCTV camera on the street is simplyequivalent to an additional cop on the beat, civil libertarians suggest thatthere is an important difference between simply being observed in a publicplace and having information about your movement, activities, and where-abouts recorded, stored, and shared.
The authoritarian risks of such systems are thrown into particular reliefby their congeniality to more unabashed authoritarian regimes. The Chinesegovernment is in the process of installing more than 20,000 CCTV cameras
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in the city of Shenzhen (with face recognition software provided by a U.S.-financed company, China Public Security, incorporated in Florida) that areto work in tandem with new ID cards for all residents. These cards willhave embedded chips (again with software from China Public Security) thatare to contain staggering amounts of information, including work, credit,and reproductive histories, religious and ethnic data, medical insurancestatus, transit payments, landlord phone numbers, police records, and roomfor lots more. And, the Shenzhen police already have the capacity to trackthe location of all cell phones in use in the city. Clearly, such invasivesystems threaten any reasonable idea of a right to privacy.
This transformation is fundamental. Cities—and the organization ofspace in general—are key media by which we sort out the boundariesbetween public and private and the public side of the equation is increasinglysqueezed. The dramatic acceleration of surveillance post-9/11 is one markerof the contraction and police agencies, public and private, are enjoyingvirtual carte blanche to intrude both in the traditional public realm—thestreets of the city—and in the private as well. As David Harvey observes,“The ‘war on terror’ has everywhere been deployed as an excuse to diminishpolitical and civil liberties.” The profusion of data-mining, phone taps,bio-metric screening, DNA testing, and other intrusive technologies is apolitical and cultural development of truly frightening implications,an erosion of our most basic freedoms, including what Henri Lefebvre hasfamously called “the right to the city.” The supportive incorporation of“terror” as part of the standard repertoire of architectural and planningdue diligence—like fire or seismic protection—is astonishingly sinister andfar exceeds any simple utilitarian account. As a profession, we are far toocompliant in advancing this threatening regime.
The contraction of the public realm, however, extends beyond theseOrwellian developments. Public space is produced from the private: indemocracy, the commons is always a compact about what is to be shared,what reserved, about where we choose to interact with the other. There’sbeen a lot of criticism from certain academic quarters about traditionalnotions of public space, about over-identifying the idea with streets,squares, parks, and other historic settings for the face to face. This critiqueis predicated on the idea both that these spaces fail to acknowledge theexistence of multiple publics and that a purely spatial definition of publicspace is inadequate in the internet (or any other) age. While the idea of aone-size-fits-all public arena surely risks its own oppressions, spaces of freeaccess are foundational to civil liberty and winnowing them, whether fornominally progressive or for out and out reactionary reasons, is very risky.Public space that excludes the civic—supporting only private forms ofexchange—puts our democracy under radical threat.
Consider Starbucks. The problem with Starbucks isn’t the instance butthe aggregate. I’ve just returned from several weeks in the suburbs and
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Starbucks was a lifeline. Not simply the only source of decent coffee formiles, it was also an oasis of conviviality with its comfortable chairs, freenewspapers, and relaxed vibe. The Starbucks we frequented was part of abig shopping center, sandwiched with a couple of other smallish shopsbetween a monster supermarket and a gigantic Lowe’s box. Not that wehad no choices: another local supermarket had a kind of satellite Starbucksright inside the store, along with a pharmacy, a bank, and various cate-gory stretching elements of the supermarket itself: bakery, liquor store,deli, hardware, florist, etc. Being there, I felt a little like Nikita Khrushchevon tour, visibly staggered by the sheer scale of the operation and of thechoices on offer in American capital’s most perfectly staged spectacle ofconsumption.
The problem with the suburbs (and increasingly the city) lies in both thehomogeneity of their formats and the frequent elusiveness of a genuinelypublic realm, the fact that a coffee always comes from Starbucks or Dunkin’Donuts and that the street on which these stores sit is always a parking lotor supermarket aisle. The difficulty is not the lovely houses and gardens, northe qualities of neighborliness they can produce, but an interstitial tissuethat is only negotiable by car. This is a toll even more severe than the down-side of congestion pricing—financially, in the alienating effects of hoursspent sealed up alone, and for those people it excludes. Over years of visitingelderly parents in the suburbs, I have watched their possibilities contract in asystem in which a carton of milk or a visit to a friend requires an increasinglyperilous drive on the highway.
It’s Sunday in New York and I’ve just returned from a walk to buy acoffee . . . at Starbucks. There’s one a block away and, as I’ve mentioned, thecoffee is tasty, despite the foolishness I feel when forced to order a “grande”instead of a medium. While strolling over, I’ve counted the security camerason the single block between here and there. There are fifteen visible to me.Fifteen. This paranoid voyeurism by the authorities surely contracts ourrelationship to the spaces over which we—whatever “public” we happen tobelong to—exercise proprietorship and in which we feel comfortable and“at home.” The line between the friendly cop on the corner and Big Brotheris not obscure.
I’d love to get some traffic out of the neighborhood but those camerasmay be too high a price to pay. Such are the ambiguities of unfreedom thatthe exclusion of cars on the one hand and their indispensability on theother can be servants of the same agendas of monitoring and control whileat the same time their use (or non-use) remains emblematic of the freedom atthe core of what makes both cities and suburbs desirable to their denizens.Technology is a human artifact and its role in culture is neither autonomousnor neutral. I have no doubt that we are at a watershed not simply in termsof the way in which we deploy technologies of surveillance, mobility, andcontrol, but in the fact that the character of the public realm is under
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enormous threat from both too much government intervention (by the get-government-off-our-backs creeps in power) and the concession of too muchof the public realm to private interest. A shopping mall is not the same as astreet and a security camera on every corner is not a pal.
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COMMUNITAS AND THE AMERICANTHE PUBLICREALM
PUBLIC REALMSPIRO KOSTOF (1987)
If I begin with Boston Common, it is because it is all there. For over threehundred years it has remained an open space, there in the heart of a thrivingcity, fighting “progress” that should have eliminated or reduced it long ago.In the seventeenth century, cows grazed here, and the local militia exercised,and “the Gallants a little before Sunset walk with their Marmalet Madams,”the English visitor John Josselyn wrote in 1663, “till the nine a clock Bellrings them home to their respective habitations.” Early in the next century,trees were planted on the Tremont Street side; the walkway they framed wascalled The Mall.
Buildings surrounded the Common. There were churches with theirgraveyards, shops, elegant houses along Beacon Hill. The MassachusettsState Houses at on an eminence on this Beacon Hill side, with an imposingset of stairs descending toward the Common. Monuments cropped up, tohonor publicly what Boston thought worth honoring. At the far side,toward Arlington Street, on land reclaimed from the mud of the Back Bayin the mid-nineteenth century, a lovely Public Garden was installed—small,formal, manicured. And so the place continued, more or less free ofencroachments, a common ground for pleasure and civic use, where allcould come and go as they pleased and encounters were easy andunrehearsed.
This is the public face of America. Every town, however small, designsinto its fabric a stage of this sort. Beyond self, beyond family and neigh-borhood, there exists a public realm which holds our pride as a people. Wewant public places in order to enjoy the unplanned intimacy of civil society,and to celebrate that sense we have of belonging to a broad community—acommunity with a shared record of accomplishment.
I want to talk to you about the public realm—and I have nothing newto say about it. This is not a research paper, nor even a carefully reasonedargument. I offer you instead a simple synthetic review, a biased one at that,of our history as public persons. I offer a hymn of praise for what we were—and an elegy for what we have become.
The public realm was of course there at the beginning, from the very firstEuropean towns planted on this continent. The street was the commonestpublic place of all. It was, with few exceptions, a straight line. And it waswithout artifice, and ill-defined by abutting structures. Still, the street was astage of activity and chance encounters from the beginning. This public life
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was especially lively in administrative capitals like Williamsburg andAnnapolis, and in port or river towns with their shops, the crowds thatarrived on boats, the bustle of the wharves.
But there were also intentional public open spaces. In the middle of theirgridded pueblos, the Spanish invariably left a large plaza, longer than it waswide and surrounded by porticoes where goods were sold. The administra-tive palace and other public buildings fronted the plaza, and so very oftendid the main church. But there was nothing in the middle: that was for thepeople, for their fiestas and the customary evening stroll or corso, a time ofsocializing, flirting, showing off.
French towns were on rivers, and the town square, which doubled as aparade ground here too, looked out on the waterfront. The buildings thatdefined the square included a barracks and a hospital. In New Orleans, thesquare, miraculously, lives still—a charmed, evocative public place, full ofshade and smell.
Americans, that side of them that derives from the English at least, werenever very comfortable with an empty public place. They liked it filled withsomething, preferably some sort of public building that would provide agood excuse for wanting to be there, so you wouldn’t be presumed to beloitering or wasting time.
Take the New England common. The open space had a useful purpose atfirst. In the early morning, when the men walked from their houses to thefields at the edge of town, they led their cattle to the “close” in this open areaof town. A herdsman would then lead the town cattle out of here to graze inthe common pastures, and lead them back at dusk for the returning men totake them home.
The real reason for the common was the meeting house, religious centerand town hall in one. When the allocation of land was first made in a newtown, a large plot was set aside for this most important building of com-munity life. Once the meeting house was set up, and the graveyard fenced inwith a neat stone wall, other buildings gathered around—the nooninghouse, where in the winter months the parishioners could find some shelterand heat during the breaks in the long, cold services of Sabbath; the tavern,which also served as temporary courthouse and stage stop; a blacksmithshop. There might be a magazine for the storage of powder, horse sheds forthe parishioners, a schoolhouse.
Otherwise, the common was an unsightly, rutted piece of barren land,riddled with stumps and stones. Its public uses were reflected in its furnish-ings: the hay scale, the bulletin board, the well, the whipping post. Toturn this stern Puritan civic center into the town green we now admire, themonopoly of the Congregational church on town life had first to be broken.
In New Haven we have the classic early case of this transformation. Afterthe War of 1812, the city cleared its common, then called the Market Place,of its old buildings and roads, moved the graveyard, and lined up three
The town common in Petersham,Massachusetts. (Photo by Kit KrankelMcCullough.)
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churches down the middle where the old meeting house had stood unchal-lenged, one of them Episcopalian. Planned spaces were also allotted to theMethodists and Baptists at the two corners. Behind the three churches rosethe new state house, in temple form, replacing an older building that wasnow found to spoil the symmetry. On the northwest side, Yale’s Brick Rowfaced it across College Street. The area was fenced in, and edged with elms.It was now called the Green. When the elms matured this became one of themost celebrated public squares in America.
By then, in the 1830s and 1840s, in the new railroad towns of theMidwest and the South, the New England green had found its counterpart inthe courthouse square. This was the central feature of towns that served ascounty seats. The courthouse stood in the middle of the one-block square,on a slight rise, surrounded by trees. In the vast treeless plains, this greenoasis was a statement of survival and permanence. The townfolk spoke of itproudly as the “park” or the “grove.” The jail and a fireproof clerk’s officemight be at the corners of the square. For the rest, it was small, local retailbusinesses, a hotel, a restaurant or coffee shop where the businessmen atetheir lunches. Board roofs projecting from the fronts of these establishmentsfurnished shade, and plank seats between the roof supports made it easy tospend time there.
The farmers came in regularly from the surrounding countryside on legaland tax matters. In the courthouse were kept land grants and commercialdebt-bonds. On the grounds there was room for the weekly market and thecountry fair, and for electioneering. Here statue-soldiers on pedestalsbetokened past wars, none more sacred than Johnny Reb.
So a public urban place like the courthouse square, in these old days,was the setting where all sorts of people came together informally, wherecollective civic actions like markets and parades took place, and wherethe prevalent values and beliefs of the community were made manifest. Theinstitutional building—the courthouse or the public library or the townhall—dominated. The space was well bounded and its scale intimate; it tookits shape from the street pattern. It had many uses, some of them unplanned.But the urban square was political territory. Within its confines, peopleknew their place, and found strength in their local tradition. The space heldthem, gave them identity. It is where they learned to live together.
Now the urban park, coming in around the same time, the mid-nineteenth century, was a very different sort of public place. It was anti-city,to begin with, both in form and intention. What it offered, visually, wasan invented, romantic landscape, with no relation whatever to the streetpattern. The sense was of a pleasure ground, a place of quiet and passiveenjoyment. The park would set us free of the structured order of the town,free of its organized, but also volatile, behavior, free of its tensions. Atthe same time, the park would provide a neutral setting where the poor andthe rich could come together as equals.
The courthouse square inLockhart, Texas. (Photo by KitKrankel McCullough.)
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So ran the rhetoric. But this outward look of innocent escapism andfraternal equality in fact couched a much more serious purpose. It had todo with the imposition of moral order where it was thought most wanting,among the urban poor. The creators and administrators of parks weregentlemen idealists. They viewed the park, from the very start, as an uplift-ing device, a means to improve the social behavior of the citizenry, whichreally came to making sure that the working classes, the immigrant laborof the Yankee-owned businesses, behaved like their betters, the culturedupper crust.1
This is how Frederick Law Olmsted thought of the park. What he reallyintended to do with his parks was to wean the working classes away fromtheir ethnic neighborhoods, away from the adventures of city streets, andto make proper Americans out of them.
Olmsted was uncompromising on the issue of built structures. Within hisparks, there were to be no monuments, no decorations. The urban squarewas the proper place for such “townlike things,” as Charles Eliot put it. Itwas, to my mind, the first major attack, all the more serious because sopolite and well-couched, on our true public places, and this polite attackfound an echo in the native prototype of the urban park, the rural cemetery.
In colonial days, people got buried in the churchyard. Burial was the rightof any church member; you did not have to pay to get a lot. The tombs hadheadstones with symbolic carvings, often reused by others, and instructiveinscriptions to remind us of the virtues of the deceased and the fearsomenessof death. These unlandscaped, fully visible churchyards in the center oftown were a kind of collective monument that stressed the oneness of theliving and the dead.
By 1800, the need for larger and more sanitary burial grounds led toplanned cemeteries, the first of them introduced in New Haven by JamesHillhouse in 1796, laid out in a regular grid. When this idea of the formallay-out takes over, the cemetery becomes a specialized, isolated place,removed from the urban scheme. You have to pay to be buried now. Deathhere is no longer something to be dreaded; it was very much as if you werebeing reunited with your loved ones and with God, so that private and notcollective commemoration becomes the ruling order and cemeteries becomeshowplaces for fancy family monuments.
In the 1830s death got an alternate setting—the romantically conceivedgarden they call the rural cemetery, more for the living than for the dead,with serpentine carriage avenues and gravel footpaths and statues ofpatriotic figures. Mount Auburn, in Cambridge, was the first, in 1835. Andthen in quick order, Laurel Hill in Philadelphia, Brooklyn’s Green Wood—which was called “The Garden City of the Dead”—others in Baltimore,Lowell, St. Louis, and so on. The city folk flocked to these pastoral,nostalgic gardens to spend the day among the flowers and the trees. But ineffect what happened was that death was neutralized and prettified, much as
1 For this discussion of the urbanpark, two current sources areindispensable: R. Rosenzweig,“Middle-Class Parks and Working-Class Play,” Radical History Review21, Fall 1979, pp. 31–46; and R.Starr, “The Motive Behind Olmsted’sPark,” Public Interest 74, Winter1984, pp. 66–76. In general,see G. Cranz, The Politics of ParkDesign (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T.Press, 1982).
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the urban tensions of those vital cities of the nineteenth century wereneutralized and prettified in urban parks. It was an early manifestation ofthat nineteenth-century tendency for family, church and community to driftapart, the tendency to remove public business from the stages of daily life,to drain the public realm of tension and spontaneous ferment, and tohomogenize it.
In this slow process of the dominant classes to diminish us as publicpersons, cemeteries, urban parks, and a third element, the suburb, hada very specific role to play. It has always seemed strange to me thatarchitectural historians would link the form of rural cemeteries, urbanparks, and picturesque suburbs, and refuse to see the more serious agendathat brings them together. All three are attempts to diffuse communality,which derived precisely from the social interaction of the diverse and theunequal, and to create, instead, lethargic environments which induce socialharmony and outward tranquility by distancing themselves from potentialconflict, from rival claims of allegiance, from reminders of misfortune andpain.
Suburbs, of course, were exclusive communities that harbored a specialway of life. There you could associate with neighbors of your own kind.A suburban street, the legacy of Andrew Jackson Downing, is to the urbanstreet what the park is to the urban square. That suburban street is areaction in part to the phenomenon of row houses, the very symbol of urbancongestion and promiscuity. This urban convention had overtaken our earlystreets that were so ill-defined, as I suggested, and, by the early nineteenthcentury, had created channels, very well-defined channels, the row housesbuilt against each other in series enclosing street corridors and so intensify-ing the public aspect of the street.
Front and side yards are gone. The houses are brought together close tothe edge of the lots and between them and the street channel, an inter-mediate space is created, a great invention of the nineteenth century, thesidewalk, a pedestrian island that increased the possibility of chanceencounters between abutters and between abutters and passers-by.
In the urban core, there was a pattern of urban use. Artisans, merchants,shopkeepers, plied their trade, often in the large front room, and of course,the ultimate in this kind of promiscuity was the great American contributionto modern urbanism in the nineteenth century, Main Street—usually two orthree blocks long, wider than the rest of the streets, and in small towns, opento the farm land at either end. The business premises were on the groundfloor, and tall false fronts advertised the owner’s intention to go up a secondstorey when he could. When they existed, these upper storeys would betaken up by professional people like lawyers and physicians, and by groupsas meeting rooms. The exterior sides would be used for advertising. So MainStreet was a place where farmers could come in for supplies and luxuries;the barbershop would be there, the local newspaper, livery stables, the
Commonwealth Avenue, Boston.(Photo by Kit Krankel McCullough.)
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saloon. This is where the 4th of July parade would be held, and this is laterwhere the young people would cruise on weekends and kill time in the drugstore and in the movie theater.
In fact, as we all know, Main Street was much more than a street. It was astate of mind, a set of values. It represented the simple, insular life of whole-some, honest folk unconcerned about the fashions of Paris or the BoerWar—the setting of Andy Hardy movies, where decency and common sensealways ruled. But it was also, as small town writers like Sinclair Lewis andSherwood Anderson sharply exposed, a symbol of ignorance, bigotry,closed-mindedness, intolerance. It was also a gritty, discordant site.Buildings were rough-hewn and clashed with each other in their styles, notat all the sanitary look and uniform nice Victorian frontages that you see inDisneyland’s version of Main Street.
At any rate, Downing’s suburb was envisaged as a relief from thatarrangement, those compacts, those tensions of Main Street and row streets.The Gothic cottage that he sells us in his books was a private place, aChristian place, a church for the family. Here Downing said, “The socialsympathies take shelter securely under the shadowy eaves, as if striving toshut out whatever of bitterness and strife may be found in the open high-ways of the world.” Precisely. Don’t bother me; I don’t want to know what’sgoing on out there.
The house has a nice open lawn, which replaces the pre-row housememory of the fenced-in, producing front yard, front garden, and createsa continuous unfenced environment down the street, stressing the sense ofa community, cut of one cloth—no social tensions, no problems. Everyonemakes the same income. Everyone has the same number of children. Thingsare cozy. There are no funny people: no Blacks, no Jews; no problem people.Just our sort of people: large store owners, brokers, prosperous lawyers,manufacturers, wholesalers, who could move their place of residence awayfrom the city and thus shun contact with that melting-pot population ofimmigrants. Behind this polite, outwardly welcoming, self-same publicaspect, the family turned in upon itself and began staging its own rituals ofcommunion and leisure.
The park had a harder time doing its leveling work. Very early it became abattleground of two contending social factions. On one side, the cultured,cosmopolitan elite of Olmsted’s peers who saw the park as a pristine workof art, a soothing middle landscape between raw nature and the unseemlyentanglement of cities. On the other hand, the ward politicians, to whomparks were vacant land that could be filled with job-producing structures.
And there were the related conflicts of use. To the reformers, the park waswhere the classes could rub shoulders. It was the ideal place for culturalenlightenment and, in time, rejecting Olmsted’s purism on the subject, edu-cational institutions like museums and conservatories, aquariums, zoos, andso on, ensconced themselves within its bounds. But the working classes were
Main Street, Lockhart, Texas.(Photo by Kit Krankel McCullough.)
Downing-style cottage,Pittsburgh. (Photo byKit Krankel McCullough.)
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much more interested in a sturdy playground, a place for fun and games.They didn’t want to be particularly cultured in that way.
These conflicts were never resolved. It is in the nature of public placesto act as fields of interaction and to change character in the process ofmediating social behavior. The working classes insisted on, sometimesviolently, and got their own playgrounds, which may not seem like muchto us, but which were different—and that is the point—from the refinedpleasure garden of the middle class.
After 1900, a new type of park that stresses organized activity appears.There was now, after 1900, a shorter work week. There were longervacations, earlier retirement—all of this was creating, as you know, whatbecame known as “leisure time” and it was best if it could be filled in anorderly way now, society felt. Now came a sudden profusion of municipalbeaches, stadiums, tennis courts, picnic areas, and public playgrounds. ButOlmsted won too. During his long career, he managed to give substanceto twenty or so urban parks of his particular brand, and to go far beyond,towards a vision of the city as a landscape at large, with a whole constella-tion of parks linked together into an integrated system.
The connectors would be green boulevards and parkways. The boulevardsand parkways would now use stately public buildings as focal points. Thescale, in fact, of our public buildings had steadily escalated after the CivilWar. By the end of the century, a spectacular monumentality had seized ourcities. It made pre-war courthouses, state capitols, and colleges look almostresidential by comparison. Something had changed. Our vision of ourselveswas not what it had been.
Size was not all. We now also joyously embraced public art. There weresheathings of lavish materials, stained-glass windows, painted friezes, andshowy furnishings. American artists trained at Dusseldorf, at Munich, at theHague, at the École des Beaux-Arts, came back armed with sophisticatedtechniques and a style that stressed historical pageantry and the rhetoricof allegory. These they now put to work in their public programs of art,in friezes and personifications. They peopled our public places withmonumental sculpture, mounted on impressive architectural frames finelyproportioned to the landscape of the city, and fixed with studied care inentrances to parks, in public squares, as markers of avenues and landscapedvistas.
Now this new worldliness at the end of the nineteenth century, whichaimed to put us on a par with Europe, to make us atone for our ugly MainStreet, came at a price. The rich harvest of allusion in our new public artleft the average viewer far behind, unable to absorb the erudite referencesthat kindled the artist’s work. And a similar distancing, I think, began totake place between our daily rituals and their aggrandizement througharchitecture. Reading, shopping, traveling, were now being ensconced inluxurious settings, far grander than the functions themselves called for.
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The Boston Public Library on Copley Square was called “a palace for thepeople” by the trustees, and so, indeed, it was. The enjoyment of art, once adomestic pleasure of wealthy Americans and their friends, was also elevatedto a public spectacle; the great private collections were open to the people bybequest and grant, and most were housed in monumental buildings. Citiesraised their own civic monuments to art in the manner of the great Europeanpalace museums.
This new tendency to design and build for show as much for utility didnot stop with government and culture. Metropolitan railroad stationsnow sat ponderously in the modestly scaled townscape. At the same timethree- or four-storey office buildings grew into spectacular towers. Andfinally, shopping areas became palaces of consumption called “departmentstores”—Macy’s, Marshall Fields, Wanamakers, Jordan Marsh; between1880 and 1910, these became the true centers of the downtowns.
The change brought about by this imperial monumentality was two-pronged. First, railroad stations, department stores, office towers, set up acolossal public scale that overwhelmed the once-dominant scale of churchesand government buildings. Traditionally, it was steeples and domes thatpunctuated American cities. Church steeples had always been omni-present—whole forests of them in the big cities. But faith compromisedsomething of its public force when the temples of commerce began to over-whelm the landscape of God. Domes, too, that once rose over governmentbuildings alone, were now pre-empted, by the end of the nineteenth century,in libraries and countless buildings—or rather, the same monumental dresscovered now a whole range of buildings, banks as well as state capitols,clubs and apartment houses as well as town halls.
Indeed, whole sections of towns, as planned and viewed by the CityBeautiful planners, now created a kind of uniformly monumental town-scape, from the business district out to the upper-class residential avenues,and so it became very difficult to assign symbolic priorities among indi-vidual institutions. There was now total disdain for the classic plottingdevice of American cities, the grid, in the new City Beautiful plans whoseradial avenues now began to cut through fine-grained neighborhoods inthe name of slum clearance—a kind of premonition of the urban renewalpolicies of the 1950s.
The second aspect of this new public domain was that it was really notpublic, not in the traditional sense. Once our collective activity had centeredupon, and been represented by, a genuinely “public” pattern: the market,the wharf, places of assembly, courthouses, town halls—these were paid forby us and in a fundamental way they belonged to us. This was not true ofbanks and skyscrapers and department stores, or even railroad stations.They were monuments to private interests and we basked in their splendorthrough the courtesy of companies that courted our business, but obviouslycould never speak for us collectively as a civic society. The more our public
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architecture celebrated the private sector, the weaker grew our sense ofbeing a distinct and whole community.
At any rate, we had long refused to behave as a public, that is to say, abody of people with a clear political and social identity, except in smalltowns. Through the latter part of the nineteenth century and into thetwentieth, a broad coalition of reformers, educators, politicians, workedhard to mold us into a homogeneous society, but we tended to fragment.Ethnicity pulled us apart; sex, class, special interests pulled us apart. So whatcivil and political cohesion we could not attain, we directed into consump-tion and recreation. So, in a sense, we deserved these new private-publicmonuments, because we had become a buying public, a traveling public, aplaying public.
True public places like streets and squares declined in favor of depart-ment stores, stadiums, beaches, and later on, shopping centers. True publicplaces declined because we chose, very consciously, to separate human lifeinto isolated functions and assign to each one its own physical setting. Wesequestered the family inside the house and moved the house away from thework place. We forced a split in our environment between the intenselybuilt-up downtown and the unaccented spread of the residential suburb.In the suburb, the family turned itself into a microcosm of society. In thedowntown, life ebbed after the work hours, leaving public places to thehomeless, the restless, and the rough.2
From 1920 on, as we all know only too well, another unexpectedphenomenon would destroy what remained of a truly public sense, and that,of course, is the car. It is an easy target, and I don’t want to belabor it. Thepoint is obvious. Piecemeal adjustments had now to be made to accom-modate this new machine. These included very simple devices that had verylongterm consequences: the widening of streets, for one thing, at the expenseof sidewalks. In New York, in 1912, the average width of the sidewalk was15 feet; by 1925 it was 13 feet; by 1960 it was 11 feet. The width of theroadway and community spirit seem to be inversely related. The merchantsunderstood that. They resisted the widening of streets because they knewthat after a certain point you couldn’t get people to relate from one side-walk across to the other, and so use the street as a communal space. But,of course, car culture could care less. Atomism, not community, was itsmotivating force.
The next thing was that curbs were gone. What was ours once, the side-walk, this great invention of the nineteenth century, might as well not havebeen. Then the squares and streets became parking lots. But I think, moreimportantly, in trying to control the machine and traffic, we introducedfears into our daily lives. Traffic hazards were nothing new, but never beforehad we vehicles hurtling by at 30, 35 miles per hour—an elevated street carwould go nine miles an hour at most—and so we became, of course, sickwith fear of public places.
2 The best general statement ofthese disjunctions, to my mind, is stillR. Sennett’s The Uses of Disorder(Knopf, 1970).
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And again, to state the obvious, public transportation began its slow butcertain decline. The more we used cars, the less we used those vehicles thattended to bring us together in the days when we had no alternative. We wentdown from 17 billion rides in public transportation in 1929 to 13 billion in1940, and it continued that way.
And then, of course, little by little, the worst fate of all: highways cominginto town. First the boulevards that were meant to be for slow, gentlerides when Olmsted and his peers set them down became, because of theirGod-given width, fast traffic arteries, and then when they were not enough,new ones began to come downtown.
What little remained in our poor cities of that lively mixture of bigbuildings and modest-scaled ones, of starchy commercial blocks and pro-miscuous neighborhoods, what little remained of all this that the car hadn’tdone away with, would come under attack after World War II. The steadyflight into the suburbs had long condemned the older center city to decay.Now came urban renewal. Its premise was that the deteriorating fabric mustbe razed, the rot removed, and in its place, modern buildings must be put upthat would look nice and would bring in moneyed clients to revitalize thedowntown.
You know the story. It all begins with the Housing Act of 1949 which,through Title I of the Act, offered funds to cities for the clearance of slumsand blighted areas. The amended version of 1954 recognized the practicalvalue of rehabilitating old buildings as a means of reversing urban decay,but wholesale clearance and rebuilding was much the easier alternative.
At the heart of the program was government’s power to buy vast, center-city parcels by the exercise of eminent domain. Typically, the land wouldbe completely cleared of structures before it was turned over to a localredevelopment agency. Urban renewal was supposed to free cities “thatwere enslaved to the 20 to 25 foot lot.” It was meant to enlarge the streetsystem, of course, at the expense of the pedestrian, and run highways intothe center-city shopping areas. In effect, the urban expressways made it eveneasier to leave the city, and the Act gave license to the often-indiscriminatedestruction of old neighborhoods with their own public spaces marked withthe character of their age and use, and the installment of apartment towersand commercial buildings lapped by vast open spaces where the thick ofthings had been.
In a sense, then, what was being destroyed was our history, our memory.Modern architecture was then going through a tradition-denying phase.It had no use for the familiar historical styles or story-telling declaration, nouse for the slow accretion of buildings through time, the intimacies of thewaterfront street, or a lightly enclosed urban square.
The earlier generations of tall buildings saw no conflict between them-selves and the traditional public spaces of streets and plazas. Even the moreflashy, historicist brood usually had a neutral space-defining facade up
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to a certain level before they gave way to the fanciful in their strangecrowns.
But the modernist dogma, that the skyscraper be a free-standing object,as articulated by Le Corbusier in the 1920s—“It is a wonderful instrumentof concentration to be placed in the midst of vast open spaces,” as he putit—this dogma was now fully subscribed to. As shiny towers stayed clear ofone another, space flowed around and even under them, but rarely came torest in pockets that might invite passersby to stay a while and relax.
As a trade-off for some of the bending of the rules in their favor, cor-porate clients would make room for a public plaza on their lots, in theshadows of their gleaming towers, but life rarely found a perch in thesesleek unsheltered wastes, transfixed by sleek, uncommunicative monumentsof abstract art.
The turning point in this slow slide away from a truly public realm wasthe 1960s. It was the decade of our discontent. Our cities went into con-vulsions. Rallies and demonstrations became endemic. Crowds now rousedby some common worry poured into the streets and open spaces of America.Public life turned political, and so public places were reinvested withcivic purpose. In the general anxiety of self-examination, the policy ofurban renewal began to raise doubts. Was the gutting of our cities really forthe good of the people? Were the benefits of corporate towers and theirimmaculate plazas really so clear cut?
This ferment, of course, strengthened the hand of preservationists whowere struggling to make their point. The National Historic Preservation Actof 1966 included the following, for us, absolutely extraordinary language.“Congress finds and declares that the historical and cultural foundations ofthe nation should be preserved as a living part of our community life anddevelopment, in order to give a sense of orientation to the Americanpeople.”
The National Register of Historic Places now was expanded to includebuildings and districts of local as well as national significance, and H.U.D.’sblock grants helped revive old neighborhoods. The inner city witnessed agradual return of the middle classes from the suburbs. Old row houses weregentrified, cafes and restaurants opened in once-derelict urban stretches, andat night strollers could be seen along piers and restored Main Streets. Theold town squares livened up. It seemed that America might be going publiconce again.
To take advantage of this gregarious mood, as business always does, ourdevelopers cooked up new schemes for the downtown. They looked at thesuburban shopping mall, which was a terrific success, and they tried toreplicate it in the city. But the sealed, isolated nature of these malls, withtheir shop fronts turning inward to face the courts, does not suit the casualinteraction characteristic of downtown street activity. The mall is coveredand air conditioned; it is not part of a larger downtown. We should, of
Lakeshore Drive Apartments,Chicago, by Mies van der Rohe,1949–1951. (Photo byDouglas Kelbaugh.)
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course, fruitfully compare it to the old galleria, like those of Milan orNaples, which you did not have to make a special trip to get to and whichare wide open to the city—not only by being literally wide open, but also bybringing street architecture straight into the arcade, and so rejecting anydiscrimination between an outside cityscape and an interior architecture ofthe arcade itself.
Something of that same inhibition that can’t make malls work as truepublic places is also evident in corporate buildings of the 1970s thatinternalize the underused open air plazas of the previous decade by giving usatria. You have to make the decision to brave the smartly polished revolvingdoors, the metallic lobbies with their uniformed guards, before you canexperience the atrium of IBM, Ford, or Trump Tower. These inner courtsare often exciting places: cage-like, lighted dramatically, and staged withintimate corners and interdependent levels that encourage people-watching.But there is something too controlled, even too secure, about them. Theyare, in the end, not our spaces. We are guests who come in from the streetand are expected to behave.
And, indeed, there is also a legal issue sharply focusing this distinction, andthat has to do with the exercise of First Amendment rights. These places areultimately private places and the Supreme Court had to deal two or threetimes with the issue of whether we can pass out leaflets and make speechesthere. In 1968, the Supreme Court voted, in the case of Logan ValleyShopping Center of Altoona, Pennsylvania, that the shopping center was “thefunctional equivalent of a sidewalk” and therefore no distinction could bemade between it and public places like streets, parks, and so on in so far as theexercise of First Amendment rights was concerned (picketing, leaflet distribu-tion, etc.) But in 1971, the Burger Court reversed this, in the case of the LloydShopping Center in Portland, Oregon, and then in 1980, the Supreme Courtlooked at it one more time and said that freedom of speech on private prop-erty can be protected through state law. And indeed, California and severalother states immediately began to put into law the identification of shop-ping malls, university campuses and corporate parks as new public places inthe American metropolis, with all the legal rights pertaining thereunto.
But even with all legal assurance that we can behave in malls and atria aspublic persons, the safe retreat of them, the glimmer of high technology, thecleanliness we are offered, fail to inspire, in the end, that spontaneous andalways unpredictable—indeed, threatening—mingling that goes on in theopen air pockets of real public quality.
Such places are usually in the heart of things. They need not be very fancyat all; a street corner will do. They’re well-connected to the street system.There is in them a working relationship between boundary buildings andopen space. There is a constant coming and going of people with differenterrands and diversions in mind, a constant shifting of the human landscape,a mixture of indolence and scurrying industry.
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Lately we thought we had refound the knack of creating this kind ofmagic out of whole cloth. We appropriate a big urban scrap that has lainneglected or defunct, fill it with shops and eating places, and let indooractivity spill over casually to the outside. The master of this wizardry is, ofcourse, James Wilson Rouse. The inner city to Rouse, however, is “a warmand human place with diversity of choice full of festival and delight.” Inother words, the emphasis is on fun, on the apolitical and the uncontro-versial, and he has a proven way of bringing this about. He creates whathe calls festival marketplaces, in crowded centers that want to combinecommerce, leisure, and showmanship without stressing any of the problemswhich public life ultimately must have constantly on exhibit.
Sometimes he begins with what is there—as with Faneuil Hall. Sometimesthe old is removed altogether, remembered fondly and judiciously, as inHarbor Place, Baltimore, not long ago a decaying waterfront which getstwo waterside pavilions that hark back to the low, long wharf buildings ofthe site, open on both sides, toward the city and toward the water, where thethree-masted frigate Constellation, commissioned by the young nation in1797, is permanently moored. These transparent walls allow people to seethrough the buildings, pour in and out without inhibition.
And on an innocent, mindless level, it works. There is the sea to look outon, that ancient waterfront scene of waves and boats and birds. There is theopen sequence of shops and restaurants on a generous ledge above thequay. And then the cascade of stairs from the ledge down to the water,which makes an adventure out of a stroll.
The means of this popular setting are, of course, clinically calculated.The Rouse Company interviews hundreds of businesses before it selects ahandful of tenants. Some businesses it invents. This occupancy is almostliterally, then, designed in terms of sight and smell. Institutional businessesare avoided; nasty businesses are avoided. Fresh fish is avoided—it smellstoo much. There are no department stores, and only a small number of chainstore outlets. Shopping mall fare, like indoor fountains, plastic plants, andmuzak are forbidden. There are strict rules about the conduct and look ofeach business premise, the use of materials.
So the spontaneity is totally deceptive. For some, at least, urban centerslike Faneuil Hall Market, Harbor Place, and New York’s Roused-up SouthStreet Seaport are celebrations of the trendy superficiality of our time. Theyspeak, as Donlyn Lyndon put it of Faneuil Hall, “of the transformationof our society, of crafts, of franchise, of aspiring good taste, and of ourabsorption with our own superfluous pleasures.”3
That leaves the pedestrian mall, which started with Kalamazoo—“MallCity, USA”—in 1959.4 The model is the suburban mall and Disneyland,and like them the pedestrian mall is artificial and sanitized. The designissue is simple. You eliminate curbs. You stress street furniture, lighting,landscaping. You can have children’s play areas, benches, etc. You can cover
Harbor Place, Baltimore. (Photocourtesy of Douglas Kelbaugh.)
3 The City Observed: Boston(Random House, 1982), p. 45.
4 On pedestrian malls, see chiefly:E. Contini, “Anatomy of the Mall,”AIA Journal 51.2, February 1969,pp. 40–50; R. Brambilla, G. Longo,and V. Dzurinko, American UrbanMalls (U.S.G.P.O., 1977); andBrambilla and Longo, ForPedestrians Only (Whitney Library,1977).
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the mall and air condition it, like Rochester’s Midtown Plaza. You can makewater the main feature, as in Victor Gruen’s Fresno Mall (Fulton Street)where there are fountains, ponds, running rivulets, trellises, shade trees. Butas Edgardo Contini said about it, “To view the pedestrian environment as aglorified botanical garden is a cowardly way out.” Fresno also has a slow-speed electric tramway. It’s too long. People will simply not walk that far—we have lost the knack. The planner’s rule is that 1,000 feet is about as far asa shopper will walk.
At least Fresno was comprehensive, based on a central area plan adoptedin 1960. It viewed the pedestrian mall as an instrument of action. Mostothers are launched with much fanfare but without a long-range programfor downtown improvement. Malls, as Roberto Brambilla puts it, “are noturban idylls created in an artist’s eye, but practical solutions to some urgenturban problem.”
This is why we must separate malling from rehabilitated main streets,where traffic is not necessarily banished at all. Great examples are MagazineStreet in New Orleans, Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and Hennepin Avenuein Minneapolis, famous because of the Venturis’ project with its contro-versial reflector trees. Venturi, who had some time ago told us that the mainstreet was almost all right, never quite got around to telling us what we hadto do to make it really all right. Hennepin Avenue is as close as he comes—insisting that it must be, as it was in the past, a transit and entertainmentavenue, and so incidentally avoiding the competition from the nearby fancyshopping street at Nicollet Mall. But in fact, both Hennepin and Nicolletare suffering from the skywalk system of Minneapolis—yet anotherexample of the slow privatization of public space. Like atria, malls, andcorporate plazas, this system too is privately funded, privately owned. It isintimidating. You always end up in a store at either end, with somebodysaying “May I help you?” And of course the system tends to create, as we allknow, an inbuilt segregation, with the black people down at street level andthe white folk in the skywalks.
Malls and the like are attempts to revive the commercial spirit of thecity, and turn its interactive tensions into a festival. Equally bloodless is theattempt to bring back the communal character of residential streets, as atBerkeley, by reducing or eliminating traffic on the model of Holland’swoonerven.
Is any of this for real? Is it possible to tame the automobile withoutcurtailing severely the very advantages that gave it its fantastic success?Why hasn’t it worked? Because, as stated plainly and resignedly in 1983 bythe author of the Buchanan Report of 1963, which first stressed the needto correlate the numbers of cars with the quality of life in the cites, “peopleare prepared to trade off their environment in return for motorizedaccessibility.”
In the past, streets and public places were stages where social classes and
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social uses mixed, stages of solemn ceremony and improvised spectacle, ofpeople-watching, of recreation. In their changing architecture, their slowshifts and adjustments, they were also time channels—the safeguard ofthose continuities of culture and place that made us users of the publicrealm vastly and substantially older than our age and infinitely wiser thanour own natural gifts. This public realm of the past was an untidy place,physically and morally, but it was also both school and stage of urbanity,which in the end means nothing less than the belief that people, all “peoplecan live together in proximity and interdependence,” as Gerald Allen putit.5
The public realm was all those things not because of the container, butbecause of what we were all willing to put inside. I don’t see much point inreviving the container now, as long as we are not ready to reinvest it withtrue urban vigor, and, yes, urbanity. As long as we would rather keep ourown counsel, avoid social tension, schedule encounters with our friends, andtravel on our own in climate-controlled and music-injected glossy metalboxes, the resurrected public realm will be a place we like to visit every sooften but not inhabit, a fun place and a museum—but also the burial placefor our hopes to exorcise poverty and prejudice by confronting them daily;the burial place of unrehearsed excitement, of the cumulative knowledge ofhuman ways and the residual benefits of a public life.
We seem ready to take our losses. In the 1980s, it is my conviction, themomentum to recreate a genuine public realm has been lost. Some see afundamental change of society in the works, and there is much evidenceto prove them right. At the turn of the twentieth century we culminated agreat revolution that shifted us from a nation of farms to a nation of factor-ies and moved us from country to city. Now we have started as momentousa revolution, it would seem, from factory to service and information, andfrom city back to country.
I am, of course, talking about megacenters—the landscape of post-industrial America, of the new information economy—those giganticpseudo-cities where hundreds of thousands work and live without any needof or love for the traditional city. I am talking of Tech Center in Denver, BenCarpenter’s Las Colinas and the Golden Triangle in Dallas, Cumberlandand Galleria Malls north of Atlanta, the Galleria in Houston, the PrincetonForrestal Center on the Route 1 Corridor, and in my own Bay Area, VelvetTurtle at Pleasanton and Bishop Ranch in San Ramon. The developer ofVelvet Turtle is quoted as saying, “We can offer a self-contained city, andthat’s a hell of a selling point.”
These instantaneous cities of the countryside have little to do with thosedormitory communities that resulted from an earlier and long-lastingabandonment of the old downtown. After the residential componentremoved itself, and the factories and industrial establishments followedsuit, the heart of the metropolis was still held together, at least in the day-
5 In Cities (Rizzoli, 1982), p. 57.
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time, by offices, banks, and administrative buildings symbolically holdingthe city down in the manner of the old guild hall, the Rathaus, the palazzo dipodesta. Now they too are beginning to leave. The work pool needed by theinformation economy is already out there in the suburbs—upscale, white,professional. So you take the plant out to them. You give them shoppingmalls and parks, movie theaters, restaurants, conference centers, and luxury“townhouses” or apartments. But you do not confuse the alternate cityenvironment with schools or churches, with poor people or ethnic con-centrations; no streets in the traditional sense and no history of course.When you do use it, it is as a ribbon in the hair, accessory urbanis—like theminiaturized City Beautiful boulevards in Houston megacenters when thereal thing, South Main Street, is crumbling unappreciated and used only asan urban expressway; like scraps of San Antonio at Las Colinas withpseudo-Venetian teakwood water taxis and Spanish house fronts thatconceal garages.
Are these megacenters the final challenge in the traditional public realm,and along with it the city itself? It is clear that they are depriving themetropolis of its only remaining mystique, that downtown cluster of towersthat is supposed to hold corporate might, political muscle, the managingworld of entertainment and design. At best, in our multicenter “global” citywith its network of telecommunications, we might grudgingly recognize theold urban core as one of these centers—for those who care to be there. Let usrecall that some 70 percent of all Americans now live in suburbs and ruralareas and only 30 percent in cities.
It is entirely possible, if the trend holds, that the institution of mega-centers will erode the much-celebrated renaissance of the downtown, andlead to yet another major exodus, leaving these old worn-out artifacts to thepoor who cannot escape them, and the incorrigible romantics who wouldrather run their rat-race down corridor-streets and live in Victorian housesyanked from the jaws of bulldozers.
It is entirely possible, and profoundly sad. In 1947, Percival and PaulGoodman justifiably announced the first death of the public realm. Theywrote in Communitas:
A city is made by the social congregation of people, for business andpleasure and economy . . . A person is a citizen in the street. A city streetis not . . . a machine for traffic to pass through but a square for people toremain within.
They invoked Sitte, his city esthetic of enclosure, intimacy, interaction—Camillo Sitte whose 1889 book, not at all coincidentally, had just beentranslated for the first time into English.
“It is possible,” the Goodmans conclude, “that this urban beauty is athing of the past . . . If this is so, it is a grievous and irreparable loss . . . If it is
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so, our city crowds are doomed to be lonely crowds, bored crowds, humanlyuncultured crowds.”
We made an effort to reverse the trend. I think we lapsed. I think welapsed because that beauty is by now a thing of the past, beyond resuscita-tion. It may also be that the Goodmans were right—that the consequence ofthat loss is as they announced—that we have become lonely, bored, anduncultured in a fundamental sense. If so, we no longer recognize it, or we nolonger think of community and liveliness and culture in that old urban way.Many of us, most of us, are contented to live the new way, or resigned to it.It gives me acute discontent. That is my prejudice.
NOTE
This talk preceded by several months the publication of my America byDesign (Oxford University Press, 1987), and it is in part based on its con-tents. Most of the latter half, however, is not included in the book. Thereader will find a full bibliography on the issues discussed here in Americaby Design. The few notes appended to this paper account for quotations andother obvious debts.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 75th Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1987. The original illustrationshave been lost. The photographs included here were selected by the editors.
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CONTESTING THE PUBLIC REALMTHE PUBLICREALM
Struggles over public spacein Los AngelesMARGARET CRAWFORD (1995)
This article, in response to architectural “narrative of loss” lamenting thedisappearance of public space, argues that urban residents are constantlyremaking public space and redefining the public sphere through their livedexperience. Following Nancy Fraser, this article questions the insistence ona unified public and private space that characterizes the bourgeois publicsphere and proposes contestation, competing “counter-publics,” and theblurring of private and public as equally significant aspects of the publicsphere. In Los Angeles, the struggles of two “counter-publics,” streetvendors and the homeless, over use of the streets and public places reveal theemergence of another discourse of public space suggesting new forms of“insurgent citizenship” and offering new political arenas.
Today, many discussions of the public sphere and public space aredominated by a narrative of loss. From the political philosopher JurgenHabermas’s description of a public sphere overwhelmed by consumerism,the media, and the intrusion of the state into private life, to Richard Sennett’slament for the “fall of public man,” to urban critics Michael Sorkin’s andMike Davis’s announcements of “the end of public space” and the “destruc-tion of any truly democratic urban spaces,” claims that once vital sitesof democracy have all but disappeared are widespread.1 These narrativesof loss contrast the current debasement of the public sphere with goldenages and golden sites: the Greek agora, the coffeehouses of earlymodern Paris and London, the New England town square, where, allegedly,cohesive public discourse once thrived. This narrative inevitably climaxesin what these critics see as our current crisis of collective life whichplaces the very identities and institutions of citizenship and democracy inperil.
I argue that this perceived loss is primarily perceptual, derived fromextremely narrow and normative definitions of both public and space. Infact the meanings of concepts such as public, space, democracy, and citizen-ship are continually being redefined in practice through lived experience. Byeliminating the insistence on unity, the desire for fixed categories of timeand space, and the rigid concepts of public and private that underlie thesenarratives of loss, we can begin to recognize a multiplicity of simultaneouspublic interactions that are restructuring urban space, producing new formsof insurgent citizenship, and revealing new political arenas for democraticaction.
1 Jurgen Habermas, The StructuralTransformation of the Public Sphere:An Inquiry into a Category ofBourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA:M.I.T. Press, 1989); Richard Sennett,The Fall of Public Man (New York:Vintage Books, 1974); and MichaelSorkin, “Introduction,” and MikeDavis, “Fortress Los Angeles: TheMilitarization of Urban Space,” inMichael Sorkin, ed. Variations on aTheme Park: The New AmericanCity and the End of Public Space(New York: Hill and Wang, 1992).
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In her important article, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” Nancy Fraseridentifies some significant theoretical and political limitations contained inthe argument about these disappearances of the public sphere.2 Whileacknowledging the importance of Habermas’s influential concept of thepublic sphere as an arena of discursive relations conceptually independent ofboth state and the economy,3 she questions many of its underlying assump-tions. Habermas’s account of “the liberal mode of the bourgeois publicsphere” links its emergence in early modern Europe with the development ofnation-states in which democracy was realized through universal rights andelectoral politics.
This version of the history of the public sphere emphasizes unity andequality as ideal conditions. The public sphere is depicted as a “space ofdemocracy” that all citizens have the right to inhabit and where all thepublic discourse takes place. Here social and economic inequalities aretemporarily put aside in the interest of determining a “common good.”Discussion about matters of common interests is achieved through rational,disinterested, and virtuous public debate. However, like the often-cited idealof Athenian democracy and the agora, this model is structured aroundsignificant exclusions. In Athens, access was theoretically open to allcitizens, but in practice this excluded the majority of the population—women and slaves—who were not “citizens.” Similarly, the modernbourgeois public sphere began by excluding women and workers. Women’srights were presumed to be private and therefore part of the domesticsphere, and workers’ concerns were presumed to be economic and thusexcluded as self-interested. Moreover, the requirements for rationaldeliberation and a rhetoric of disinterest privileged middle-class andmasculine modes of public speech and behavior by defining them as uni-versal norms.4
Recent revisionist history has contradicted this account, demonstratingthat non liberal, non bourgeois publics also emerged, producing competingdefinitions and spheres of public activity in a multiplicity of public arenas.In nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, for example, middle-classwomen organized themselves into a variety of exclusively female voluntaryorganizations that undertook philanthropic and reform activities basedon private ideals of domesticity and motherhood. Less privileged womenfound access to public life through work and public roles that addressedboth domestic and economic issues. Working-class men also founded theirown public organizations, often structured around workplace or ethnicidentities, such as the unions, lodges, and political organizations. If webroaden the definition of public from a singular entity to include these“counterpublics” a very different picture of the public sphere is revealed,one based on contestation, rather than unity, and created through com-peting interests and violent demands as much as by reasoned debate.Demonstrations, strikes, and riots, as well as struggles over issues such as
2 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking thePublic Sphere: A Contribution to theCritique of Actually ExistingDemocracy,” in Bruce Robbins, ed.,The Phantom Public Sphere(Minneapolis, MN: University ofMinnesota Press, 1993).
3 Ibid., pp. 4–6.
4 David Wharton, “A Walk on theMild Side,” Los Angeles Times,Valley Edition, May 27, 1994: 10;Norman Klein, “A Glittery Bit ofUrban Make-believe,” Los AngelesTimes, July 18, 1993: B17; LeonWhiteson, “Dream Street,” LosAngeles Times, Oct. 31, 1993: K1;and Charles Jencks, Heteropolis(London: Academy Editions, 1993)pp. 46–51.
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temperance or suffrage, propose alternative public spheres, arenas wheremultiple publics with inevitably competing concerns struggle and whereconflict takes many forms.
In the bourgeois public sphere, public citizenship is primarily definedin relation to the state, addressing issues and concerns dealt with throughpolitical debate and electoral politics framed within clear categories ofdiscourse. This assumes a liberal notion of citizenship based on abstractuniversal liberties, with democracy guaranteed by the electoral andjuridical institutions of the state. Fraser instead argues that democracyitself is a complex and contested idea that can assume a multiplicity ofmeanings and forms. These often violate the strict lines between public andprivate on which the liberal bourgeois concept of the public sphere insists.In contrast, counterpublics of women, immigrants, and workers havehistorically not only defended established civil rights, but also demandednew rights based on differentiated roles originating in the domestic oreconomic spheres.
These constantly changing demands continually redraw the boundariesbetween public and private. Two current efforts to re-define public andprivate behavior demonstrate both the intensity and the complexity of thesestruggles. On one side, feminists are attempting to transform domesticviolence from a matter of strictly private or domestic concern, dealt withwithin the family or through specialized institutions of family law or socialwork, into a matter of public concern and legal control. On the other side,the religious right is attempting to transform abortion from a privatedecision about one’s own body into a public act regulated by civil law. Whilepursuing conventional remediation through legal or legislative means andattempting, through public debate, to mobilize public opinion, both groupsalso adopt less conventional methods that further blur the line betweenpublic and private. Feminist activists have attempted to create an alternativedomestic sphere to the family by creating shelters and other communalliving arrangements for battered women. Antiabortion demonstratorshave abandoned rational discourse in favor of direct action and civildisobedience.
RETHINKING PUBLIC SPACE
How can Fraser’s ideas of multiple publics, contestation, and theredefinition of public and private be extended and applied to the physicalrealm of public space without losing their connection with larger issuesof democracy and citizenship? First of all, they suggest that no singlephysical space can represent a completely inclusive “space of democracy.”Like Habermas’s idealized bourgeois public sphere, the physical spacesoften idealized by architects—the agora, the forum, the piazza, or thetown square—were similarly constituted by exclusion. Thus, instead of asingle “public” occupying an exemplary public space, the multiple and
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counterpublics that Fraser identifies necessarily produce multiple sites ofpublic expression, creating and using spaces that are partial and selective,responsive to limited segments of the population and to a limited numberof the multiple public roles individuals play in urban society. Ratherthan being fixed in time and space, these public spaces are constantlychanging, as users reorganize and reinterpret physical space. Unlikenormative public spaces, which simply reproduce the existing ideology,these spaces, often sites of struggle and contestation, help to overturn it.The public activities that occur here suggest that urban politics andurban space can be restructured from the bottom up as well as from the topdown.
The narrative of lost public space presents Los Angeles as particularlycompelling evidence for the disappearance of public life. Most critics agreethat the city’s low density development and wide-spread dependence onthe automobile have eliminated street life and public interaction. Thecity’s traditional public spaces support the argument that public space andpublic life in the city are either commodified, bankrupt, or nonexistent. Forexample, over the last thirty years, Pershing Square, historically the centralfocus of the downtown business district, has lost any public meaning.Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta’s recent redesign, featuring brightlycolored walkways, plazas, and seating areas above underground parkingand a subway station, has failed to reinstate its public function. Althoughstill physically recognizable as a traditional public square, it is usuallyunoccupied, except for a few hours at lunch time, and its emptiness visiblydemonstrates the city’s impoverished public life.
In contrast, the sidewalks of Citywalk are always jammed withpeople. Operated by M.C.A. and Universal Studios, this complex of movietheaters, shops, and restaurants was designed as a simulation of a publicstreet, a collage of Los Angeles’s most attractive urban elements supervisedby mall designer Jon Jerde. Citywalk’s popular appeal, however,owes as much to its crime-free image as to its architectural spectacle. Themanagement of this privately owned space has the right to excludeanyone it deems undesirable, in addition to those groups of the publicalready discouraged by its suburban location, six dollar parking fee, andheavily policed spaces. To many architectural and urban critics, Citywalk’ssuccess demonstrates the total absorption of public life by privateenterprise.5
However, Fraser’s redefined public sphere allows us to identify other sitesof public expression that propose an alternative conception of publicspace. The civil unrest of April 1992, for example, can be interpreted as aspontaneous and undefined moment of public expression, an explosionof multiple and competing demands (some highly specific, others barelyarticulated) on the streets and sidewalks of Los Angeles. These eventsunleashed a complex outpouring of public concerns, involving a number of
Pershing Square, Los Angeles.Designed by Ricardo Legorreta.
5 Frank Clifford, “Rich–Poor GulfWidens in State,” Los Angeles Times,May 11, 1992: A1; “The Path toFury,” Los Angeles Times, May 11,1992: T1–10; and Mike Davis, “InL.A., Burning All Illusions,” TheNation, June 1, 1992: 743.
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different ethnic and social groups. African-Americans, many of whom calledthe uprising the “justice riots,” attacked the inadequacy of urban politics toredress the juridical inequality demonstrated by the Rodney King andLatasha Harlins verdicts. To many, this constituted a denial of fundamentalrights of citizenship. Liberal concepts of universally defined civil rights failedto address the visible racism of the police department and the court system,allowing them to avoid public responsibility to more specifically definedethnic and social groups.
The riots also dramatized economic issues: poverty and the lack of jobs,exacerbated by the recession and the long-term effects of deindustrializa-tion. This was expressed through highly selective patterns of lootingand burning that largely spared residences while attacking commercialproperty; 74 percent of damaged buildings were retail stores and restaur-ants. Despite public perception, the riots were multicultural. Thirty-fourpercent of those arrested were black, 51 percent were Hispanic, mostlyrecent immigrants. Also economically marginalized and exploited, theyprotested their economic exclusion and political and social disenfranchise-ment. The riot also pitted immigrants against one another. Korean-ownedstores were the focus of much of the burning and looting, serving as targetsfor pent-up frustration about the lack of economic self-determination inlow-income neighborhoods. Briefly, streets, sidewalks, parking lots, swapmeets, and mini-malls became sites of protest and rage: new zones of publicexpression.
The violent dissatisfaction revealed by the unrest makes it imperative tolook more closely at the lived experience of different groups in the riot areasand to acknowledge their use of everyday space as a site of public discourse.Looking around the city, we can discover innumerable places where newsocial and economic practices re-appropriate and restructure urbanspace. Arenas for struggle over the meaning of social participation, thesenew public spaces are continually in flux, producing constantly changingmeanings. Streets, sidewalks, vacant lots, parks, and other places of the city,reclaimed by immigrant groups, the poor, and the homeless, have becomesites where public debates about the meaning of democracy, the nature ofeconomic participation, and the public assertion of identity are acted out ona daily basis. Without claiming that they represent a totality of public space,in their manifold forms these public activities collectively construct andreveal an alternative logic of public life.
STREET VENDORS
No longer deserted, Los Angeles’s streets, sidewalks, and vacant lots areincreasingly populated by street vendors. Existing on the margins of theformal economy, their informal commerce supplements income, rather thanconstituting an occupation, or else supports only the most marginal ofexistences. Although all types of street vendors openly occupy space all
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over the city, street vending remains illegal. Current discussions aboutcentralizing vendors in designated locations acknowledge the existing realityof widespread vending but attempt to restrict one of the main advantagesof vending: its flexibility to respond to changes in activity and demand.Street vending constitutes a complex and diverse economy of micro-commerce, recycling, and household production. The innumerable varietyof vendors publicly articulates the multiple social and economic narrativesof urban life in Los Angeles. In the process of pursuing their trade, vendorsblur established understandings of public and private in complex andparadoxical ways.
Dramas of immigration are played out daily on the streets of Los Angeles,increasingly exposing to the consciousness of the city stories both heroicand horrifying. For example, the ubiquitous orange vendors, workingon street dividers all over the city, are almost always undocumentedimmigrants. Working for the “coyotes” who brought them across theborder, they sell the fruit the coyotes supply to pay off the cost of theirillegal crossing. Along streets in the Zona Centroamericana, otherimmigrants use vending as a means of economic mobility. For manyself-employed vendors, their vending carts provide an alternative tosweatshop labor and may eventually lead to a stall at a swap meet or evena small store. Lined up along sidewalks, wearing aprons, female vendorsextend the domestic economy into urban space, selling tropical fruits,tamales, or nuts that they have prepared or packaged in their own kitchens.Defending the right to sell on the street has become a political issue to manyimmigrant vendors, many of whom are undocumented, therefore doublyillegal. The organization of Vendadores Ambulates represents the interestsof more than eight hundred vendors to the city government. Other vendorsrecently demonstrated against police harassment, chanting, “Somosvendedores, no criminales” (We are vendors, not criminals).6 Defendingtheir livelihood, vendors are becoming a political as well as an economicpresence in the city.
In other parts of the city, vending takes different forms. In BaldwinHills, a middle-class African-American neighborhood, a parking lotbetween a gas station and a supermarket has become a scene of intense, iffluctuating, social and commercial activity. On most days, a van parks inthe lot, offering car detailing services. The operators, two local men who arenow retired, set out chairs, providing a social magnet for neighborhoodmen who pass by. On weekends, a portable barbecue is set up nearby, selling“home-cooked” ribs and links. On holidays and weekends, a group ofmiddle-aged women joins them, setting up tables to sell homemade craftsand gifts. Mostly grandmothers who work at home, their products representboth hobbies and an income supplement. Replicating the domestic order ofthe surrounding neighborhoods and expanding the private roles of grand-parents into the public realm, their local activities provide a focus for the
6 Robert Lopez, “Vendors Protestagainst LAPD,” Los Angeles Times,Aug. 2, 1994: B3.
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community that is also accessible to anyone driving by. Simultaneously localand public, the activities in this parking lot strengthen the neighborhoodwhile they visibly represent its culture to outsiders.
THE HOMELESS
No group challenges the limits of the concept of public more than the home-less. Even the designated social category of homelessness can be seen as amethod of removing a group of people from the larger collectivity of thepublic by collapsing various life situations, such as joblessness, disability,or extreme poverty, into a generic category. For many homeless people,minimal boundaries exist between public space and the spheres of domesticand economic life.
Occupying parks, streets, sidewalks, and the lawns of public buildings,they claim the space necessary for their own personal and economic sur-vival. This forces them to live at least part of their private lives on the streetand in other public places. It is often impossible for them to secure domesticprivileges that are taken for granted, such as bedrooms, closets, and privatebathrooms. Their private use of public space tests democracy’s promise ofuniversal access in a very literal fashion.
For the homeless, streets and sidewalks also function as importanteconomic spaces. Although most homeless people work, they do notearn enough money to afford shelter. Instead, public spaces becometheir primary venue for seeking work and acquiring money. Waiting forday-labor jobs, posting bills, recycling cans and bottles, or collectingand reselling refuse or castoffs, homeless men and women claim theirrights to be economic actors.7 Using cardboard signs to explain theircircumstances, they assert their identities as unique individuals in need of
Clothes for sale, street-side garagesale, Hollywood.
7 For an excellent overview ofhomelessness in Los Angeles, seeJennifer Wolch and Michael Dear,Malign Neglect: Homelessness in anAmerican City (San Francisco, CA:Jossey-Bass, 1993).
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a job or money. Even panhandling can be understood as an economictransaction, encouraging individuals to evaluate requests for a certainamount of money or a specific need on the basis of their own judgment orfinancial situation.8,9,10
Yet even these minimal social and economic rights are under attack. IfPershing Square, with its hard surfaces and intense security, was explicitlydesigned to repel the homeless, far more intense struggles over public spaceare taking place in Santa Monica. Intent on criminalizing the daily activitiesof the homeless, the city council is incrementally redefining the nature ofpublic space while gradually expelling the homeless from the city. After aban on sleeping in public parks proved unenforceable, the city closed allparks from midnight to 6 a.m. Even in daytime, the presence of homelesspeople in city parks has become a point of tension, with some parentsdemanding that homeless people be evicted from parks with playgroundsand sports facilities. Other antihomeless measures include eliminatingfood programs in city parks and preventing the expansion of social serviceagencies. Local merchants are also attempting to eradicate panhandling;they have initiated a campaign to urge pedestrians not to give moneydirectly to panhandlers but instead to put donations into a bronze dolphin,to be distributed to approved social service agencies. For these people, thedefinition of a “public” place has become a space without homeless people.Homelessness is perhaps the ultimate determination of citizenship. Definedas undesirables, the homeless are not just evicted from public parks, they arestripped of “the right to have rights.” In Santa Monica, the right to publicspace has become conditional, based on official residence, appearance, oradherence to a set of values that defines “proper” use.
Mother’s Day on La Brea Avenue,Baldwin Heights, Los Angeles.
8 Nancy Hill-Holzman, “Brother,Keep Your Dime,” Los AngelesTimes, July 11, 1992: J1; Nancy Hill-Holzman, “A Lightning Rod forAnger over Homeless,” Los AngelesTimes, Nov. 10, 1991: J1; and JeffKramer, “City Wants to ShutPalisades Park at Night,” LosAngeles Times, June 10, 1993: B1.
9 Rosalyn Deutsche, “Art andPublic Space: Questions ofDemocracy,” Social Text 33 (Fall1992): 37–39.
10 James Holston, “Spaces ofInsurgent Citizenship,” PlanningTheory 13 (Summer 1995): 30–50.
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NEW FORMS OF INSURGENT CITIZENSHIP
These struggles define what anthropologist James Holston has called“spaces of insurgent citizenship.” These emergent sites of citizenshipaccompany the processes of change that are transforming societies locallyand worldwide. In cities such as Los Angeles, migration, industrialrestructuring, and other economic changes increase social reterritorializa-tion. When they appear in the city, residents with new histories, cultures,and demands inevitably disrupt the normative categories of social life andurban space. In the course of expressing the specific needs of everydaylife, they dramatize the large-scale public issues of economic change andmigration. Their urban experiences, the focus of their struggle to redefinethe conditions of belonging to society, reshape cities like Los Angeles. Asnew and more complex kinds of ethnic diversity come to dominate the city,these multiple experiences increasingly define a new basis for understandingcitizenship.
The homeless and the street vendors, demanding access to public space,are just two of many social groups articulating new demands. The demandsof the urban poor for “rights to the city” and of women and ethnic andracial minorities to “rights to difference” constitute new kinds of rights,based on the needs of lived experience outside of the normative andinstitutional definitions of the state and its legal codes. These rights emergefrom the social dramas acted out in the new collective and personalspaces of the city; they concern people largely excluded from the resourcesof the state; and they are based on social demands that are not constitution-ally defined but that people increasingly perceive as entitlements of citizen-ship. Expanding the definition of urban political activity to include thesenew social bases can produce new forms of self-rule, which in turn canlead to new social movements that challenge existing formulations ofdemocracy.
Holston warns that, while the city is an arena for the self-creation of thesenew citizens, it is also a war zone. The dominant classes have met theadvances of these new citizens with new strategies of segregation, privatiza-tion, and fortification. The war zone includes gang-devastated neigh-borhoods, corporate fortresses, and suburban enclaves. Just as the local andthe urban appear as crucial sites for articulating new social identities, theyalso engender exclusion and violent reaction. The public sites where suchstruggles occur serve as evidence of an emerging order, not yet fully com-prehensible. Here differences between the domestic and the economic, theprivate and the public, are blurring. Change, multiplicity, and contestation,rather than constituting the failure of public space, may in fact define itsvery nature. The emergence of these new public spaces and activities inLos Angeles, shaped by lived experience more than built space, raisescomplex political questions about the meaning of economic participationand citizenship in our cities. By recognizing these struggles as the germ of an
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alternative development of democracy, we can begin to frame a new dis-course of public space—one no longer preoccupied with loss, but filled withpossibilities.
This essay was originally published in the Journal of Architectural Education,Vol. 49, No. 1 (September 1995).
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ACTION SPACETHE PUBLICREALM
RICHARD SCHERR (1996)
Over the last two decades there has occurred a transformation in the designof urban public space, marking a radical shift from its historical roots. Thecharacteristics of the phenomenon are represented by a series of challengingnew parks and plazas, the most important of which have resulted fromurban development programs carried out in Barcelona, Paris, and NewYork.1 These plazas diverge significantly from traditional public spaces, andconstitute examples of what can be termed a type of “action space,” whichcan be defined by its polarization from earlier spatial models:
• If the perception of historic space is dependent on defined limitsdistinguishing clearly delineated voids, action space can haveirregular limits determined by circumstance; its order is perceivedthrough the nature of contained human activity.
• If the formal order of historic space is based on singular,geometrically derived shapes conceived as indivisible wholes, actionspace can be conceived as fragments, or zones whose order isachieved through the sequencing of experience, rather than formalcomposition.
• If historic space tends to be permanent, and developed inconjunction with the design of surrounding buildings, action space isconceived independently from the design of its peripheral edge, andchanges incrementally over time.
• If historic space tends to be neutral and passive, allowing the user toinitiate activities or experiences with minimal constraints, actionspace tends to be highly directive and programmed, utilizing propsthat specify particular patterns of use and cognition.
• If historic space establishes a collective, public setting which is botha product and generator of social agreement, action space is alsopublic, but is engaged on an individual, private basis, resulting invaried possibilities for behavior and personal cognition.
It is suggested that the development of this new type of space should beseen as more than simply another formal trend. More fundamentally, it isbased on the realization of a continuing misfit between contemporary cul-ture, with its evolving tendencies towards displacement, privatization,
1 The inspiration for this articlelargely comes out of exposure toBarcelona’s program of urban spacesand public art, which has resulted inover 200 new parks and 50 sitespecific works since 1980,establishing the city as a uniquelaboratory for the evolution of urbanopen space.
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motion, and simultaneous frames of reference, and the making of urbanspaces whose formal criteria continued to be based on static, rigidly framed,“drawing room” settings more in keeping with cultural and estheticsensibilities of earlier historic periods. Recent interventions in the moderncity that are based in programmed events, performance, and the intro-duction of large-scale, site specific sculpture suggest another type of space,the qualities of which are based more on the active, directed experience ofthe user rather than the self-referential, formal qualities of the space itself.Action space is an expression of 21st century culture, the culture of personalcontrol, a shift from the politics of collective order to the fragmented,private aspirations of the individual.
The failure of earlier modern public spaces is evidenced by one of thegreatest urban designs of our age, the central mall and plaza of New York’sRockefeller Center, designed in 1931. The aspirations and symbolism ofthe project were of the new age of communications, a new world order,generating a defining statement of the modern metropolis. Yet appearingmore than two decades after Cubism, the plan is straight-jacketed withina most conservative, 19th century Beaux-Arts order—a centralized, axialspace functioning as little more than a viewing stage to the then R.C.A.Building and spatial relief from the overall project density, representinga product of market conditions and opportunity rather than a vision ofmodern culture.2
One of the reasons that historic spatial models continued to be persuasivewell into the modern period was the publication in 1889 of Camillo Sitte’sCity Planning According to Artistic Principles. In this treatise, the art ofdesigning space is based on succinct, formal principles that were deducedfrom a reexamination of the historic city, described by step-by-stepformula and diagrams that were easily adapted to other contexts. After theproliferation of Modernist urban experiments of the 1920s and 1930s basedon Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, such notions as spatial enclosure, axiality,and perspectival order proved to be an attractive alternative.
Sitte’s work was rediscovered by modern planners after the publica-tion of the 1945 English edition, influencing the work of Cullen Davisand the British Townscape movement, and later, Colin Rowe and othercollaborators in the development of “Contextualism.”3 The principlesderived from this work continued to play a role in the redevelopment of thecity well into the 1980s, as evidenced in the design of public spaces suchas Pioneer Square in Seattle, Rector Place in Battery Park City, much of thework of Leon and Robert Krier, and other manifestations of the “Post-Modern” city.
The more recent manifestations of action space constitute a correctiverupture with the precepts of 19th century space; their sources have less to dowith the history of urban space, and more with the influences of cultural andaesthetic shifts that have evolved throughout the 20th century. Two sources
Camino Sitte,Votive Church Plaza, Vienna.
2 Alan Balfour, Rockefeller Center:Architecture as Theater (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1978), pp. 7–24.
3 George R. Collins, Christiane C.Collins, Camillo Sitte: The Birth ofModern City Planning (Rizzoli, NewYork, 1986), pp. 126–127.
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in particular have received little critical attention: One can be traced to therealization of the so-called “spectacle,” or programmed event, as agenerator of modern space; the other is derived from the influences of thedevelopment of 20th century art, mostly centered within a series of investi-gations which were part of the Minimal and Performance Art movements ofthe 1960s and 1970s.
THE URBAN SPECTACLE
The nature of the spectacle, the planned public display and programming ofurban space as a field of human activity, depends less on the physical attrib-utes of the defined setting, and more on the activity within the setting tocreate a specific sense of place. In fact, it can be argued that some of thegreatest urban designs in this century were not permanent spaces withinfixed physical boundaries, but rather, have been staged, temporary events ofunparalleled focus and intensity.
While there exist many examples throughout the 20th century, one of themost memorable took place in Nuremberg, Germany, only several yearsafter the completion of the Beaux-Arts plan for Rockefeller Center. In 1936,Albert Speer designed a “cathedral of light” to contain the Nuremberg PartyRally, part of a week-long series of speeches, exercise drills, marches, andparades to promote policies of anti-bolshevism and National Socialistunity. On the evening of the fifth day, 1,200 floodlights are focused on themain stage of the Zeppelinfeld; with 70,000 spectators in the stands,200,000 participants holding 25,000 flags march into the stadium in dark-ness. Only at the moment that Hitler’s car enters the stadium, 130 anti-aircraft searchlights spaced at intervals of 40 feet around the stadium areturned on, sending vertical shafts of lights 6–8 kilometers into the sky,finally merging together into an overall glow. Sometimes, as described bySpeer, “a cloud moved through this wreath of lights, bringing an element ofsurrealistic surprise to the mirage.” The stadium is transformed into anotherworldly space of potentially infinite limits, totally unlike any other everconceived in history, used to promulgate a political and cultural agendabeyond the bounds of known civilization.4
Mass gatherings and marches do not end with Nuremberg, and indeed,have continued as an enduring feature of 20th century culture. The1968 student uprisings in Paris, the civil rights marches in the Mall inWashington, D.C., the 1970 anti-war demonstrations on the New HavenGreen, and elsewhere, vary in political agenda, but share similar charac-teristics. While sometimes circumstantially contained within spatialboundaries, the action and movement continually shifts; participants flowbetween interior and exterior spaces, and are absorbed into the landscapeand out into the streets beyond.
Finally, consider the definitive spectacle taking place in a rural setting, an“instant city” that can never be duplicated: at the gathering of 500,000
Albert Speer, Nuremberg Rally,1936.
4 Ernst Eichhorn et al., Kulissen derGewalt: Das Reichsparteitagsgeländein Nürnberg (Heinrich HugendubelVerlag, Munich, 1992); also: AlbertSpeer, Inside the Third Reich(Macmillan Co., New York, 1970),p. 59.
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youth in 1969 at the Woodstock concert at Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel,New York, all participants were compressed into a bowled field; theperformance and event depended less on the assigned performers andmore on the directed, shared presence of the audience, a community ofa half million private desires, blurring the distinction between theobservers and the observed. The walled limits of space have all butdisappeared, and contribute little to the experience—the notion of placehas been achieved purely by a program of activity, a city whose only fabricis human presence.
20TH CENTURY ART
The other sources for the new urban space come out of the development ofart and film during the 20th century. The invention of Cubism and montagetechniques in filmmaking fundamentally shifted traditional notions ofperspectival space, fixed points of reference, and bounded, singular formsinto dissociated fragments layered, or collaged within an open field, shiftingpoints of reference, and multiple events articulated within an interrupted,non-linear flow of time. If traditional urban space is dependent on beingperceived as a clearly conceived focal center through a tightly boundedgestalt, defined by surrounding buildings, modern space suggestsa shift towards a non-centralized, peripheral vision, generating a formof “marginal” space, more ambiguously interactive with surroundingconditions.
What mainly sets the stage for the radically shifted role and form ofrecent public space comes out of the art investigations of the 1960s and1970s. During this period of intense activity along a number of fronts,Minimalism, Conceptualism, Performance Art, and Earth Art all tendedto break down traditional relationships between the art work and theobserver, either by removing work from the gallery setting and inserting itinto the outside world, or focusing not so much on the object itself but onthe perceived space between the work and the observer.5 For instance, ina work such as Richard Serra’s “Shift” of 1970–72, six concrete planes arevertically positioned in a field related to the slope, in which each planeestablishes a horizontal datum within a fluctuating topography; the viewerhas to traverse over the whole field from one plane to another to perceive theoverall work. In this work and many others from the period, “the characterof sculpture has been modified from concentration in a discrete thing toexpansion across a behavioral space in which the symbiotic relationship ofsculpture and viewer becomes the real object of experience.”6 The self-importance of the object has been supplanted by the experience of theobject—“you just have to experience it . . . the experience alone is whatmatters.”7
In other cases, artists programmed activities, or events in external set-tings, that would define the cognitive experience of the observer. Some of the
5 Perhaps the seminal statement ofthe basic characteristics of MinimalArt comes from the writings ofRobert Morris, one of themovement’s most prominentsculptors. See: Robert Morris,“Notes on Sculpture,” Art Forum(4, no. 6, February, 1966 and 5,no. 2, October, 1966).
6 Roald Nasgaard, Structures forBehaviour (Art Gallery of Ontario,Ontario, 1978), p. 14.
7 Michael Fried, “Art andObjecthood” in Gregory Battcock,ed., Minimal Art: A CriticalAnthology (E.P. Dutton & Co., NewYork, 1968), p. 131.
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seminal works of this period are the “Peopled Space” experiments from1969–71 by Vito Acconci, an early performance artist.8 One example is his“Following Piece” presented at the Architectural League in 1969:
Daily scheme: choosing a person at random, in the street, anylocation; following him wherever he goes, however long or farhe travels (the activity ends when he enters a private place—his home,office, etc.).
I was thinking in terms like these: I need a scheme, I can follow a scheme,I can follow a person—street as “promising line of development,”“channeling of effort”—“on the street,” homeless, I have to find someoneto cling to.
Adjunctive relationship—I add myself to another person—I let my controlbe taken away—I’m dependent on the other person—I need him, hedoesn’t need me—subjective relationship. A way to get around, get intothe middle of things (I’m distributed over a dimensional domain)—outin space—out of time (my time and space are taken up into a largesystem.)9
In this piece, the notion of “place” is determined not by fixed boundaries,but rather by some planned, directed activity that takes place within thespace. The perception of space only acquires significance through itscognitive occupation—the space exists as long as the work goes on; whenit’s over, the space collapses into abstract locations, insignificant and devoidof meaning. The activity takes on a different nature from theater, say, or thecollective spectacles described above, whereby action is performed withinuniform, agreed upon systems, or rules of behavior. For Acconci, the inter-action between activities and participants is distinctly private—the actionis unpredictable, unrehearsed, and played out on an individual basis, within
Vito Acconci, “Following Piece”1969–71. (Photo by permission ofVito Acconci.)
8 Acconci has been creating sincethe late 1980s large-scaled interiorand exterior interventions in citiesthat perform as art, and function forhuman occupation. See: VitoAcconci, Jean-Claude Massera,Lilian Pfaff, Christophe Wavelet,Vito Hannibal Acconci Studio(Barcelona: Actar Editorial), 2005.
9 Vito Acconci, “Following Piece,”Avalanche (Fall, 1972), p. 31.
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a private world of desires, fears, and unlimited possibilities, specificallyaligned to the cultural sensibilities and freedoms of the 20th century.
The power of art to radically, if not subversively, change the nature ofurban space was exemplified by Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” projectinstalled in Federal Plaza, lower Manhattan, in 1981. The plaza was anundistinguished, poorly scaled space with little meaning or role other thanserving as a decorative setting for the even less distinguished adjacentFederal Building. Once the sculpture was installed, the space was radicallytransformed in terms of the sculpture setting new terms of engagement,forcing a response on the part of anyone coming within contact. The issuewas not that a work of art as “object” was placed in the space that couldeither be interpreted, or remain distant from public consciousness. Serraallowed the public no choice, inserting a curved wall (not an object), 120 feetlong and 12 feet high, that divided the space, limited how one could traversethe space, determined what one could see and not see, and neededhuman occupation and context to become activated, conceiving “a way todislocate or alter the decorative function of the plaza and actively bringpeople into the sculpture’s context.”10 Or, as later interpreted by RosalindKrauss:
The kind of vector “Tilted Arc” explores is that of vision. Morespecifically, what it means for vision to be invested with a purpose . . . Forthe spectator of “Tilted Arc”, this sculpture is constantly mapping a kindof projectile of the gaze that starts at one end of Federal Plaza and . . .maps the path across the plaza that the spectator will take.11
What “Tilted Arc” did was to specifically take away some of the partici-pant’s options; as a form of resistance, it demanded that we interact on itsterms, and not ours; our choices, the freedom to move, or see within anunlimited, non-directional field, were compromised. It is this demand forthe viewer to be directed within a prescribed, limited set of possibilities,
Richard Serra, “Tilted Arc,”1981, Federal Plaza, New York.(Photo by the author.)
10 Robert Storr, “ ‘Tilted Arc’:Enemy of the People?” Art inAmerica (73, September, 1985),p. 92.
11 “Tilted Arc Hearing,” Art Forum(23, Summer, 1985), p. 98. Theserestrictions were clearly felt by theusers of Federal Plaza, and ultimatelybecame the instigator of the public’soutcry for its removal. Fordocuments from the public hearingsand court proceedings, see: ClaraWeyergraf-Serra and MarthaBuskirk, The Destruction of TiltedArc (M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, MA,1990).
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rather than be placed in a position to freely act on one’s own terms, whichpresents a paradigmatic shift in the formation of urban space.
PUBLIC URBAN SPACE
The differences between historic public space and the nature of action spaceare made graphic when comparing two parks within Battery Park City,Manhattan, both of which were designed almost concurrently (in the early1980s), and built within a quarter mile of one another. One park, RectorPlace, was modeled after Gramercy Park, an “English square” concept sur-rounded by built edges that define a regular trapezoidal solid, densely land-scaped, and formally organized along a longitudinal axis extended from theHudson River. The space serves to provide an open relief from the densesurrounding development, a natural oasis in contrast to built structures,establishing a setting that enhances the view to adjacent buildings, or con-versely, is to be viewed from apartments above. Nothing much goes on inthe space itself—the obligatory benches, flowered gardens, and open lawn;pleasant, but hardly stimulating.
The South Cove, designed through a collaboration of an architect (Stan-ton Eckstut), landscape architect (Susan Child), and artist (Mary Miss), isanother matter entirely. The park sits in the South Residential District paral-lel to the river, and is only minimally defined by a built edge. All of the actiontakes place within, with every part designating a particular pattern of use, orcognition. One is directed to move along straight paths, curving paths, anarched bridge, proceed up steps to a platform overlook, or even continuearound a broken jetty-like extension into the river, which dead-ends, andthen forces you to retrace your steps.
Every detail of the project seems to have been designed to force aresponse, initiate a bodily action, or expose an additional layer of content.We are exposed to traces of the waterfront’s history, isolated piers, and thejetty’s disintegrated form to suggest the typical pier forms along Manhattanthat are gradually decaying; an observation structure that recalls the crownof the Statue of Liberty, and even an area where the platform surface of the
South Cove, Battery Park City,New York. (Photo by author.)
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park has been removed, exposing the structure below, so that one canunderstand that the whole affair is really an artificial construction built overwater. The varied components deny any notion of compositional unity.Each component establishes an independent “quotation” that is per-ceptually assembled in a linear sequence; together these scenes are eachgiven a particular role to impart information, follow a prescribed narrative,and induce a directed dialogue with a captured observer.
The South Cove represents a transformation of designed space intothe realm of staged “event.” One enters into a form of private theater,interacting with a series of props and loaded images, linearly connectedon a path allowing little chance to veer off the intended sequence, or turnone’s attention away. This is a radically different scene from the historicgarden, with its sublime landscape and open fields that inspire reflection,relaxation, individuality, and free associations into unlimited, unpredictedpossibilities. Here, we must act, learn, acknowledge, and move onwithin a highly specified context, until the information is absorbed,the action completed, and the event is over. If the perception of thehistoric garden can be said to be analogous to painting, which invites thespectator to contemplation, action space can be compared to film, whosecontrolled passage of continuous events interrupts free association andreflection. The participant is held captive, completely “distracted” by spatialcircumstance, removing all critical distance between viewer and perceivedspace.12
Many of the new spaces planned in Barcelona over the last decade can becharacterized as action spaces, with similar characteristics to those definedabove. Most of them incorporate public art, in one form or the other, whichprovides possibilities of directing a physical response to its presence (as in“Tilted Arc”), or establishes the conceptual framework, or theme, aroundwhich the park is designed. In other cases, action is determined by particularsequences and landscaped forms, and the theme is derived from a dialoguebetween new design forms versus traces of the context which are left toco-exist and interact with the new interventions.13
Parc du Clot, Barcelona.(Photo by the author.)
12 These and other insights relativeto painting, film, and perception arediscussed in Walter Benjamin, “TheWork of Art in the Age ofMechanical Reproduction,” inHannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations(Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.,New York, 1968). A furtherdevelopment of Benjamin’s work,and the implications of programrelative to space, can be found in“Spaces and Events,” from BernardTschumi, Architecture andDisjunction (M.I.T. Press,Cambridge, MA, 1994).
13 Garry Apgar, “Public Art and theRemaking of Barcelona,” Art inAmerica (Vol. 79, February, 1991).
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The Parc du Clot, designed by Dani Freixes and Vicente Miranda in1988, is a particularly strong example of the latter. As in many of therecent Barcelona parks, the space was not conceived in the context of newsurrounding development, but was carved out of an existing context. Itsoverall form is irregular, relationships to the buildings are circumstantial,if they exist at all, and while the space is somewhat contained by surround-ing building walls, it doesn’t seem to be particularly well defined, or pro-portioned. But it hardly matters—as in the case of South Cove, it’s what’sinside that counts. The lack of traditional formal resolution actually letsthe park be more integrated into the context and be absorbed by theneighborhood.
The park was originally the site of a series of large brick factories, most ofwhich have been removed, while some wall fragments remain as a reminderof the past. These ruins now provide unique settings for activities, and in onecase, are transformed into a kind of aqueduct along one edge, which sendsan extended curtain stream of water into an adjacent pool. This wall isthen cut by a new bridge, which crosses the park diagonally, leading toanother bridge crossing a sunken paved play area. Both bridges direct therouting of residents through the park, connecting various activities, andallowing observation of the events below. All parts of this space are charged,programmed for action, in terms of literal physical movement as well ascognitive awareness of its history and transformation.
The essence of Parc du Clot is the perception of space through directedaction, in which all the props—the paths, gardens, industrial remnants,bridges, etc. are orchestrated to put the viewer into a precisely staged seriesof perceptions. The act of design is not so much the arrangement of forms asan autonomous construct, but the design of the experience itself, which issponsored, or activated by the setting. The goal is the limitation of certainpossibilities, and the direction, or programming, of others. All of the remain-ing choices lead to individual action, the inducement to move, participate,interact, and respond—one must only go along and experience thepossibilities—passivity, or non-involvement, is simply no longer an option.
Such a relationship between the viewer and the object(s) within the space,and not the object itself, has long been a critical arena for perception andmeaning in art. The experience is a form of theater, or performance, with theaudience reduced to the scale of an individual, placed “within a situationthat he experiences as his . . . the work in question exists for him alone,even if he is not actually alone with the work [or in the space] at the time . . .the work [space] depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him, ithas been waiting for him.”14 This critical shift in perception, whether ofsculpture, from an independent form within its own gallery setting to formcompletely depended on the shared space of the viewer, or of one’s everydayinteraction with the environment at large, has now become a centralcondition that shapes our relationship to public space.
14 Michael Fried, op. cit., p. 140.
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The success of the new urban space is measured not so much from thequality of its design as a physical artifact or independent setting, but thequality of programmed event, the richness and satisfaction of the inducedaction, and the perceptual response of the participant. The recent urbanplazas and parks in Barcelona, New York, Paris,15 and elsewhere are theresult of shifting paradigms in art and culture throughout the 20th century,and mark a decisive break with earlier models which have proved to bemost resistant to change and transformation. Most importantly, just asearlier landscape forms and spaces inspired parallel models of city formmore charged and richly defined than anything the existing city has tooffer,16 possibly the characteristics of these new urban spaces can leadto more persuasive possibilities for redefining the late 20th century city,which continues to require critical reassessment and renewal.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 84th Annual Meetingof the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1996.
15 Bernard Tschumi’s widelydiscussed La Villette park innorthern Paris is clearly one of theprimary models for the concept ofaction space; an excellentdescription can be found in: BernardTschumi, Cingramme Folie: Le ParcDe La Villette (PrincetonArchitectural Press, Princeton,1987).
16 The influence of earlier gardentypologies and city form has beendocumented extensively; one of themost convincing explorationsremains the work found in: ColinRowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City(M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, MA,1978), pp. 175–177.
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THE INSCRIPTION OF “PUBLIC” ANDTHE PUBLICREALM
“CIVIC” REALMS IN THECONTEMPORARY CITYMICHAEL E. GAMBLE (2003)
The city used to be something that you get for free. It’s been a publicspace, and it enables the citizens to assemble in a kind of collectivesense, but basically through the process, effects of the market economyand through the withdrawal of the public sector and the kind of com-plimentary invasion of the private sector, which is expressed throughshopping, the nature of the city has changed from something that isfundamentally free, to something that you have to pay for, so that evenin educational establishments, even in religious establishments and cer-tainly in cultural establishments there is always this kind of commercialpresence . . .
Rem Koolhaas in an interview with Ray Suarez, PBS commentator
In our day it seems to me that civic spirit is inseparable from the exerciseof political rights . . .
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
This is not a narrative about the universal decline of the public realm,nor am I locked in a search for the once vital site of democracy or a unifiedpublic. I realize that the “decline” of public space was essentially class-specific nostalgia for a place that never existed on the terms so imagined,especially by middle income suburbanites. I cannot mourn the loss of some-thing that has hardly ever existed in parts of Atlanta. I do believe that weneed public spaces that are free from private influence, market force andpolicies based on control and consumption. The terms public and civicshould in fact be in quotation marks, denaturalized, because of the changesin meaning wrought by so much interpretation. The definition of publicspace is indeed a site of debate.1
As the contemporary city grows and designers, policy makers, developersand special interest groups seek ways to allay the gap between suburban lifeand urbanity, automobiles and pedestrians, ambiguous public space and thepublic realm, sustained debate on the term public is essential. In what wayscan public life manifest itself in an increasingly privatized world? Is publiclife now limited to residual, ambiguous spaces? How are the boundariesbetween public and private inscribed? Public space is literally required inorder for democratic society to exist by the Bill of Rights and Amendmentsto the Constitution, being the realm of organized political action, the place
1 I was fortunate enough ingraduate school to participate inRosalyn Deutsche’s course on PublicSpace and am indebted to her forinsight and debate related to thesubject. The term public remainsbracketed throughout thisdiscussion.
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of free speech and freedom of assembly, tolerance, self-presentation,self-preservation and public dialogue. Some would say that today thedefense of public space is a radical project. The question is where is it andhow is it made manifest in suburbia, urban retrofits and new public/privatepartnerships? Is the public realm now relegated to the temporary2 statusdescribed by Margaret Crawford in Everyday Urbanism?
The Generic City, Shopping Mall Urbanism, Simulated Urbanism, thePrivate Public are all recent themes associated with the increased pri-vatization of American public space. In Atlanta, most parks and outdoorspaces are now privately maintained and monitored. New developments inAtlanta such as Lindbergh City Center, Perimeter Town Center and AtlanticStation are developer-driven, privately maintained, consumer havens withlittle or no civic or public infrastructure. Similarly, in Atlanta’s newest park,Centennial Olympic, the private body that maintains the space prohibitssome forms of public gathering and the expression of political opinion.The trend has even reached many of Atlanta’s sidewalks, which arenow privately maintained and monitored through video surveillance andsecurity.
Why is the continued cultivation of the public realm important? Publicspace today is understood as a place in which a range of different individualswho don’t necessarily know each other can interact. Pure public spaceshould be democratic and responsive, accessible to all groups, and a locusof public action, but because so many public spaces are now part of largerpublic/private partnerships and not essentially democratic, this definition, aswe will see, can be problematic.
To Hannah Arendt, “Action and speech create a space between the parti-cipants which can find its proper location almost anytime and anywhere. Itis the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the spacewhere I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merelylike other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.”3
The space of appearance, a subject that is now widely understood as theessence of Arendt’s position on political representation, is “. . . for us,appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as byourselves, that constitutes reality.”4 Privacy, to Arendt, is the other, darker,hidden side of the public realm, and while to be political meant to attain thehighest possibility of human existence, to have no private place of one’s ownmeant to be no longer human. Public life, by her definition, was essential inthe formation of private identity. For Arendt, society is the form in whichthe fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumespublic significance, and where the activities connected with sheer survivalare permitted to appear in public. The space of appearance is the worlditself, “. . . as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privatelyowned place in it.”5 While Arendt’s definition of the public was representa-tive of a hierarchical political system, and was not essentially social, she
2 “no-longer-but-not-yet-their-own,”p. 29.
3 Arendt, The Human Condition,p. 198.
4 Ibid., p. 23.
5 Ibid., p. 47.
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articulates a clear vision of the significance of public space to society. LikeAristotle’s, Arendt’s urban epistemology evolves from the fact that without avisible public realm, we lose our private place in it. What happens wheneverything becomes privately held?
Like Arendt’s definition, the search for “public” space has traditionallyfocused on an idyllic place, made possible by the elimination of conflict.In her book Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Rosalyn Deutsche contendsthat conflict is a prerequisite for the existence and growth of public space,and states that public space is possible only when society accepts that thesocial field doesn’t have an essential identity, but is structured by multiplerelationships. Focused on public art discourse and working with ClaudeLefort’s thesis6 stating that democratic power comes from the people and islocated in the social, Deutsche further defines public space as the placewhere the meaning and unity of the social is negotiated. Eliminating conflictobscures the basis of democracy, making public space artificial. Individualand group identities are formed in public space and only become meaningfulthrough sustained debate. Without a singular identity, the social has nounity and power; in essence, it belongs to no one. The existence of democ-racy is based in the fact that the social is an open, incomplete entity. Thismisconception of public space rises through the definition of democracy.With no central core of power, the social order has no basis. In essence, theprivatization of the public realm is an attack on society. The security of apublic/private division shelters the subject from public space. The recogni-tion of public space as the locus of conflict and the struggle for representa-tion is an attempt to prevent the conversion of the public sphere intoa private possession, something that is often attempted in the name ofdemocracy.
Margaret Crawford, drawing from the writings of Lefebvre, de Certeauand more recently Nancy Fraser, proposes an alternate reading of publicspace to that of Arendt’s, and extends Habermas’ concept related to “com-municative action” and “dialogues” beyond systems of equal power. Byintroducing, through Fraser, “counter publics” and “subaltern counter-publics,” Crawford dismisses the public as a single entity and defines apublic sphere “based on contestation, rather than unity, and createdthrough competing interests and violent demands as much as by reasoneddebate.” Crawford seeks locales, both public and private, for the develop-ment of new social and spatial practices where new meanings arecontinuously being created because new users keep reinterpreting andreorganizing the place over and over again. Unexpected and unplanneduse of these places enables the specificity of the liminal urban terrain tobecome visible: “. . . instead of a single, ‘public’ occupying and exemplarypublic space, the multiple and counter-publics that Fraser identifies neces-sarily produce multiple sites of public expression, creating and usingspaces that are partial and selective, responsive to limited segments of the
6 Lefort, The Political Forms ofModern Society. See specifically thechapter on Politics and HumanRights.
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population and to a limited number of the multiple public roles individualsplay in urban society.”
According to Crawford, “when we recognize these struggles as the germof an alternative development of democracy, we can begin to frame a newdiscourse of public space—one no longer preoccupied with loss, but filledwith possibilities.” In her evolving definition of democracy, we discover acomplex and contested idea that can assume a multiplicity of meaningsand forms. The boundaries between public and private become blurred and“violate the strict lines between public and private on which the liberalbourgeois concept of the public sphere insists.”7
Arendt’s theory is formed from an idealized public space; Crawford’stheories of public space are grounded in the radical ethnicity and suburbansprawl of Los Angeles; Deutsche’s in the contested, compressed spaces ofManhattan. Significant and parallel is a concern with the definition a publicand private. Deutsche argues that private identity should be formed in thepublic sphere, because the social (or “phantom public”) has no essentialidentity. While Arendt considers the social as an anomaly caused by theconfusion of public and private, Crawford and Deutsche argue that it is thisvery condition that must be accepted and enhanced. While Arendt refers tothe rising phenomenon of the social, in which private activities are allowedto take place in public spaces, Deutsche and Crawford encourage it, arguingthat private individual identity should be formed in public spaces. Againstany notion of collectivity or “oneness,” Deutsch and Crawford warn usagainst the dangers of a society distracted by the “benign fantasy of socialcompletion”8 which negates plurality and conflict through the constructionof an image of social space on authoritarian ground. Democracy is all thatsupports the construction of public space—enigmatic, grounded in thestruggle for representation of all individuals and based on multiple publics.
Whether implicit or explicit, many new developments, be they NewUrbanist or other, problematize the role of public and civic space by eithersanctioning private definitions of the public realm, or by failing to describethe role of civic and institutional structures on democratic terms. What is thenature of public and civic space in the contemporary city? Privatizationmakes public space, civic and social institutions like sidewalks, squares,parks, museums, community centers, and schools vulnerable to censor,security and pervasive retailing as decreased consumer demand, fear andmarket instabilities proliferate. In many cases, debates about the representa-tion of diverse publics are suppressed. Unfortunately today, many privateand public development agencies see the tenets of New Urbanism onlyas a brand or a commodity. On the heels of many successful projects likeSeaside and the Kentlands, New Urbanist practice is seen now more for itscapacity to produce profit than to create the types of spaces outlined bythe Charter and desired by the Congress. “How do we know it’s NewUrbanism?” is a recent addition to the Congress of New Urbanism’s
7 Crawford, Everyday Urbanism.Many thanks to Ana Maria Leon andher work in my Public Space seminaron parking lots. Her commitment toclose readings of selected texts wasvery beneficial to this research.
8 Deutsche, Evictions, p. 326.
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website. Good Urbanism and its progeny New Urbanism both place highvalue on civic identity, community and representation in the publicrealm. But in the contemporary city is there simply no space for civic andpublic space in the developer’s pro forma? Is shopping the ultimateexpression of public life? Where does branding end and public life begin? InAmerica there are well over five and a half billion square feet of retail space.Is, as Koolhaas contends, the marketplace the final arbitrator and regulatorof life?
It’s an exciting time for many American cities, as blighted areas arerevitalized and new developments realized. Doug Kelbaugh asks, “Ascitizens, are we too seduced by private pleasures and personal conceits tocultivate a rich, coherent, and democratic public realm? In our quest fora new civitas, which New Urbanism can help sponsor, are we prepared,like great cultures before us, for the balance and discipline required?”9 Whatand where is the public? Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp observe thatthe lack of authenticity and a limited form of control don’t have to obstructthe experience of public domain. “The existing need for the consumption ofevents in a protected space won’t necessarily obstruct the experience ofpublic domain. The design of public domain is just a matter of designing thecrossings between the different landscapes, and of the provocation ofvoluntary manifestations of diversity.”10 As Americans stroll forth fromfranchise cafés and bookstores in search of more varied public space, it isimportant to at least qualify this desire by looking to the future and the past.More public and civic spaces are needed, but it is not clear that sufficientquantities were ever present in the past, that they were not highly exclusive,or that we would not be better served creating settings and activities fitted toour current needs, rather than relying on misconceptions of earlierexamples.11 However, experience in relation to social form is what’s at stakehere, and as I see it, the new social forms under construction in Atlanta areinadequate. “I shop therefore I am” should not be our only mantra. Theconstruction of identity in public is only possible when places in whicheach of us can appear as democratic citizens are willfully conceived andimplemented.
WORKS CONSULTED
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. London: University of Chicago Press,1967.
Crawford, Margaret, John Chase and John Kaliski. Everyday Urbanism. New York:Monacelli Press, 1999.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall.Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America, translated by George Lawrence,edited by J.P. Mayer. New York: Harper Perennial, 1988.
Deutsche, Rosalyn. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press,1995.
10 Hajer and Reijndorp, In Searchof New Public Domain: Analysisand Strategy.
11 Smithsimon, “People in theStreets.”
9 Kelbaugh, “Three Urbanisms.”
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Duany, Andrés, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck. Suburban Nation: The Rise
of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press,2001.
Dunham-Jones, Ellen. “75 Percent,” Harvard Design Magazine (Fall 2000),pp. 5–12.
Ellin, Nan. Postmodern Urbanism. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.Fishman, Robert. “Cities After the End of Cities,” Harvard Design Magazine (Fall
2000), pp. 14–15.Hall, Peter. “Retro Urbanism,” Harvard Design Magazine (Fall 2000), pp. 30–34.Hajer, Maarten and Arnold Reijndorp. In Search of New Public Domain: Analysis
and Strategy. Rotterdam: NA: Publishers, 2001.Kelbaugh, Douglas. “Three Urbanisms: New, Everyday and Post,” University of
Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, available at<http://www.tcaup.umich.edu> and <http://www.fathom.com/feature/122197>
Koolhaas, Rem et al. “Whatever Happened to Urbanism,” in S,M,L,XL. New York:Monacelli Press, 1995.
Koolhaas, Rem. “Atlanta,” in S,M,L,XL. New York: Monacelli Press, 1995.Krieger, Alex. “Whose Urbanism,” Architecture (Nov. 1998), pp. 73–79.Lefort, Claude. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy,
Totalitarianism. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1987.Smithsimon, Greg. “People in the Streets: The Promise of Democracy in Every-
day Public Space” available at <http://www.columbia.edu/~gs228/writing/importanceps.htm>
This essay is excerpted from the original published in the Proceedings of the 91stAnnual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2003.
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ZONEGLOBALISM ANDLOCAL IDENTITY
KELLER EASTERLING (2007)
DUPLICITY
As global powers juggle multiple sovereignties and allegiances, theirbehavior is, by necessity, discrepant. Manipulating both domestic and inter-national sovereignty, nation states are more vigorously partnering withnon-state forces and deciding together how to release, shelter and laundertheir identity to create the most advantageous political or economic climate.Non-state forces may seek out relaxed, extra-jurisdictional spaces (S.E.Z.s,F.T.Z.s, E.P.Z.s etc.) while also massaging legislation in the various statesthey occupy (N.A.F.T.A., G.A.T.T.). We emphasize patriotism and citizenshipwhile looking for cheap labor and unfilled quotas in the global market. Thestances of any one nation are therefore often duplicitous or discrepantreflections of divided loyalties between national and international concernsor citizens and shareholders. Observers, researchers and theorists, some ofwhom are included in this anthology, continue to report the failure ofpolitical orthodoxies to assess contemporary global powers. They rejectuniversals or world system theories as they reject binary oppositions ofnational/non-national, citizen/non-citizen, global/local. Whether one refersto Arjun Appadurai’s “scapes,” Aihwa Ong’s “situated ethical regimes,”Peter Sloterdijk’s “spheres,” or the “worlds” about which many theorize,these thinkers return with complex models of multiple sovereignties tomatch the necessity of multiple ethical platforms.1 The contention that thenation state is weakening in the face of burgeoning transnational forces isnowhere near sneaky enough. It is much more likely that the multiple realmsof influence are kept in play to lubricate the obfuscation so important to themaintenance of power. Crucial then might be a working knowledge of thelogics of duplicity.
Some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are writtennot in the language of law and diplomacy but rather in the languageof architecture and urbanism. Having often escaped the bounds ofparliamentary politics, this extrastatecraft resides in the unofficialcurrents of cultural and market persuasion. Beyond the well-rehearsedtechniques of national sovereignty (war, citizenship, suffrage and diplo-macy) are events that may not have an orthodox political pedigree,but nevertheless create a shift in sentiment, a cessation of violence ora turn in economic fortunes. Indeed, the notion that there is a properforthright realm of political negotiation usually acts as the perfectcamouflage for a rich medium of subterfuge, hoax and hyperbole that finallyrules the world.
1 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity atLarge: Cultural Dimensions ofGlobalization (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press,1996); Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism asException: Mutations inCitizenship and Sovereignty(Durham: Duke University Press,2006); <www.petersloterdijk.net>;Marc Auge, An Anthropology forContemporaneous Worlds (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1999). Wemight now consider locality toreflect not primordialism, but ratherthe complex mixtures and tincturesof global forces on the ground in anylocation or in any very particularorganization that may, in fact, notrely on location.
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ZONE
Among these urban changes is the emerging paradigm of the free zone.Heir to ancient pirate enclaves or the freeports of Hamburg or Genoa, the
zone is the perfect legal habitat of state—non-state partnerships. If it is thecorporation’s legal duty to banish any obstacle to profit, and the zone isthe spatial organ of this externalizing—a mechanism of political quarantinedesigned for corporate protection. The earliest historical urges to incor-porate express this desire for freedom and exclusivity. In 1934, the UnitedStates established Foreign Trade Zone status for port and warehousing areasrelated to trade. As the zone merged with manufacturing, Export ProcessingZones appeared in the late 1950s and 1960s. China’s Special EconomicZones (S.E.Z.s), allowing for an even broader range of market activity,emerged in the 1970s. Since then special zones of various types have grownexponentially, from a few hundred in the 1980s to between three and fourthousand operating in 130 countries in 2006.2 Special zones handle over athird of the world’s trade. Some zones accumulate a few hectares; somegrow in conurbations that are hundreds of kilometers in size.3
Breeding more promiscuously with other “parks” or enclave formats,the zone now merges with tourist compounds, knowledge villages, I.T.campuses and cultural institutions that complement the corporate head-quarters or offshore facility. More and more programs and spatial productsthrive in legal lacunae and political quarantine, enjoying the insulationand lubrication of tax exemptions, foreign ownership of property, stream-lined customs and deregulation of labor or environmental regulations.Indeed, the zone as corporate enclave is a primary aggregate unit of manynew forms of the contemporary global city, offering a “clean slate,”“one-stop” entry into the economy of a foreign country. Most banish thenegotiations that are usually associated with the contingencies of urban-ism—negotiations such as those concerning labor, human rights orenvironment. Many of the new legal hybrids of zone, oscillating betweenvisibility and invisibility, identity and anonymity, have neither been mappednor analyzed for their disposition—their patency, exclusivity, aggression,resilience or violence.
The zone launders identities. Countries just entering the marketplace mayuse the new zone economy, while also rejecting its incompatibility with staterhetoric or banishing it as a contradiction to the state’s purity. The D.P.R.K.(North Korea) introduced zones like Rajin Sonbong and Kaesong to act ascash cows for the state but also remain separate and vilified as a capitalisteconomy. China’s S.E.Z.s are the world’s model of this phenomenon. Theirearly experiment with four S.E.Z.s to quarantine the capitalist market hasexploded to produce scores of different zones of various types all across thecountry. Cross-national growth zones in the South China Sea move prod-ucts between zones in different jurisdictions to take advantage of differentquotas and levels of regulation. In Eastern Europe the zone allows other
2 Michael Engman, Osamu Onoderand Enrico Pinali, “ExportProcessing Zones: Past and FutureDevelopment,” O.E.C.D. TradePolicy Working Paper No. 53, May22, 2007; <http://www.oecd.org/>
3 Xiangming Chen, “The Evolutionof Free Economic Zones and theRecent Development of Cross-National Growth Zones,”International Journal of Urban andRegional Research, vol. 19, no. 4(Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995),593–621.
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European corporations to take advantage of less expensive labor from enter-ing EU countries. Similarly, AllianceTexas, north of Fort Worth, a classiccorporate city as office park and distripark, renames and redistributes manyof the products produced in Mexico under N.A.F.T.A. agreements so thatthey can be calibrated to the desired profitability in a U.S. context. Theorgmen who tend the self-referential organizations of the free zone areproud of the fluid, robust, information-rich environments they have created.Their automated warehouses and information Landschafts slowly andobsessively sort and stack enormous amounts of information: yet onlyinformation that is compatible to a common platform qualifies for inclu-sion. Indeed, an enormous intelligence is deployed to reset or eliminate anyerrant or extrinsic information. While remaining intact, the hermetic organ-ization develops shrewd auxiliary tactics and strategies to fortify its stupid-ity and defend against contradiction. Regimes of power at once diversifytheir sources and contacts while consolidating and closing ranks, extendingand tightening their territory. They grow while deleting information. Thisinformation paradox—wherein an enormous amount of information isrequired to remain information poor—is a common tool of power.
The zone often calls itself a “city.” HITEC City or Ebene Cybercity,among many others, take on the title of “city” as an enthusiastic expressionof the zone’s evolution beyond being merely a location for warehousing andtransshipment. The zone has become a new primordial civilization and awarm pool for the latest cocktail of spatial products (e.g. offices, factories,warehouses, calling centers, software production facilities etc.) that movearound the world. Many countries in South Asia, China and Africa usedExport Processing Zones as a means of announcing their entry into a globalmarket as independent post-colonial contractors of outsourcing and off-shoring. For example, with Ebene Cybercity, Mauritius has merged E.P.Z.development with I.T. campus development thanks to help from the develop-ers of HITEC City in Hyderabad. Dubai has rehearsed the “park” orzone with almost every imaginable program beginning with Dubai InternetCity in 2000, the first I.T. campus as free trade zone. Calling each new
Below left: Alliance Texas,Forth Worth, Texas.
Below right: Dubai Internet City.
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enclave “city,” it has either planned or built Dubai Health Care City, DubaiMaritime City, Dubai Silicon Oasis, Dubai Knowledge Village, DubaiTechno Park, Dubai Media City, Dubai Outsourcing Zone, Dubai Humani-tarian City, Dubai Industrial City and Dubai Textile City.
The zone has become a resort. Able to materialize and dematerialize withthe caprice of petrodollars and offshore holdings, the new corporateenclaves also need to get away and relax. Operating in a frictionless realm ofexemption and merging with other urban formats, the zone also naturallymerges with the resort and theme park, even assuming an ethereal aura offantasy. Indeed if corporations are often only vessels for liberated money,they can easily be maintained outside of the work-week environment. I.T.campuses in India and Malaysia like Multimedia Supercorridor sometimesrefer to themselves as I.T. resorts offering lush vegetation and a mixture ofsmall scale vernacular buildings and mirror-tiled office buildings. Even moreextreme are those zones that merge with the offshore island retreats. Jeju,for instance, is a quintessential island retreat that has housed, as have manyislands, all of those programs or illicit activities that do not fit into the logicsof the continent. Transforming itself from penal colony and strategic mili-tary position to citing Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong as models, theisland of Jeju, for instance, has transformed itself into a “free economiccity.”4 On the island of Kish off the coast of Iran, Kish Free Zone similarlyattracts business to an island notorious for its relaxed religious standards.Here, there is not only a loosening of headscarves and a greater opportunityfor socializing between men and women, but the standard set of exemptionsto which the corporation has grown accustomed. Nearby fantasy hotelslike the Dariush Grand Hotel recreate the grandeur of Persian palaces withperistyle halls, gigantic cast stone sphinxes and ornate bas reliefs depictingancient scenes.
The zone is a double. Now major cities and national capitals are engineer-ing their own world city Doppelgangers—their own non-national territorywithin which to legitimize non-state transactions. The world capital andnational capital can shadow each other, alternately exhibiting a regionalcultural ethos and a global ambition. Companies like CIDCO and SKIL cannow be hired, as they were in Navi Mumbai, to deliver an infrastructurallegal environment like those in Shenzhen and Pudong. City-states like HongKong, Singapore and Dubai, that assume the ethos of free zones for theirentire territory, have become world city models for newly minted citieswith not only commercial areas but a full complement of programs. KingAbdullah Economic City, a production of the U.A.E.s’ Emaar developers onthe Red Sea near Jeddah, offers cultural, educational, business and residen-tial programs merged with a resort. Fly-throughs with swelling traditionalmusic render the city as a shimmering golden man-made island filledwith multiples of traditional Islamic palace buildings and programmedwith leisure space. While corporate headquarters in national capitals and
Cyber Gateway, Hyderabad, India.
Kish Island, Iran.
4 <http://www.jeju.go.kr/>
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financial capitals portray a glamorous business-like atmosphere, here thezone projects the image of a kingdom of unencumbered wealth. NewSongdo City, an expansion of the Incheon free trade territories near Seoul, isa complete international city on the Dubai or Singapore model designed byK.P.F., an American architecture firm. Here, aspiring to the cosmopolitanurbanity of New York, Venice and Sydney, the zone is filled with residential,cultural and educational programs in addition to commercial programs.While the emotional streaming videos for any of the smaller “cities” areoften accompanied by tinny fanfares of low production values, the NewSongdo City video messages are accompanied by new age tunes or heroicstrains in the John Williams style—the spectacular theme music of the non-state capital.
The zone is the parliament for the de facto global governance of privatecorporations. Enjoying quasi-diplomatic immunities, corporations functionin an elite parastate capacity, providing to nations the support and expertisefor transportation and communication infrastructure or relationshipswith the I.M.F. and the World Bank. Networks of construction companiesand infrastructure specialists like Bouyges, Bin Laden, Mitsubishi, Kawasakior Siemens deliver technologies for high speed rail, automated transit andskyscraper engineering. To the ports around which so many free trade zones,Export Processing Zones and Special Economic Zones crystallize, con-glomerates such as P.S.A., P.&O., Hutchison Port Holdings or E.C.T., likemodern counterparts of British or Dutch East India company franchises,deliver transshipment and warehousing technologies. Technology parksaround the world grow their own satellite and cable networks with theirown headquarters or embassies at the interstices of the network; wholefamilies of corporations stick together in the same legal habitat recreatedanywhere in the world and separated by a plane trip or a satellite bounce.Real estate operators like Emaar provide the spatial environments andamenities that corporate “families” recognize as home.
The zone prefers non-state violence to military conflict that might bebad for business. The gulf widens between the extremes of the Dubaidevelopment model and the slums of Lagos or Kinshasa. Yet the zone is aformation within which poverty can be strictly maintained without thechaos of informal economies. The offshore sweatshops in Saipan or themaquiladoras on the thickened border between the United States andMexico organize a form of labor exploitation that is stable and within thelaw. The corporate city not only provides a double to the national andfinancial capital: it has its own double in these offshore enclaves. Morediscrete and less visible, these backstage formations are not given the “city”designation. In Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, the Alsunut DevelopmentCompany Ltd. is building Almogran, which includes 1660 acres of sky-scrapers and residential properties. The new corporate city only underlinesthe extreme discrepancies between oil wealth and the exploitation of oil
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resources in the mostly non-Arab southern Sudan. Indeed, the overt, evenhyperbolic, expressions of oil money are among the chief tools for instigat-ing war and violence in the south.
The zone tutors impure ethical struggles. Duplicity is the prevailing logicand organizational disposition of this space. The logics of righteousness andthe insistence on orthodox political sentiment evaporate in these environ-ments. Most urgent for architecture, then, may be not the consolidation of asingular position but rather the acquisition of an expanded, agile repertoire.Curiosity and ingenuity nourish a position wherein one is too smart to beright. Some backstage knowledge of the bagatelle in exchange, the playersin the game and the cards being dealt returns more information about thetools and techniques of extrastatecraft. The zone is an especially discrepantterritory within which to rehearse a new species of spatio-political activism.
Portions of this essay were adapted from an article prepared for the RotterdamBiennale, 2007, Visionary Power catalog (NAI, 2007).
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DIS-ASSEMBLING THE URBANGLOBALISM ANDLOCAL IDENTITY
The variable interactions of spatial formand contentSASKIA SASSEN (2007)
This short essay examines the tensions between the shapes of a builtenvironment and the underlying dynamics feeding it. Because some of thesharpest tensions can be found in economic spaces, I focus especially onthese. To make it concrete and allow the reader to visualize some of theconceptual points, I regularly invoke the models of the so-called ChicagoSchool and the Los Angeles School, as they represent familiar contrastingunderstandings. The L.A. model’s core proposition is that the L.A. region isthe urban form of today’s new (post-modern) economy while the Chicagomodel reflects that of an older (modern) economy, with the centrality ofagglomeration as its organizing dynamic.
I distinguish between spatial outcomes that may result from similar noveldynamics even when they look very different, and spatial outcomes that mayresult from different dynamics even when they look the same. In its mostextreme instances, the variability of spatial forms given similar underlyingdynamics makes legible the diverse constraints shaping the spatializing ofsimilar dynamics across different cities and urban regions, on the one hand;and, on the other, the homogenized state-of-the-art built environment ofmajor cities, no matter how original the architecture, obscures drasticallydifferent economic logics.
DIVERSE SPATIAL FORMS BUT SIMILAR UNDERLYING DYNAMICS
RECOVERING THE ROLE OF A PLACE IN TRANSLOCAL CIRCUITS
In focusing on spatial form versus underlying dynamic, my emphasisis on the extent to which their articulation is partly shaped by a rangeof intermediate variables. That is to say, diverse spatial outcomes mayresult from area-specific constraints on the scaling and spatializing ofthe same particular dynamic rather than from intrinsic urban forms,whether modern or post-modern. Path-dependence eventually sets in,further confining the options for future spatial outcomes and potentiallyraising the divergence between two urbanized areas as a function ofpath-dependence rather than the underlying dynamics getting spatialized.Once a distinct spatial form is produced, even though conceivablystemming from a similar underlying dynamic, it will have its own effectson outcomes. This is perhaps best exemplified by the contrasting logicsfor real estate profitability evident in the original development of
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both Chicago and L.A. An emphasis on intermediate variables questionsthe easy opposition of Chicago vs. L.A. as models of urbanism repre-senting respectively an old and the future phase in the evolution of urbanform.
A critical but easily overlooked variable when comparing formatssuch as the L.A. and Chicago models is the fact that complex trans-localprocesses comprise diverse geographic moments, notably agglomerationand dispersal. We need to know where a particular area fits in suchmulti-sited processes. Just describing the spatial organization of an areadoes not allow us to get at such deeper economic dynamics. Areas withcomplex spatial organizations such as those represented by the L.A. or theChicago model, are likely to contain both moments of agglomeration anddispersal, including for the same firm. And they may contain predominantlyone of those moments in a firm’s or a sector’s spatial organization of itsactivities, for instance, dispersal in the L.A. region and agglomerationin Chicago.
Translocal chains of operations are increasingly common for manyfirms and for whole economic sectors. The evidence shows that globalizedfirms and sectors contain both agglomeration and dispersal moments intheir spatial organization. Dispersal might be at a regional, national andglobal level, and agglomerations might vary sharply in content and inthe specifics of the corresponding spatial form—for instance, Chicago’s
Hilary Koob-Sassen, The ParacultureNr. 6 (London, T1+2 Gallery).
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financial center and L.A.’s Hollywood or Northern California’s SiliconValley. A focus on the presence of such translocal chains of operations helpsus situate the specifics of a city, a metro area, or an L.A.-type region in a farbroader systemic condition, one that might include points both of sharpagglomeration and of sharp dispersal.
In my own research I found that the most globalized and innovative firmswere characterized by the fact that agglomeration is itself a function ofdispersal. That is to say, the more globalized and thus geographically dis-persed a firm’s operations, the more likely the presence of agglomerationeconomies in particular moments (the production of top-level headquarterfunctions) of that firm’s chain of operations. It became one of my core thesesin specifying the global city model. For the purposes of this essay, it under-lines the fact of a single dynamic with diverse spatializations, i.e. bothagglomeration and dispersal, for a firm or a sector. This is critical given theproposition in the L.A. model that spatial dispersal is the new, post-modernurban form that captures novel economic (and other) dynamics; in contrastChicago style agglomeration is then represented as belonging to an oldereconomic phase—the modern city.
One way of specifying some of this empirically is to establish whetheragglomeration economies, especially as a function of dispersal, matter forunderstanding the spatial organization of the L.A. region. I would add thatwe need the same type of analysis for Chicago, both the city and the largermetro region, because the Chicago model is predicated on an older notion ofagglomeration, one shaped by the weight of core inputs and by transportcosts. The L.A. model as per Dear (2002) posits that agglomeration econ-omies have ceased to be a locational determinant in the new economy andhence a marker of urban form. (But see the work on L.A. by Scott, Storper,Christopherson, Soja and others for analyses that diverge to variable extentsfrom Dear’s.)
To organize the argument one might posit that the underlying neweconomic dynamic is the same in significant and indeed in growing segmentsof each region even as spatial form diverges. This would then engagethe thesis that the L.A. model represents the spatializing of a new dynamicthat makes itself legible in the L.A. landscape, and thus that the geographicdispersal at the heart of the L.A. model captures a whole new economicphase that is reshaping urban form. I counterpose the hypothesis thatthe more an urban region is being shaped by the new economic dynamics,the more spatial organization will involve agglomeration economiesprecisely as a function of geographic dispersal of economic activitiesunder conditions of systemic integration no matter the scale—regional,national or global.
This is a type of agglomeration economy I found in my research onglobal cities, but it can also be applied to national or regional scales. Let meelaborate briefly on the hypothesis, alluded to earlier, that I derived from this
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finding—to wit, that the greater the capabilities for geographic dispersal afirm can evince, the more it can benefit from agglomeration economies forthe increasingly complex management of a globally dispersed set ofoperations (see Sassen 2001: New Preface for a brief explanation of the ninehypotheses that specify the global city model).
The complexity of the functions that need to be produced, the uncertaintyof the markets such firms are involved in, and the growing importance ofspeed in all these transactions, is a mix of conditions that constitutes a newlogic for agglomeration; it is not the logic posited in older models, whereweight and distance are seen to shape agglomeration outcomes. The mix offirms, talents and expertise in a broad range of specialized fields, makes acertain type of dense environment function as a strategic knowledge econ-omy wherein the whole is more than the sum of (even its finest) parts. This isa crucial asset for highly globalized sectors. In my current research Ihave added yet another variable to explain the importance of suchagglomerations to the most advanced sectors. It is the fact that organiza-tional complexity allows firms to maximize the benefits they can derive fromthe new digital technologies, thereby further underlining the importanceof agglomeration to the new economy. Further, the capabilities for globaloperation, coordination and control contained in the new informationtechnologies and in the power of transnational corporations need to beproduced, serviced, “debugged” through specialized cultural work, andultimately also designed and invented. The fact of having to “produce”these capabilities adds what is often a neglected dimension in discussionsabout how the new technologies neutralize distance and place, as madeemblematic in the L.A. model.
A second key dynamic that articulates dispersal and agglomeration is thatthe more headquarters actually buy some of their corporate functions fromthe specialized services sector rather than producing them in house, thegreater their locational options become. Among these options is moving outof global cities, and more generically, out of agglomerations. This is anoption precisely because of the existence of a spatially concentrated net-work of specialized producer services sector that can increasingly handlesome of the most complex global operations of firms and markets. It isprecisely this specialized capability to handle the global operations of firmsand markets that marks the global city production function, not simplythe number of corporate headquarters of the biggest firms in the world, asis often suggested. A third key dynamic is that the more large corporateclients buy components of their top-level headquarter functions from thespecialized corporate services sector, the higher the benefits this sector canderive from being in a global city. This sector needs to be a state of the art,networked knowledge economy, capable of producing a global service, andof absorbing the growing uncertainty and risks facing their corporate clientsas these go global. In the L.A. region we find elements of this in Hollywood
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for the global entertainment industry and the L.A./Long Beach harboreconomy, and perhaps now also in the corporate office complex of OrangeCounty and even in downtown L.A. These are intense agglomerations thatare very much part of the new economic phase, particularly its mostadvanced sectors. This contests the key proposition of the L.A. model onurban form and the new economy. Interpreting what is novel about the L.A.region would then entail analytic rescalings that allow us to capture thepossibility that some of L.A.’s multipolarity is actually better understood asreflecting the presence of agglomeration economies.
The available evidence, and there is plenty of it, indicates that keyfactors shaping the spatial organization of leading firms are operativein both the L.A. region and in older cities such as Chicago and New York.But it all looks so different. Upon closer examination we might also saythat it is perhaps to some extent a question of coding. What is codedas multipolarity in the L.A. region gets coded as “relocation to the metro-politan area or beyond” in Chicago and New York. At the same time,dense concentrations of the most innovative and globalized sectorssubject to agglomeration economies are present in both L.A. and Chicago/New York, but their contents are very different. Diverse economic histories,path dependencies and contents hamper the legibility of possible similaritiesin underlying dynamics. Rescaling the Chicago area to incorporatethe metro area, and the L.A. region to include sub-regional micro-agglomerations, gets us only so far in analytically neutralizing thediverse histories and contents of each region. But it is essential workfor specifying whether the new dynamics reshaping the urban con-dition necessarily spatialize according to the L.A. model—dispersal andmultipolarity.
HOMOGENIZED BUILT ENVIRONMENTS OR INFRASTRUCTURES FOR
ADVANCED ECONOMIES?
RECOVERING THE SPECIFICS OF A PLACE
My key argument here is that the common notion of the homogenizing ofthe economic urban landscape misses a critical point. It misses, or obscures,the fact of the diversity of economic trajectories through which cities andregions become globalized, even when the final visual outcomes may looksimilar. Out of this surface analysis, based on homogenized landscapes,comes a second possibly spurious inference, that similar visual landscapesare a function of convergence. Both propositions—that similar spatial formsare indicators of both similar economic dynamics and of convergence—mayindeed capture various situations. But key conditions are not, and, in fact,they are rendered invisible by such notions. Hence we cannot assume thatsuch inferences from the visual order always hold. This then also problemat-izes the proposition that the L.A. model represents the new urban spatial
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form arising out of what are today’s new dynamics, including prominentlyeconomic dynamics.
What led me to question the prevailing homogenization and convergencetheses was the research comparing Chicago and New York. It is common tosee Chicago as a latecomer to global city status because of its agro-industrialpast. Why did it happen so late—almost fifteen years later than in New Yorkand London? It is easy to assume that Chicago had to overcome its agro-industrial past which put it at a disadvantage compared to old trading andfinancial centers such as New York and London.
But I found that its past was not a disadvantage. It was one key sourceof its competitive advantage. The knowledge economy, developed to handlethe needs of its agro-industrial regional economy, gave Chicago a key com-ponent of its current specialized advantage in the global economy. Whilethis is most visible and familiar in the fact of its preeminence as a futuresmarket built on pork bellies, it also underlies other highly specialized com-ponents of its global city functions. The complexity, scale and internationalcharacter of its agro-industrial complex required highly specializedfinancial, accounting and legal expertise, quite different from the expertiserequired to handle the sectors New York specialized in—service exports,finance on trade, and finance on finance.1 Other sectors are, clearly, alsocritical to the advanced service economy of today’s Chicago;2 some of thesehave developed as a result of this particular core knowledge economy, e.g.the expansion of professional firms and households, high end componentsof the hotel and restaurant sector, and of the cultural sector.
The specialized economic histories of major cities and urban regionsmatter in today’s global economy because there is a globally networkeddivision of functions. This fact is easily obscured by the common emphasison inter-city competition and by the standardization (no matter how goodthe architecture) of built environments. Because financial, legal andaccounting experts in Chicago had to address in good part the needs of theagro-industrial complex, the city today has a specialized advantage in pro-ducing certain types of financial, legal and accounting instruments. But forthis specialized advantage to materialize entails repositioning that pastknowledge in a different set of economic circuits. It entails, then, disembed-ding that expertise from an agro-industrial economy and re-embeddingit in a “knowledge” economy—that is to say, an economy where expertisecan increasingly be commodified, function as a key input, and therebyconstitute a new type of intermediate economy. Having a past as a majoragro-industrial complex makes that switch more difficult than a past as atrading and financial center. This then also explains partly Chicago’s “late-ness” in bringing that switch about. But that switch is not simply a matterof overcoming that past. It requires a new organizing logic that can revaluethe capabilities developed in an earlier era.3 It took making to execute theswitch.
1 For some initial elements seeGreene et al. 2006.
2 Lloyd 2005.
3 Sassen 2006a. Chapters 1 and 5.
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Recovering this specialized advantage linked to a city’s specific economichistory also brings to the fore a key argument by Peter Taylor about citiesthat derive their significance from their location in global networks ratherthan only their position in a hierarchy. To recover this particular specializedadvantage, one akin to a positional good, we need empirical research aboutthe intersections of regional locations and functional activities.4 It alsopoints to the fact that “the” global network comprises multiple, oftenspecialized networks. I have found this to be the case with financial markets:once we disaggregate the global capital market into its multiple specializedfinancial markets, it becomes clear that there are several specific networks ofcities in play. A city like Chicago dominates some of these financial circuitsbut is a fairly minor player in others. This opens up a whole research agendathat takes us beyond city rankings. The aim is to recover the more complexcity networks that are a strategic infrastructure for the global operations ofmarkets and firms, and on which a variety of other types of actors andnetworks can build, such as global civil society actors, alternative culturalcircuits, transnational migration networks, and so on, even as these alsobuild their own distinct city networks.5
Through its particular type of past, Chicago illuminates aspects of globalcity formation that are far less legible in cities such as New York andLondon, which did have very large manufacturing components but werenonetheless dominated by predominantly trading and banking economies.Chicago’s history points to the mistake of assuming that the characteristicsof global cities correspond to those of such old trading and banking centers.A second issue raised by the Chicago case is that while there are a number ofglobal cities today with heavy manufacturing origins, many once importantmanufacturing cities have not made the switch into a knowledge economybased on that older industrial past. Along with Chicago, São Paulo andShanghai are perhaps among today’s major global cities with particularlystrong histories in heavy manufacturing. But most once important manu-facturing cities, notably Detroit and the English manufacturing cities,have not undergone the type of switch we see in Chicago, São Paulo andShanghai. This points to the importance of thresholds in the scale and diver-sity of a city’s manufacturing past to secure the components of knowledgeproduction I identify in Chicago’s case—specialized servicing capabilitiesthat could be dislodged from the organizational logic of heavy manufactur-ing and relodged in the organizational logic of today’s so-called knowledgeeconomy.
The economic trajectory and switching illustrated by the case of Chicagocontests the thesis of homogenization on two levels. One concerns whatit takes to become part of leading sectors. It is not simply a question ofdropping that past and converging/homogenizing on the headquarters–services–cultural sector axis. Critical is executing the switch describedearlier—whatever might be the specifics of an area’s past. The other
4 Taylor 2004.
5 Sassen 2006b. Chapters 5 and 6.
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concerns the meaning of homogenized landscapes. It becomes critical toestablish the particular specialized sectors that might inhabit that homogen-ized landscape. This qualifies the convergence thesis. There is a kind ofconvergence at an abstract systemic level, but at the concrete, material inter-face of the urban, the actual content of the specialized services that inhabitthat built environment can vary sharply.
From here, then, my proposition is that critical components of thehomogenized/convergent urban landscape, frequently presented as today’squintessential urban visual order, are actually more akin to an infrastructurefor the advanced sectors. The critical question becomes what inhabits that“infrastructure.” Looking similar does not necessarily entail similar con-tents, circuits, moments of a process. This illustrates the thesis that differentdynamics can run through similar institutional and spatial forms, and viceversa. The substantive character of convergence in the global city model isnot the visual landscape per se but its function as an infrastructure, and it is,above all, the development and partial importation of a set of specializedfunctions and the direct and indirect effects this may have on the larger city,including the visual landscape that functions as a necessary infrastructure—state of the art office districts and commercial and housing areas, airports,and so on. This is yet another indicator of the growing distance betweenpeople and technical domains that is one of the features of some of the mostdeveloped economic sectors, even when these are the most demanding oftalent. One does not preclude the other.6
CONCLUSION: REASSEMBLING URBAN FRAGMENTS INTO
NEW FORMATS
Introducing the possibility that a given format—whether the Chicago modelor the L.A. model—might be one moment of a multi-sited process, bringsto the fore the question of the boundary. Rescaling can make legible respec-tively Chicago’s regional dimension and L.A.’s sub-regional micro-agglomerations. Thus although Chicago thinks itself a city, criticalcomponents of its economy inhabit a larger metropolitan geographic terrainand constitute what have been designated as L.A. type spatialities. Andwhile L.A. thinks itself a vast region, critical components of its economycorrespond to Chicago type spatialities marked by concentration. Finally,if our concern is to capture the translocal processes within which bothChicago and L.A. are partial geographic moments, closure whether at a cityor regional scale becomes problematic, in turn making the distinction cityversus region somewhat less meaningful.
Turning to the second issue addressed in this essay, the specificcontents of the global located in Chicago may diverge considerablyfrom those of L.A. The actual economic content of each downtown Chicago,Hollywood and downtown L.A. varies sharply and each is located onvery different sets of global circuits. Yet all three have a spatial form marked
6 Sassen 2006a. Chapter 7.
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by agglomeration. All three are also marked by dispersal of many oftheir operations. The interactions between their agglomeration andtheir dispersal moments can encompass one or all of three scalings—regional, national and global. Closed formats such as those represented inthe L.A. and Chicago models need more analytic elaboration in order toincorporate some aspects of these types of scalar interactions and spatialforms.
A refinement on such scalar and formal interactions concerns the builtenvironment of a region or city. One step here is to distinguish betweenthe formal aspects of today’s built environments for new economy sectorsand the actual economic activities they contain. Here I find the emphasis inthe literature and general commentary on homogenization of the builtenvironment of globalized places misleading. We need to specify with fargreater detail what they contain. Similar looking landscapes may containvery different types of operations and very different moments of a firm’smulti-sited processes.
This means that the specialized economic history of an area can be criticalto the development of its specialized advantage in the global economy (orstate of the art national economy). Overlooked in most of the literatureis the fact that the specialized differences among cities within nationaleconomies and across borders assume renewed value in today’s advancedeconomic sectors. Under these conditions, convergence and homogenizationof the built environment become an envelope, a standard applied topotentially very different economic contents.
I recode these homogenized built environments—the hyperspace ofglobal business—as an infrastructure for advanced global economic sectors.It signals they are state-of-the-art, with all the features that requires.They are indeterminate in that they can be used for a very broad range ofspecific economic functions. This indeterminacy makes them more akin toan infrastructure.
REFERENCES
Dear, M. J. 2002. Los Angeles and the Chicago School: Invitation to a Debate. City
and Community, 1(1), 5–32.Greene, R. P., Bouman, M. J., and Grammenos, D., editors, 2006. Chicago’s
Geographies: Metropolis for the 21st Century. Washington, D.C.: Association ofAmerican Geographers.
Lloyd, R. 2005. NeoBohemia: Art and Commerce in the Post-Industrial City. NewYork: Routledge.
Sassen, S. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. 2nd Edition. Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
—— . 2006a. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
—— . 2006b. Cities in a World Economy. 3rd Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage/Pine Forge.
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Scott, A. J. and Soja, E. W., editors, 1996. The City: Los Angeles and Urban
Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley, CA: University ofCalifornia Press.
Taylor, P. J. 2004. World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis. London:Routledge.
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TROPICAL LEWIS MUMFORDGLOBALISM ANDLOCAL IDENTITY
The first critical regionalist urban plannerLIANE LEFAIVRE AND ALEXANDER TZONIS (2001)
Lewis Mumford is not generally thought of as a tropicalist. Nor is he usuallyconsidered an urban planner. Yet the one time he departed from his role as ahistorian, theoretician and critic and put his ideas into practice by enteringinto urban planning practice was in the tropics, to be precise, Hawaii. Hehad been invited to Honolulu in 1938 by the City’s Park Board, under thedirectorship of Lester McCoy, to survey the need for recreational sites.1
He had attended an education conference at the University of Hawaii andwas invited by the Honolulu Park Board to conduct a survey on parksand playgrounds. The report is based on a four-week study of the parks andplaygrounds of Honolulu in June 1938 and on a second visit in August.Whither Honolulu is the report he prepared. Because of the war, the 67-pagetext’s publication was delayed until 1945. One may say that it stands notonly as the first master plan for a tropical city planned along the lines of agarden city; it is the first master plan for any city planned along the lines ofcritical regionalism.
Initially meant to address park planning only, the report rapidly grewinto a comprehensive planning memorandum also dealing with problems ofair pollution and congestion, slum clearance, land use and municipaladministration. Mumford defended an all-inclusive rather than piecemealapproach by arguing in manner, typical of a regionalist, that “no structurecan stand alone; no function exists by itself.” His overriding concern, how-ever, was sustainability—again typical of a regionalist. His aim was to ensurethat Hawaii “conserve(d) resources that are already in existence”2 because ithad “now reached a point where some of her natural advantages are not
Lewis Mumford, Pencil drawing ofDiamond Head.
1 Lewis Mumford, “Report onHonolulu” in City Development:Studies in Disintegration andRenewal (New York, Harcourt,Brace, 1945).
2 Lewis Mumford, WhitherHonolulu, p. 2.
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merely in danger of being neglected, they have already been spoilt” and that“more disastrous results may follow unless steps are taken at once toconserve Honolulu’s peculiar assets.”3
Although Mumford was a New Yorker, it was when writing aboutSouthernness that his regionalism was at his most passionate, inspired andpractical. After the memorandum on Hawaii, he wrote The South inArchitecture (1941), a patriotic address to Southern soldiers at a militaryacademy in Virginia about to leave for the front in Europe. Frank LloydWright, apparently an isolationist, wrote in his review of the book that itspurpose was to “throw the lives of American boys at Hitler.”4 The short butdense book extended for the first time his regionalist approach, until thenfocused on historical and theoretical issues, to a hands-on one. One of thecultural paradoxes of globalization is that outsiders sometimes express bet-ter than local people the character of a particular region. The South inArchitecture contains two such examples: that of Thomas Jefferson, aNortherner settled in the South, and Richardson, the Southerner who morethan any other shaped the particular character of architecture in the North-eastern U.S.
Both books were written during the first effort of the Roosevelt adminis-tration in the U.S. to counter the traditional indifference of the North to theSouth, when the regional plan by the Tennessee Valley Authority was set upto modernize the then impoverished southern states. At the same time, theRoosevelt administration was also sending experts to Puerto Rico. RichardNeutra was hired by the federal government to consult on the developmentof impoverished, slum infested Puerto Rico, eventually leading to the publi-cation of his book called The Architecture of Social Concern, with designsfor new public buildings such as schools and hospitals.5 Lester McCoy’s callto Mumford to help plan Honolulu is also part of this trend. The conditionsin Honolulu at the time were dire. Here is what Mumford wrote aboutthem: “The slums themselves are among the filthiest and the most degradedin the world: that they are not even viler, when the physical conditions oflife are considered, is a tribute to the personalities of their inhabitants. Theovercrowding of the land in the central areas imposes upon a park programa burden that park planning by itself cannot retrieve. Such an acutemaldistribution of population may be beyond the physical powers of a parkcommission effectually to correct.”
As we have written elsewhere, Mumford never pulled together in a com-prehensive way the various regionalist fragments to be found in his differentwritings.6 To situate the Honolulu study within Mumford’s life’s work,1938 was the same year he published his first major book, Technics andCivilization,7 his evolutionary study of modernization from the earlyRenaissance to the present, ending with a defense of what he termed a new“biotechnic” order, based on what we would today call sustainability andsocial justice, which he saw as the necessary replacement for the current
4 Frank Lloyd Wright, “MumfordLectures,” Saturday Review,undated, Mumford Archive,Annenberg Rare Book andManuscript Library, University ofPennsylvania.
5 Richard Neutra, The Architectureof Social Concern (São Paolo,Todtmann, 1948).
3 Lewis Mumford, The South inArchitecture (New York, Harcourt,Brace, 1941).
6 Liane Lefaivre and AlexanderTzonis, Critical Regionalism:Architecture in an Age ofGlobalization (Munich, Prestel,2004).
7 Lewis Mumford, Technics andCivilization (New York, Harcourt,Brace, 1938), p. 353.
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“neotechnic” one, based on an environmentally wasteful and sociallyoppressive industrial one. That purely theoretical book, as well as being amajor historical study, was the most systematic formulation of his personalcredo and the theoretical foundation of everything he wrote afterwards.8
When looked at as a whole, as we have also argued elsewhere, it is equallyclear that there is a thread running through Mumford’s writings and thatthis thread interweaves four strands, each one constituting a critical rethink-ing of traditional regionalism.9 Given this, one could say that WhitherHonolulu is his clearest statement about a new kind of urban planning, andthat The South in Architecture, written three years later, is his cleareststatement about what a new kind of architecture might be.
The first tenet of traditional regionalism that Mumford overturnedin both these writings is that regionalism necessarily entails a return toauthenticity. As far as architecture is concerned, although he did advocatethe preservation of actual historical buildings built in the “vernacular bricktradition” of the South because it “deserves to be regarded with a far moreappreciative eye that people usually apply to it,” he balked at the idea ofmimicking them in new buildings. “Let us be clear about this,” he wrote,“the forms that people used in other civilizations or in other periods of ourown country’s history were ultimately part of the whole structure of theirlife. There is no method of mechanically reproducing these forms or bring-ing these back to life. It is a piece of rank materialism to attempt to duplicatesome earlier form, because of its delight for the eye, without realizing howempty a form is without the life it once supported. There is no such thing asa modern colonial house any more than there is such a thing as a modernTudor House.”10 This attitude, equating the historicist with kitsch, is stillnovel and surprising today.
There are current books announcing the impossibility of recapturingregional authenticity in contemporary architectural design, indicating theissue is still alive today.11 Such an announcement would have been allthe more shocking in 1941. This hardly deterred Mumford. In fact, in hisstrongest worded statement, he declared that “if one seeks to reproducesuch a building in our own day, every mark on it will betray the fact that it isfake, and the harder the architect works to conceal that fact, the more patentthe fact will be . . . The great lesson of history—and this applies to all thearts—is that the past cannot be recaptured except in spirit. We cannot liveanother person’s life; we cannot except in the spirit of a masked ball . . .”12
Accordingly, he wrote: “Our task is not to imitate the past, but to under-stand it, so that we may face the opportunities of our own day and deal withthem in an equally creative spirit.”13
With Mumford’s rejection of architectural historicism as the equivalentof a masked ball was his reaction to local materials or local building craftswhen they were not adapted to the function of the building. “Regionalism,”he wrote, “is not a matter of using the most available local material or of
8 See Lefaivre and Tzonis, “LewisMumford’s Regionalism,” DesignBook Review, 19, Winter 1991.
9 Ibid., pp. 20, 25.
10 Mumford, The South inArchitecture, p. 14.
11 Shelly Errington, The Death ofAuthentic Primitive Art and OtherTales of Progress (Berkeley,University of California Press,1998).
12 Mumford, The South inArchitecture, p. 13.
13 Ibid., p. 18.
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copying some simple form of construction that our ancestors used, for wantof anything better a century or two ago.”14 In fact, he was for the totalabandonment of precedents of any kind if they were not adapted to theevolving needs of the region: “People often talk about regional characters asif they were the same thing as the aboriginal characters: the regional isidentified with the rough, the primitive, the purely local. That is a seriousmistake. Since the adaptation of a culture to a particular environment is along complicated process, a full blown regional character is the last toemerge. We are only beginning to know enough about ourselves and aboutour environment to create regional architecture.”15
In fact, Mumford disapproved of Jefferson’s use of the local stone, schist,for his capitals at the University of Virginia because its innate brittlenessdamaged the ornaments of the building. On the other hand, he praisedRichardson for adapting local architecture to new industrial building tech-niques and materials. In general he preferred the more modern, innovativeRichardson, in Mumford’s view a rigorist or functionalist like Greenough,to the more tradition-bound Jefferson as a model for regionalist architects.
As with architecture in The South in Architecture, so with urbanism inWhither Honolulu. Indeed, here too he balks at the idea of preservation forthe sake of preservation, arguing on the contrary that Honolulu had muchto learn from the social housing projects or Siedlungen of Frankfurt andsuggesting inner city slum clearance in these terms.16
The Return to Nature was a second keystone of traditional regionalismthat Mumford consistently tried to adapt to mid-twentieth century urban,industrial, economic, social and political realities. He rejected the equationof regionalism with the cult of the genius loci and picturesqueness, that is asthe purely aesthetic or spiritual enjoyment of landscape for its own sake.17
For him “regional” meant “something besides a place for the personaltouch, for the cherished accident,” although it must be stressed that he didlove the land in these terms too. This is only natural. His roots stretchedback to Rousseau’s love of the natural life as he mentioned several times.He wrote that “there was a romantic movement from its beginning inRousseau, an element of energy and vitality that could not be denied: thebelief in nature, as a resource of the human spirit.”
It was in a—so to say—tropical Rousseauiste spirit that he saw Honoluluas a “great park” made up of “tropical foliage with the pepper red of thePoinciana, the brilliant yellow of the golden shower, the feathery greens ofthe palms, the dark tones of the banyan trees”18 and proposed that thecity tap the local population of Chinese and Japanese inhabitants to createJapanese and Chinese gardens. It is in this spirit that he suggests opening thecity up to the view of the mountains by widening and planning the majorthoroughfare, Bishop Street, the provision of a parking area and the wipingaway of the collection of miscellaneous buildings marring the view. And it isequally in this spirit that he proposed nude bathing for Hawaiian beaches,
14 Ibid., p. 30.
15 Ibid., p. 13.
16 Ibid., p. 27.
17 Ibid., p. 32.
18 Ibid., p. 77.
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something he and his own family regularly practiced on Long Island, butwhich in the late thirties was perceived as the height of prurience and raisedderision in the local press. One article quoted Lester McCoy’s opponent,Superintendent of Public Works Louis S. Cain, as facetiously referring toMumford’s “two novel suggestions—beaches for bare bathers and spooningalleys.”19
But for Mumford, the attachment to nature was not just a matter ofpastoral nostalgia, bucolic sentimentality or hedonistic hippiedom. He had adeep commitment to redefining the meaning of the landscape in order todeal with new realities. “Regional forms,” he wrote, are those which “mostclosely meet the actual conditions of life and which fully succeed in making apeople feel at home in their environment: they do not merely utilize the soilbut reflect the current conditions of the culture of a region.”20 In this, he wasa disciple not only of Rousseau but of the regional planning philosophy ofPatrick Geddes who had abandoned the Garden City Movement as a way ofdesigning leafy residential suburban areas, preferring a more robust searchfor policy-guiding economic and social planning based on decentralizedneighborhoods. As an indication of Geddes’s influence, Mumford’s “Reporton Honolulu” appeared along with other essays by Mumford in a bookentitled City Development, a direct reference to Geddes who had publisheda book under the same title a quarter century earlier in 1904, City Develop-ment, a Study of Parks, Gardens and Public Institutes.21
Among the aims of biotechnic regionalism expounded in Technics andCivilization had been the restoration of the balance between man andnature, the conservation and restoration of soils, and of the forest cover toprovide shelter for wildlife.22 For Honolulu, this meant an extension of boththe garden city idea and regional planning idea: Mumford suggested theprovision of the old Garden City “greenbelt,” or park girdle. Honolulu waspartly surrounded by mountains. As “the spurs of the mountains that leadinto the city form natural open areas that can only be developed for urbanbuilding at an extravagant cost,” he proposed that “where these areas havenot been sacrificed to the subdivider, they should be retained and connectedtogether as a greenbelt.” The greenbelt could be “as little as a hundred feetwide, which could give as much coherence to a modern neighborhood as theancient wall used to for medieval cities.”23
Greenbelts had been first proposed as a means of limiting the size ofgarden cities. This is the purpose Mumford put them to on the scale of thecity of Honolulu in order to act as a brake on sprawl. “Planning forindefinite expansion is now wasteful and obsolete. The city of the futurewill have a better sense of its natural limits. It will attempt to make themost of what it has, rather than to evade its actual difficulties and its actualdeterioration by encouraging its population to move out to the outskirts andpermit the interiors to become more completely blighted.24
This brings us to what distinguishes Mumford from Geddes. What
Lewis Mumford, Pencil drawing ofpalm fronds.
19 “Mumford Book on City ParksRapped by Cain,” Honolulu StarBulletin, December29, 1938.
20 Mumford, The South inArchitecture, p. 30.
21 Mumford, City Development.
22 Mumford, Technics andCivilization, pp. 431–3.
23 Mumford, City Development,p. 98.
24 Ibid., p. 103.
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Mumford had in mind as a greenbelt Geddes could not have imagined.Geddes had not been concerned with the issue of sprawl and automobiletraffic because they had simply not been a problem in his day. InMumford’s, however, sprawl and its potential for ecological and socialdisaster was just beginning to dawn. His conception of what a greenbeltshould be took that new reality of vehicular traffic into consideration. Hesaw greenbelts as what he called the locus for what he termed “arterialparkways,” parks with highways running through them. In order both tolimit car traffic in the inner city and establish a strong link to both the seaand the mountains, therefore, Mumford called not only for the provision ofbroad boulevards in the city center leading to the water and two east–westparkways, one Mauka and one Makai, but also for two “arterial park-ways” in the greenbelt, linking the opposite sides of the city, called Ewa andDiamond Head.
If Geddes could not have imagined sprawl this was not the case forMumford. “Reckless expansion,” which he called one of the “greatweaknesses in Honolulu’s development,” was something he put down to theabandonment by local government of the city center. This abandonment hadcaused “the spotty and erratic nature of their growth.” In turn this meantthat “large tracts of land near the middle of the city have long been held outof use” preventing “the orderly and systematic development of the city,section by section,” necessitating “a premature building up and exploitationof the land in the remoter suburban areas.”
Mumford put his finger on the economic consequences of sprawl. In hischapter called “Can Cities Hold their Population?” he railed against “thetendency on the part of many people to escape from the more congested andsordid internal sections of the city to outlying urban developments whereat least a little sunlight, fresh air, and free play can be secured for theirchildren.” If these trends continue, he goes on, “the cities that now exist will
A sketch on top of a map of Honoluluby Lewis Mumford indicating thegreenbelt he wished to placebetween Honolulu and the mountainrange above it.
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be emptied out in their central areas, leaving a mass of rotting or dilapidatedstructures and a vast burden in capital investments whose returns areannually becoming smaller and shakier to the point of eventual tax delin-quency and forfeiture.”
As with “cities throughout America” that had “been decaying in theirold centers, and over-extending themselves in ragged fragments, oftentax-delinquent or otherwise approaching private and public industry at theedges,” so with Honolulu. Here “in many cases, the areas zoned for businessand industry are five to fifteen times the amount that any city wouldnormally have used.” This, in Mumford’s assessment, has been accom-panied by the “extremely costly development of the hillside sites of the city,long before, in the ordinary course of things, they should have been madeavailable.” In tracts of St. Louis Heights, for example, land has been openedup to middle-class home owners “who could ill afford the excessive sitepreparation and utility costs that such a development calls for: and the cityhas been forced to expand its municipal services at a disproportionate cost.”Sprawl was costly in other ways. It was costly in terms of the local watersupply that “by itself limits this expansion”; to overcome it by drawing upondistant supplies would create water shortage.
Having argued to contain sprawl outside the city limits through a green-belt and rationalize the flow of traffic through parkways in the center of thegreenbelts, he then went onto the other side of the coin: how to managethe resulting inner city density. “The question, I submit, can be successfullyanswered only if it is recognized that the older cities must be made intosound biological environments.” For Honolulu, this translated into hiscriticism of the restriction of the present parks to mere “recreation zones”25
He called “for the systematic improvement of housing, the prevention ofovercrowding, the establishment of healthy standards of density, thecreation of necessary open spaces” as well as for the provision “of gardens,parks and recreation grounds on a scale that will give to the city all theadvantages that the suburb usually has at the beginning of its existence—before the suburb itself becomes a prey to speculative disorder andcongestion.”26
Among his urban planning ideas, he borrowed the idea of ribbon parksfrom Radburn and “Frankfurt housing projects before 1932” (that isbefore the rise of Nazism) for the inner-city area of Honolulu instead of the“isolated open area in the midst of a pattern of built up blocks”27 becauseit was the natural site for elementary schools and made it possible for a childto walk to school.
Another way he proposed that parks be more integrated in urban lifewas as a potential cooling mechanism capable of “renewing the air, tem-pering the heat of the sun, reducing glare and strain, providing visual delightfor play and relaxation and supplying one of the most sanative of allmodes of work—the care of plants themselves.”28 He noted that the trade
25 Ibid., p. 95.
26 Ibid., p. 111.
27 Ibid., p. 128.
28 Ibid., pp. 89–90.
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winds that swept over the city from the northeast formed “an admirableair-cooling apparatus that a community could boast.” The purpose wasto “command the fullest possible exposure to sunlight, in a climate likeHonolulu’s, with its open-air life, the main degree of ventilation.” This, hespecified, “does not merely mean open houses: it means an open andoriented type of planning, of which Honolulu as yet can show but few goodexamples.”29
Like a true regional planner, he not only placed urban planning underregional planning but also called for the setting up of a centralized planningcommission in order to set limits and control laissez faire development.He argued that “to take care of the possible increase of population involvesnot city planning but regional planning for the islands at large. No city, nomatter how drastic the pressure of population, can afford to grow in thehaphazard and wasteful fashion that prevailed in the past.”
And like a true Rooseveltian, he favored a measure of government inter-vention in arguing that a regional planning authority should be set up.Against what he called the “congestion-for-profit” or the “spear to every-where” school of thought he advocated “collective democratic methods”in order to “end blight in the city and waste of resources in the suburbs.”In order to promote his remedy—satellite towns and the dispersal ofindustry—he called for “a strong executive agency that would reinforce itslegislative mandate without bending to local prejudices.”30 “Ultimately,”he argued, “every well administered municipality, in order to save itselffrom bankruptcy and hopeless arrears, must offset the tendency towardreckless suburban growth by taking substantial measures towards its ownrenovation. Not merely must the municipality discourage such uneconomicgrowth by resisting premature subdivision, by withholding assent fromill-advised express highways, bridges, or tunnels that open up cheap landoutside the municipality’s area of control: what is much more importantis that it will seek to make the city itself permanently attractive as a humanhome by slum clearance, large-scale housing, neighborhood planning andpark development.”31
On the other hand, for all his ecological concerns, he was also for the useof the most advanced technology of the day in the service of economicmodernization. This is the third element of his regionalism that was patentlyat odds with traditional regionalists.
The relation between open planning, air circulation, and efficiency isworth extra emphasis here. In a well organized factory, like that of theHawaiian Pineapple company, the principal working units are designed soas to permit the free circulation of the air. Numerous physiologicalinvestigations, beginning with Winslow’s classic experiments, have shownthat the lowering of the temperature is not so important as the direct aircooling of the body. Mechanical air conditioning may be a useful auxiliary
29 Ibid., p. 88.
30 Carl Abbott, “Oregon camearound to Mumford’s ideas but 40years late,” The Oregonian Forum,February 1, 1979.
31 Mumford, City Development,p. 111.
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to nature under special conditions; but for the mass of the population, andfor most circumstances of living, the more natural modes of airconditioning that would be available to everyone in the city throughadequate planning must retain major importance.32
As is evident, he was for the air conditioner. Although scientific researchhas shown that the lowering of temperature was not so important asdirect air in cooling the body, still Mumford allowed that “mechanical airconditioning might be a useful auxiliary to nature under special conditions.”33
Such conditions included the work place, preceding Singapore’s foundingpremier, Li Kuan Yew, who declared the air conditioner the best invention ofthe twentieth century. But in most circumstances of living, natural modes ofair conditioning through ventilation was the best.34 Thirty years beforeReyner Banham’s Theory and Design of the First Machine Age (1960), inMumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934) we have a celebration of tech-nical inventions such as the modern steamship. He had great admiration forBuckminster Fuller’s streamlined Dymaxion car, the Union Pacific train, theSoviet “rail zeppelin sphero-train,” Brooklyn Bridge and the Galerie desMachines in Paris. Finally, he admired Neutra’s image of the modern cityput forth in his largely forgotten Rush City Reformed scheme published inhis early Wie Baut Amerika,35 where the emphasis was placed on movement,with ubiquitous freeways, local and express elevated train systems, railroadsand airports all interlinked.36 An interesting feature was landing strips forhelicopters at the railroad station and on the roofs of elevated stations.Mumford wrote in 1949 that Neutra’s “kind of thinking should now beresumed and perhaps public competitions should be held to enlist theimagination of the younger generation of architects and planners. . . .37
Surely the most radical departure associated with Mumford’s regionalismwas his definition of “community.” First, as an heir to Whitman and theTranscendentalists, he could not abide the traditional regionalists’ equationof community as monocultural, based on tribal or national affiliations,blood ties and attachment to the soil. Mumford espoused the view thatcommunity could be something multicultural.38 Second, he was a followerof the philosopher Martin Buber, the first philosopher in Germany to pro-pose an alternative to the Blood and Soil theory of community that haddominated German thought since the theme of Gemeinshaft versusGesellshaft had been introduced by Simmel. Mumford’s The South in Archi-tecture makes the point forcefully. Here his definition of regionalism is con-sciously opposed to Heidegger’s. His “Report on Honolulu” is where heapplied this view hands-on. He described a city as a multicultural city, madeup of original Polynesians, Japanese, Chinese and various Haole groups(western) who made it a “significant experiment in the hybridization ofcultures which perhaps will mark the future development of human society;it is a miniature experimental station.”39
32 Mumford, City Development,p. 94.
33 Ibid., p. 95.
34 See Philip Bay, “Three TropicalDesign Paradigms,” in Tzonis,Lefaivre and Bruno Stagno (eds.)Tropical Architecture: CriticalRegionalization in the Age ofGlobalization, London, Wiley,2001), p. 259.
35 Richard Neutra, Wie BautAmerika (Stuttgart, Hoffmann,1927).
36 Ibid., p. 30.
37 Lewis Mumford, The NewYorker, January 8, 1949, p. 60.
38 See F.O Matthiessen, AmericanRenaissance (London, OxfordUniversity Press, 1941) and DavidReynolds, Beneath the AmericanRenaissance. The SubversiveImagination in the Age of Emersonand Melville (Cambridge, HarvardUniversity Press, 1988).
39 Mumford “Report onHonolulu,” p. 50.
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Finally, Mumford saw no opposition between what he called the localand the universal, between what we would call “regional” versus “global”today. He saw regionalism not as a way of resisting globalization, or rather,not completely. Mumford struck a balance between regionalism andglobalism. Again, it is in The South in Architecture that he introducedthe notion in these terms: “The philosophical problem of the general and theparticular has its counterpart in architecture; and during the last centurythat problem has shaped itself more and more into the question of whatweight should be given to the universal imprint of the machine and the localimprint of the region and the community.”40
This was another way of saying that every regional culture necessarily hasa universal side to it.
It is steadily open to influences that come from other parts of the world,and from different cultures, separated from the local region in space ortime or both together. It would be useful if we formed the habit of neverusing the word regional without mentally adding to it the idea ofuniversal—remembering the constant contact and interchange between alocal scene and the wide world that lies beyond it. To make the best use oflocal resources, we must often seek help from people or ideas or technicalmethods that originate elsewhere . . . As with a human being, every culturemust both be itself and transcend itself: it must make the most of itslimitations and must pass beyond them; it must be open to fresh experienceand yet it must maintain its integrity. In no other art is that process moresharply focused than in architecture.41
The originality of this last proposition cannot be overestimated. For thefirst time a regionalist steered a middle course between the particular andthe universal, taking the view that there was nothing mutually exclusivebetween one region and another, or between one region and the globe, thatthere was the possibility of mutually beneficial negotiating to be carried outwithin a wider, in principle collaborative so to speak, scheme of things. Thismarked a major swing away from the centuries-old pattern of regionalistthinking based on either an adversarial stance or on resistance to one basedon dialogue and negotiation, what one might call “in betweening,” to useBuber’s term.
Was Mumford’s urban plan for Honolulu a good one? In terms of itsbroad integration of elements of planning, including not only landscapebut air pollution and congestion, slum clearance, land use and municipaladministration, the answer, we believe, is yes.
One may ask if parkways were a good solution to sprawl, or rather goodenough. The fact is all transportation in Mumford’s plan was car-dependentand he made no provision for a public transit system. Even in 1938, at atime when the car was not nearly as dominant as it is today, the blindness
40 Mumford, The South inArchitecture, p. 50.
41 Ibid., p. 5.
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to this issue is serious and the failure to address the issue is a definiteshortcoming.
Besides this shortcoming, how did the plan fare? The unfortunate fact is:not well. In fact it has been completely ignored. Mumford’s main Democratsupporter, Lester McCoy, died in 1941. This left him defenseless in the faceof the attacks by the Republican Louis S. Cain, the territorial superintendentof public works who was soon to become the mayor of Honolulu, whocalled Mumford’s plans “mumblings” that “fumbled the facts.”42
The result, as appraised by urban designer A. A. Smyser, writing in a localnewspaper in 1965, was a disaster. “Cruise along the ugly, tree-less arterialto town from Honolulu International Airport. Or curse your luck at4:30 pm traffic jam almost everywhere, or look at crowded, overhead wirestrewn ugly streets all over town,” he wrote. “Mumford’s parkway runningfrom the shore from Honolulu harbor out to Koko Head, with its widetraffic lanes and trees shaded and beautified by it would have changedthis.”43 He went on to decry the lack of Mumford’s Makai and Maukaparkways to solve traffic congestion and complained about the plans, muchopposed by Mumford, for the “highly dubious Pali Tunnel which wouldfurther disorganize the growth of the city.”44
By 1980, things were no better. According to planner Gerald Hodge45
many of Mumford’s proposals “would have made the problems moremanageable.” In order to establish a strong link to both the sea and themountains, Mumford proposed broad boulevards leading to the water andtwo east–west parkways. Instead Honolulu opted for the H-1 expressway—a ruthless gash across the landscape—and Nimitz and Kalanianiolehighways which scarcely take advantage of their closeness to the water.Mumford felt that the two parkways would clearly link the Ewa and Dia-mond Head sites of the city. Today travel to or from the Ewa side is stillthwarted by a maze of inconclusive streets such as Vineyard, School,Dillingham.
Seventy years have passed since Mumford put forth a working model fora critical regionalist urban planning model. Though ignored for so long—with its shortcomings as well as its remarkable inclusiveness, involvingissues of memory, sustainability, economic modernization, technology,social justice and community—it just gets more relevant all the time.
A version of this essay was published in the Proceedings of the International Confer-ence of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2002. This text is amuch expanded version of a section of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, CriticalRegionalism: Architecture in an Age of Globalization, Munich: Prestel, 2004 andTropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization with BrunoStagno, London: Wiley 2001. The authors wish to thank the Annenberg Rare Bookand Manuscript Library of the University of Pennsylvania for permission to repro-duce all the material related to Mumford’s Honolulu plan here.
42 “Mumford Book on City ParksRapped by Cain,” Honolulu StarBulletin, December 29, 1938.
43 A.A. Smyser, “MumfordRevisited,” Honolulu Star Bulletin,May 15, 1965. p. A-9.
44 David Smollar, “Old advicevalid, but . . .” The Sunday Star-Bulletin & Advertiser, Honolulu,May 11, 1975.
45 Gerald Hodge, “LewisMumford’s Unfinished Vision ofHonolulu,” in Honolulu, December1980, pp. 90–93.
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THE LUXURY OF LANGUORGLOBALISMAND LOCALIDENTITY
MICHAEL A. McCLURE ANDURSULA EMERY McCLURE (2003)
The present economy, culture, and built environment of the United Statesrely on efficiency and speed. The primary gauge of the commodity of timeis its acceleration. The spaces we construct reflect that pace; strip malls,drive-thru windows, parking lots, and freeways. Speed spaces such as thesehave become the public spaces of America. As the pace of the Americanlifestyle increases, so does the need for temporary escapes into the opposite.People save money and accrue vacation time for the momentary opportunityto travel and experience a languid cultural landscape. In the tourism indus-try of Southern Louisiana, like other areas of cultural and infrastructuraluniqueness, the built environment is essential to this escape. “It’s buildingsthat give cities their identity, especially in New Orleans.”1 The area findsitself in a contemporary contradiction of preserving and promoting its“languid spaces” of tourism within an atmosphere of convenient andimmediate speed. One of the greatest commodities of the lower Mississippiriver valley, from Natchez to New Orleans, is its built environment and theperceived cultural meaning that this environment holds for those who liveoutside of it.
Retaining and providing access to an idea of “languid space” is one ofSouth Louisiana’s major economic products, ranked the sixth largesttourist economy in the United States. (It employs over 87,000 workers andgenerates 5.2 billion dollars per annum). Retained and re-used architectureof the area creates “languid space” and it is evident at many scales. The mostapparent scale is that of New Orleans and its buildings. It is a city knownprimarily as a tourist destination of languid escapism, even though it con-tains the United States’ third largest port. It is the access point to four of theeleven largest U.S. ports (in foreign commerce tonnage) and they handlemore than 457 million tons of U.S. waterborne commerce a year, includingnearly half of all American grain exports. In its scale, style, and planning,one witnesses a direct contrast to the normative commodity of convenienceand capitalism found throughout most of the United States. Immediatelyadjacent to New Orleans’ urban scale slowness, one finds “languid space” ata smaller scale along the Scenic Byways. The Mississippi river, the smalltowns, and the singular spaces of plantations frame these routes and con-tribute to the region’s spatial slowness. North to Natchez, these remainingrestored places stand as symbols of a slower time and of languid humaninteraction without the distractions of modern speed.
For this paper, we define Southern Louisiana’s “languid spaces” by theirdifferences from what is seen as the American norm. If the efficiencies
Port of New Orleans. (Image byGrant L. Robertson.)
1 Ingrid Whitehead, “Patricia Gay:Working Hard for Preservation inthe Big Easy,” Architectural Record,August 2002, 256.
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in communication, convenience, and accelerated obsolescence definenormative American space, then the opposite, the inefficiencies, defineunique “languid space.” Inefficiencies in communication are mostlyspatial and historic: porches, porticos, and plazas. These tangible placesencourage inefficient human interaction (chatting, lounging, and strolling).Inefficiencies in spatial convenience decrease acceleration: pedestriandistricts, meandering byways, and tree-lined, residential thoroughfares.They encourage and sometimes force one to stop and observe. Delayedobsolescence has value in a “languid space.” We measure the value of thesespaces by the difference from what is progressive. Thus, the older, lessconformable and least similar spaces increase in value and define a “languidspace.” Through advertising, historic example, movies, books, and tele-vision commercials, the idea of “languid space” also increases in value andhas become as important as the space itself. People are drawn to the areathrough promises like this byline of something other: “The small roads thattraverse the countryside from Natchez to New Orleans offer access to smalltown America . . . charming towns and villages which still celebrate a styleof life that has become increasingly elusive for many of us.”2
Southern Louisiana very efficiently and progressively caters to, exagger-ates, and protects both the idea and the reality of its greatest commodity:“languid space” as an alternative to the normative. With little economicmotive to modernize from the end of the civil war to the mid-twentiethcentury, there was no need to demolish the built fabric. For example, as ofMarch 2000, 30 percent of Louisiana’s residential structures pre-date 1950.This built spatial slowness coexists in the midst of a highly evolvedport/factory economy and tourism remains the primary perceived commod-ity of the area. This leads to the contemporary contradiction SouthernLouisiana relies on: maintaining its obsolescence in order to remain viable asthe alternative. Tourists flock to experience a “languid space.” They do so,however, within such short periods of time and with such vigor, they usuallyonly experience an idea of space, a flattened visual reference (the postcardexperience). The main goal seems to be a proof-of-attendance or thepostcard, t-shirt, and coffee mug that serve as a memory of attendance atthis unique space. Rarely will they experience the inefficiencies and slowvalue of the space that drew them there initially.
Because the value of the “languid space” is both perceived and actual,Kevin Lynch’s notions of how we come to understand our position withinspace become important. “Imageability,” or the quality of a physicalenvironment that gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in themind, is essential to understanding the value a built environment has onthe escapist “languid space.” Because of this significance in understandingand nomenclature, we will now briefly examine three examples of Lynch’selements of imageability in relation to the “languid spaces” of tourism ofSouthern Louisiana: paths, and urban and rural districts/landmarks. For the
2 James Fox-Smith, “CountryRoads Area Map,” Country RoadsMagazine (every issue).
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purpose of this study, we will discuss them in terms of their physical space,use, and cultural meaning. Each space exists as a complex overlay/compres-sion between the artifacts of a “languid space” and the contemporaryefficient condition of speed space.
PATHS: URBAN AND RURAL
Two of the most identifiable paths of the area are the urban St. CharlesAvenue in New Orleans, and the rural River Road. The “languid space” ofSt. Charles Avenue is composed of the inefficient and obsolescent overlay ofuses and scales. It is a thoroughfare for cars; it is a corridor for the outdated,slow, unreliable public transportation of the electric trolleys; it is a walking,running, bicycle path. Connecting uptown to downtown, it is both a linearpublic park and an important thoroughfare for the city. The use of St.Charles is all of these, and not much has changed from its intended use. Thecultural meaning has also remained consistent, but a critical balance haschanged. Now, the visitors, who have always come to St. Charles to view theelaborate homes of the social elite under a canopy of live oaks, view it as anartifact in a museum. The experience is singular and linear. The real urbanvalue is not a concern. The visitor measures the avenue’s value as a forty-fiveminute surface tour for one dollar, not a well-established thriving urbanthoroughfare.
There was a grand feel of luxury about the streetcar. Not only was itconstructed of much better material, mahogany seats, stout leather straps,solid hunks of steel, than any form of public transportation put togetherin the past 50 years, and not only did you pass block after block ofmansions oozing romance and old prosperity, but also the ride was slowas summer.3
Another identifiable path, the River Road, is a rural “languid space” thathas changed more dramatically from its initial condition. What was origin-ally an efficient, modern connector of economic centers to the river, ports,and cities, Interstate 10 and several high clearance bridges over the river
St. Charles Avenue. (Image byemerymcclure architecture.)
3 Tony Dunbar, City of Beads (NewYork: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), 7.
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have replaced. The River Road’s value as a “languid space” comes nowfrom its obsolescence. One must drive slowly through the tight curves,caught in the fixed space between the Mississippi River Levy on one side andchemical plants and sugar cane fields on the other. Only at occasionalmoments does one come across a small town or remaining plantation home.The River Road may still physically link the modern chemical plants andserve as access for the vital upkeep of the levy; its meaning as a “languidspace” now occurs in segments because of the alternate routes that havereplaced it. Its main use is the idea or image, not as a vital contemporaryspace. One can now very efficiently exit the freeway, drive a short distancealong the river at an inefficient pace, tour a plantation, drive through a smalltown, eat a good meal, and then efficiently return to I-10.
DISTRICTS/LANDMARKS: URBAN
Along each of these paths exist districts and landmarks that identify whathave now become, through historical use and the international advertisingof a highly developed tourism industry, the ubiquitous “languid spaces” ofescape. The French Quarter in New Orleans, specifically Bourbon Street andJackson Square, is simultaneously an actual example of “languid space” andan intense commodification of the idea or image. The commodity is relianton an actual built space, but the commodity has become primary. The out-side perception of these spaces holds their value. Bourbon Street hasremained constant in its space, use, and cultural meaning. It is still a densespace of multiple levels of social interaction. Its use is still a place for cele-bration and release dependent on support spaces. Historically those supportspaces were the port, city homes of country farmers, and transient housingof the city. Now those support spaces are exponentially larger, more effi-cient, and convenient. The New Orleans Convention Center brings in 1.5million people annually. The volume and intensity of Bourbon Street hasalso grown exponentially so that the idea of the “Bourbon Street Experi-ence” is paramount to those who occupy the space. The idea of a night on
Cane Field/Factory on the RiverRoad. (Image by emerymcclurearchitecture.)
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Bourbon Street has surpassed the actual experience. Both the idea and theexperience, however, rely on the physical space that has been preserved andre-adapted for the new reality. The proof-of-attendance shops (T-shirts,coffee mugs, etc.) have become a primary program, now rivaling the barsand strip joints of the streets in leased square footage.
On the other hand, the tourism industry and contemporary speed spacehave changed the use and cultural meaning of Jackson Square. Any plaza isa rare space in the United States in both its physical form and contemporaryvitality and use. Based on the Law of the Indies with church, government,and commercial buildings occupying the sides of a central open square,Jackson Square once acted as the town center. During the week, it served asa civic meeting place, the spatial town bulletin. On the weekends, it actedas a market and social promenade. Now that these spaces are no longerrequired to inform and celebrate information exchange on a daily basis, theplaza’s use and cultural meaning have been transformed. The contemporaryreality of use and meaning is still exchange, but the exchange has changed.Experiential value is no longer essential or valuable for society, politics, andcommerce. Instead, like Bourbon Street, the postcard view is primaryand the exchange is a proof of attendance. One now goes to the plaza toview a street performer, take a photograph, and then move on. Like all ofthe “languid spaces” of Southern Louisiana, the idea has become primary,the experience secondary. Very few locals, if any, does one find in JacksonSquare. The primary change in the physical space of the plaza is a tellingaddition to the classic plaza formed by the Law of the Indies. What was oncean open side on the square to the river is now a tourist information exchangeand snapshot platform. Access to “river walk,” trolley tours, and boats to
Above: T-Shirt Shack on Bourbon.(Image by emerymcclurearchitecture.)
Above right: Jackson Square. (Imageby emerymcclure architecture.)
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the aquarium and zoo now dominate the riverside of the plaza. JacksonSquare is a prime example of the value of a “languid space” in today’ssociety. It still exemplifies the spatial inefficiencies of a plaza and demon-strates the tangible contradictions required for a “languid space” oftourism.
DISTRICTS/LANDMARKS: RURAL
The same contradictions in the conditions of adaptive re-use and adaptivere-meaning can be seen in the rural “languid spaces” of tourism. Plantationsites along the river road may have experienced the greatest change in theiruse, meaning, and space. “Their self-sufficiency seems strange today, whendistance is so easily bridged; but in those days the houses were remoteindeed. Some of them stood a day’s long journey from the nearest town.”4
Originally centers of economic and cultural exchange, they acted as therural versions of Jackson Square. Now House Museums, the remaininggrand homes and few support buildings provide an extremely limitedvantage into the spatial and cultural space of a working rural factoryand social center. Their value still relies on their spatial characteristics.The plantations’ remote and infrequent locations along the Mississippicontinue to accurately provide an experience of a slower, non-connected,self-reliant space as a comparative escape from the norm. The hierarchiesof spaces, formal to informal and public to private, also provide anexample not seen in today’s non-hierarchical architecture of instant totalaccess and convenience. They are artifacts of the formal public façadewhose vestiges remain in the public access faces of strip malls andbox stores. These porches, however, are spatial, not merely a flat signlocated on the street façade, much like plazas are spatial artifacts whosevestiges can still be seen in food courts and parking lots. The porchesprovide the public threshold to the ground floor, which consists of thesocial gathering spaces: ballrooms, parlors, and grand dining rooms. Theseover-scaled interior rooms coupled with the deep, occupied façades areunique. They give the spaces value in the escapist, tourism economy.To continue the illusion we are expected to ignore the contemporaryextended landscape, for history has removed the vast, exterior supportspaces of fields, docks, barns, and slaves’ and workers’ quarters. Chemicalfactories, large corporate fields, and suburban developments now occupythe once essential, extended landscape spaces of plantations. Like theentire remaining valuable “languid spaces” of Louisiana, the plantationhouses survived originally through inattention and lack of better economicalternatives. Now they exist as an asset because of their low availability tothe rest of the country.
The small towns along the River Road exemplify some of the last“languid spaces” that the tourist industry has not transformed. They con-tinue to operate in much the same inefficient and isolated manner that they
4 Lyle Saxon, Old Louisiana(Gretna, LA: Pelican PublishingCompany, 1998), 147.
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originated. The towns along the river between New Orleans and Natchezwere originally local centers for the plantation culture outside of the threelarger cities. The free plantation workforce lived in these towns and a com-mercial center formed to serve the immediate area. Now, the workers areemployed mostly at the chemical factories (the contemporary plantationcrop), but the towns serve the same function. The towns abut the river levywith low-density residential blocks adjacent to denser commercial streetswith shaded sidewalks and they still mostly serve the local population.They have not been incorporated yet into the tourist economy through theoverlay of efficiency and convenience. The exceptions are few. One is therecent opening of high-end Cajun/Creole restaurants with bed andbreakfasts. Most notable is Lafitte’s Landing, operated by one of SouthernLouisiana’s most famous gourmet chefs, John Folse. This restaurant’s pricesand cuisine are well above the scale that the small community populationshould support. Again, “access to small town America”5 in conjunctionwith the lure of “authentic” or high-end cuisine lures visitors to the placewith the promise of the opposite of what they experience in their dailyenvironment.
To further substantiate that Southern Louisiana’s built environment isnot just a time capsule of artifacts from a slower time, but a complex overlapand collision of the speedy and slow, one must only look to the new hybridbuilding of the area, Harrah’s Casino in downtown New Orleans. Thisarchetype of spatial escapism, replication, and efficiently captured audienceis familiar and can be seen at its purest in Las Vegas. A compression oflanguid and speed space can be seen in Las Vegas and any other tourist areathat originated for those who journey for pleasure. The difference in areassuch as Southern Louisiana is the existence and re-established meaning ofthe original artifacts. True, Harrah’s Casino is a modern American casino.Its program and spaces perform in the same complex manner as the newestand most contemporary Las Vegas casino. Harrah’s in New Orleans is
Bocage Plantation. (Image byemerymcclure architecture.)
5 James Fox-Smith, “CountryRoads Area Map.”
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unique because of its adjacency to the original artifact. One can find spatialreplicas of the canyons of New York and the canals of Venice in Las Vegas.However, the Las Vegas replications are far removed from the originals. Onecould visit the Vegas Venice and never have seen the original. This is notpossible in New Orleans. One experiences Harrah’s flattened imitation ofthe French Quarter within the view of the spatial original. Couple this withthe contemporary condition of the French Quarter, itself a contemporaryflattened experience of its original space, and the contradictions/overlays/ironies of the new “languid space” are enormous.
The New York historian, Kenneth Jackson, at a lecture given at theCollege of Art and Design at Louisiana State University, concluded hislecture regarding New Orleans by drawing comparisons between modernday New Orleans and turn of the century Venice, Italy. He asked the ques-tion whether or not New Orleans had given up its role as a vital progressiveurban environment, or if, like Venice, it had become an artifact frozen intime, valued only as a past thing. Many similarities exist between the twocities regarding the value of architecture, urbanism, and space within itseconomic viability as something other. However, New Orleans and SouthernLouisiana differ from other historic tourism centers like Venice, Italy. Thatdifference exists in the vast compression and complexities of space,economy, time, culture, and tourism. The overlays of inefficiencies andefficiencies and of inconvenience and convenience seem to demand a uniquehybrid building like Harrah’s Casino. It is a tourism space that replicates are-used and re-interpreted original only blocks away. It is a contemporaryarchitecture that relies on imitation. This same notion of compressionallows the chemical plants to hold the same economic positions withintheir rural landscapes that their neighboring Plantation Homes once did,seemingly without conflict. The homes exist now as museums of what wasonce an efficient culture, but now is outdated. Southern Louisiana haskept its architectural detritus. It is not in a zone or area separated frommodernity. This detritus is its own unique progressiveness, reliant on ideasof regression. The two co-exist simultaneously. It is not a simplified andsanitized version of entertainment (Disneyland) or a regressive capsule ofthe past (Williamsburg, Virginia), or a vibrant contemporary cultural andeconomic center (New York, Chicago). It is partly all of these, and not reallyany of them.
Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such away that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through eachother. To know oneself is to know one’s region. It is also to know theworld, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world.6
This investigation into notions regarding the complexities of space,economy, time, culture, and tourism, stems from a desire to teach and
6 Flannery O’Connor, Mystery andManners (New York: The NoondayPress, 1997), 34.
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practice relevant architecture in Southern Louisiana. Southern Louisianapresents a unique microcosm of the conditions found in the contemporaryglobal environment. Its “languid space” is a speed space that capitalizes onthe idea and the experience of the regressive. Its built environment consistssimultaneously of adaptive re-use, preservation, contemporary industry,and replication. It is landlocked by the Mississippi river, the Gulf, theAtchafalaya Basin, Lake Pontchartrain, and the numerous swamps, rivers,and bayous. The compression and overlay of these infinite influencesand their lack of clear hierarchy epitomizes the contemporary “culture ofcongestion.” 7 If we are to contribute to the built environment and culturalidentity of Southern Louisiana (or anywhere), it is necessary we understandthe constant influences of everything and nothing at all. To understand one-self and environment is dependent on these influences vying for relevance.The process is fluid, dynamic, and non-hierarchical. In a time whenhierarchies are fluid, should not the practices and pedagogies that attempt totranslate them into the built environment be fluid as well?
We ask ourselves these questions:Can a contemporary practice be critical and/or relevant within the
“culture of congestion,” specifically a viable “languid space”?What type of practice can relevantly negotiate in any of the infinite
unique landscapes?Can it be simultaneously local and global?
REFERENCES
U.S. Department of Commerce. 2002. Regional Economic Accounts. Bureau of
Economic Analysis, http://www.bea.gov/bea/regional/gspmap/.Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Heard, Malcolm. 1997. French Quarter Manual: Architecture Guide to New
Orleans’ Vieux Carre. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press.Louisiana Economic Development Department. 2003. Economic Indicators. http://
www.lded.state.la.us/.Systems Support Division of the U.S. Census Bureau. 2002. Louisiana General
Demographic Characteristics. U.S. Census Bureau. http://www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 91st Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2003 (prior to HurricaneKatrina).
7 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious NewYork (New York: Monacelli Press,1994), 10.
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TECHNOSCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENTALTECHNOLOGYCULTURE
A provisional critiqueKENNETH FRAMPTON (2001)
The consequences of techno-cultural processes are not inevitable, as ifdecreed by the blind gods of a mechanical fate. Like the Freudianunconscious, the realm of techno-culture is at once over-determined andconstantly in process; it is coded, but its codes are continually subject tomutation and rewriting. In this realm, nothing is inherently stable,secure, guaranteed. Such a realm is precisely the realm of politics, wherefutures are imagined, contested and brought into being. If there is to be atechno-cultural politics that does not simply try to control the processesof techno-culture, it must imagine human beings as participants in thetechno-cultural unconscious—riding its waves, attempting to navigate itscurrents, but also by their actions, initiating unsettling new movementswithin it, generating new relations and processes, whose consequencesoften cannot be foreseen. Such a politics would itself be a complex, gen-erative process in which fixed values and power relations would beunsecured, in which connection and interconnection with others wouldbe “essential,” in which hybridity and partiality would be valued overpurity and wholeness.
R.L.RutskyHigh Techné, 19991
Thus, after the development of the transport networks in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries, with the network of networks, the Internet,comes the imminent establishment of real networks of transmission ofthe vision of the world, the audiovisual information superhighwaysof those on-line cameras which will contribute, in the twenty-firstcentury, to developing the panoptical (and permanent) tele-surveillanceof planetary sites and activities, which will very probably end in theimplementation of networks of virtual reality. This is a cyberoptics whichwill leave intact neither the old aesthetics that was a product of Europeanmodernity, nor the ethics of the Western democracies.
I am referring to that “representative democracy,” which tomorrowwill be subject to the pressure of the acceleration of historical reality,with the incalculable risk that the “commerce of the visible” will bringabout what no totalitarian regime has managed to create throughideology: unanimous support.
Paul VirilioThe Information Bomb, 2000 2
1 R.L. Rutsky, High Techné(Minneapolis, MN: University ofMinnesota Press, 1999) pp. 157–158
2 Paul Virilio, The InformationBomb (London and New York:Verso, 2000), pp. 121–122.
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PAPERLESS?
The ascendancy of technoscience and the rise of the mediatic bring intoquestion the capacity of democracy to survive our ever accelerating rate oftechnological change, along with the collapse of history into the immediacyof an ever more fungible present. This unstable field of continually fluctuat-ing data and mediatic images, identified by some as the technologicalsublime, lends itself to the domination of the spectacular, as had alreadybeen foreseen by the situationists some forty years ago. Under these con-ditions, as Guy Debord predicted, power not only loses its ability to thinkbut also concludes that it no longer has to think.3 Thus the situation arisesin which space previously accorded to thought becomes subsumed bycybernetic calculation.
Nevertheless, as the urban economist Saskia Sassen reminds us, thematerial world still has to be made, and building culture remains exception-ally subject to this rubric whether we like it or not. Thus, while the rateof technological change has greatly escalated over the past two decades,building as a generic process remains, in many aspects, heavy, massive,expensive, static, and relatively intractable. Against the all-but-seamlesskaleidoscopic flow of digital and telematic images that continually passlike luminous phantoms across the surface of our screens, we may posit theponderously wet aggregate of in situ concrete, where a tolerance of evena centimeter is hard to maintain. Despite the precision of high-techarchitecture, ideally assembled dry from machine-tooled parts, building asan overall process tends not to be high-tech, particularly when we compareit to the latest advances in microcircuitry, smart weaponry, and geneticengineering. Building, by its very nature, is involved with the more basic, lessdynamic, aspects of existence and hence is more intimately connected to theslower metabolic rhythms of the biosphere. We may note in this regard thatwe still distinguish in the environment between the mobile and immobile,paralleling the distinction in French between meubles (furniture) andimmeubles (apartments).
However, like many other design disciplines, architectural practice hasbeen transformed by cybernetic procedures, although this does not meanthat computer-aided design (CAD) will have an impact comparable tothat experienced by building culture between 1870 and 1920, when theperfection of steel and concrete frame construction, combined with theintroduction of the elevator and other electromechanical services, totallytransformed the physical nature of builtform. That CAD has had and willcontinue to have a major impact on the design process does not imply thatbuiltform must directly reflect or even mimic the constantly transformingmorphology of the telematic world. Clearly, digital drafting along withcybernetic production will continue to facilitate the generation of forms“hitherto unimaginable,” to borrow Konrad Wachsmann’s memorablephrase, but this is not sufficient justification, in itself, for architecture
3 Guy Debord, in Commentary onthe Society of Spectacle (London:Verso, 1988), p. 38, writes: “It isindeed unfortunate that humansociety should encounter suchburning problems just when it hasbecome materially impossible tomake heard the least objection to thelanguage of commodity; just whenpower—quite rightly because it isshielded by the spectacle from anyresponse to its piecemeal anddelirious decisions andjustifications—believes that it nolonger needs to think; and indeed canno longer think. It is sometimes saidthat science today is subservient tothe imperatives of profit, but that isnothing new. What is new is the waythe economy has now come todeclare open war on humanity,attacking not only our possibilitiesfor living, but our chances ofsurvival. It is here that science—renouncing the opposition to slaverythat formed a significant part of itsown history—has chosen to put itselfat the service of spectaculardomination. . . .
“What is false creates taste, andreinforces itself by knowinglyeliminating any possible reference tothe authentic. And what is genuine isreconstructed as quickly as possible,to resemble the false. . . .
“Feuerbach’s judgment on the factthat his time preferred ‘the sign of thething to the thing signified, the copyto the original, fancy to reality,’ hasbeen thoroughly vindicated by thecentury of spectacle, and in severalspheres where the nineteenth centurypreferred to keep its distance fromwhat was already its fundamentalnature: industrial capitalism. Thus it
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to pursue the allure of spectacular form for its own sake or to strive fora technocratic legitimacy based on its computer generation of exoticform. Thus we need not only to assimilate the computer but also to guardagainst its abuses, above all, perhaps, the exploitation of cyberneticperspectival projection as a seductive substitute for all other modes ofrepresentation.
The current tendency to transform the traditional architectural atelierinto a “paperless” studio is surely just as reductive in its implicationsas the erstwhile beaux-arts insistence on the rendered drawing, asopposed to other forms of three-dimensional representation, suchas axonometrics, models, etc., into the architectural design processuntil the mid-twentieth century. Admittedly, the digital is a supremelyeffective tool at many levels in the design and realization of builtform,from the use of laser cutters in the fabrication of models to the cyberneticallyregulated production of reiterative large-scale components such as wefind in the varying tubular steel frames that make up the torus volumeof the terminal building in Kansai Airport, Japan. However, in thegeneration of form, one needs to continually pass through multiple modesof representation at all stages of the project, from prototype to productiondrawing. That is to say, one needs to verify the work in differentways throughout the design process, passing from hand drawing, tomodel making, to digital projection, and vice versa. Ironically enough,far from being paperless, the paperless studio has already contributed asmuch as the word processor and the fax machine to our exponential, neverending consumption of paper.
TRANSIT
The inescapable interaction between technology and culture may be furtherrevealed by noting the different environmental conditions that have beenengendered by automotive versus locomotive modes of transportation anddistribution. Such a comparison may appear to be rather academic given thecurrent dominance of the automobile throughout the world, but it is none-theless instructive to observe that the two successive infrastructures of thenineteenth and twentieth centuries have had very different consequences inenvironmental terms. It is unlikely, for example, that the rain forest wouldever have been subject to devastation had it not been for the mass ownershipof the automobile and the concomitant building of autoroutes, and a similarcausality surely obtains with regard to the continual suburbanization ofthe earth’s surface. The United States loses some 50 acres of virgin-cum-agricultural land per day to suburbanization, while at the same diurnal rate,the world loses an area of the rain forest the size of Manhattan, togetherwith some 100 species of flora and fauna. This apocalyptic state of affairscan barely be justified opportunistically in terms of gratifying some popularconsumerist desire, for nothing surely is more artificial in our admass
was that the bourgeoisie had widelydisseminated the rigorous mentalityof the museum, the original object,precise historical criticism, theauthentic document. Today,however, the tendency to replace thereal with the artificial is ubiquitous.In this regard it is fortuitous thattraffic pollution has necessitated thereplacement of the Marly Horses inthe Place de La Concorde, or theRoman Statues in the doorway ofSaint-Trophime in Arles, by plasticreplicas. Everything will be morebeautiful than before, for thetourist’s cameras.”
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manipulation of taste. As the environmental engineer Guy Battle recentlyremarked, appropriate development should meet the needs of the present“without compromising the capacity of future generations to meet theirown needs.”
The “motopian” chain reaction initiated after 1945 by powerful oiland automotive interests, aided and abetted by the governmental subventionof the freeway system, is too well known to require reiteration here,but people are perhaps still insufficiently aware of how the mass owner-ship of the automobile and the proliferation of the suburb were thetwo symbiotic agents that brought about the demise of the Americanprovincial town.4 The freeway opened up hitherto inaccessible agriculturalland to suburban subdivision, which in its turn gave rise to the shoppingcenter and the mall. These new outlets effectively vitiated the main streetshopping frontage of the average small town, along with the railroad stationthat had been its lifeblood. Furthermore, the automobile remains a majorsource of pollution contributing to our excessive production of carbondioxide, not to mention the fact that we are enclosing with acousticalbarriers every freeway of consequence that passes through any suburb ofstanding.
Where the automobile has had the effect of emphasizing the sovereigntyof the individual to the exclusion of the collectivity of the railroad, high-speed rail transit has been able to coexist with the car in such a way as toemerge at the end of the twentieth century as the optimum vehicle for trans-port over intermediate distances. I am alluding to high-speed rail as this hasbeen developed over the past quarter of a century in France, Germany,England, Switzerland, Spain, and Japan.
Where the automobile tends towards a commodification of the environ-ment, the locomotive provides a more restrictive mode of distribution, andwhere the former favors decentralization, the latter still focuses on thecity. That this split in technological application also implies a parallel dif-ferentiation in sociopolitical terms is partially confirmed by the prominentrole played by the European Community in subsidizing intercontinental,high-speed rail travel. The E.C. policy in this regard has been to maintainthrough state subsidy and taxation the existence of different complementarymeans of transport, with the result that today the T.G.V. is more advanta-geous for intercity, short-haul travel than comparable journeys by planeover similar distances. One year from now, it will be possible to travel fromthe center of Nîmes to the center of Paris in two and a half hours. Given theever increasing delays at so-called hubs due to aircraft congestion at both theintra- and intercontinental levels, not to mention the perennially cloggedautoroutes leading to and from the airport, high-speed rail begins to emergeas the more efficient mode for distances up to 500 miles. This is independentof its side benefits—its tendency to reinforce civic memory, and to minimizeenvironmental pollution.
4 The term motopian was coined byGeoffrey Jellicoe in his bookMotopia: A Study of the Evolution ofUrban Landscape (New York:Praeger, 1961).
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This infrastructural interplay between technology and culture seems tohave ramifications at a more immediate, experiential level as when wecompare, say, the means of airport access obtaining today in London andZurich. Not only has London been slower than Zurich to provide a directrail link to the city center, but even now this link is inadequately coordinatedwith the main line and intracity systems. Zurich, on the other hand, has arail link that is fully integrated with the federal rail system. One may furthernote that the Swiss authorities developed an ingenious luggage cart for useon escalators and travelators with absolute safety throughout the terminaland its corresponding rail connections. May we conclude that such inno-vation and investment depend upon “cantonal” culture, since clearly it isaddressed to the convenience and comfort of the ordinary citizen? One can-not help noting how different this is from the paucity of passenger conveni-ence provided in large airport hubs throughout the United States, wherepassengers invariably have to walk long distances without the aid of travel-ators and where luggage has to be hand-carried up and down escalatorsor stairs.
Here we already touch on policies favoring the amortization of publicinvestment as opposed to assuming the durability of the fabric. Is it equallysymptomatic of direct democracy that Zurich is one of the few cities in theworld where the electric tram is still in use, as a mode of nonpollutingtransit, where the rhythm of stopping and starting is symbiotically relatedto the walking speed? Thus, we see how the tram, along with various formsof light rail, may still assert itself as an ecologically valid system of urbantransit.5 The edict that each successive technological innovation mustipso facto eliminate its predecessor does not always apply, either in civilengineering or in building culture, and in this regard we may note that weare still using essentially the same system of reinforced concrete constructionthat we used over a century ago.
LAND SETTLEMENT
As the Danish planner Bent Flyvbjerg has remarked, there is a disjunctionbetween power and reason that is rarely, if ever, discussed in the institutionsof government and higher learning. As he puts it in his book Rationality andPower: Democracy in Practice (1991), power is imbued with a reason thatit is unaware of, whereas reason is unfortunately not equipped with acomparable power.6 This explains why in the conflict between reason andpower, power is invariably the stronger. What is of concern to power isnot reason but rationalization as a means for arriving at a consensus infavor of certain vested interests. Under the late modern conditions ofdistorted communication, the rational argument all too often fails toprevail, since its recommendations come to be represented as being eithereconomically infeasible or as popularly unacceptable.7 It is not that we lackappropriate models for addressing the seemingly intractable problems of
5 See Brian Richards, Transport inCities (London: Architecture, Designand Technology Press, 1990), p. 115.Richards writes of light rail: “This isa development of the conventionaltram, to a much improved design. Inthe past trams were often removed,in favor of buses, on the grounds thatthey conflicted with vehicular traffic.Today that position has beenreversed. The first importantplanning initiative for light railoccurred in 1961 in Bremen, throughthe work of Dr. Dorfler, the citytraffic engineer.”
6 Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality andPower: Democracy in Practice(Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press, 1998), p. 236. Onthis concluding page of the studyFlyvbjerg writes: “At times directpower struggle over specific issuesworks best; on other occasionschanging the ground rules for suchstruggle is necessary, which is whereconstitutional and institutionalreform come in; and sometimeswriting genealogies and case historieslike the Aalborg study, that is, layingopen the relationships betweenrationality and power will help toachieve the desired results.”
7 Jurgen Habermas, Toward aRational Society: Student Protest,Science, and Politics, Jeremy J.Shapiro, trans. (Boston, MA: BeaconPress, 1970), pp. 62–67.
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our time. It is rather that we lack the conviction or even perhaps the politicalmeans of convincing society of the necessity of adopting certain measures,particularly where these affect market forces and the rights of privateproperty.8
In a recent inquiry commissioned by the British government with theintention of evolving an appropriate national planning policy for thetwenty-first century, a committee of experts comprising engineers,architects, and urbanists, strongly recommended that there should beno more construction on “green-field” sites, that is to say, on virgin oragricultural land that has not been built on before. It is rumored that thisfinding was rejected by the current socialist administration on the groundsthat “middle England would not stand for it”; a rumor which, if true,exemplifies only too directly the constraints imposed by populist consensusin our admass democracy. It is a sobering thought that the less openbourgeois democracies of the nineteenth century were more effectivein managing the expansion of the metropolis than contemporarymegalopolitan governments have been in managing the environment. Thisdifference in political mandate perhaps partially explains how the wholesalecommodification of our urbanized regions has taken place without toomuch public investment, save for the provision of an auto-infrastructurethat was considered to be essential to land speculation and the expansionof consumerism.
Two alternative models may be seen as exemplary alternative landsettlement strategies that were posited in the second half of the twentiethcentury. The first of these was the abandoned plan for the town of Hook inHampshire, designed for the London County Council in the late 1950sand published in 1961 as The Planning of a New Town, while the secondwas set forth as a low-rise, high-density paradigm in Serge Chermayeff andChristopher Alexander’s Community and Privacy of 1963. Where the firstwas a relatively dense yet flexible form of settlement conceived as anappropriate response to the constraints and opportunities of the welfarestate, the second was a more generic alternative of motopian sprawl. Bothmodels were equally rational and pragmatic and although the realization ofeither would possibly have entailed “the power of eminent domain,” neitherwas categorically anticapitalist, nor incompatible in any way with the massownership of the automobile. However, both were predicated on economiz-ing in infrastructural costs, land use, and fuel and hence were dedicated tolimiting the consumption of nonrenewable natural resources. That the low-rise, low-density, gridded infrastructure of Milton Keynes (1972) was real-ized instead of Hook (as the last British new town) was due to the adoptionof the American free-market, land speculation model, derived from MelvinWebber’s rationalization of Los Angeles as the ultimate, automotive, “non-place, urban realm.”9
8 Efforts to check suburban sprawlin the burgeoning megalopolissurrounding the urban core ofAtlanta have been categoricallyopposed by private interest. SeeDavid Firestone, “SuburbanComfort, Thwarting Plans to LimitGrowth,” in New York Times, Nov.21, 1999. “In July, the commissiondropped the plan.” ElsewhereFirestone notes that in Atlanta, thecounty pastoral, “long timelandowners . . . fought the planbitterly because it meant they mightnot be able to sell to developers.”
9 Melvin Webber, Explorations intoUrban Structure (Philadelphia, PA:University of Philadelphia Press,1964), pp. 79–153.
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The viability of low-rise, high-density development as an alternative tothe current patterns of megalopolitan development has been well demon-strated by various architects, including the Austrian Roland Rainer, in hisPuchenau Siedlung under construction on the Danube, near Linz, from 1960to 1980; a project that would be elaborated as a general principle in hisseminal book Livable Environments of 1972. For Rainer, the imperative stillremains one of maintaining a balance between culture and nature. For him,the cultivation of the land and the biosphere are strategies with which tocompensate for the maximizing drives of our technoscientific, motopianeconomy.
Irrespective of the topographic potential of low-rise, high-density settle-ment, the fact remains that the American megalopolis has already been builtand that there is little chance of radically recasting it. The alienating “non-place, urban realm” is already a ubiquitous condition covering vast areas ofthe continent and clearly there is little that can be done to humanize thisruinous situation except possibly the gradual application of fragmentarylandscape interventions. This may be the most fundamental reasonwhy landscape design is of greater cultural consequence today than thetraditional environmental disciplines of architecture, planning, and urbandesign. The proliferation of heat-absorbing, blacktop parking areas andshopping malls; the miles of treeless commercial strip; the general lack ofparks and recreation spaces; and the constant depletion of the soil caused byexcessive storm water runoff, not to mention the pollution of the watertable and the land itself through the excessive use of nitrate fertilizer anddetergent—all may be open to mediation through the adoption of moresustainable techniques and through remedial topographic treatments,always assuming that society will not only be willing to undertake suchworks but also to maintain them.
PLACEFORM VERSUS PRODUCTFORM
The term productform derives from the Swiss architect Max Bill, whoemployed it to refer to industrial design elements, which are determinedby constraints of production rather than by ergonomic or functional con-siderations. The so-called high-tech architects have clearly done much totransform the craft of building along these lines—they have frequentlycreated buildings that have been determined as much by fabricationmethods as by function. It is obvious that such sophisticated buildingtechniques challenge our traditional building methods, particularly wherethese have become too expensive or where they are ultimately unattainabledue to the degeneration of craftsmanship. As the high-tech architects haveconvincingly demonstrated, this is an age that favors lightweight, long-span construction; tessellated skins; thinner and more efficient insulatingmembranes; and above all, cybernetically varied modes of production ratherthan simple serial prefabrication. Ours is the epoch of miraculous glasses, of
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laminates and plastics, of gluing rather than welding, of prestressing andposttensioning, of servomechanisms and “smart” buildings, rather thanmanually operated controls. Moreover, whether we like it or not, it is atime when up to two-thirds of the average building budget is consumedby electromechanical services rather than by built fabric itself. Against allthese lightweight, dry technological developments we must nonetheless setthe placeform, that is to say the foundational, topographic element that isusually cast into the ground as a wet, heavyweight component in order toprovide a substantial base for the productform, the structure that is invari-ably erected on top of it. As Italian architect Renzo Piano has put it: “Theprimary structure itself constitutes the place; it is sculpted in position,as it were, like a bas-relief. This part is normally massive, opaque andheavy. Then you craft a light, transparent, and even temporary piece ofarchitecture, which is poised on top of it. In such a combination, the heavyis permanent and the light is temporary. I believe that it is possible to createa tension between these two aspects, the place and the building, or rather theplace and the crafted fabric. They are of two different worlds, but they maycertainly coexist.”10
Whether the superstructure is light or temporary, partially handcrafted orindustrially produced, will no doubt vary from project to project, but clearlythis cultural perception of a dialogical relationship obtaining between the“earthwork” and the “roofwork” is a culturally apposite way of regardingthe interaction between a wet, landscaped, placeform and a dry, rationallyassembled, productform. The capacity of the placeform to resist thehomogenizing tendency of universal, consumerist technology may gobeyond the earthwork, however, particularly if we turn our attention to theroof and the enclosing membrane, both of which are envelopes potentiallyresponsive to the specific location of a given work. In this respect, sophisti-cated buildings are being realized (with increasing frequency all over theworld) in which the roof, the cladding, the fenestration, and the earthworkare equally expressive of the values of the particular climate and topographyinto which the work has been inscribed.
The way in which such a technological, “value-laden” sensibility comesto be gradually incorporated into the everyday culture may be suggested byciting the way in which place-conscious, sociocultural benefits come to beincorporated into building legislation. Once again we have evidence thatsuch legislation is never as neutral. Current Dutch building law mandatesthat all office structures must be provided with manually operable windows,as opposed to the common practice in the United States where it has longbeen the norm to fully air-condition office structures and hence to sealthe fenestration hermetically throughout the building. This maximizingapproach has three undesirable results: first, it becomes impossible toventilate the building naturally when the climate happens to be temperate;second, the building consumes excessive amounts of energy; and third, the
10 Renzo Piano, Technology, Placeand Architecture: The JerusalemSeminar in Architecture (New York:Rizzoli, 1998), p.133.
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standard curtain wall that generally results from such an approach isdeprived of any means of expressing the climate in which it is situated.Much the same applies, as I have attempted to argue elsewhere, with theoptimum rationalization of sitework, where contours are bulldozed flatin order to realize immediate, short-term economies at the level of thefoundations.
To what degree new methods, techniques, and materials may be effect-ively and appropriately used must surely vary from case to case, but in allinstances we should bear in mind the risk of technological maximization,which invariably entails negative side effects in whatever field it occurs,be this the abuse of antibiotics in the field of allopathic medicine or theoverdependence on nitrates and insecticides in modern agriculture. In thefirst instance, the consequence has been the generation of drug-resistantbacteria; in the second, we are confronted with the continual pollution ofnonrenewable resources, along with evidence that now indicates thatnonorganically cultivated food is detrimental to health. One may citeinnumerable examples of similar negative procedures in building, from con-struction of museums in which no natural light is admitted in order toexclude even the slightest trace of ultraviolet light, to the building of everlarger supermarkets and shopping malls that are not only “unsustainable”by definition but also invariably isolated from the topographic grain of thesurrounding landscape. The maximizing of such shopping facilities, togetherwith the recent proliferation of gated communities, can hardly be regardedas environmentally or culturally sound solutions to the predicament of landsettlement.
It is one of the virtues of building that in many respects it is inherentlyanachronistic. Thus when it comes to construction we would be moreapposite if we settled for the adjective “appropriate” rather than “high”technology. It is this hybrid approach that brings us to acknowledge thosearchitects who have attempted to design buildings that are not only har-moniously integrated into the landscape but also climatically responsive:that is, designed in such a way that that they are well insulated, partiallyventilated, cooled, and heated by natural means, thereby allowing theinternal climate to vary with the external environment. All of this becomesof a greater critical import when one takes into consideration the concept ofembodied energy in relation to the durability of builtform, of which PeterBuchanan has written: “The common building material with the leastembodied energy is wood, with about 640 kilowatt-hours per ton (most of itconsumed by the industrial drying process, and some in the manufacture ofand impregnation with preservatives). Hence the greenest building materialis wood from sustainably managed forests. Brick is the material with thenext lowest amount of embodied energy, four times (4X) that of wood, thenconcrete (5X), plastic (6X), glass (14X), steel (24X) and aluminum (126X).A building with a high proportion of aluminum components can hardly be
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green when considered from the perspective of total life cycle costing, nomatter how energy efficient it might be.”11
One cannot resist observing that clear cutting, as opposed to sustainableforestry, is still standard practice in the American lumber industry and thatas long as our current pattern of gasoline-driven, suburban commutingprevails, energy-efficient construction will not sufficiently reduce our overallconsumption of energy even though buildings are said to account for halfthe annual energy consumption. There remains the possibility that inthe long run, a world shortage of oil will render our current patterns ofautomotive commuting unviable. In the interim, smog will continue to bethe order of the day and automotive congestion will increase. But oil is notthe only foreseeable scarcity in the future, for an intractable, loomingproblem is the relatively imminent shortage of water. Of this Buchananwrites: “Though the earth is mostly covered with water, less than one per-cent of this is fresh and most of this is now contaminated. Yet buildingscontinue to use and pollute vast amounts of water. Green buildings conserveand recycle water in a variety of ways. Rainwater is captured and used forplants and flushing toilets; ‘grey’ water from showers, baths and basins isalso used to flush toilets and repurified through reed beds that are part of thebuilding’s landscaping.”12
Populists are given to celebrating the seeming abundance of the consumersociety and the way in which this fulfills the popular desire of a classlesssociety, in which a liberal “third way” comes to prevail, to the exclusionof totalitarianism. How this implicitly democratic alternative is to beenvironmentally cultivated and maintained, when 25 percent of the world’spopulation uses 75 percent of the world’s energy, is far from self-evident,particularly in North America, where currently only 34 percent of thepeople vote and the maldistribution of wealth is notorious. Although weknow that liberal democracy cannot be realized once and for all and that inall probability it has not been fully achieved anywhere, it is by no meansevident that our telematic, technoscientific civilization will be able to furtherits development.
REFLECTIVE PRACTICE
Given the “spectacular” character of the epoch, there appear to be as manyways of practicing architecture as there are architects. While this pluralismmay stem in many instances from superficial stylistic variations, these none-theless evoke the issue of what should be the ethical role of the architect inthe face of the technological sublime; a challenge rendered the more ironicby the fact that architects, in any event, are only responsible for less than10 percent of the built environment. Put in doctrinaire terms, there wouldappear to be only two categorically different choices facing the architecturalprofession, and schools of architecture, today.
12 Buchanan, p. 8.
11 Peter Buchanan, Ten Shades ofGreen (New York: The ArchitecturalLeague of New York, 2000), p. 9.
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The first of these and the one which, given the sway of fashion, theprofession seems increasingly inclined to adopt, is to embrace the techniqueof the spectacular without any reservations; to enter, under the rubric ofavant-gardism, the generation of unprecedented plastic visual effects,preferably derived from digital processes and dependent for seductive effecton the extravagant use of new high-tech materials. The rationale supportingthis exotic impulse, which often has the nerve to characterize itself as sub-versive, is not so hard to divine since it surely relates to the continualattempts made by the profession, ever since the 1960s, to legitimize itspractice in terms of technological fetishism; in addition, that is, to theperennial compulsion towards some identifiable “originality” as the sinequa non of individual competition.
The second basic choice is to establish a distance from the technoscientificwhirlwind without denying the potential capacity of advanced technologyand the unavoidable effects of its influence. This last position is, in my view,a more objective and ethically responsible alternative and one which comesclosest to Donald Schon’s concept of “reflective practice” of which he wrotein 1982:
The idea of reflective practice leads . . . to a demystification of professionalexpertise. It leads us to recognize that for both the professional and thecounterprofessional, special knowledge is embedded in evaluative frameswhich bear the stamp of human values and interests. . . . Whenever aprofessional claims to “know,” in a sense of the technical expert, heimposes his categories, theories, and techniques on the situation beforehim. He ignores, explains away, or controls those features of the situation,including the human beings within it, which do not fit his knowledge-in-practice. . . . If technical expertise is value-laden, and technical expertshave interests of their own which shape their understandings andjudgments, then we will recognize the need for social constraints onprofessional freedom. On the other hand, we will also respect theprofessional’s claim to extraordinary knowledge in the areas susceptible totechnical expertise, and we will place a special value on practitioners whoreflect-in-action both on their own evaluative frames and in situationswhich transcend the limits of their expertise. 13
Schon’s critical conception of reflection-in-action leads inexorably notonly to the evaluative framing of life situations as a necessary prerequisiteof any responsible design procedure but also to the recognition of a certainlimit, which may be applied to architecture and technology alike. Thus,I would argue it is necessary for the architect not only to take advantageof modern technology but also to retain a certain skepticism with regard toits ideological dimensions and hence to resist its propensity for proliferatingplacelessness.
13 Donald Schon, The ReflectivePractitioner (New York:HarperCollins, Basic Books, 1983),pp. 345–346.
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Schon argues that there are two interrelated levels at which reflection-in-action ought to take place. The first of these concerns the relationshipbetween the architect and the client—the latter should participate activelyin the design discourse along with the architect and the various technicalconsultants. The second level turns on the civic responsibility of architectsto relate their one-off designs to the larger general principles that impingeon their resolution, thereby to engage the body politic in the formationof environmental policy and so to pass from reflection-in-action todemocracy-in-action.
This brings us to the double-edged character of the placeform as anenclave, for while the gated community can only be rejected, as a morbid,reactionary symptom, causally linked to the inequitable distribution ofwealth, a critical work has also to be bounded in order to sustain itselfagainst the miasma of value-free placelessness that engulfs it on every side.The building as placeform exists not only to ensure a certain tranquilitywithin its boundaries but also to posit a ground within which the subjectmay sustain its being against the indifference of the megalopolis. And while Ihave broached this issue before, most notably perhaps in my interpretationof critical regionalism, I would like to reassert the argument here in moreobjective terms, namely, as the framing of the body-being, within the limitsof microspace, sensitively inflected so as to accommodate the needs anddesires of the subject within a given place and climate, at a particularmoment in time.
This essay was originally published in the Journal of Architectural Education,Vol. 54, No. 3 (February 2001).
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TECHNOLOGY, PLACE, AND THETECHNOLOGYNONMODERN THESIS
STEVEN A. MOORE (2001)
INTRODUCTION
In the 1980s and early 1990s the topic of regionalism enjoyed considerablevisibility within architectural discourse. The prospect of a progressiveor a critical regionalism seemed an antidote to both the regressivefantasies of postmodern historicism and the various proposals for adeconstructivist architecture inspired by European linguistic theory. Sincethe mid-1990s, however, the regionalist moment has waned. Theprogenitors of that conversation, Kenneth Frampton, Alexander Tzonis andLiane Lefaivre, have moved on to other topics and the projects of thosearchitects who embodied the critical regionalist attitude have beenre-framed by other discourses.
This state of affairs is, in my view, a rather natural, if not entirely satisfy-ing development. In the maturation of any conversation some possibilitiesare suppressed just as others are amplified by the exigencies of the situation.The purpose of this article, then, is to reconstruct those suppressed possi-bilities contained within the modern conception of regionalism that mightyield unsuspected theoretical opportunities that are relevant to contem-porary conditions. In short, I wish to argue that technology and place shouldbe understood as the suppressed core concepts that are contained withinregionalist architectural production.
This is not to say that regions are constituted only of places and tech-nologies, but that these concepts are central to our understanding of whata “region” might be. The interrogation of these core concepts, then, is anopportunity to reconsider the history of regionalism as a concept.
Before I argue that the concept of regionalism should be renovated in onedirection or another, I have a responsibility to review how the core conceptsof place and technology have been used in the past. In what follows I’llfirst define the concept of place by reconstructing the rationale behind itsdevaluation as a concept relevant to modern conditions. Because the con-temporary recuperation of place is often a conservative reaction againstmodernist ideology it will be helpful to put this discussion in a historicalcontext before looking further.
In their essays on “Critical Regionalism,” Alexander Tzonis and LianeLefaivre documented five historical stages in the evolution of the concept ofregionalism in Western culture: the picturesque, the romantic, Nazi Heimat,the commercial, and finally, Critical Regionalism. I find their analysis to behelpful and will review their genealogy for the benefit of the nonmodernthesis to follow. Having defined the concept of place through the disciplines
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of geography and history I’ll then consider how we might understand themodern construction of technology. Kenneth Frampton has, of course,deeply mined the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s critique of modern tech-nology as a way of informing his Critical Regionalism hypothesis. Ratherthan revisit that discourse, however, I will borrow from the contemporaryliterature of science and technology studies to provide a sociological view ofhow technological systems are developed.
My own position is very supportive of the Critical Regionalismhypothesis originally constructed by Tzonis and Lefaivre, and fully devel-oped by Frampton. There are, however, hanging threads in that conversa-tion which tug at a contemporary understanding of the topic. In my viewit is necessary to resolve the internal tensions implicit in Frampton’shypothesis that (too freely) mix the underlying modernist assumptionsof critical theory, particularly those of Jurgen Habermas, with the under-lying postmodern assumptions of Martin Heidegger. I will attempt toresolve this opposition by constructing a nonmodern position thatavoids the conflicted attitude toward the concepts technology and placethat are implicit in both modernist and postmodernist thought.1 BeforeI can map a nonmodern position from which Frampton’s CriticalRegionalism hypothesis might be renovated, however, it is necessary tobetter define my terms.
DEFINING PLACE
The geographer John Agnew has argued that, in modernist thought, thetraditional concept of place is devalued, and this for two reasons. First,modern social science has confused, or conflated, the distinction between“place” and “community.” “Community” in the modern view, arguesAgnew, is assumed to define both “a physical setting for social relations”and “a morally valued way of life.”2 In the conflation, place has beenerroneously equated with local concepts of traditional morality. Modernistthought, in Agnew’s analysis, fails to understand society as a dynamic pro-cess that transforms, but does not abolish or invalidate the concept ofregion. As a result, moderns tends to reify moral concepts as places. In otherwords, our characterization of big cities as dens of iniquity, and small townsas the vessels of morality is ideological, not empirical.3
Second, beginning in the nineteenth century—a period that witnessedthe dramatic evaporation of traditional communities—social scientistsattempted to project the trajectory of history. Common to all of these apriori projections was the polarity of “community” and “society.” Writersas dissimilar as Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx saw community as being“coercive, limiting, or idiotic,” whereas national societies were charac-terized as liberative. Conservatives, such as Auguste Comte, saw the loss oftraditional village forms as the loss of the ideal social type. In contrast, thepolitics of nation building and the liberative project of Enlightenment
1 I should make clear at the onsetthat when using the terms “modern,”“postmodern,” and “nonmodern” Irefer, not to architectural styles, butto the philosophical assumptionsthat lead to material choices.
2 John Agnew, Place and Politics(Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987),p. 62. Agnew also discusses thetheme of the historic devaluation ofplace in “Representing Space: Space,Scale and Culture in Social Science,”in Place / Culture / Representation,James Duncan and David Ley, eds.(New York: Routledge, 1993),pp. 251–271. Although Agnewinterrogates the concept of “place,” Iuse the term “region”interchangeably in this text. “Place”and “region” do not mean the samething, but for the purpose of thisdiscussion I conflate them.
3 For example, crime statisticsreveal that the murder rate in NewYork City is dramatically lower thanthat of rural Arkansas. See BoxButterfield, “Nationwide Drop inMurders Is Reaching to SmallTowns,” in New York Times,Tuesday 9 May, 2000. Availableat <http://archives.nytimes.com/archives/>.
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became an ideology of “antitraditionalism.” To free humans from feudalbonds to the land, and the hierarchical relations inscribed there, was under-stood by moderns to be the grand scheme (or teleology) of history. TheGerman sociologist, Max Weber, popularized this historical tension as thetransformation of Gemeinschaft into Gesellschaft.4
This logic suggests that the modern reification of moral codes and theteleology of history conspired to devalue place as a concept relevant tothe conditions of contemporary life. “Becoming modern’ involves castingoff ties to place (in work, recreation and sense of identity) and adopting an‘achievement oriented’ or ‘class conscious’ self that is placeless.”5 Agnewargues, in concert with the postmodern geographer Edward Soja, that thedevaluation of place was most vigorously promoted by Marxist ideology.6
For traditional Marxists to consider social behavior as in any way deter-mined by the conditions of place would have been to subvert the dialecticorder of causality. Marxist logic has traditionally held that material orderarises from a dialectic relationship with social activity. But if Marxistsdevalued the concept of place on ideological grounds, there is considerableirony in the recognition that it has been market forces that have mosteffectively devalued real places.7
In the eyes of the Left, the doctrine of environmental determinism(which opposes a dialectic understanding of place by holding that societiesowe their unique character to the conditions of their territory) amountsto nothing less than racism and the fetishization of place.8 We will return tothe logic shortly.
In a friendly renovation of this Marxist logic, Agnew argues that placescannot be understood within the limited dimensions of architecture orphysical geography.9 Rather, Agnew argues that the variables that character-ize places are multi-valent. He offers three elements, or scales by which wemight understand the phenomenon of place: location, sense of place, andlocale.10
By location, Agnew intends that a place can be understood as a geo-graphic area encompassed by the objective structures of politics andeconomy. In this sense, places are linked together, for example, by the inter-ests of the E.C. (European Community), or the Monroe Doctrine. Using thesame logic, one might argue that Houston is closer to the cities of Aberdeen,Scotland and Stavanger, Norway than to Austin, Texas. This is so because itis the same corporate structures that manage the oil fields of the North Seaand those of Texas. It is these structural conditions of political economy atthe macro-scale that most concern Marxist scholars.
At the other end of the spectrum Agnew argues for the existence of asense of place. By this term he means the local “structure of feeling” thatpervades Being in a particular place. This dimension of place includes theinter-subjective realities that give a place what conventional language woulddescribe as character or quality of life. For example, the reverence that the
4 Although Max Weber iscommonly credited with the coinageof these terms, they belong toFerdinand Tonnies who first usedthem in 1887. See FerdinandTonnies, Community and Society(New York: Harper, 1963).
5 Agnew, Place and Politics, p. 231.
6 Soja’s position is associated withthe tradition of Critical Theory;however, his intention is revisionist.See Edward Soja, PostmodernGeographies: The Reassertion ofSpace in Critical Social Theory(London: Verso, 1989), p. 120.
7 I am indebted to my colleagueStephen Ross for this insight.
8 Anna Bramwell, for example, hasargued that German anti-Semitismarises from the doctrines ofenvironmental determinism. Togeneralize that all Germans share agenius that originates in the forestand that wandering Jews share arootlessness that originates in thedesert is a classic example ofdeterminist, reductivist logic. SeeAnna Bramwell, Blood and Soil:Richard Walter Darre and Hitler’sGreen Party (Abbotsbrook: KensalHouse, 1985). See also Jeffery Herf,Reactionary Modernism:Technology, Culture and Politics inWeimar and the Third Reich(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1984).
9 Agnew’s concern is apparentlythat those of us who are mostconcerned with the physical world—architects and physical geographerschief among the suspects—are proneto fall into the trap of environmentaldeterminism.
10 Agnew, Place and Politics, p. 28.The definition of these terms isfurther amplified in his essay“Representing Space,” p. 253.
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citizens of Austin, Texas reserve for a swim in Barton Springs, or the stylishambition of street life that New Yorkers enjoy, are ontological, rather thanobjective, dimensions of place. It is at this scale that the complex humanpoetics of place are experienced. It is the inter-subjective construction ofconditions experienced as a sense of place that most concerns constructivistscholars and phenomenologists.
Between objective location, and the subjective sense of place, Agnewestablishes a middle ground, or locale. This scale of place is the setting inwhich social relations are constituted. Locale includes the institutionalscale of living to which architecture contributes so much: the city, thepublic square, the block, and the neighborhood. I want to claim that byconsidering the concept of place, or region, from this meso-scale we avoidtwo problems. First, we can appreciate the insights of Marxists, but avoidthe over-determination that derives from their preoccupation with the seem-ingly objective conditions of political economy. Second, we can appreciatethe insights of constructivists and phenomenologists, but avoid the under-determination that derives from their preoccupation with the subjectiveconditions of atomized reality.11 It is the “elastic” scale of all three dimen-sions, viewed from the meso-scale of the city-state, which best describes aplace. By understanding the concept of place as a dynamic process thatlinks humans and nonhumans in space at a variety of scales, we might getbeyond the opposition between those who understand the concept as a set ofobjective structures and those who understand it as a set of romantic mythstied to subjective experience.
REGIONALISM AS A HISTORIC STRATEGY
Agnew’s analysis of the devaluation and reconstruction of place ishelpful, but doesn’t tell us much about how place, or the concept ofregionalism, has been employed in architecture. The essays of AlexanderTzonis and Liane Lefaivre are more helpful. These authors distinguish“regionalist” architecture from “regional” architecture as a matter ofpolitical content. Where a “regional” architecture is constituted byan isolated craft tradition that adapts to local ecological conditions,“regional-ist” architecture implicitly “criticizes an architectural orderthat claims universal application.”12 The regionalist position, then,is both reactive and liberative. It reacts against imposed a prioristandards and seeks liberation from a power that is considered foreignand illegitimate.
Tzonis and Lefaivre’s first regionalist category, 18th century Englishpicturesque architecture, is a good example. It is no accident that AnthonyAshley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–1683), was a member of theWhig Party, a promoter of a parliamentary form of governance, an anti-monarchist, a nationalist, and an advocate of constructing a picturesquelandscape. The cultivation of a landscape that intensified the natural
11 Thomas Misa, “RetrievingSociotechnical Change FromTechnological Determinism,” inDoes Technology Drive History?Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx,eds. (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press,1995), pp. 115–142.
12 Alexander Tzonis and LianeLefaivre, “Critical Regionalism,” inCritical Regionalism: The PomonaMeeting Preceedings (Pomona, CA:The College of EnvironmentalDesign, 1991), p. 4.
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topography and flora of place was, for Shaftesbury, an asthetic tactic thatwould foreground the rigid imposition of classical order upon local order.Rather than tolerate the classically ordered formal gardens adopted by themonarchy, which were associated with the claims of absolute rule, theWhigs cultivated a landscape of particularity in the hope that it wouldnurture the liberative politics inscribed in the genius loci.
Tzonis and Lefaivre’s second category, romantic regionalism, continuesthe project of political liberation from central authority that was initiallyfound in the English picturesque, but it employs new tactics. Wherethe picturesque was a spatial strategy, romantic regionalism alsoemploys temporal strategies. In the projects of Johann Wolfgang Goethe andJohn Ruskin, for example, architecture is constructed as a “memorymachine”—a setting that evokes one’s sense of belonging to a familiarhistory. The romantic, however, should not be confused with the merelyeclectic. Where the eclectic chooses what appears to be best from diversesources, the romantic recuperates a seemingly authentic ethnic historyfor the purpose of reconstructing lost authority. In this sense, romanticregionalism employs the previously introduced doctrines of environmentaldeterminism, which have roots in architectural theory going back toVitruvius. In his Ten Books, Vitruvius argued that Africans to the southwere dim-witted because their climate was too hot. Using similar logic,Vitruvius argued the Germans to the north were no less dim-witted becausetheir climate was too cold. In this logic it follows that Roman geniusemerged from the just right environmental conditions of the sacred region ofRomulus and Remus. Like Vitruvius, the romantics of the 19th centurycredited nature, or those who presumed to speak for her, with culturalconstructions.
The architecture of German National Socialism, or Heimatsarchitektur,the third of Tzonis and Lefaivre’s categories, is post-romantic in that itsgoal was one of neo-tribal regimentation rather than liberation. Althoughthe volkish fantasies of Albert Speer clearly emerge from German romanti-cism, they invent an “authentic” taxonomy of forms that is intended toexclude those others that threaten the spatial purity of the race. NaziHeimatsarchitektur, or literally, “homeland architecture,” relies upon thedoctrines of environmental determinism, but with a particularly malig-nant twist of logic. Hitler, Himmler and their cohorts argued that just asGermanic genius was derived from the enchantment of the Black Forest, theshiftiness and untrustworthiness of Jews, for example, was derived from alife of wandering in the desert. Heimatsarchitektur, as in contemporaryBosnia and Kosovo, leads to a spatial project of ethnic cleansing.
Following the Second World War, regionalist strategies were appro-priated less by totalitarian regimes than by the market. Tzonis and Lefaivredescribe “commercial regionalism,” their fourth category, as an architectureof tourism. Corporate sponsorship of the local can be understood as one of
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many tactics discovered by the market to differentiate its products in anendless sea of mediocre suburban choices. This is true particularly in theAmerican West, where the propinquity of the place-form has been sacrificedto standards imported by the universal concern for maintaining resale value.Herein some petrified sense of the local has reached epidemic dimension.Some critics have argued that the phenomenon of New Urbanism is apotent critique of commercial regionalism while others have maintained theopposite—that New Urbanism is itself a product differentiation strategythat succeeds in the market only to the degree that it extracts value from so-called “authentic” places. In this view, a distinction between “authentic”regionalist houses in places like Austin, and what my colleague David Hey-mann refers to as “yuppie limestone starter-mansions,” has become some-what moot. The cynical marketing of architectural motifs precludes anunderstanding of place as an environmental reproduction grounded in trad-itional construction practices.
It is into this historical context that Tzonis and Lefaivre have cast theirproposal for a fifth category, that of “Critical Regionalism.” These authorsargue that architecture can mount an effective resistance to the traditionallyrestrictive conception of place as well as to the hegemony of the globalmarket through a strategy of “defamiliarization.”13 They mean by this termthat architecture should evoke meaning and thought rather than emotionand excitement—that architecture should evoke critical consideration of thecultural and ecological origins of construction practices rather than feed thefolk scenographic fantasies which allow them to withdraw into familiarity.For Frampton, Critical Regionalism is an attitude rather than a set ofmotifs—it is a set of ever-evolving tectonic practices rather than a look. Byslowing down cognition, rather than appeasing consumer lust for instantgratification, critical regionalists hope to engage the inhabitants of a regionin a thoughtful consideration of what it means to live locally. This is anontological rather than a representational project. This distinction suggeststhat the labor and material practices employed to construct a place aremore important than visual references made to the traditional canons ofarchitecture or to the artificial icons produced by Madison Avenue.Although we lead lives increasing dominated by universal forces, the criticalregionalists argue that some of those forces might act to stimulate, ratherthan repress, creative response to the material condition of the places intowhich we are thrown.
Although Tzonis and Lefaivre’s genealogy of regionalism is extremelyhelpful, it implies a classically modernist teleology about which I amskeptical. Although their successive historical categories ring true, I doubtthat there is any historical necessity, Marxist or otherwise, that will dragour understanding into the critical consciousness they advocate. Rather,I will argue, places spring up in response to those interests that are mosteffective at gathering resources. The social construction of places is an
13 Ibid., p. 20. The authors creditthe term “defamiliarization” toVictor Schlovsky, a member of the“Russian Formalists” who coinedthe term around the time of theBolshevik Revolution. See alsoVictor Schlovsky, “Art asTechnique,” in Russian FormalistCritique, L.T. Lemon and M. Reis,eds. (Lincoln, NB: University ofNebraska Press, 1965).
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entirely contingent event, not one determined by the structure of history.It is such nonmodern logic that contributes to the concluding thesis.
DEFINING TECHNOLOGY
Just as the definition of place requires a multi-faceted strategy, so does thedefinition of technology. Conventional thought understands place asonly physical in quality. Similarly, technology is commonly understoodto be physical hardware—radios, refrigerators, or computers. Such amaterialist definition tends to consider the social construction of suchobjects as outside the competing interests of society.14 In the positivisttradition, technology is understood as the asocial application of scientifictruths. In the philosophical tradition of Heidegger, technology is understoodas an ontological practice. In contrast to both of these traditions, theliterature of science and technology studies has demonstrated that tech-nology, far from being constructed outside society, and far from beingthe singular practice of the poet, is a system that is inextricably partof society.15 Technology, like place, is a field where the struggle betweencompeting interests plays out. The sociologists Donald MacKenzie andJudith Wajcman have argued that the concept of technology, like place,includes three qualities. In their construction, technology includes “humanknowledge,” “patterns of human activities,” and “sets of physicalobjects.”16 Rather than return to those discourses, like Frampton’s orHeidegger’s, that examine technology, or techne, through ontologicallenses, I find it helpful to examine technology as a process of socialconstruction.
In MacKenzie and Wajcman’s definition, knowledge—the first charac-teristic of technology—is required, not only to build the artifact, but torelate the natural conditions upon which the artifact works, and to usethe artifact. The second characteristic of technology, “Patterns of humanactivity,” or what I would prefer to call human practices, refers to theinstitutionalization, or routinization, of problem solving that inevitablyoccurs in society. The practices of architecture, carpentry or farming areexamples. The third quality of technology, “sets of objects,” is, of course,the most obvious—these are the things themselves. The point is, however,that computers, hammers or tractors are useless without the human know-ledge and practices that engage them.
What I want to argue here is that the definition of place offered by Agnew,and the definition of technology offered by MacKenzie and Wajcman, arerelated by a tripartite structure that is not accidental. Figure 1 will help tomake this point clear.
The limited point of the diagram is threefold: first, that places and tech-nologies are both spatial concepts with related structures; second, thatthese qualities are dialogically related; and third, that modern forms ofknowledge, like the economics of location, tend toward the abstract and
14 Reductive, materialist definitionsof technology tend to be lesssophisticated in their understandingof the social construction of artifacts.However, Bruce Bimber’s essay,“Three Faces of TechnologicalDeterminism,” in Russian FormalistCritique, L.T. Lemon and M. Reis,eds. (Lincoln, NB: University ofNebraska Press, 1965) develops avery scholarly, yet reductive,definition of technology as limited toapparatus. Bimber’s project,however, leads to other ontologicalproblems beyond the scope of thisstudy.
15 I have discussed the varioustraditions within science andtechnology studies elsewhere ingreater detail. See Steven A. Moore,“Technology and the Politics ofSustainability at BlueprintDemonstration Farm,” in Journal ofArchitectural Education, 51/1(September 1997): pp. 23–25 andTechnology and Place: SustainableArchitecture and the Blueprint Farm(Austin, TX: University of TexasPress, 2001).
16 Donald MacKenzie and JudithWajcman, “Introductory Essay,” inThe Social Shaping of Technology(Philadelphia: Open UniversityPress, 1985), p. 3.
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over-determined (meaning that the outcome of events is strongly tied tostructural conditions) while our understanding of objects and sense of placetends toward the under-determined (meaning that the outcome of eventsis weakly tied to structural conditions). These points serve only to magnifythe centrality of locale and practices as the glue that holds the discourse ofplaces and technologies together.
To argue that place is a spatial concept is a tautology and requiresno further backing. However, to argue that technology is a spatialconcept requires some explanation. Bruno Latour’s term technologicalnetwork is helpful in this regard. Latour has argued that, “Technologicalnetworks, as the name indicates, are nets thrown over spaces. . . .”17
By “technological network,” Latour refers, not just to “sets of objects,”but to the social networks that construct a relation between human know-ledge, human practices, and nonhuman resources—the latter beingthe stuff—steel, wood, water, etc.—from which the objects themselves aremade. His point is that technology is essentially a spatial concept becauseits operation depends upon the mobilization of human and nonhumanresources that exist in different places.18 For example, architects, clients,contractors and bankers comprise a social network of building producers.Their relationship has a social and spatial quality to it. Advances incommunications technology, many now argue, have radically collapsedthe spatial reality of these social relations. When one recognizes, however,that lumber from Oregon, windows from Pittsburgh, carpets from Mobile,and compressors from Taiwan are required to realize the materialintentions of the producers, the concrete qualities of their purely socialnetwork are materialized as a global technological network. A technologicalnetwork produces spatial links that tie the social network of producersto those nonhuman resources required for construction. This is a centralargument of this study that has, as we shall see shortly, importantimplications for how we understand an architecture of place in a con-temporary context.
My argument is that technology is best understood, not throughhistory, but through geography. History interprets reality as human
Figure 1. The dialogic qualities ofplace and technology.
17 Bruno Latour, We Have NeverBeen Modern (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1993),p. 117.
18 Bruno Latour, “Visualizationand Cognition: Thinking with Eyesand Hands,” in Knowledge andSociety: Studies in the Sociology ofCulture Past and Present (J.A.I.Press, Inc. 1986), pp. 1–40, and WeHave Never Been Modern.
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events in time. Through temporal interpretation we might better understandthe causal sequence in which humans construct artifacts. In contrast,geography interprets reality as human events in space. Through spatialinterpretation we are more likely to understand how technological networksoperate to dominate the places inhabited by humans and nonhumans. It isgeography, then, that offers methods more relevant to this inquiry becauseit is through similar spatial structures that technologies and places areconstituted.
Henri Lefebvre has argued two points that reinforce the dynamic relation-ship between technology and place that is claimed here. First, that socialspaces are produced by technology acting upon nature.19 Lefebvre’s secondpoint is that each society—or, as Marxists would have it, each mode ofproduction—produces its own peculiar type of space.20 What architectsmight extract from Lefebvre’s logic is that the differing qualities of placesare more a matter of technological practices than aesthetic choices becausesuch practices are always already spatial. For example, the practice ofcarpentry requires not only forests and citizens to house, but the spatialmechanisms that link them. This is the heart of what I will characterize asthe dialogic relation of technology and place.
In constructing this dialogic relation between place and technology, Ishould make clear that I am not building a case for environmental determin-ism, which would be to say that places cause technologies. Given differentcultural conditions, the sets of objects that dominate any particular placemight be different. Given constant environmental conditions, the inter-pretive flexibility of culture is entirely contingent. I want to argue thatenvironments do shape technologies, but are in turn shaped by them.21 As acorollary, I am not building a case for technological determinism, whichwould be to say that technologies cause places. The same logic holds thattechnologies do shape places, but are also shaped by them.22 The point hereis that the relation of place and technology is both spatial and discursive. Itis a dialogue of cause and effect, means and ends. They are inseparable, butcontingent concepts that lead inhabitants of a place to a dialogic narrowingof cultural horizons.
Following the development of the telephone, for example, businesspractices were extended by the possibility of synchronous communicationacross space. As a result, business people spent many unproductive hoursplaying “telephone tag.” Although the physical distance between peoplecould be radically collapsed, their places could be joined only by availabletechnological space. After the development of the internet, however, businesspractice has become increasingly asynchronous. The places where we workare connected to each other through wider and more porous linkages thatare independent of time. The changing technological linkages betweenplaces are both reflective of, and determinant of, how we conceive our work,perceive our co-workers and live our lives.
19 Implicit in this point is the claimthat original nature, if it ever existedat all, has long ago beenincorporated into second nature,which is a work of society. See HenriLefebvre, The Production of Space,translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,1991 [1974]), p. 190.
20 Ibid., p. 31.
21 Anthony Giddens is creditedwith developing the Theory ofStructuration which is an attempt tosynthesize the seemingly opposedprinciples of voluntarism anddeterminism. He argues that humansare free to transform socialstructures, but are also products ofthose structures. My argument here,regarding the relation of places andtechnologies, is drawn from the samelogic. See also MacKenzie andWajcman, The Social Shaping ofTechnology, p. 6.
22 Philip Brey has examined how“space-shaping technologies” havedisembedded the contemporaryphenomenon of place. Where Brey’sstudy has focused upon the role of“connectivity development” intransforming the experience of place,my own emphasis has been on whatBrey terms “local development.” SeePhilip Brey, “Space-ShapingTechnologies and the Disembeddingof Place,” in Philosophy andGeography III: Philosophies of Place(New York: Rowman and Littlefield,1998), p. 242.
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This rather lengthy definition of technology in relation to place can nowbe related back to the topic of regionalism. The dialogic structure that Ipropose to exist between technology and place is only in part consistent withthe modernist assumptions that lie behind Frampton’s Critical Regionalismhypothesis. Extension of Frampton’s hypothesis, then, requires different(nonmodern) assumptions.
THE NONMODERN THESIS
In this short essay I will not try to fully explicate the Critical Regionalismhypothesis. Between 1983 and 1990 Frampton produced no fewer than sixseparate essays that fully accomplished that goal. In my view, what might bemore helpful in the current discussion would be to examine what I’ll refer to asFrampton’s antinomy, or the unresolvable conflict between Frampton’s mixof modernism, as it is embodied in the doctrines of critical theory, andpostmodernism, as it is embodied in the place-bound doctrines of MartinHeidegger. The simplest way to illustrate this conflict is demonstrated inFigure 2. Here I have plotted the way that modernism and postmodernismvalue the concepts place and technology.23
The point of the diagram is to argue, as did Agnew, that moderns havegenerally held a negative attitude toward place because the social hierarchiesinscribed there restrict human liberty. Conversely, moderns have held apositive attitude toward technology, because it is the machines invented byus that, science claims, will free us from the drudgery of place-boundtyrannies.
The flip side of this diagram is to recognize that postmoderns, far fromconstructing a new worldview, have merely inverted the relationshipsconstructed by modern thought. Where postmoderns desire to recuperatethe propinquity of place and value it positively, they have become evermoreskeptical of modern technologies and the unintended consequences thathave followed in its wake. The malignant promises of atomic power andindustrial agriculture are salient examples of the fears nurtured bypostmoderns like Heidegger, or the American poet-farmer WendellBerry. Another way to argue this point is to claim that conservative post-moderns, at least in their attitude toward place and technology, areonly anti-moderns. In the world of architecture, a figure like Leon Krierexemplifies this position—his drawings value the premodern city as theplace that embodies ideal civic relations, but he employs technology onlyas a scenographic or instrumental tool required to realize those socialrelations.
The problem, or the opportunity found in Frampton’s Critical Regional-ism hypothesis, then, is that it relies upon assumptions drawn fromopposing philosophical traditions. Critical Regionalism proposes to valueboth technological means and the propinquity of place as positive forces inhistory. I want to stress that the problem I see here lies not in the expressed
Figure 2. The value oppositionof place and technology inmodern thought.
23 I want to stress that I am notmaking a claim in this diagram thatmodernism or postmodernism can bedescribed entirely within the limits ofthese two concepts. Rather, I onlysuggest that these concepts areparticularly helpful, as heuristicdevices to get at those qualities of ourtime that are relevant to a discussionconcerning regionalism.
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goal, which is admirable, but in the incompatibility of the assumptions uponwhich the hypothesis relies. By relying alternately upon the opposingassumptions of critical theory, which are modern, and those of MartinHeidegger, which are postmodern, Critical Regionalism is led to philo-sophical confusion.24 What is needed, in my view, is not more hybridizingof disparate sources, but a single set of philosophical assumptions thatwill lead to a coherent position. Fredric Jameson has hinted at such a direc-tion. Jameson has argued that the philosophical assumptions of CriticalRegionalism are neither modern nor postmodern.25 I agree. The question is,then, what are they?
I argue that the doctrines of Critical Regionalism are better served bynonmodern assumptions. Figure 3 demonstrates this conceptual possibility.Bruno Latour has used the term “nonmodern” to argue that we have, inpractice, never been modern at all, by which he means that modernity hasbeen so powerful, and sometimes environmentally destructive, preciselybecause it has concealed our existence within nature.26 By embracing theCartesian assumptions that position us outside nature, we have madethose nonhuman “Others” with whom we share the planet available fordomination and exploitation. If being modern means the isolation of sub-jects from objects, and the isolation of humans from nonhumans, then,I agree with Latour that we have been modern in theory, but never inpractice. It is a condition like pregnancy—one is never “sort of” modern.In this sense, modernity has been a convenient license to plunder nature, notan anthropological fact.
The nonmodern thesis proposes to erode the Cartesian distinctionsbetween humans and nonhumans. In the nonmodern view, we are no longersubjects empowered to contemplate and order up resources from afar.When we examine how the world really works we are compelled torecognize that we—riders and horses, politicians and voters, bricklayers and
Figure 3. Alternative theoreticalpositions with regard to the conceptsplace and technology.
24 In philosophical discourseHerbert Marcuse attempted a similarblending of Heidegger and Marx. InMarcuse’s case, however, the projectwas further confused by the inclusionof Freud as a third pole. To be clear, Iam not suggesting that suchhybridized texts are unhelpful, onlythat their confused assumptions leadto previously unrecognizedpossibilities.
25 Fredric Jameson, The Seeds ofTime (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1994), pp. 187–203.
26 Latour, We Have Never BeenModern.
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bricks—are “quasi-subjects” and “quasi-objects.”27 These terms suggestthat what distinguishes a subject from an object at any given moment in timeis only a temporary advantage in power relations. At one moment we areempowered to control conditions, and at the next moment we find ourselvesbeing ordered about by the digital logic of machines that determine ourhealth care benefits, or which telephone company will bill us eachmonth. My point here is that, in a nonmodern world, humans and non-humans have more in common than they don’t. In such a world, placesshow up as place-making is practiced. In other words, it is hard todistinguish between the qualities of a place and the technologies employedto make them.
This nonmodern logic further suggests that there is no effective distancebetween culture and nature. If there ever was such a thing as primevalnature—nature untouched by human invention—it has long ago dis-appeared. Far from lamenting the lost garden of human origins, nonmodernssee not ruination, but increasing opportunities in which human institutionscan creatively participate in the cycles of natural systems. Participation innature just might produce life-enhancing conditions that will benefit all usquasi-objects.
I recognize that the nonmodern thesis that I am proposing, and Figure 3in particular, leaves many questions unanswered. I should dwell on thisdiagram long enough, however, to point out that just as Critical Regional-ism constructs a positive nonmodern synthesis, a negative nonmodern syn-thesis resolves the modern dilemma equally well—at least from a purelyrhetorical point of view. The position that I label as radical nihilism in thediagram is, I think, best exemplified by the projects of Rem Koolhaas andthe Office for Metropolitan Architecture. The negative nonmodern positionis, of course, disinterested in the topic of regionalism, so that discussion canbe left for another day. When taken up, however, the first question to beasked must be: “can a double-negative constitute a life-enhancing course ofaction?” As metaphor this strategy surely has merit. As a material practice,however, I am skeptical.
For the sake of brevity, I will also leave other terms that appear inFigure 3 undefined. “Sustainability” and “eco-tech” are concepts relatedto regionalism and the current discussion, but are well documentedelsewhere.28
The term that appears in the upper left-hand corner of Figure 3,“regenerative architecture,” does, however, demand more discussionbecause it describes the heart of the nonmodern thesis. This term isborrowed from the landscape architect John Tillman Lyle. By placingthis term in this position in the diagram I am proposing to substitute theword regenerative for Frampton’s word critical. This language is pro-posed because “critical” must always refer back to the modern, dialecticassumptions embraced by “critical theory.” Just as Jameson would renovate
27 Ibid., pp. 51–55.
28 The term “sustainability” ismuch used and much contested. Foran excellent analysis of the term seeSimon Guy and Graham Farmer,“Reinterpreting SustainableTechnology: The Place ofTechnology,” in Journal ofArchitectural Education, 54/3(February 2001): pp. 140–148. Seealso, Scott Campbell, “Green Cities,Growing Cities, Just Cities: UrbanPlanning and the Contradiction ofSustainable Development,” in APAJournal (Summer 1996): pp. 296–312. The term “eco-tech” has comeinto use to describe theenvironmentally responsible projectsof those firms, like Sir NormanFoster & Partners, that werepreviously described as “high-tech”practitioners. For example, seeCatherine Slessor, Eco-Tech:Sustainable Architecture and HighTechnology (London: Thames andHudson, 1997), p. 7.
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Critical Regionalism as a postmodern doctrine, I would renovate it as anonmodern doctrine.29 I am arguing that the philosophical trajectory ofCritical Regionalism is most comfortable, not in its modernist origins, nor inpostmodern Marxism, but in a nonmodern, dialogic future.
Lyle defines a “regenerative system” as one that “. . . provides for thecontinuous replacement, through its own functional processes, of the energyand materials used in its operation.”30 In this definition, the notion thattechnology might “provide for the continuous replacement . . . of energyand materials used in its operation” does not mean that architecture mightovercome the second law of thermodynamics, and thus escape the conceptof entropy. While it is not possible for any technological system to reconsti-tute all of the energy consumed in its own creation, architecture—or“place-forms” as Frampton would have it—can certainly participate farmore effectively in the natural energy flows of a place than is the currenttechnological practice. It is through such participation that entropy might beradically reduced.
Lyle offers the concept of “regeneration” as an alternative to the nowcommon term, “sustainability,” because, in his view, to simply sustaincurrent entropic conditions is inadequate. I agree, but for different reasons.In my view, to merely maintain the status quo of material systems is anecessary, but insufficient strategy to achieve life-enhancing conditions. It isequally necessary to recognize, as does Latour, that all material systems aretechnological networks in the sense previously defined. In other words, theyare politically constituted. This political recognition requires that we rejectthe status quo of social systems as equally entropic. It is simply a passiveform of positivism (traditional science by another name) to imagine thatecologists can repair the ecosystem in isolation from political processes.Lyle’s definition of a regenerative system, then, is flawed because it ignoresthe social and political constitution of an ecosystem.
Rather than attempt a comprehensive redefinition of what a regenerativearchitecture might be in this short essay, I’ll suggest a single politicalcharacteristic that we might add to Lyle’s scientific definition: a regenerativearchitecture will seek to engage human institutions in the democratic repro-duction of life-enhancing places. This is not yet an adequate definition ofthe possibilities foreseen in this essay, but it does point toward a culturalhorizon where the dialogic relationship between technologies and places canbe better understood.31
Having now defined place and technology as the core concepts uponwhich regionalist architecture depends, I can conclude by summarizing thisdiscussion in three short propositions:
First, it is politically desirable and ecologically prudent to reproduceregionalism as a practice relevant to contemporary conditions. Regenerativearchitecture provides a framework through which we might reconstruct andextend that discourse.
29 Jameson, Seeds of Time, p.194.
30 John Tillman Lyle, RegenerativeDesign for Sustainable Development(New York: Wiley, 1994), p. 10.
31 In Technology and Place:Sustainable Architecture and theBlueprint Farm, I examine a singlecase of architectural and agriculturalproduction that provides enoughempirical evidence to support aneight point definition of regenerativearchitecture.
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Second, to do so we must understand the historic uses and abuses ofregionalism as a concept, with particular regard for the geography of powerrelations. It is both possible and desirable to make places that relate humaninstitutions to the natural cycles of a region without resorting to appealsthat authenticate, and thus legitimize, the authority of entrenched socialnetworks. Rather, a regenerative architecture might consciously, and demo-cratically, construct places that relate humans and nonhumans in life-enhancing and ever-changing practices.
Third, although Critical Regionalism offers a positive and life-enhancingdirection for architectural practice, its own assumptions are conflicted andrequire renovation as a nonmodern polemic for architectural production.The articulation of regenerative architecture is a first attempt to meet thischallenge.
In sum, these propositions are an attempt to reconstruct the suppressedpossibilities of an ongoing discourse. By examining the core concepts ofregionalism we find a vocabulary through which we might interpret thecontemporary projects of such architects as Webler + Geissler Architekten,Stuttgart; Herzog + Partner, Architekten, Munich; Renzo Piano BuildingWorkshop, Paris; and Neutelings Riedijk Architekten, Rotterdam. Theprojects of these firms, and those of six others, were collectively documentedin the 2000 exhibition, Ten Shades of Green, organized by the ArchitecturalLeague of New York and guest curated by Peter Buchanan.32
What these projects share is a dialogic attitude toward the variables oftechnology and place. In each case documented, these architects have foundunexpected technological opportunities through rigorous investigation ofecology and physics, local building practices, and/or the objects themselves.Similarly, they have found unexpected topological opportunities throughrigorous investigation of global economic structures, local sense of place,and/or the unique ordering systems of the cities and neighborhoods in whichthey have built. Most important, however, is that these architects investigatethe qualities of place through the qualities of technology, and vice versa.
My only uncertainty about the projects exhibited in Ten Shades of Greenis that too little is known about the social and political context of theirproduction. Although curator Peter Buchanan did an admirable job ofinterpreting these projects through multiple lenses that examined such avis-ual issues as “embodied energy,” “total life cycle costing,” and “communityand connection,” I would like to know more about the technologicalnetworks that were forged by them. In the scheme of things, however, theseare quibbles. The emergence of these projects, and their positive publicreception, is an extremely hopeful event, one that leads the way toward anonmodern dialogic of technologies and places.
As I have implied throughout this essay, the nonmodern dialogic requiresthat the discipline of architecture be reconstituted as a political, rather thanan aesthetic practice. Through this reconstitution the canon of architecture
32 The other firms represented inthe exhibition include: Foster andPartners, London; Clare Design,Sydney; Jourda & PerraudinArchitectes, Kassel; Andrew Lee forHackland + Dore Architects Ltd.,Edinburgh; Michael Hopkins andPartners, London; Lake/FlatoArchitects, San Antonio; Rick JoyArchitects, Tucson; Fernau &Hartman Architects, Berkeley; andBrian MacKay-Lyons ArchitectureUrban Design, Halifax. For a reviewof the exhibition, see Muschamp,“Good Buildings, and Good forYou,” New York Times (April 16,2000).
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would be re-conceived as, not a set of heroic objects, but the materialrecord of life-enhancing discourses. This proposal suggests that architectswould no longer design “things” per se. Rather, we would design thepolitical processes embodied in technological and topological choices.Indeed, we would no longer distinguish between technologies and places.
This essay was originally published in the Journal of Architectural Education,Vol. 54, No. 3 (February 2001). Portions of this article are adapted from Technologyand Place: Sustainable Architecture and the Blueprint Farm (Austin, TX: TheUniversity of Texas Press, 2001). Portions have also appeared in “Reproducing theLocal,” in Platform (School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin,Spring, 1999): 2–3, 8–9. I would like to thank Kenneth Frampton, Barbara Allen,Michael Benedikt, and Vince Canizaro for their help in revising both the text and thethesis proposed.
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IMMANENT DOMAINTECHNOLOGY Pervasive computing and the public realm
DANA CUFF (2003)
Machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans toenter theirs will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk inthe woods.
Mark Weiser
In 1991, the late Mark Weiser wrote a prescient essay for ScientificAmerican foretelling the age of ubiquitous computing which he describedas “embodied virtuality,” in contrast to then cutting edge virtual reality. Itis this very distinction that motivates the present essay. For architects andurbanists, there can be no more significant revolution in digital technologythan the spatial embodiment of computers embedded everywhere.
This essay makes the argument that while embodied virtuality hasemerged from clear historic precedent and origins, it raises four distinctimplications that hold the potential to change our ideas about space andspatial practices. First, our environment is enacted and given life, not in thesense that robots are actuated, but that the entirety of the physical environ-ment is recreated as a potential source of coordinated, interdependentactions and reactions. Whether this enacted environment is actual orimagined, as Foucault argued in the case of the panopticon, it reformulatesour notions of power and moreover, our relationship to the world aroundus. Second, visibility both literal and metaphorical is transformed. Whatwas solid and opaque becomes transparent, yet what makes the hiddenaccessible is itself invisible. Third, further erosion of the concepts of publicand private force their reconsideration. In particular, questions of surveil-lance, control, and exhibitionism render the distinction between public andprivate new. Fourth, heightened security and surveillance possibilities holdthe potential to restructure civility, or public life as we know it. In Britain, inthe four years following terrorist attacks in London, there was a fifty-foldincrease in surveillance networks. Post-9/11 America is experiencing a simi-lar expansion, with even more sophisticated systems and little debate aboutthe “Orwellian potential.”1 The consequences for the public sphere areparadoxical given the intrinsic nature of information technology to biteback—to be turned and used in ways opposed to its original intent.
This essay introduces topics for debate, essentially asking more questionsthan it answers. The four-part argument for a transformed public sphereraises provocative issues for architects and urbanists. Just as the panopticonspatially embodied a complex cultural order in the 18th century prison, so
Surveillance, voyeurism, andexhibitionism collide.
1 See David A. Fahrenthold andDavid Nakamura, “Council AttacksD.C. Surveillance Cameras.”Washington Post, November 8,2002, p. B01. There is a growingliterature and spreading activistmovement against the recent, rapidexpansion of video surveillancesystems. Two websites documentingactivist projects are from the NewYork Civil Liberties Union(www.mediaeater.com/cameras/)and from Washington, D.C.’sElectronic Privacy InformationCenter (www.epic.org/privacy/surveillance/).
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will embodied virtuality stand as the spatial manifestation of the 21st cen-tury. We are only just beginning to realize the forms pervasive computingwill assume. Consider Spielberg’s 2002 sci-fi movie Minority Report,where futuristic biometric scanners can identify shoppers and emit a sirensong of personalized consumer preferences as they pass through the mall.This portrays a near future, and it is at this generative phase of developmentthat architects and urbanists must engage pervasive technologies. Whilepervasive computing applications within the private sector, like advertising,may have a deep impact on society, I wish to explore ways that thetechnology is applied within and by the public sector, and in particular, bythe state.
Although there are clear technological precedents for the emergent, per-vasive technologies, they can be distinguished from past developments by(1) the fact that this new technology can be both everywhere and nowhere(unlike the automobile that is mobile but locatable); (2) that it acts intelli-gently yet fallibly, and its failure is complex (versus the thermostat, whichis responsive but singular and unintelligent); and (3) that intelligent systemsoperate spatially, yet they are invisible (unlike robots). For utopians likeWeiser, these distinctions suggest that an environment embedded withintelligent computing can be nuanced in compelling and even more naturalways, “as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.” Embedded networks,however, are just as likely to spark dystopic views, as have all precedingtechnological breakthroughs. Now, as pervasive computing grows, there is acertain urgency to its critical review by all those concerned with the publicsphere.
CYBURGS, THE ENACTED ENVIRONMENT
To be an agent, one must be somewhere.Robert Sack, 1988
The term “public sphere” is necessary to a discussion of embedded net-works because it implies not only physical space but also the metaphoricalspace of public discourse, social norms, interaction, and social sentiment.I want to make a strong distinction between what has been called “cyber-space” from what I will call the cyburg.2 Cyberspace is defined as having nophysicality, no matter, and no Cartesian duality because there is only themind, and communication is the only transaction: “Ours is a world that isboth everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.”3 If cyber-space is dematerialized space, the cyburg is spatially embodied computing,or an environment saturated with computing capability. It is the imminentstage of digital media that places computation in all things around us, fromour own skin and bodies (bio-technology and nano-tech medication), toour clothing, our cars, our streets, our homes, and our wildernesses. The
2 “Cyberspace” was first coinedby science fiction writer WilliamGibson, then taken up in architectureby writers like Michael Benedikt inCyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge,MA: M.I.T. Press, 1991) andChristine Boyer in Cybercities (NewYork: Princeton Architectural Press,1996).3 From “A Declaration of theIndependence of Cyberspace” byJohn Perry Barlow, who first appliedsci-fi writer William Gibson’s termcyberspace to the digital social spaceenabled by the internet. See http://www.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html.
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cyburg is the opposite of Christine Boyer’s cybercity and may indeedfunctionally sidestep all the dystopian visions of disembodied, disengaged,socially remote cyber-life.
No longer residing in the abstract space of the internet, digital communi-cating, processing, and sensing increasingly actuate the world around us.Ironically, as computing becomes more pervasive, we will exist simul-taneously within both cyberspace and cyburg-space. This dual existencecharacterizes a new postmodern space. Our own agency is enhanced by thecyburg, for we can know and act in more powerful ways. Complementingour empowerment is the newly enacted environment. Not only do the wallshave ears, but networks of eyes, brains, and data banks to use for purposefulaction. Though we are reluctant to attribute agency to objects in our sur-roundings, it is a stance that won’t survive long. These embedded systemscan be said to have intelligence insofar as they link together diverse databases and change their response according to new information as well as theconsequences of their own actions.
Baudrillard, in an essay on “Consumer Society,” says that the ecology ofthe human species has fundamentally mutated from a life surrounded byother human beings, to a life surrounded by objects.
The concepts of “environment” and “ambiance” have undoubtedlybecome fashionable only since we have come to live in less proximity toother human beings, less in their presence and discourse, and more underthe silent gaze of deceptive and obedient objects which continuously repeatthe same discourse, that of our stupefied (medusée) power, of our potentialaffluence and of our absence from one another.4
This could fundamentally mutate once again, as our objects/environmentare no longer silent but active, nor are they obedient but indirectly willful.
New capabilities of pervasive computing systems will expedite therestructuring of everyday life, since they permit what we considered thecontext to become a bonafide agent in the public arena. This is the oppositeof early projections about electronic technology. In 1964, MarshallMcLuhan wrote “The telephone: speech without walls. The phonograph:music hall without walls. The photograph: museum without walls. Theelectric light: space without walls. The movie, radio and TV: classroomwithout walls. Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously asinformation-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than hisPaleolithic ancestors.”5 Instead, speech is issued by the walls, the museum’swalls present visitors its works of art according to their particular viewinghabits, or any of a myriad curatorial themes. Street lights monitor as wellas regulate traffic by assessing variable fees and suggesting less-crowdedroutes; public park sensors scan for unusual behavior and known criminals,reporting each to the authorities; smart glass becomes more obscure and
4 Jean Baudrillard, SelectedWritings (edited by Mark Poster;Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress, 1988), p. 29.
5 Marshall McLuhan,Understanding Media: TheExtensions of Man (Cambridge, MA:M.I.T. Press, 1998), p. 283 (firstpublished 1964).
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reflective during the hottest part of the day; stores can identify your vehicleand send drive-by messages tailored to your past consumer behavior. Thesenew levels of information, security, conservation, and access are balancedby heightened possibilities of intrusion, tracking, classification, andexclusion.
Thus our urban environment can be qualitatively transformed so thatit occupies a new status and role in everyday life. We can be complicitwith the sidewalks, rejected or embraced by a park, bombarded in thestreets with advertisements.6 Marshall McLuhan, sometimes calledthe “oracle of the electronic age,” argued that the content or message wasnot just distorted but defined by the media. Had he lived to see pervasivecomputing, his thesis might have extended to question the boundarybetween space and subject, between the advertisement, the object beingadvertised, and the reception of that ad. Even if we are less technologicaldeterminist than McLuhan, his analysis sets the stage for embeddedvirtuality.7
INVISIBILITY AND EXPOSURE
Pervasive computing enhances what we can know, where we can know it,and how immediate it will be. As when Muybridge showed stop-frameaction in his time-sequence photographs, infrared sensors, microsensors,and processors can network together to build a dynamic portrayal of whatotherwise could not be known. Doctors can track the real time progress ofan ingested medication or see the internal anatomical details of a surgerypatient; firefighters can get critical information about the fire as it rages andtheir rescue efforts; the migration of endangered whales can be closelymonitored.
“Visualization technologies” provide access into what was opaque,knowledge where there was previously ignorance, bringing close what hadbeen remote—all these capabilities of pervasive computing transform ourideas about space. Now that police equipped with increasingly commonthermal imaging technology (and a search warrant8) can drive past a houseand “peer through” the walls, our ideas about not only privacy but thewalls themselves must change. Even stranger is the use of the same imagingto see where a person has been—sensors of the past tense. This new tech-nology goes beyond the often-mentioned collapse of distance promulgatedby fax, telephone, or overnight delivery. It also represents the possibilityof new knowledge that will enhance safety, inform action, and provideperspective. Publicly accessible monitors that display moment-by-momentreadings of everything from water quality to activity in the public square totraffic patterns, can provide a type of information previously unavailableand potentially community-enhancing. Pervasive computing can open upthe workings of an otherwise inaccessible mystery, whether that be theperformance of a building’s structure in an earthquake or the nanny’s
This image portrays a post-9/11proposal to reduce traffic in lowerManhattan via remote surveillancethat monitors the number of peopleper car to assess variable fees. Thefewer passengers, the more it costs todrive on the streets.
6 The formal likenesses betweenphysical urban infrastructure—thesidewalks, streets, systems of parks,sewers, and electrical grids—andpervasive computing networksfacilitate each one’s absorption of theother.
7 McLuhan also recognized theconnection between space, society,and technology. In his discourse onthe book he says: “Printing, a dittodevice, confirmed and extended thenew visual stress. It created theportable book, which men couldread in privacy and isolation fromothers.” In Marshall McLuhan’s TheMedium is the Massage (New York:Random House, 1967), p. 50.
8 See Linda Greenhouse on theSupreme Court Decision regardingprivacy and thermal imagingsearches: “Justices Say Warrant isRequired in High-Tech Searches ofHomes.” New York Times, June 12,2001.
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behavior while mom and dad are at work. There is an irony here: itis invisible, miniaturized sensors that make formerly inaccessible realmsvisible.
That irony of pervasive computing is related to longstanding criticalinquiry into the relationship of seeing and being seen. For example, RolandBarthes characterized the mythical status of the Eiffel Tower explicitlyin these terms: because it “transgresses this separation, this habitualdivorce of seeing and being seen; it achieves a sovereign circulation betweenthe two functions; it is a complete object which has, if one may say so,both sexes of sight.”9 As such, it attracts meaning like a lightning rod.The digitally embedded city, strewn with sensors, pervasively monitoredand actuated, is fundamentally the opposite of the Eiffel Tower.De-monumentalized, the seeing transpires with a spatial-disconnect—not from a distance, but from somewhere else. The possibility of being seen,on the other hand, is everywhere. But without the identifiable pointof observation (the top of the Eiffel Tower, the center of the panopticon),surveillance becomes pernicious—potentially everywhere, by any agency,for unknown purposes. Embedded systems create the opposite ofmonument, the opposite of geographic centeredness, the opposite of subject-ivity and objectivity. Consider the extensive implementation of closedcircuit TV in London as well as other cities in Great Britain. JournalistJeffrey Rosen found that the cameras, intended to reduce terrorism, wereprimarily used to watch hookers, girls in tight T-shirts, and young men ofcolor. Expected to protect society, bored security guards become voyeurs,reasserting their own discriminatory stereotypes and sending a chill overpublic behavior.10
In privacy debates, some take the position that signage to the effect of“camera surveillance in operation” must be required. But how far shouldthe signage go? It could also post: “by the London Police”; “your facialfeatures will be scrambled”; or “connected to Interpol data base.” Suchsignage under our current assumptions of the city is the public spaceequivalent of Duchamps’ “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Being watched forunclear purposes by uncertain authority contradicts basic notions of publicspace.11 The uncertainty goes hand-in-hand with nano-technologies, withembeddedness, with surveillance, and even closed-circuit TV. UnlikeMaupassant who could choose to dine in the Eiffel Tower in order to bothescape its presence and reverse its relation to the city, the surveillance stateis intrinsically omnipresent. There is no escape except perhaps toexhibitionism.
PRIVATE AND PUBLIC
Exhibitionism, the tendency to show off something that is generally held tobe private, is part of modernity and has long had its spatial component.When Napoleon III and Georges Eugene Haussmann opened the great
Traces of the people on the couchremain in the thermal image, so thatwe can now record not only aspectsof the invisible, but the past.
9 These are Barthes’ italics; TheEiffel Tower and Other Mythologies(translated by Richard Howe; NewYork: Hill and Wang, 1979), p. 5.
10 Jeffrey Rosen’s informative essayentitled “A Watchful State” waspublished just after 9/11 in the NewYork Times Magazine, October 7,2001, pp. 38–43, 85, 92–93.
11 For a comprehensive andarticulate discussion of the changingnotions of public space, seeAnastasia Loukaitou-Sideris andTridib Banerjee, Urban DesignDowntown (Berkeley, CA: U.C.Press, 1998).
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boulevards of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, cutting swaths throughworking class neighborhoods to link axial monuments, they also ushered inmodern urban life. Baudelaire wrote about this new unified city space—aspace of human activity and physical connectedness. Wide sidewalks, streetslined with trees, cafes, and multitudes of citizens from across Paris came tocharacterize the city. A new public realm was made, and with it came a newdefinition of the sixteenth century dialectic between public and private. Bysome accounts, these highly public gestures created the frame for a kind ofanonymity, so that the street both concealed and exposed its drama simul-taneously. Marshall Berman, in his analysis of modernity, says “For lovers. . . [Haussmann’s Parisian] boulevards created a new primal scene: a spacewhere they could be private in public, intimately together without beingphysically alone.”12
Haussmann’s boulevards shaped the modern city, opening intimacy topublicity across Paris, but they also promoted state control of the physicalwhole and the populace. A parallel transformation is occurring in our owndecade: the reformulation of public and private urban life resulting from asophisticated, digital connectivity. Even now, wireless networks available tocell phones and a variety of handheld devices enable people in public spaceto engage in a new primal scene: a space where they can be private in public,but unlike Haussmann’s Paris, intimately involved with no one intimatepresent, surrounded only by the company of strangers. Wireless internetalready exists at offices, airports, and college campuses, and more recentlycommercial establishments like Starbucks are instituting their own networksavailable to customers for a fee. The results are paradoxical: greater con-nectivity coupled with increased isolation, intimacy paired with distance,privacy with publicity. Although pervasive computing’s multiple effectswill take time to comprehend, new displays of intimacy and their dismalshadow, terrorism, are enabled by transformations of visibility, privacy, andpublicity.
Some of pervasive computing’s impacts are clearly extensions of thosewrought by the telephone and the automobile, heightening individualprivacy in the city, collapsing spatial distance, and restructuring physicalspace. But some consequences are unique to the electronic age. Perhaps themost profound impact concerns the realms of public and private, tradition-ally separated by semi-public/semi-private zones. This continuum has servedto describe regions of social life and space for centuries. Public life, publicspace, and public man have stood for a certain notion of civility wherechance interactions among strangers produce a societal tolerance. Manytechnological advances and social transformations have been accused ofweakening the public sphere, including the automobile and the concomitantsuburbs, the air conditioner, the elevator, and resultant skyscraper. However,only the most recent technological innovations threaten to dissolve thepublic-private continuum altogether. This is possible when what was once
12 Marshal Berman, All That IsSolid Melts Into Air (New York:Penguin, 1982), p. 152.
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considered private is integrated and exposed in public—our intimacies (e.g.cameras that watch bedrooms and bathrooms on reality TV) and our secrets(e.g. medical, legal, and financial data bases linked to a national identitycard).
In The Fall of Public Man, sociologist Richard Sennett decries the crisisof public culture, arguing that public life had succumbed to an ideology ofintimacy and personality, in turn sparking the transmutation of politicalinto psychological order. If we agree with Sennett, then the erodedboundaries between public and private are merely further dissolved by theadvent of embodied virtuality. But while Sennett saw public man in a freefall, it may be that pervasive computing in some sense restores his notion“that people grow only by processes of encountering the unknown.”13
Might the continuous representation of the unfamiliar, the unseen, and theremote counteract isolationism and withdrawal from public life? Similar tothe way that Jacob Riis’s photographs of the slums at the turn of the 20thcentury showed “how the other half lives,” there are ways that remotesensing could expose previously hidden worlds. To adopt the view that theprivate is public requires the replacement of Sennett’s public man with asubject no longer bound by conventional public-private distinctions.
Privacy, at the other end of the traditional polarity, has been definedas the achievement of desired levels of boundary control and access.14 Thus,I have privacy if I can keep unwanted visitors from my home or resist intru-sions while engrossed in a book. Indeed, privacy has been formulated as thecentral concept integrating socio-spatial behavior. This notion of privacyhinges on individual subjectivity: my desired levels of access, my boundaries.While it seems obvious to anyone experiencing “cell yell” (private cell phoneconversations audibly broadcast to proximate strangers) that boundariesare difficult to establish, it may be less obvious that these boundaries arecorroding. The continuum model, from private to semi-public, to public,might instead be replaced by a nested metaphor where publicity has infectedprivacy in every conceivable context, and vice versa. Moreover, embeddednetworks undermine the pretense that we control our environment orour boundaries within it—a pretense fundamental to the constructof privacy.
The usurpation of privacy by means of technology is a modern phenom-enon, but not a new one. Indeed, the concerns about pervasive computing’sintrusion into everyday routines were echoed in Rudofsky’s 1955 book onAmerican domesticity, and an unnervingly diminished solitude in daily life.He worried about media technologies replacing conversation with merelistening:
The latest invention in the art of listening introduces a prankish elementinto what is left of social intercourse. The pocket recorder, a gadgetheralded as “of unparalleled usefulness,” can be counted upon to remove
13 This is the concept of public lifeconstructed by Richard Sennett in hisseminal book, The Fall of PublicMan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1977), p. 295.
14 Irwin Altman offered this classicdefinition of privacy in TheEnvironment and Social Behavior(Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1975).
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the last dregs of privacy from our lives. Originally designed for militaryand diplomatic secret service, it enables everyone to strike out a line ofone’s own murky practices; . . . “Just stick it in a pocket and pin a tinymike under your lapel (or wear the facsimile wristwatch mike!)—[thejoyous exclamation point is theirs, not mine]—and you can record thewords of anything within about twenty feet; you simply put your handin your pocket and flick a silent switch.” What, one may ask, makesthe promoters of the new furtiveness so sure that we shall keep ontalking? 15
He goes on to imagine counter spying techniques, like scattering “anti-acoustic confetti” all over our houses. Sounding like an inversion of the“smart dust” being developed for military purposes, Rudofsky’s concernsmay have been technologically prescient but socially off-base. Legalprivacy standards maintain social norms, but at the same time socialnorms evolve so that “the last dregs of privacy” are redefined. Perhapsthe increasing numbers of surveillance cameras will have no more chill-ing effect on social life than did the tape recorder. But on the other hand,one could say Rudofsky’s worry was merely misplaced: Walkmans, notsecret listening devices, are the pocket recorder’s greatest blow to socialintercourse.
If our awareness of the new social roles for wireless technologies wasgrowing before September 11, 2001, it became our collective nightmare aslast, loving calls were made from cell phones at the top of the World TradeCenter and from within the fourth plane before it crashed in Pennsylvania.As it turned out, terrorists too were linked by cellular technologies thatsuited their mobile, network-structured organization. In the wake of 9/11, asurveillance society lurks. We can look again at the case of Great Britain:after terrorist attacks in London in the early 1990s, installation of closed-circuit cameras to surveil city streets and squares increased dramatically.In 1994, 79 city centers had surveillance systems; there were 440 suchsystems by 1998; and by 2001 there were over 2.5 million surveillancecameras across Britain. There, the average citizen is photographed threehundred times each day.16 By contrast, the average American was photo-graphed seven times a day in 2001 by surveillance cameras. Since 9/11,there has been a proliferation of surveillance systems like the 100cameras proposed for Times Square, and 300 for Los Angeles InternationalAirport.
The impact of ubiquitous surveillance cannot yet be known, but it isclear that the security interests of the state have negative consequences forindividual privacy. The Patriot Act, signed into law just one month after9/11, expedites counterterrorism efforts by easing restrictions on electronicsurveillance. Our online activities are more likely to be monitored and datais easier to collect from I.S.P.s in what is often called “domestic spying.” In
15 Bernard Rudofsky, Behind thePicture Window (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1955), p. 196.
16 Rosen, “A Watchful State.”
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Washington, D.C., police activated a “command center” after 9/11 to moni-tor in integrated ways criminal data bases and surveillance cameras thatoperate in “shopping areas, streets, monuments, and other public places inthe U.S. capitol.”17 Proposals for a “smart” national identity card resurfaceregularly, with computer chips to identify the user, limit access, and trackthe user’s criminal history, location, travel speed, and financial transactions,for starters.
We can be certain that privacy will not be the only terrain where socialimpacts will result. Sociologist Anthony Giddens describes the “disembed-ding” mechanisms of modernity. By this he means those mechanisms thatbreak apart social relations across space and time, that remove local controlof resources, services, information, and even the mechanisms themselves.Pervasive computing used as a tool of surveillance is a disembedding,abstract mechanism, because the sensors, processors, and actuators areanonymous. Thus, although any abstract system requires trust of theanonymous (e.g. that nuclear reactors are built well enough to withstandterrorist attacks), that trust is intertwined with intrinsic doubt. The streetsare surveilled by the police, yet we know that the police are not alwaystrustworthy and that surveillance systems can be hacked. The pervasivenessof the systems is astounding: as early as 1998, a map of “every camera,public or private, which records people in public space” in Manhattandocumented 2397 such cameras.18
It may be the urban designer’s task to create physical space or new formsof visibility to restore social bonds. In their project entitled “Refresh,” archi-tects Diller and Scofidio created a project from a dozen office webcams. Inconsidering why these cameras exist, the architects say:
The live cam phenomenon can be thought of as a public service, or a modeof passive advertisement, or it may be a new type of exhibitionism, or self-disciplinary device. The desire to connect to others in real time may bedriven by a response to the “loss” of the public realm. But however variedthe motives, live cam views always seem casual and lacking dramaticinterest and content; they appear unmediated. Despite this apparentinnocence, cameras are willfully positioned, their field of vision is carefullyconsidered, and behavior within that field cannot help but anticipate thelooming presence of the global viewer.19
In such applications reside possibilities for critique and modificationof pervasive surveillance. And the critique emanating from the artscan spark debate that contributes to evolving social norms. Consider LarsSpuybroek’s D-Tower project for Doetinchem in the Netherlands. Thewhimsical multi-media project includes a website that surveys participatingtownspeople’s emotions on a monthly basis, and those emotions are inturn displayed in differing colored surfaces of the tower: when it is deep red,
Diller and Scofido’s first web artproject, for the Dia Foundation,investigates live office webcams.
18 See www.mediaeater.com/cameras.
19 See http://www.diacenter.org/dillerscofidio/intro.html.
17 Reuters, “Washington PlansUnprecedented Camera Network.”New York, February 13, 2002; storyID: 593227.
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passersby know the town is feeling more love and happiness than hate andfear.
PUBLIC LIFE
The examples above hint at possible ways pervasive computing will nudgea newly defined public life into existence. It will be part of the historicaltrajectory of technology’s socio-spatial implications for public life, as is thedevelopment of plate glass with the resultant shop window, and the tele-vision with the interiorization of residential space. In “A Manifesto forCyborgs” (cybernetic organisms, like us), Donna Haraway argues thatdigital capabilities will transform everyday life: “No longer structured bythe polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technologicalpolis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, thehousehold.”20 Just as Haraway sees the previously private household’srestructuring, there are parallels in the public sphere where common groundgrows more individuated and privatized because of wireless technology.And public space can incorporate, even publicize, that which was remoteand inaccessible: a town broadcasts its emotions; a school projectsa children’s collaborative art project as it develops or webcasts their musiclesson.
Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon captured a formal-social symbiosis,whereby a spatial model arose to typify and exemplify a complex nexusin cultural history. Koolhaas’ description of the skyscraper as proximatestacking of unrelated lives captured the essence of the twentieth century.The imminent equivalent is the city of embodied virtuality: the cyburg forcyborgs. The embedding of tiny computers and their networks into the citybrings promise and uncertainty. Creating a realm of dispersed displacement,surveillance aims toward a particular space or spaces. It, and we know notwhat or who “it” is, observes us and our actions, emotions, histories, andreactions. These observations may be known to us (screening for passenger-carried weapons at airports), uncertain to us (visible cameras linked tounknown processors, such as face recognition systems and criminal databases), or opaque to us (cyber-interceptions of potential terrorist communi-cations). Thus, the actuated environment, our actuated surroundings, cannow “manage” not only that which is capable of being seen and known,but also that which is not capable of being seen, and about which we remainignorant.
In a realm of dispersed displacement, discourse about centers and mar-gins becomes irrelevant. For lovers walking hand in hand while speakingsimultaneously by cell phone to their respective spouses, spatial dislocationis crucial and unquestioned. In this they remain secure. But they cannot becertain even about the immediate other: with whom is she speaking? Is shewith me, or is she elsewhere? In this context, the other is not just distracted;neither is she absent. Instead, she is both present and absent in a way that
D-Tower, a tower, a questionnaire,and a website for the city ofDoetinchem. (Project by LarsSpuybroek of NOX studio inRotterdam, in collaboration withartist Q. S. Seafijn, 1998–2003.)
20 Donna Haraway, “A Manifestofor Cyborgs: Science, Technologyand Socialist Feminism in the1980s.” Socialist Review, 15/2, no80, March–April 1985, p. 67.
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was not possible prior to wireless technologies whereby everywhere isconnected. There is no spatial logic nor spatial guarantees for intimacy.Publicity likewise embodies uncertainty. Public life is spatially located, butalso displaced and dispersed, requiring new logics and new physical forms.
CONCLUSION
The age of pervasive computing is imminent; its implications for archi-tecture and for the city are just beginning to emerge. It is clear thatubiquitous and mobile systems will alter fundamental ideas about publicand private, civic life, invisibility, and environmental agency. Each ofthese terrains is situated within the domain of design, giving rise to newarchitectural concerns. The existing literature projects consequenceswith either a utopian tone (as with Weiser’s seminal article of 1991 andWilliam Mitchell’s e-topia) or a dystopic view (e.g. Rosen’s essay on BritishCCTV).21 Instead, in this preliminary exploration of issues, I have triedto present a double view, utopian and dystopian, equally aware of thepromise and uncertainty that lies within embedded networks. Under suchcircumstances, the architect’s goal must be to embed civility in a pervasivelycomputerized public realm.
If the “public geography of a city is civility institutionalized” and ifcivility is, as Sennett puts it, “treating others as though they were strangersand forging a social bond upon that social distance,” then the designer mustinvent means to embed the possibility of civility into both new pervasivetechnologies and new urban geographies.22 What does it mean to embedcivility in the public sphere? I would offer three linked guiding principles,information, choice, and control, which architects must find ways toembody in physical form. The first goal is to provide useful informationabout the embedded networks so that the public maintains an awarenessabout otherwise imperceptible systems. Information then contributes topeople’s ability to make choices about their public lives, and simultaneouslyreturns to them a degree of control. A parallel from the 1960s and early1970s: the Vietnam war protests and “love-ins” that rejuvenated life inurban America’s public sphere were catalyzed by television broadcasting.Anti-surveillance web-camera performances in public settings are a similarphenomenon. Until awareness of pervasive computing is heightened, thelack of public debate restricts architecture’s full participation in the projectto embed civility.
Nevertheless, the simultaneous existence of cyberspace and cyburg-spacecreates a socio-spatial-digital arena like none before. Its origins are inher-ently modern: the modern world of contradiction and display, and where, asMarx famously put it, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy isprofaned.” In Giddens’ conception of the late-modern condition of increas-ingly abstract systems, he cites intensifying conditions of risk and danger.Within his array of risks, one component is the created environment or
Digital House. (Project by Haririand Hariri, 1998.) Both interiorand exterior walls are liquidcrystal displays in thisdemonstration of new electronictechnology for House Beautifulmagazine.
21 Mitchell’s e-topia argues thatdigital technology will transform thecity in myriad positive ways(Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press,2000).
22 Sennett, The Fall of Public Man,p. 264.
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socialized nature. This is “the infusion of human knowledge into thematerial environment.” Giddens identifies rightly “the altered character ofthe relation between human beings and the physical environment.”23 What Ihave called the enacted environment, Weiser’s embodied virtuality, is know-ledge extended such that the material environment is infused also with intel-ligent action and reaction, data gathering, surveillance, and networkedinformation. The intensity of risk increases substantially, but so can theintensity of experience.
Giddens concludes his exegesis of modernity with the ways it might beengaged, which parallel the ways an era of embodied virtuality could beengaged: pragmatic acceptance, sustained optimism, cynical pessimism, andradical engagement. The last is the domain architects and urbanists mustinhabit when designing to provide information, choice, and control. Radicalengagement, or what Giddens at one point calls utopian realism, is indeedthe ken of designers who use their expertise to reveal, contradict, play with,or intervene in pervasive computing. As a first step, designers are projectinginformation on surfaces that were formerly static. Works are increasinglyinteractive and customized. Here, the opportunities for informed choice andcontrol can grow in complexity, sophistication, and diversity over thecoming decade. The immanent domain of a newly public realm dependsupon it.
This essay was originally published in the Journal of Architectural Education,Vol. 57, No. 1 (September 2003).
Spuybroek’s water pavilion for theMinistry of Water Management andthe Destra Expo (1994–1997) in theNetherlands. The buildingincorporated digital sensors toactivate light, sound, and projectionsaccording to the visitors’ movementsthrough space.
23 These two quotes are taken fromAnthony Giddens’ TheConsequences of Modernity(Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress, 1990), pp. 124 and 127respectively.
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CITY OF DREAMSTECHNOLOGY Virtual space/public space
EUGENIA VICTORIA ELLIS (2000)
ARIADNE’S VEIL
It has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason why I wasdescribing it to you: from the number of imaginary cities we must excludethose whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, aninner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, it is as with dreams:everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpecteddream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, likedreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourseis secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and every-thing conceals something else.
Marco Polo to Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities 1
Theseus stood at the gates to the labyrinth, a ball of pitch in one hand and aball of thread in the other: one to be used to silence the Minotaur’s bite, theother to retrace his steps.2 Theseus had been armed with these dual pelotonsby Ariadne to face the two great dangers of the labyrinth: the monsterwithin and the maze’s entangling inextricability. Theseus was successful inboth slaying the Minotaur and in escaping Daedalus’s creation. His victorydance at Delos with the children who had escaped with him, first circling inone direction and then winding back, mimicked not only the path they tookthrough the labyrinth on their escape, but also celestial harmony: the firstpattern of the dance imitated the turning of the heavens from east to west;the second enacted the orbits of the planets from west to east; and in thethird movement all stood still like the earth, around which everythingelse circles. It has been said that both the human architect Daedelus andthe divine creator crafted their circular complexities as if with compasses,the center being the only certain point and origin of their creations.
Since archaic times the idea of the labyrinth has been linked with citiesand so, too, have most mazes been named after cities, for example, Troy,Jerusalem, Babylon, Nineveh, and Jericho.3 Movement through a city’sarchitecture was the dance; and the space of the city was the space ofritual. Neither architecture nor city was an abstract, geometrical entity.4
According to Isidore of Seville, “urbs” is derived from “orbis” becauseancient cities were always circular in form.5 Jericho was circled by theHebrews for seven days and, like Ariadne, Rahab helped the Hebrew spiesescape from the city with the aid of a scarlet thread. Troy was the archetypal
1 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities,translated by William Weaver (NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1974), pp. 43–44.
2 Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea ofthe Labyrinth (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1994), pp. 68,123–128.
3 Doob, p. 116.
4 Alberto Pérez-Gomez, “The Mythof Daedalus,” AA Files 10 (1985):52.
5 Isidore de Seville, Etymologiae15.2.3.
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city for many medieval people, and the circling Trojan Ride became knownas the founding of the Roman city.
The ritual dance was related to the ritual of the foundation of citiesin Roman times,6 when an essentially invisible ritual created an invisiblewall that made the city secure; the ritual was so important that it had tobe re-enacted periodically to re-inaugurate the founding of the city. Inclassical times, the founding of a city began with the calling of its founderin a dream.7 The city would then be inaugurated by a recognized seer, anaugur who was especially gifted: one who could see heavenly bodies thatare invisible to the ordinary mortal. The augur would project this celestialvision onto the landscape and oversee the plowing of a furrow around thesite discovered by its founder.
The primordial idea of the city is contained within the labyrinth: adialectic of seemingly opposing characteristics that reveals order out ofapparent chaos. The labyrinth itself is a splendidly ordered complexitythat confuses us only when we cannot comprehend its underlying system.Cities are labyrinths of a dual nature: inherent within their complex artisticorder is a bewilderment experienced by someone so immersed in this orderthat its abstract pattern cannot be seen without the vision provided bythe change in perspective obtained when elevated above the confusion.Ariadne’s thread is required to provide that insight when one is tangledwithin the turnings of the maze. The maze itself has characteristic dualitiesthat are all held in balance and are all perspective-dependent: blindness andinsight, chaos and order, confusion and clarity, path and plan, unicursalityand multicursality, vision from within time and from beyond eternity.8
There are two varieties of labyrinth: the unicursal maze and the multicursalmaze.
Heavenly Jerusalem, medievalwoodcut.
6 Hermann Kern, “Labyrinth-Cities, City-Labyrinths,” Daidalos3 (1982).
7 Ivan Illich, H2O and the Watersof Forgetfulness (Dallas: The DallasInstitute of Humanities and Culture,1985), pp. 12–15.
8 Doob, p. 189.
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The unicursal model has its origins in the visual arts.9 Its structural basisis a single path that twists and turns, defining the most circuitous routeconceivable and the longest possible way to get to the center; there are nochoices, the maze-walker simply goes where the path leads. It has only twocertain points: entrance and center. The characteristic quality of movementthrough the unicursal maze is steady and continuous, and involves timemore than decision. Ariadne’s thread is not required.
The multicursal model derives from the literary tradition.10 Its structuralbasis in contrast incorporates an extended series of bivia, or an array ofchoices. The multicursal maze is dangerous even if no minotaur is lurking,for one risks getting lost and remaining perpetually imprisoned. The charac-teristic quality of movement through the multicursal maze is halting andepisodic, with each fork or alternative requiring a pause for thought anddecision, and emphasizes an individual’s responsibility for his or her ownfate. This maze is potentially inextricable and escape depends not onlyon the maze-walker’s intelligence, memory, and experience, but also onthe kind of guidance provided by Ariadne’s thread: insight, instructive prin-ciples, signposts, or advice along the way.
In a unicursal maze one learns by precept; in a multicursal maze, bydialectic. The need for a seer or visionary to clarify the meaning of dreamsand visions, to provide Ariadne’s insight, illustrates the dual or multipleperspectives implied by mazes, which can be seen in part (from within) orwhole (from above, or through memory and insight).11 What seems to us tobe an inextricable prison is simply what divine order looks like when viewedfrom within time, where a linear and sequential perspective is natural.12
From a more enlightened or celestial point of view, the confusing maze is asimple and well-ordered structure.
The multicursal labyrinth has origins in the literary traditions of classicalantiquity, and its attributes can be seen replicated in present-day computersystems logic, particularly in what has come to be known as hypertext. Theunicursal labyrinth can be compared to analogue technology: the recordingof sound and visual information through a serial or linear process, the accessof which is sequential, for example, a cassette recording or video tape. Themulticursal model is similar to digital technology, which removes the needfor sequence by allowing direct access to a particular piece of informationthrough a series of bivia (an array of choices) by branching throughnetworks, for example, a compact disc.
The word text derives originally from the Latin word for weaving andfor interwoven material. The electronic linking which has reconfigured textas we have known it has created a hypertext: a form of textuality thatpermits multilinear reading paths.13 Hypertext can be conceived of as a vastassemblage, which is defined by Derrida in Speech and Phenomena: “Theword ‘assemblage’ seems more apt for suggesting that the kind of bringing-together proposed here has the structure of an interlacing, a weaving or a
Typical circular unicursaldiagrammatic.
Example of an early multicursallabyrinth of the so-called Chartrestype.
10 Doob, pp. 46–48.
11 Doob, p. 188.
9 Doob, p. 48.
12 Doob, p. 130.
13 George P. Landow,Hypertext: The Convergence ofContemporary Critical Theory andTechnology (Baltimore, MD: TheJohns Hopkins University Press,1992), pp. 21–22.
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web, which would allow the different threads and different lines of sense orforce to separate again, as well as being ready to bind others together.”14
In S/Z, Roland Barthes describes an “ideal text” that has attributes of amulticursal labyrinth and could be used to define characteristics of com-puter hypertext: “In this ideal text the networks are many and interact,without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy ofsignifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; wegain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritativelydeclared to be the main one.”15 Hypertext, also referred to as hypermedia,16
is a computer matrix composed of blocks of words, images, sound, or otherforms of data that are linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, ortrails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by theterms link, node, network, web, and path.17
In The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch studies the mental image of the cityformed by its citizens; and accordingly, defines its clarity upon the ease withwhich its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherentpattern.18 Coincidentally, two of the elements Lynch uses to define the city’simage are node and path. Paths are the channels along which the citizen-observer moves, such as streets, walkways, and transit lines.19 Nodes occurat the crossing of paths and are often the foci of civic activity. The texture ofthe city is dependent upon the weaving together of nodes and paths, whichin turn determine the pattern and geometry of the city’s fabric.
The reading of the image of the city is hypertextual and is perspective-dependent: moving through the city is a labyrinthine dance; its imageunfolds through movement along a path; at each node there are alternativesthat require reflection; there are many entrances and no right one; and thereis an underlying order that can seldom be appreciated except at a distance.When retracing one’s steps through the city, Ariadne’s thread weaves a veil.20
As with the labyrinth, inherent within the city and the computer is a dialecticof oppositions that both bewilders and illuminates, the attributes of whichtogether define their contradictory spatial logics: one side of the analogyhas to do with the construction of space, the other the construction ofinformation networks; one side is material, the other immaterial.21
COMPUTER MATRIX/CITY METRIC
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions oflegitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathemat-ical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from thebanks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constella-tions of data. Like city lights, receding.
William Gibson, Neuromancer 22
14 Jacques Derrida, Speech andPhenomena, trans. David B. Allison(Evanston, Illinois: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1973), p. 131.
15 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans.Richard Miller (New York: Hill andWang, 1974), pp. 5–6.
16 Landow, p. 4.
17 Landow, p. 3.
18 Kevin Lynch, The Image of theCity (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T.Press, 1988), pp. 2–3.
19 Lynch, p. 47.
20 The notion of the labyrinth as anetwork, and of meandering throughthe city and in the process weaving aveil, was inspired by MarcoFrascari’s article, “A New Angel/Angle in Architectural Research: TheIdeas of Demonstration,” Journal ofArchitectural Education 44/1(November 1990): pp. 11–19; inparticular “. . . a meander is alabyrinth that works as a net. In a netevery point is connected with everyother point.” (p. 13)
21 M. Christine Boyer, Cybercities:Visual Perception in the Age ofElectronic Communication (NewYork: Princeton Architectural Press,1996), p. 15.
22 William Gibson, Neuromancer(New York: Ace Books, 1984), p. 51.
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The spaces we inhabit, the social relationships we form, and our modesof perception have historically been influenced by the way we receiveinformation. For example, prior to the printing press, information wasrelayed orally and its transmission relied upon memory. Thought patternswere based upon the ability to think in terms of the inter-relationshipsencouraged through the use of mnemonic devices.23 Before newspapers werereadily available, people congregated in churches to hear sermons that werecoupled with news about local and foreign affairs. Eventually the newspaperbegan to replace the pulpit and churchgoers learned about local affairs insilence at home.24 The format of the newspaper, periodical, and illustratedmagazine with texts laid out in columns of disparate narrations andjuxtaposed to illustrations, required the reader to develop a new way ofprocessing information from fragmented data.25 With today’s electronicdata processing and digital technology, we will have to develop new modesof perception that will allow us to navigate through the web-like disjunctivearray of highly mediated information.26
The computer matrix is a space of rupture and discontinuity that parallelsthe fragmented space perceived by a society continuously in motion:driving the freeways and shopping at the mall.27 The space of the computerrecedes into an electronic matrix that pulls the user into a totalwithdrawal from the world, distancing engagement with one’s surroundsand the city itself.28 A transformation of our cities is taking place suchthat the material space of the city metric, which once was measured bytraditional western geometry, work, buildings, and the machine, isbeing replaced by the ethereal space of the postindustrial city, which isbeginning to be defined by the computer matrix, leisure, cyberspace, andthe information network.
The public realm of the ancient city was representational. Not only didactivities of a public and collective nature occur there, but the public realmitself also symbolized those activities.29 The medieval city belonged to themerchants and artisans. The church, the market square, the buildings of theguilds, and the city gates were its representational elements. The publicrealm was defined by its axial roads (paths) and their crossing (node) wherethe market square and church were usually located. The medieval cityand its architecture were crafted according to the guild tradition whoseprinciples were transmitted, like an aural literary tradition, by rules ofthumb.
On the other hand, the Renaissance city belonged to the politicians andpolitics. The representational elements were its public monuments such ascivic buildings, obelisks, and coliseums, which in themselves were meta-phors of collective or ceremonial functions. The medieval marketplace,which was generally located at its geometrical center, became the actualcenter of political power. The Renaissance city and its architecture weredesigned according to Platonic geometrical principles and conceived as total
23 Lewis Mumford, Technics andCivilization (New York: HarcourtBrace Jovanovich, 1963), pp. 136–137.
24 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ThePrinting Press as an Agent of Change,vol. I (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1979), pp. 131–132.
25 Walter Benjamin, “The Authoras Producer,” Reflections, trans.Edmund Jephcott (New York:Schoken Books, 1978), pp. 224–225.
26 Boyer, pp. 8–9.
27 Boyer, p. 19.
28 Boyer, p. 11.
29 Alan Colquhoun, “TheSuperblock,” Essays in ArchitecturalCriticism (Cambridge, MA: TheM.I.T. Press, 1981), pp. 83–102.
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projects. The city and its buildings were an act of an individual mind andwere constructed by builders who merely carried out the visions of this mindaccording to a preconceived plan. The mental image of the historical city,whether based on commerce or politics, is one of interaction, ceremony, andritual provided by a public realm that was representational of thoseactivities.
The modern city, if it can be said to provide any mental image at all,merely represents an inventory of objects of material wealth. The meta-phorical status of today’s postindustrial city is one of a consumptivepostmodern society gradually consuming itself.
The American city of today is a symbol of both the real and virtualdistance created by the shift from nineteenth-century industrial productionto contemporary information technology. This has been a long-term processwhich began in the 1930s due to the highways created by the Works Pro-gress Administration and the single-family cottage subsidies funded by theFederal Housing Administration. Urbanism was replaced by suburbanismdue to the diminished perception of distance provided by travel in an auto-mobile over accessible and connected roadways. Like the market square andthe church, but without the symbolic significance, the shopping center atthe crossroads of highways began to appear to support these suburbancommunities.30
According to Fredric Jameson, features of a new type of postindustrialsociety began to emerge: a mobile automobile culture, new types of con-sumption, the pervasive penetration of advertising and media throughoutsociety, and the replacement of the traditional tension between city andcountry with the suburb and universal standardization.31 For this post-modern culture, reality has transformed into images and time has becomefragmented into a series of perpetual presents.
The change from an urban society to a suburban society (completedby the time of the 1990 census, which recorded a suburban majority forthe first time in this nation’s history) parallels the radical break frommodernism to postmodernism: from an industrial economy based on themachine and the production of tangible goods and services to a post-industrial economy based on electronic technology and the production ofthe intangible commodity of information, or, in other words, a basic shiftfrom traditional manufacturing to more service-oriented businesses. Thisshift has necessitated a restructuring of our cities in response to this changein status.
Today, the images associated with the industrial city are negative:declining economic base, pollution, the past, and the old, a city on its waydown. Being in the industrial city is associated with work and the worldof production. In contrast, the postindustrial city is seen as the bright newfuture: clean, efficient, crime-free, high-tech, on the economic upswing,based on consumption and exchange. Postindustrial life is associated with
30 Neil Harris, “Spaced-Out at theShopping Center,” The Public Faceof Architecture, ed. Nathan Glazerand Mark Lilla (New York: The FreePress, 1987), pp. 320–328.
31 Fredric Jameson,“Postmodernism and ConsumerSociety,” The Anti-Aesthetic, Essayson Postmodern Culture, ed. HalFoster (Port Townsend, WA: BayPress, 1983), p. 125.
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the world of leisure as opposed to work.32 The postindustrial city can becategorized into three broad classifications: cities of fragments, fortress-cities, and cities of the “new urbanism.”
Cities of fragments are those cities like Houston or Atlanta, which havedisconnected metropolitan fringes comprised of suburb after suburb.33 Thestructure of these cities is formless, fluid, and homogeneous without centeror periphery. They are defined by the automobile and the highway, arethinly populated with occasional spots of density, and appear limitless asthey fade into the countryside. Their symbolic identity lies with thehighways and beltways that define them as networks of endless circulationwithout space or dimension.
Cities like Detroit and Los Angeles might be described as fortress-citiesthat clearly demarcate social boundaries. These cities openly exposeAmerican apartheid: whites reside safely in the suburbs, while poorminorities live in the city.34 For example, due to advances in technicalproduction and the streamlining of factory processes, Detroit’s urban auto-mobile factories have been replaced by suburban distribution factories.Detroit’s residents must flow out of the city in search of work and food,only to return to a neighborhood that is more reminiscent of a Third-Worldcolony than an urban American community. Detroit’s poor residents areheld prisoners in a city with an urban center replete with the empty carcassesof abandoned skyscrapers, which were left by corporations who discoveredit to be safer and more economical to operate from a suburban locationelectronically connected to the rest of the business world. This is a far cryfrom a decade or so ago when the urban skyscraper was a symbol of acorporation’s power and success. On the other hand, Los Angeles hascreated a dense, compact, multifunctional core area of billion-dollar,block-square megastructures from the erasure of its historical core.35 Thisnew Downtown is comprised of superblocks and has a self-containedcirculation system, every amenity imaginable for the nine-to-five busi-nessperson, and an impenetrable edge defining it as a citadel separate fromthe rest of the central city. The affluent in LA live in fortified enclavesoutside the city limits complete with encompassing walls and gates, securitycameras, restricted entry-points with guards, both public and private policeservices, and privatized roadways.36
Cities of the “new urbanism” can be conceived of as both cities of frag-ments and fortress-cities. These cities are being developed in suburbanlocations based on a nostalgic urban structure reminiscent of the historiccity but without the context provided by the density of population and cul-tural diversity.37 These cities can be developed anywhere any time. They areloosely based on the notion of a small town of mixed-use occupancy inthree- to four-story buildings, generally comprised of streetfront retail withresidential on the floors above. This ideal urban core might then be accessedon foot by the newly built surrounding neighborhoods. The urban planning
33 Uwe Drost, “TheTransformation of Urban Identity ina Post-Industrial Society,” Body,Technology, and Design: Proceedingsof the 11th Annual A.C.S.A.Technology Conference (1993): 122–125.
34 Richard A. Plunz, “Detroit isEverywhere,” Architecture (April1996): 55–61.
35 Mike Davis, City of Quartz(New York: Vintage Books, 1992),pp. 223–226.
36 Udo Greincaher, “The NewReality: Media Technology andUrban Fortress,” Journal ofArchitectural Education 48/3(February 1995): 176–84.
37 Heidi Landecker, “Is NewUrbanism Good for America?”Architecture (April 1996): 68–77.
32 John Rennie Short, Lisa M.Benton, William Luce, and JudithWalton, “The Reconstruction of aPostindustrial City,” Journal ofArchitectural Education 50/4 (May1997): 244–245.
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of these cities is generally modeled on the desirable qualities of walkablecities such as Charleston, South Carolina, or Venice, Italy. Besides the goodsand services required for the inhabitants, the industry to support this type ofcity is anything within driving distance or that is accessible electronically tothe rest of the world. Unfortunately, these developments ultimately attract asingle class of resident and are destined to become privatized middle- andupper-income enclaves.
The postindustrial city is increasingly making apparent the sharp divisionbetween those who have technology and those who have not. Traditionalpublic space is disappearing and being replaced by privatized pseudo-publicrealms. The richness and character of any urban environment comes from asheer density, which necessitates that there are people on the streets at alltimes of the day co-mingling races, creeds, and cultures. This city is the cityof dreams: where people from different backgrounds and lifestyles brushshoulders with each other, which spurs an imagination of the unknown. Theimaginable can only be triggered by difference. Diversity is the connectingthread of the city of dreams.
THE DANCE OF SUPERABUNDANT LIFE
The comparison between the forms of play discovered and created bymen, and the uninhibited movement of play exhibited by superabundantlife, can teach us that precisely what is at issue in the play of art is notsome substitute dream-world in which we can forget ourselves. On thecontrary, the play of art is a mirror that through the centuries constantlyarises anew, and in which we catch sight of ourselves in a way thatis often unexpected or unfamiliar: what we are, what we might be, andwhat we are about.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Play of Art”38
The universal civilization and homogenous culture we find ourselvesin today is a result of a global commodification, which was forecast byWalter Benjamin early in the twentieth century when he wrote that the“world exhibitions glorify the exchange value of commodities. They createa framework in which commodities’ intrinsic value is eclipsed.”39 PaulRicoeur has described this situation as one in which mankind is approachingen masse a basic consumer culture where everywhere “one finds the samebad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminum atrocities,the same twisting of language by propaganda, etc.”40 Globalization andunification of commodities have created a society that has lost the object ofits desire. The object no longer has value in itself as an object inasmuch as itsvalue is dependent upon something intangible such as the control, power, orprestige it might bestow on its possessor.41 According to Kenneth Frampton,this cultural change has created attitudes that “emphasize the impotence
38 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “ThePlay of Art,” The Relevance of theBeautiful and Other Essays (NewYork: Cambridge University Press,1986), p. 130.
39 Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capitalof the Nineteenth Century,”Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1978), p. 151.
40 Paul Ricoeur, “UniversalCivilization and National Cultures”(1961), History and Truth, trans.Chas. A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL:Northwestern University Press,1965), p. 276.
41 Roland Barthes, “The NewCitroën,” Mythologies, trans.Annette Lavers (New York: TheNoonday Press, 1972), pp. 88–90.
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of an urbanized populace which has paradoxically lost the object of itsurbanization.”42 In so doing, urban public space has transformed intopseudo-public realms defined by privately owned megastructures such ashotels and shopping malls; while simultaneously electronic space is beingrestructured into public space.
The megastructure is a privatized public space: a new kind of commercialenvironment based on a rigid exclusion of undesirable populations, avail-able only to those who can afford to be there, heavily policed, and equippedwith high-technology surveillance to ensure optimal control and publicsafety.43 Public space, which once was the theatre of the social and thetheatre of politics, is disappearing.44 Once a heterogeneous “scene” mirror-ing human activity, the public realm has now been replaced with theprivatized and homogenized public space, such as the shopping mall, whichacts as a screen and a network. This postmodern change began when thestatus of the object as a mirror of its subject changed and took on a newdimension due to the effects of advertising and its visual medium.Advertising is no longer an ecstatic scenario of objects and consumption,but the effect of an omnipresent visibility of enterprises and the social virtuesof communication, which invade everything as true public space disappears.The “real” scene has become a screen or network of infinitesimal memoryand an endless stream of information. Architecture of a human scale hasbecome a system of matrices: what once was acted out or projected mentallyand psychologically here on earth as a metaphorical scene, is now projectedonto the screen of absolute reality, without any metaphor, as an image ofreality that is also a simulation of reality.
In the traditional city, space was like a mirror or scene which derived itsqualities from an imitation of life through participation in the ritual ofliving. In ancient Greece, this “play” of life was reenacted through the ritualdance, which had its origins in religion and the festival, and from whichtheatre developed in ancient Greek culture.45 The uplifting experience of thefestival is one that raises its participants out of everyday life and elevatesthem into a kind of universal communion. Participation in the festival is oneof enactment, or re-presentation, in which time is suspended so that the pastand present become one in an act of remembrance. This vital essence of thefestival creates a transformed state of being that produces in the participanta dreamlike mirage of reality. The origin of theatre was in the city streets:where people gathered and were of equal significance to the actors; wherethe city’s citizens were actors in the play of urban life. The primordial idea ofthe ancient city was contained within the labyrinth and the ritual dance. Thespace of the city was the space of ritual and architecture was the “dance”that re-presented the order of the world. Because postmodern culture ismoving away from being a scene or mirror of life, the labyrinth can be takento symbolize the city as a network of information and communication andas a screen upon which the play of life is projected.
42 Kenneth Frampton, “Towards aCritical Regionalism: Six Points foran Architecture of Resistance,” TheAnti-Aesthetic, Essays onPostmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster(Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press,1983), p. 25.
43 Rosalyn Deutsche, “Questioningthe Public Space,” Public 6, ed. MarkLewis, Andrew Payne, and TomTaylor (Toronto Public Access,1992): 49–64.
44 Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasyof Communication,” The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on PostmodernCulture, ed. Hal Foster (PortTownsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983),pp. 126–130.
45 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “TheFestive Character of the Theatre,”The Relevance of the Beautiful andOther Essays (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1986), pp. 57–65.
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The urban environment of the postindustrial city is disassembling fromits historical roots, and reassembling as fortress-cities. Urban public space isdisappearing and re-appearing as pseudo-public realms disengaged from thecity and located peripherally in the network of the suburban landscape. Thepostindustrial city is being evacuated by its community, leaving its emptyspace as a metaphor for a disembodied computer matrix. Activities of apublic nature are being miniaturized and simulated in the electronicinner world of information. The lesson we are learning is that informationdoes not need the public realm, which originally gave the city its form andrepresentational value.46
The information network is a labyrinth of a dual nature: the “public” isincreasingly being redefined as a composite of privates by a global system ofcommunication that is only available to those who can afford the tech-nology. Societies can now be grouped into the information-rich and theinformation-poor: there are some areas of this country experiencing whathas been called “electronic redlining” and are being denied video, voice, andcomputer communications.47 The postindustrial city of inter-connectedcomputers holds the promise of permitting a complexity of relations bybringing people together through information and communication withoutthe physical limitations of geography, time zones, or conspicuous socialstatus. However, communication on the internet is in isolation, which cutsthe physical face out of the communication process.48 Thousands of cues,not just facial, add up to a conversation. In the end, public space is relationaland gestural, and is created over time through layers of context, interaction,ritual, and the physical environment itself.49
The postindustrial city is a universal global village whose public realmcan be experienced at a distance from the privacy of one’s own living roomvia a network of televisions and word processors. The postindustrial cityis becoming a screen upon which life may be projected as a simulacrumsubstituting for an absent presence. In cities such as Detroit the vacantcarcasses of abandoned skyscrapers stand as tower-museums of ruins. Thesecities can be seen as endemic of the future American city: devoid of itsoccupants, who now safely reside in cities of the “new urbanism” withglobal connections from the privacy of their own homes without the dis-comfort of brushing sides with the unclean. The postindustrial city maybecome a placeless space: a modern day labyrinth whose sole purpose is tobe a node in the network of the endless flux of circulation, information, andcommunication. Lacking the experiential, the postindustrial city maybecome a placeless space to pass through on the way to somewhere else.Without its citizens, the ritual dance cannot take place in the postindustrialcity. There can be no scene involving the play of life.
In order for postindustrial cities to become viable public urban placesthey must be able to encourage the city’s citizens to become actors inthe play of urban life. Ideally, and with foresight, the postindustrial city
46 Martin Pawley, Theory andDesign in the Second Machine Age(Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell,1990), p. 178.
47 Steve Lohr, “Data HighwayIgnoring Poor, Study Charges,” NewYork Times, 14 May 1994.
48 Michael Heim, “The EroticOntology of Cyberspace,” inCyberspace, ed. Michael Benedikt(Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press,1994), p. 75.
49 Neill Bogan, Chea Prince, andGlenn Harper, “A Brave NewWorld?” Art Papers (July–August,1997): 16–22.
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will return to the labyrinth of the legendary Daedalus: a labyrinth thatsymbolizes the order of the city through capturing the trace of the ritualdance.
This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 88th Annual Meeting ofthe Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2000.
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INDEX
Absurd, Theater of 239–40
Acconci, Vitto 285–6
action space 281–3, 288–90
Acuña, Rodolfo 92–3
Adler, Cy 40
A.D.O.B.E. L.A. 87, 93, 94
Adorno, Theodor 157–8, 164
affordable housing xx, xxi, 78, 173, 176,
182
Aga Khan award 71
agglomeration 304, 305–6, 311
Agnew, John 346, 347
A.H.O.Z. (Affordable Housing Overlay
Zone) 78
air conditioning 320–1, 340–1
airports 337
Alexander, Christopher 20, 338
Allen, Gerald 268
Allen, Stan 121–2
Allen, Woody 7
Alliance Texas 299
Almogran 301–2
Alsunut Development Company Ltd. 301
Alvo, Nebraska 150
Alys Beach 174
American Bicentennial 58
Amsterdam 229–31, 233
Anderson, Sherwood 259
anti-abortion 273
anti-city xvii, 54
antiterrorism 364, 367–8
anti-war demonstrations 283
Appadurai, Arjun 90, 94, 297
Aranya Nagar 17
Archer, Dennis 116
Archinect 117–18
Architectural Association 227
Architectural League of New York 358
architectural types: deconstructivist 345;
environmentalist 53, 71; high-tech
339–40; postmodern 214–15; regenerative
356–8; vernacular 73, 107–8, 168, 200,
315
architecture: computer-aided design 335; as
frozen music 214; green theory 73–4;
iconic value 196; loss, narrative of 271;
modernism 242; public space 260–1,
263–4; reflective practice 342–4; and urban
design 237
Arendt, Hannah 80, 83, 292–3, 294
Ariadne 372, 373, 374, 375
armatures/enclaves 238–9, 240
Armonics 191–2
art 150, 284–7
Artaud, Antonin 239–40
Artnews 150
ARUP Engineers 160
Asco 87, 89n13, 91, 94
Assemblage 93
Association of Collegiate Schools of
Architecture xxiii, 105
Athens 272
Atlanta 109, 209–11, 214–15, 292, 378
Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn 267
Atlantic Station 292
Atlantic Terminal 108
atria 215n55, 265
Auge, Marc 297n1
avant garde 108–9, 161, 343
Baca, Judith 89, 90
Back Bay, Boston 7–8, 254
Baird, George 213
Bakhtin, Mikhail 96
Balanchine, George 163–4, 164
Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles 276–7
Balinese cockfight 96
Ballets Russes 163–4
Baltimore 8, 266
Banham, Reyner 26, 321
Barcelona 281n1, 288–90
Barlow, John Perry 361n3
Barthes, Roland 204, 364, 375
Bataille, Georges 209
Battery Park City xix–xx, 105, 181, 182–3,
184, 282, 287–90
Battle, Guy 336
Baudelaire, Charles 365
Baudrillard, Jean 24, 25, 26, 30n15, 204, 362
Beacon Hill, Boston 254
Benjamin, Walter 288n12, 379
Bentham, Jeremy 240
Berlin, Isaiah 129
Berlin Wall 222
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Berman, Marshall 365
Berréby, Gérard 36n14
Berry, Brian J. L. xviii
Berry, Wendell 354
Bhabha, Homi 89
“Big & Green: Toward Sustainable
Architecture in the 21st Century” 52–3
bigness 69–70, 71–4, 207–8, 220–8
Bijlmermeer 204, 229, 233, 234
Bill, Max 339–40
biometric scanners 361
Bishop Ranch, San Ramon 268
Black and Veach 144
black culture xviii, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86
Blake, Peter 28, 29
Blake, William 203, 204
Blau, Eva 166
Bloomberg, Michael 250
Bloomington 7
BMW plant 109
Bocage Plantation 330
Bond, Max xxi
Borden, Iain 36n12
borderlands 7, 75–6, 88
Boston 7–8, 130–3, 254–5, 258; see also New
Urban Ring
The Boston Conference 136
Boston Fens 141
The Boston Globe 136
Boston Public Library 261
Boston Society of Architects’ Committee on
Municipal Improvements 132
boulevards 260, 365
boundaries 10, 78–9
Boyer, Christine 210, 362
Brambilla, Roberto 267
Bramwell, Anna 347n8
Braungart, Michael 55
Brey, Philip 353n22
bricolage 94
Bridgeport 176, 178, 184
Briggs, Detroit 116
Britain 282, 338, 360
Broadacre City 25
Brooklyn 184, 267
Brown, Bill 40
Brown, Denise Scott 210
brownfield sites xx
Browning, Robert 9
Brown’s Chapel, Selma 85
Bryan, John xxi
Buber, Martin 321, 322
Buchanan, Colin D. 267
Buchanan, Peter 341–2, 358
Buffalo 8–9
building materials 316, 341–2
built environment: economic spaces 303;
homogeneity 307–10, 311; human
interaction 4; identity 324; social change
105; stewardship 57–8; transects 106
Buñuel, Luis 209
burial grounds 257–8
Burnham, Daniel xxi
Cain, Louis S. 317, 322–3
Calquhoun, Alan 73
Calthorpe, Peter 176, 191, 195
Calvino, Italo 9, 372
Canal Street, New Orleans 28
Capello, Odin 41–2
capitalism 129, 235
car use: city/country 46, 378; congestion 51,
250; Ford 48; oil consumption 55–6;
pollution 336; and public transport 13,
263; sprawl 109; suburbs 12; see also
highways
Carpenter, Ben 268
Casa Familiar 77–8, 79
CCTV 250–1, 364; see also security cameras;
surveillance
CCTV Building (Koolhaas) 160
Celebration 190
cell phones 367, 369–70
Centennial Olympic 292
Central Park, Manhattan 222–3
Cerda, Ildefonso 221
Certeau, Michel de 34, 41; bricolage 94;
Crawford 293; The Practice of Everyday
Life 35–6; Sadler on 37; walking 38, 40,
44
Chanel, Coco 162–3, 165, 162
Chanel exhibition 155
charity 98
Charleston 379
Charlestown 131, 136
Charlottesville 28
Chase, John 115–16
Chermayeff, Serge 338
Chicago: agro-industrial past 308;
architectural growth periods 200; financial
center 304–5, 309; Halsted Street 128;
Lakeshore Drive Apartments 264; Loop
384
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xxi, 200; and Los Angeles compared
310–11; Millennium Park xxi, 105; and
New York compared 308; World
Columbian Exposition 96
Chicago School 303
Chicano culture 87–8, 90–1, 92
Chicano Youth Conference 88n4
Child, Susan 287
China 160, 208, 250–1, 298
Christian Science Monitor 72
Churchill, Winston 161
C.I.A.M. 125, 230–1
CIDCO 300
Cincinnati 147
Cincinnati University 118
circuitboards 67, 68
Ciriani, Henri 17
cities: central sites 59; dominant cultures
81–2; Holston 279–80; as labyrinth
372–3, 380, 382; landscape 121, 140–1;
and nature 223; primary elements 197–9;
public realm 10, 376–7; and regions
176–7; society 15; see also public space
cities, types: corporate 299; everyday/
extraordinary 96; fortress 378, 381;
functionalist 125; global 269, 309;
incremental 118; instant 283–4; machine-
city 240–2; mixed-use 109–10, 187,
378–9; modern 377; postindustrial 381;
postmodern 34, 237, 282; Renaissance
376–7; self-contained 268; walkable 12,
35–6, 379; working xxi, 13; see also edge
cities; garden cities
citizenship 110, 112, 138, 272, 273, 279–80
City Beautiful movement 107, 261–2
city islands concept 220, 221–2
City Parks movement 224
Citywalk 12, 274
civic liberalism 129n6, 134
civil rights marches 283
Civil Rights Movement 80, 83, 86
civil traditions 24, 25, 251
civil unrest 274–5; see also riots
class xviii, 148, 248, 258, 259–60, 262,
272
Clinton, Bill 138, 153
Cloud Gate (Kapoor) xxi
C.N.U. (Congress of New Urbanism) 109
COBRA 36–7
CoEvolution Quarterly 53
collage 62–3, 64–5
Columbus, Indiana 197
commodification 72, 336, 379
common good 134, 272
commons 251, 254–6
Commonwealth Avenue, Boston 258
communication 7, 241, 338, 369–70
communications technology 352
community: democracy 119; Everyday
Urbanism 111, 117, 118–19;
infrastructure 138, 151; isolation 148;
marginalized 95; Mumford 321; New
Urbanism 112; place 346–8; suburbs 258;
urban design 15–16, 180–1
composite grafting 65, 68
computer-aided design 334–5
computers: embedded 360; obsolescence
62n4; recycling 62n6; space of 376;
ubiquitous 360, 363–4, 365; see also
pervasive computing
Comte, Auguste 346
Condé Nast Building 52–4
Coney Island, New York 203, 205–6
congestion 51, 250
conglomerates 301
Congregational church 255
Congress for the New Urbanism 106
connectivity 9, 10, 122, 148–9, 370, 379
Connery, Nancy Rutledge 138
Consolidated Edison 52
Constellation 266
consumerism xxv, 12–13, 129, 342
Contini, Edgardo 267
control 20, 234–5, 240–1
Cook, Peter 225n12
Cooper, Alexander xix, 182
Corboz, André 31
Corner, James 124–5
counter-spying techniques 367
La Courdangle, Saint Denis 17
courthouses 24–5, 85, 118, 256
Covent Garden, London 118, 238–9
craftsmanship 173–4
Crane, David 21
Crawford, Margaret 87, 93–4, 115–16, 292,
293, 294
crime statistics by region 346n3
critical regionalism 345–6, 350–1, 354–5,
356, 357
Crown Fountain (Plensa) xxi
cultural cleansing 12, 166–7
Cultural Revolution 156
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culture 83–4, 281–2, 335–6; see also black
culture
Culver City 118
Cumberland Mall 268
Curitiba 108
Cusato, Marianne 192n10
cybercity 362
cybernetics 335
cyberspace 361, 370, 375
cyborg 61n3
cyburg 361, 370
Czechoslovakia 152
Czerniak, Julia 123n19
Daedalus 372
Daley, Richard M. xxi
Dali, Salvador 209
Dallas 268
Dallas County Courthouse 85
Danube quays 165
D’Aprile, Dario 42
Davis, Cullen 282
Davis, Mike 128, 210, 271
Davis, Robert and Daryl 173, 174
Dear, M.J. 277n7, 305
Debord, Guy 37, 334
defamiliarization 350
La Défense 206, 216, 223–4
democracy: community 119; grid system 18,
27–8; in-action 344; public space 251,
291, 294; representative 333–4;
technoscience 334; tolerance of differences
192; urban design 118
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea 298
Democritus 64n12
demonstrations 272–3, 283
Denver 32, 107
Denver Art Museum 108
department stores 261
Depression Era 179
derelict people 98; see also homelessness
dérive 36, 37
Derrida, Jacques 69, 195–7, 204, 374–5
Descombes Architects 234
determinism: environmental 347n8, 349;
rationality 30n15; technological 353, 363
Detroit 9–10, 116, 309, 378, 381
Deutsche, Rosalyn 291n1, 293
Diaghelev, Serge 163
dialogic relations 353, 358
Dickens, Charles 203, 204
difference 192, 279; see also diversity
Digital House 370
digital technology 185, 376
Diller + Scofidio 368
Dionne, E.J. 133–4
the disadvantaged 108, 192
Disney World 12
dispersal 304, 369
dis-placement 24–5, 369
districts 327–8, 329–32
diversity 195, 248, 379
Dogon village 199
Doshi, B. V. 17
Douglas Loop, Louisville 118
Downing, Andrew Jackson 258, 259
downtown xvii–xviii, 10, 168, 186n4
Downtown Athletic Club 207, 233
Driehaus Awards 159, 160
dross 61; design experiment 66–7; post-
praxis 63–4; reuse paradigms 65–8
D-Tower 368, 369
Duany, Andres 116, 176, 191, 208
Dubai 299, 300, 301
Dubai Internet City 299
Duchamp, Marcel 64, 364
Dukakis, Michael S. 132
Duke, Doris 159
Dutch Pavilion, Expo 2000 74
Eastgate 73
Ebene Cybercity 299
Eckstut, Stanton xix, 182, 287
ecological engineering 150
ecological factors xxiv–xxv, 45, 68n14,
149–51
economic spaces 303, 307–10
eco-tech 356
edge cities 7, 12, 186, 204, 206, 208, 241,
242
Edgemar 32
Edificio Mirador, Madrid 161
Edmund Pettus Bridge 85
egalitarianism 18, 27, 112, 163, 256–7
Eiffel Tower 364
Eisenman, Peter 158, 186, 196
El Al freight plane crash 234
electricity blackout 52
electricity consumption 46
electronic data processing 376
Electronic Now 109
elevators 53
386
INDEX
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Page 387
Eliot, Charles 257
Eliot, T.S. 203, 204
Ellison, Ralph 80, 81
Emaar 301
Emergency Relief Appropriation Act 179
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 6, 211
emerymclure architecture 327, 328, 330
Empire State Plaza, Albany 208
enclaves 180, 237–40, 241, 378
energy consumption 46, 47, 49, 52, 340
Enlightenment 26, 346–7
environment 336, 362
Environmental Design & Construction 53
environmental determinism 347n8, 349
Environmental Protection Agency 188
Environmental Science and Technology
article 152
environmentalism 47, 74, 151–2, 189
ethical struggles 302
ethnic cleansing 349
ethnic neighborhoods 200, 257, 262
EuroDisney 33n18
Europe 112, 113, 298–9, 336
Everyday Urbanism 105; citizen control 110;
community 111, 117, 118–19;
egalitarianism 112; public realm 292;
Speaks on 113; Upton on 115n4;
vernacular paradigm 107–8
Everyday Urbanism (Chase, Crawford and
Kaliski) 115–16, 119
e-waste 62
Expo 2000 74
Export Processing Zones 297, 298, 301
exurban highway interchange 188
Exxon Tower 31
facial recognition software 41
Fairmount Waterworks 142–3
Falwell, Jerry 134
Faneuil Hall 266
Fathy, Hassan 70, 71
favelas 118
Federal Housing Administration 377
Federal Plaza, Manhattan 286–7
feminist activists 273
Ferguson, Homer L. 178n10
Ferriss, Hugh 206, 208
festivals 96, 380
Fifth Avenue, Manhattan 30
Fifth Street, Los Angeles 99
financial markets 309
First Amendment rights 265
First Baptist Church, Selma 85
Fishman, Robert xxiii, 105, xviiin3
Flathead Country Courthouse 24–5
Flyvbjerg, Bent 337–8
Folse, John 330
“Footprint Mapping” (Fujimura) 42, 43
Ford, Henry 48
Foreign Trade Zones 297, 298
Forest Hill Gardens, Queens 8
forestry, clear cutting 342
Forty-Second Street, New York 12
Foster, Jodie 210
Foster, Norman 69, 71
Foucault, Michel 237, 239–40, 360, 369
Los Four 91, 94
Fowle, Bruce 53–4
Fox & Fowle Architects 53
fragmentation 34, 62–3, 133–4, 378
Frampton, Kenneth 70, 71, 248, 345, 346,
350, 354–5, 379–80
Frankfurt School for Social Research 157
Fraser, Nancy 271, 272, 273, 274–5, 293–4
Fred Jordan Misson 98
Free Trade Zones 301
freedom 24, 25, 28, 207–8, 228
Freixes, Dan 289
French Quarter, New Orleans 327–8
Fresno mall 267
Frontline 160
Frost, Robert 10
Fry, Maxwell 70
Fujimura, Noriyuki 42, 43
Fuller, R. Buckminster 321
Furley, David J. 64n12
Fusco, Coco 89
Futternan, Marc 191n9
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 379
Galleria, Houston 268
Galleria Mall 268
Gandelsonas, Mario 69, 70, 71, 131
Gap San Bruno 71, 73
garden cities 7, 107, 122, 179, 241, 242
Garreau, Joel 242
Geddes, Patrick 240, 317–18
Geertz, Clifford 96
Gehry, Frank xxi, 32, 108, 158, 159, 185,
196
Geldzahler, Henry xviii–xix
Generic City 211–13, 292
387
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Page 388
Genet, Jean 209
Georgetown, Washington 128
Gibson, William 361n2, 375
Giddens, Anthony 353n21, 368, 370–1
Gideon, Sigfried 156–7, 158
Gladys Avenue, Los Angeles 101
glass technology 54, 340, 362–3
Glatt, Linnea 144
global warming 52
globalization xvii–xviii, 17, 72, 73, 248, 297,
305–6, 379
Gnaizda, Robert 53
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 349
Goldberger, Paul xix, xx
Gomez-Peña, Guillermo 88–9
Goodman, Paul xxii, 269–70
Goodman, Percival xxii, 269–70
Goodstein, David 55
Gorky, Maxim 205
Graff, Frederick 143
graffiti 91
Grand Avenue, Los Angeles 108
Great Saunter 39–40
Greece, ancient 380
green belts 241, 317–18
The Green Braid xxiii
green buildings 70, 72, 121, 342
Greenbelt, Maryland 179
Greenberg, Ken 109
Greendale 179
greenfield sites 7, 59, 338
Greenhills 179
Greenough, Horatio 25, 316
Greenwich Village 47
grid system: agency of 32; Battery Park
City xix–xx; democracy 18, 27–8; fluidity/
movement 27; Kalispell 24; movement 26;
social order 30
Gropius, Walter 155–6, 158
The Grove, Los Angeles 118
Gruen, Victor 267
Grupos 91
Guggenheim Museum 30–1
Gulf Coast 109
Habermas, Jurgen 271, 272, 273–4, 293, 346
Habraken, N.J. 229, 231–2, 234–5
Hadid, Zaha 108, 109
Halbwachs, Maurice 80, 84
Halsted Street, Chicago 128
Haraway, Donna 61, 369
Harbor Place, Baltimore 266
Harlins, Latasha 275
Harrah’s Casino 330–1
Harrison, Wallace 206
Hartford, Connecticut 176
Harvard Graduate School of Design 213–14
Harvard School of Architecture 155–6, 158,
167
Harvard Square, Cambridge 128
Harvey, David 210, 251
Haussmann, Georges Eugene 364–5
Hawaii 313–14
Hawkins, Stephen 225
Hayden, Dolores 89n13, 94
Hayes, Michael 156–7, 158, 164
Hedgewood Properties 189n7
Hegel, G.W.F. 158
Heidegger, Martin 321, 346, 351, 354, 355
Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis 267
Herrón, Willia 89–90
Hertzberger, Herman 231, 233, 234
Herzog + Partner 358
heterogeneity 7–8, 127, 128–9, 134
heterotopias: enclaves 237–40; machine-city
240–2; urban design 242–3
Heymann, David 350
highways 24, 151, 263, 377, 378
Hismen Hin-nu Terrace, Oakland 16
history 34–5, 158, 159, 212–13
HITEC City 299
Hodge, Gerald 323
Hohokam irrigation canals 144
holes 120, 122, 123
Holl, Steven 108, 111
Holland 141, 267, 340–1
Hollinger, Barbara 150
Hollywood 305, 306–7
Holston, James 279–80
Holtzclaw, John 45
home ownership 179–80
homelessness 22, 271, 277–8
homogeneity 128–9, 134, 140, 252, 307–10,
311
Hong Kong 300
Honolulu 322–3
Honolulu Park Board 313
Hood, Raymond 206, 208
Hook, Hampshire 338, 338
HOPE VI xxi, 111, 161, 187, 188, 192
Horsfall, T.C. 177
Horton Plaza, San Diego 17
388
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Page 389
House Beautiful 370
House Rules 93
housing: affordable xx, xxi, 78, 173, 176,
182; industrial 177–8; local projects 17;
mass 231–2, 234–5; public 176; social
161; see also enclaves, HOPE VI
Housing Act 263
Housing and Urban Development: see HUD
Houston 31, 109, 268, 378
Howard, Ebenezer 179, 241, 242
HUD (Housing and Urban Development)
180, 181n22, 264; see also HOPE VI
hurricane damage 109, 116, 189
hypertext 374, 375
identity cards 251
import replacement concept 199–200
individualism 28
industrial housing 177–8
inequalities: access to information 381;
wealth 176, 186, 248, 272
infill 112, 236
information network 381
information technology 299–300
information transmission 376
infrastructure: Cincinnati 147;
commonwealth 146–8; community 138,
151; connection 148–9; cultural utility
139, 140–1; ecological function 149–51; as
landscape 141–3; maintenance 146–7;
Phoenix 144; public spaces 147–8;
working cities 13
Ingersoll, Richard 208
Institute for Applied Autonomy 41
Institute for Classical Architecture 158–9
Institute of Transportation Engineers 188
insurgency 279–80; see also riots
International Movement for an Imaginist
Bauhaus (IMIB) 36
Internationale Situationniste 36, 37
Internet 191, 333–4
invisibility 83, 85
Ionesco, Eugène 239–40
iSee 41
Isidore of Seville 372
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff 140, 141, 150
Jackson, Kenneth 330–1
Jackson Square, New Orleans 118, 328–9
Jacobs, Jane: border vacuums 49; Dark Age
Ahead 113–14; The Death and Life of
Great American Cities xviii, 48, 194, 208;
incremental city 118; organized
complexity 194–5; parks 49; plain, old
brick buildings 198; Soho xix
James, Sharpe 152
Jameson, Fredric 355, 356–7, 377
Jarzombek, Mark 72
jazz 157–8
Jefferson, Thomas 19, 27, 28, 48, 56, 314,
316
Jeju 300
Jenny, William Lebaron 159
Jensen, Ron 144
Jerde, Jon 117, 274
Jericho 372
Jerusalem 372, 373
Jesuits 27
Johnson, Hildegard Binder 27n
Jones, Pettus & Pyatock 16
Joseph, Franz 165
Josselyn, John 254
Journal of Architectural Education xxiii
Judaism 157
Jussieu University 225–6
Kahan, Richard 182
Kahn, Louis 117
Kalamazoo 266
Kaliski, John 115–16
Kalispell 24, 26, 33
Kaplan, Daniel 53
Kapoor, Anish xxi
Karl Marx Hof 166
Katrina, Hurricane 109, 189
Katrina Cottage 192n10
Kaus, Mickey 128, 129, 134
Keane, Thomas J. 38
Keillor, Garrison 143
Kelbaugh, Douglas 115–16, 196, 202, 295
Kennedy, Sheila 62n7
Kentlands 294
Kepes, Gyorgy 63
Kerouac, Jack 26
Khartoum 301
King, Rodney 275
King Abdullah Economic City 299, 300
Kish Free Zone 300
kit-houses 192n10
knowledge economy 308
Koning-Eisenberg 118
Koob-Sassen, Hilary 304
389
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Page 390
Page 390
Koolhaas, Rem 118; on Atlanta 209–11,
214–15; Berlin Wall 222; Big Brother
Skyscraper, Sweat Shop Economy 160;
bigness 69, 71, 207–8, 220–8; Bijlmer 229,
235; CCTV Building 160; claustrophobia
205n6; Content 160; Delirious New York
203, 205, 206, 210, 233; edge cities 204,
206, 208; and Eisenman 186; essays 160,
203, 221; EuroDisney 33n18; as
existentialist 217; “Exodus” 227, 228;
Generic City 211–13; green building 70;
interview 291; Jussieu University 225–6;
Le Corbusier 207, 209; “Learning
Japanese” 203, 211; making do/making
real 219; Manhattan 206; Melun-Sénart
122, 123, 221, 222; mixed-use urbanism
109–10; Post Urbanism 108, 110–11,
195–7; Pritzker Architecture Prize 220;
radical nihilism 356; Singapore 209,
215–18; skyscrapers 369; S,M,L,XL 203,
204, 207, 209, 210; sprawl 223; surrealist
influences 204; urban theory 227–8; void
123
Kostof, Spiro xxii
K.P.F. architects 301
Krauss, Rosalind 286
Krieger, Alex 3, 5, 130
Krier, Leon 109–10, 174, 195, 282, 354
Krier, Robert 282
Kubla Khan 9, 372
Kwinter, Sanford 211
labyrinth 372–4, 375n20, 380, 381, 382
Lafitte’s Landing 330
Lagerfeld, Karl 155, 163
Lai, Richard 21
Lakeshore Drive Apartments, Chicago 264
landfill 131, 144–6, 183
landmarks 8, 30, 327–8, 329–32
landscape 120, 122, 140–1, 310, 348–9
landscape urbanism 120–1, 124–5
landscaping 212–13
land-use planning 139
languor 324–32
Las Vegas 109, 240
Latino culture 87
Latour, Bruno 352, 355, 357
Le Corbusier 121, 139, 207, 209, 230–1,
264, 282
L.E.E.D.-N.D. 189
Lefaivre, Liane 345, 346, 348–51
Lefebvre, Henri 251, 293, 353
Lefort, Claude 293
Legorreta, Ricardo 274
L’Enfant, Pierre-Charles 49
Lerup, Lars 198
Lettrist International 36
Lewis, Sinclair 259
Libeskind, Daniel 108, 196
libraries, public 261
Lindbergh City Center 292
Living Rooms at the Border 78–9
Lloyd Shopping Center, Portland 265
local dimension 73, 316, 321–2
locale 347, 348
location 347–8
Lockhart, Texas 256, 259
Logan Valley Shopping Center, Altoona 265
London 250, 338
Los Angeles: Baldwin Hills 276–7; Banham
on 26; as borderland 88; and Chicago
compared 310–11; Chicano culture 87,
92; Citywalk 12, 274; civil unrest 274–5;
counter-publics 271; downtown 10, 98,
378; East 90–1, 92; Fifth Street 99; as
fortress city 378; Gladys Avenue 101;
Grand Avenue 108; The Grove 118;
Hollywood 305, 306–7; homelessness
277–8; Latino culture 87; Metropolitan
Transportation Authority 50; missions 98;
murals 99; neighborhood centers 191n9;
Omar Avenue 98; Pershing Square 274,
278; politics of identity 91; public space
274; rationalization 339; San Julian/Sixth
Street 98, 100; Skid Row 98, 118; street
vendors 275–7; Towne Avenue 100, 101;
transport 45; as urban model 305–7;
Whittier Boulevard 90; Zona
Centroamericana 276
Los Angeles Police Department 98
Los Angeles School 303
Lo/Tek 64
Loudoun County, Virginia 49
Louisiana, Southern: languid spaces 324–32;
residential structures 325; tourism 331–2
Louisville, Douglas Loop 118
Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia 364n11
Love, Tim xx
Lovins, Amory 53
Lucy & Phillips 58–9
lumber industry 342
Luna Park 203, 205–6
390
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Page 391
Lurie Garden (Nichol) xxi
Lyle, John Tillman 356, 357
Lynch, Kevin 9, 325–6; The Image of the
City 196–7, 375; A Theory of Good City
Form 19–20, 241–2
Lyndon, Donlyn 266
McCoy, Lester 313, 314, 317, 322
McCreery, Sandy 36n12
McDonough, William 55, 71, 72
McGrath, Ben 38
McGraw-Hill Tower 31
McHarg, Ian 121, 123–4, 125
MacKenzie, Donald 351
McKinley, William 8
McLuhan, Marshall 242, 362–3
Magazine Street, New Orleans 267
Main Street concept 32–3, 258–9
maintenance 146–7, 150–1
Maki, Fumihiko 212, 217
Malaysian traditions 73
Mandl, Dave 42–3
Manhattan 46, 48; Central Park 222–3;
congestion charging 250; Federal Plaza
286–7; Fifth Avenue 30; Guggenheim
Museum 30–1; Koolhaas 206; landmarks
30; Lower East Side xx–xxi; Lower
Manhattan Expressway xviii; Rector Place
287; Rockefeller Center 30–1; security
cameras 40–1, 250; South Cove
287–8
Manhattan Waterfront Greenway 40
Mao Tse Tung 156
maquiladoras 301
market urbanism 105
markets 108, 186n4, 306
Markova, Alicia 163
Marsh, Benjamin C. 177
Martínez, Rubén 87–8
Marx, Karl 370
Marxism 28; aesthetic theory 158; bigness
225, 235; community 346–7; Frankfurt
School 157; production, mode of 353;
reification 63
Massachusetts 8, 9
Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority
133, 136
Massachusetts State House 254
mat building 121, 122
Matisse, Henri 163
Matura infill system 236
Maupassant, Guy de 364
mazes 373–4
media technologies 366–7
megacenters 268–9
megalopolis 339
megaplex 135
Meier, Richard 197
Melun-Sénart 122, 123, 221, 222, 226n16
memes 198, 200, 201
memory 83–4, 84–5
mental map 34, 144
mercury contamination 152
Mesiniaga, Menara 71, 73
Metropolitan Museum 155
Mexican muralists 89
Mexico–US border 75–6, 301
Michigan Debates on Urbanism 194
Michigan University 116
Midtown Plaza, Rochester 267
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 9, 200
migrant workers 75, 76–7
Millennium Park, Chicago xxi, 105
Miller, Henry 209
Miller, Richard B. 52
Milton Keynes 338–9
Minneapolis 267
Minnesota Department of Natural Resources
152
Minnesota University 152
Minority Report (Spielberg) 361
Miranda, Vicente 289
Miss, Mary 287
Mississipi river 189, 324
mixed-use buildings 107
mobility 6; see also movement
M.O.C.A. (Museum of Contemporary Art)
93, 94
modernism 155, 161–2, 166, 240, 241,
242
molding 64–5, 67–8
M.O.M.A. (Museum of Modern Art) 69,
161, 167
Moneo, Rafael 205
money liberalism 129n6, 134
monumental buildings 261–2
Moore, Ruble Yudell student center 118
Moore, Steven A. 351n15
Moses, Robert xviii, 48, 241
Mostafavi, Mohsen 126
movement 26, 32, 33, 77
El Movimiento 88
391
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Page 392
Mumford, Lewis xvii, 8; air conditioning
320–1; community 321; open planning
320–1; parks 313–14, 319–20, 322–3;
regionalism 314, 315–16, 320, 321–2;
Report on Honolulu 321; The South in
Architecture 314, 315, 316, 321; sprawl
318–19; Technics and Civilization 314–15,
317, 321; Whither Honolulu 313, 314,
315, 316–17
municipal bankruptcy 176, 184
muralism 89, 99
Murguia, Edward 88n4
Muybridge, E. 363
M.V.R.D.V., Pig City 74
N.A.F.T.A. 299
Najle, Ciro 126
Napoleon III 364–5
National Building Museum 52–3
National Conference on City Planning 177
National Historic Preservation Act 264
National Register of Historic Places 264
Native American earthworks 150
natural resources 150–1
Natural Resources Defense Council 188
nature: and city 223; as fake 212–13; land
use 139; landscape 120, 348–9;
transcendentalism 222
Naureckas, Jim 39
Navogazing project (Capello) 41–2
neighborhood centers 191n9
neighborhoods 8, 77, 189
neo-avant garde 108–9
neo-traditionalism xix–xx, 107, 185
networks 301, 309, 352, 358
Neutelings Riedijk Architekten 358
Neutra, Richard 314, 321
New Bedford, Massachusetts 9
New Haven 255–6
New Jersey 176
New Museum of Contemporary Art 42
New Orleans 116, 143, 324; Canal Street 28;
French Quarter 327–8; Jackson Square
118, 328–9; Magazine Street 267; River
Road 326–7; St Charles Avenue 326
New Songdo City 301
New Urban Ring, Boston 128–9, 130, 132–4,
135–6, 137
New Urbanism 105, 106–7, 378; City
Beautiful movement 107; commercial
regionalism 350; as commodity 294–5;
community 112; creativity 189–90;
criticism of 195; flexibility lost 112, 113,
192; interconnectedness 198–9; Kelbaugh
on 116; modernism 161–2, 166; neo-
traditionalism 185; organized complexity
194–5; pattern books 190; post-
industrialism 185; and Post-Urbanism
194; rules 189; sprawl 186–7; successes/
failures 155; typology 110; urban design
188–9
New York City 30; asthma rates 47; Atlantic
Avenue 267; Brooklyn 184, 267; and
Chicago compared 308; Coney Island 203,
205–6; crime statistics 346n3; ecology
45–6; Forty-Second Street 12; General
Development Plan 181; green credentials
47, 54–5; Metropolitan Transportation
Authority 50; public transport 45;
Rockefeller Center 282; sidewalks 262;
Smith’s walks 38; Soho xviii, xix;
songlines 39; South Bronx 184; South
Street Seaport 266; 4 Times Square 52–4;
traffic 51; utopian project 45; walking
projects 43–4; see also Battery Park City;
Manhattan; Roosevelt Island
New York State Urban Development Corp.
182–3
New York Times 250
New Yorker, The 38, 53
Newport 178n10
Ngo, Viet 150
Nichol, Gustafson Guthrie xxi
Nicollet Mall 267
Nietzsche, Friedrich 205
nihilism, radical 356
Nixon, Richard 180
nodes/paths 375
Nolen, John 48
Nolli plan analysis 221
nonmodernism 355–6, 358
non-state forces 297, 301
Nora, Pierre 80, 84
North Adams, Massachusetts 8
Notre Dame architecture students 158, 159
Nuremberg Rally 283
Oakland 16
obsolescence 62n4, 66, 67, 327
office buildings 261; see also skyscrapers
Ohio 52
oil consumption 55–6
392
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Page 393
Olmsted, Frederick Law 141, 178, 222–3,
225, 257
O.M.A. (Office for Metropolitan
Architecture) 122, 123, 229, 233–4, 356
Omar Avenue, Los Angeles 98
“One Block Radius” (Ray and Mandl) 42–3
O’Neill, Shayne 226n16
Ong, Aiwa 297
On-Site 161
Open Building group 235–6
Owen, David 5
Pacific Design Center 70
panopticon 215n55, 240, 360–1, 369
The Parachute (Koob-Sassen) 304
Parade of Fools 97
Parc de La Villette (Tschumi) 120–1
Parc du Clot 289
Paris 197; La Défense 206, 216, 223–4;
Haussmann 365; Koolhaas on 212; Villa
Dall’Ava 209
parking 169
parking lots 54, 108, 262, 339
parks: class 259–60; design 125, 227;
egalitarianism 256–7; Jacobs 49;
Mumford 313–14, 319–20, 322–3;
Olmsted 257; as playgrounds 260; public/
private 265, 292; ribbon-design 319;
voids 222; see also specific parks
pathways 326–8, 375
Patriot Act 367–8
Pearce Partnership 73
Pedestrian Pocket concept 176
pedestrian realm 188–9, 235
Ped-GRiD program 191n9
Pei, I.M. 197
Pelli, Cesar xix, 69, 70
Pentagon, New Map 75
Peopled Space experiments 285–6
Perimeter Town Center 292
Pershing Square, Los Angeles 274, 278
pervasive computing 361, 362, 363–4,
365–6, 370
Petersham common 255
Phalen neighborhood 152–3
Philadelphia 142–3
Phillips, Michael 53
Phoenix 50, 56, 144, 145–6, 152
Phoenix Arts Commission 143, 144–5
Phoenix Public Arts Plan 143–4
photography, time-sequenced 363
Piano, Renzo 340
Picasso, Pablo 62–3
Pig City, M.V.R.D.V. 74
Pioneer Courthouse Square, Portland 118
Pioneer Square, Seattle 282
pipeline corridors 151
Pirsig, Robert L. 26
Pittsburgh cottage 259
place 345, 346–8, 353, 356; see also space
placeform 340, 344, 350, 357
Plan for New York City 181
plantation culture 330
planting 212–13
plastic matter 65–6, 68
Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 116, 176, 191
Plensa, Jaume xxi
Plessy v. Ferguson 82
Pocket Wall 67, 68
political economy 177
politics of identity 91
pollution 152, 336
Polo, Alejandro Zaero 121
Polo, Marco 9, 372
population density 7, 46, 47–8, 50–1
Portland 118, 265
Portman, John 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 214,
215n55
Post Urbanism 105, 108–9, 110–13, 195–7,
199
postcolonialism 89
postindustrialism 185, 186, 190–1, 268–9,
377–8, 381–2
postmodernism 214–15
poststructuralism 205
poverty 22, 250, 257
preservation 58–60
Princeton Forrestal Center 268
Pritzker, Jay xxi, 159
Pritzker Architecture Prize 220
privacy 363–4, 366, 367
The Private Public 292
private sphere 247–8, 364–9
privatization 176
productform 339–40
production, mode of 353
proof-of-attendance shops 328
propinquity 7, 11
proximity 7, 11
psychogeography 36, 37, 43, 44
PsyGeo Conflux 41, 43
public art 260
393
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Page 394
Page 394
public buildings 168
public realm: cities 10, 376–7;
communication 369–70; Crawford 292;
defined 247–8; loss of xxii, 271, 368;
recreation 268; streets 254–5; see also
public sphere
public space: architecture 260–1, 263–4;
Arendt 292–3; Battery Park City 183;
centred 31; commercialization 262;
democracy 251, 291, 294; design 281–2;
fear in 262; infrastructure 147–8; loss of
274; Loukaitou-Sideris 364n11; parks
265; postindustrialism 381–2; privatized
265, 380; rethinking of 273–4; streets
267–8; traditional 379; use of 36, 256,
291; see also walking
public sphere 247–8, 271, 272, 273–4,
360–1, 364–9; see also public realm
public transport 45, 50–1, 263
Puerto Rico 314
Pyatok, Michael 16
race xviii, 80, 83, 85–6, 184, 275
Radburn layout 319
Raffone, Salvatore 137
railroad stations 261
railways, high-speed 336–7
Rainer, Roland 70, 71, 339
Rapid Transit Development 149
rationality, determinism of 30n15
rationalization 337–8, 339, 341
Ray, Christina 42–3
recycling 54–5, 152
reflective practice 342–4
Regional Contribution Agreements 184
regionalism: authenticity 315; biotechnic
314, 317; commercial 345–6, 349–50;
critical 345–6, 350–1, 354–5, 356, 357; as
historic strategy 348–51; Mumford 314,
315–16, 320, 321–2; Nazi Heimat 345–6,
349; New Urban Ring, Boston 132–3,
135–6; picturesque 345–6, 348–9;
romantic 345–6, 349
region/place 176–7, 348
rehabilitation of buildings 58–60
Reijndorp, Marteen 295
Riley, Terence 161
religious right 273
Renzo Piano Building Workshop 358
retail centers 168; see also shopping malls
reterritorialization 279
reurbanism xvii–xviii, 105
reuse paradigms 4–5, 9–10, 64, 65–8
Richards, Brian 337n3
Richardson, H.H. 314, 316
Ricoeur, Paul 379
Rieff, David 72, 73
Riis, Jacob 366
Rijnboutt, K. 232
Ringstrasse, Vienna 134, 135
riots xvii, 272–3, 275, 283
ritual 372, 373
River Road, New Orleans 326–7, 329–30
Riverside, Illinois 8
Rochester, Midtown Plaza 267
Rockefeller Center 30–1, 206–7, 282
Rocky Mountain Institute 53, 54
Rogers, Richard 71
Rojas, James 87, 92–4
Roland Park, Baltimore 8
Romans 349
Romero, Frank 87, 91, 91–2, 94
Romose-Washington Metro Watershed
District 152
Roosevelt administration 314
Roosevelt Island 177, 181–2
Rose, Charlie 158
Rosemary Beach 174
Rosen, Jeffrey 364
Rossi, Aldo 197–8, 201, 202
Rotterdam Architecture Biennale 76–7
Rourke, Howard 3
Rouse, James Wilson 266
Rouse Corporation 128, 266
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 316, 317
Rowe, Colin 158, 282
Rudofsky, Bernard 198–9, 366–7
Rumney, Ralph 36n14
Ruskin, John 349
Rutsky, R.L. 333
Saarinen, Eero 197
Sack, Robert 361
Sade, Marquis de 209
Sadler, Simon 36–7
St Charles, Sales Centre 191
St Charles Avenue, New Orleans 326
Saint Denis 17
St Paul, City of 152
Saipan 301
Salazar, Rubén 90, 91–2
Salk Institute 117
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Salt Lake City 191
Salvucci, Fred 132
San Diego 17, 75–6, 78–9
San Julian/Sixth Street, Los Angeles 98, 100
San Martin, Ignacio 56
San Ramon 268
San Ysidro 78
Santa Monica 32
Sao Paulo 309
S.A.R. (Foundation for Architectural
Research) 232, 233
Sassen, Saskia xvii–xviii, 69, 334
saxophone 158
Schlovsky, Victor 350n13
Schoenberg, Arnold 157
Schon, Donald 343
Schuman, Tony xx
Schuylkill River 143
Schwitters, Kurt 64
Scientific American 360
Sclar, Elliott xx
Seagrove 169
Seaside 168–9, 184, 190, 294; affordable
housing 173; architects 173, 175; building
types 171–2; craftsmanship 173–4;
twenty-five years on 172–5; zoning code
171
Seattle 282
security cameras 40–41, 250, 252; see also
CCTV; surveillance
segregation 83, 85–6, 148, 378
Selma, Alabama 80, 85
Sennett, Richard 128, 129–30, 271, 366, 370
serpentine bridge (Gehry) xxi
Serra, Richard 284, 286–7
Sert, Jose Luis 3
services sector 306–7
sewage treatment system 150
Shaftesbury, Anthony, Earl of 348–9
Shanghai 309
Shawmut peninsula 130–1
Shenzhen 251
shopping malls 12–13, 264–5, 266–7, 292,
341, 380
Shorewalkers 39–40
Shurtleff, Arthur 132
sidewalks 258, 262
Sierra Club 49–50
Silicon Valley 305
SimCity 16
Simmel, Georg 321
Simulated Urbanism 292
Singapore 209, 215–18, 300
Singapore Planning and Urban Research 209
Singer, Michael 144
Sitte, Camillo 269, 282
Situationism 36–7, 41
Skid Row, Los Angeles 98, 118
SKIL 300
skyscrapers 70–1, 264, 369; abandoned
381
skywalks 267
Sloterdijk, Peter 297
smart buildings 340
Smart Growth 49, 109, 188
SmartCode 189
Smith, Adrian D. xxi
Smith, Caleb 37, 38
Smith, Joseph 19
Smith, Neil 210
Smithson, Alison 120, 121, 122, 123, 225n12
Smithson, Peter 121, 225n12
Smyser, A.A. 323
social behavior 30, 105, 347
social housing 161
social work 177n8
society 15, 176, 346–7
Soho xviii, xix
Soja, Edward 34–5, 37, 347
songlines 39
Sorkin, Michael 271
South Bronx, New York 184
South Cove 287–8
South Street Seaport, New York 266
Southfield 9–10
space: Arendt 83; boundaries 78–9; civic
xxi, 168; embedded computers 360;
formal/informal 118; form/outcomes
303–4; human behavior 20; languid
324–32; marginal 284; movement 33; and
place 285–6; ritual 372; shared
consciousness 34, 37; social relationships
85, 376; Soja 34–5; speed 324; and time
156; see also public space
Speaks, Michael 113
Special Economic Zones 297, 298, 301
spectacle 283–4
spectacular society 40, 342–3
speed 324
Speer, Albert 283, 349
Spencer, Herbert 346–7
Spielberg, Steven 361
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sprawl xvii; cars 109; control of 338n6;
dissatisfaction with 57–8, 176, 180;
Koolhaas 223; Mumford 318–19; New
Urbanism 186–7; population density
47–8; public transit 51
Spuybroek, Lars 368, 371
Stapleton 107
Starbucks 251–2
Starrett, Theodore 205
state control 24–5, 240–1, 247–8
Steiglitz, Alfred 7
Steinbeck, John 26
stewardship 57–8
Stravinsky, Igor 157, 164
street people 98, 271
“Street Stripes with Memory” (D’Aprile) 42
street vendors 275–7
streets 9, 32–3, 254–5, 267–8
strikes 272–3
structuration 353n21
Suarez, Ray 291
suburbanization 12, 48, 57–8, 133, 335, 377
suburbs 8, 140, 252, 258–9, 268–9; see also
sprawl
Sudan 301–2
Sullivan, Louis 159
superabundance 379
Superstudio 227
surveillance: antiterrorism 367–8; Bentham
240; borderlands 75–6; CCTV 250–1,
364; Geddes 240–1; impact of 367–8;
increasing 360; state 247–8; traffic
reduction 250, 363; unfreedom 252–3
Surveillance Camera Players 40–1
surveillance cameras: see CCTV; security
cameras
sustainability xxv, 356; building materials
341–2; Lyle 357; re-use 4–5, 9–10;
socioeconomics 57; stewardship 58
sweatshops 301
Sylvan Street, Selma 85
Tafuri, Manfredo 240
Taylor, Peter 309
Team X 121, 122, 123, 125, 231
Tech Center, Denver 268
techno-culture 333
techno-junk 61–2
technological determinism 353, 363
technology: culture 335–6; defined 351–4;
geography 352–3; networks 352, 358; as
ontological practice 351; place 345, 353;
socio-politics of 248–9
technology parks 301
technoscience 334, 343
telecommunications 269
telephone 353; see also cell phones
Ten Shades of Green 358
Tennessee Valley Authority 314
termit mounds 73
Terry, Quinlan 159
text/texture 8–9, 374–5
thermal images 364
Theseus 372
Thoreau, Henry David 7
Tijuana 75–6, 77
Tilted Arc project (Serra) 286–7
4 Times Square, New York 52–4
Tocqueville, Alexis de 26, 28, 291
Tokyo 9
Tonnies, Ferdinand 347n4
tourism 329, 331–2
Towne Avenue, Los Angeles 100, 101
Traditional Neighborhood Development 106,
176
traffic reduction 51, 250, 363
transcendentalism 222
transects, built environment 106
Transfiguration, Church of the 38
transit: see transport
translocal chains 304–5
transport 13, 51, 106, 149, 201, 241, 263,
335–6
Tribune Building competition 200
Troy 372–3
Tschumi, Bernard 120–1, 185, 290n15
Tugwell, Rexford Guy 179
Tzonis, Alexander 345, 346, 348–51
UN Studio 226n18
unfreedom 252–3
Ungers, O.M. 221
Union Rescue Mission 98
United Arab Emirates 300
Universal Studio 12
university campuses 265
Upton, Dell 115n4
urban art 83, 90–1; see also public art
urban design xxv, 1, 3, 18; architecture 237;
as catalyst 15, 16–17; community
development 15–16; democracy 118;
future 20–2; globalization 17;
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heterotopias 242–3; meaningfulness
14–15, 21–2; New Urbanism 188–9;
strategies 134–5;
see also grid systems
urban development xxiv, 128, 176–7, 184
Urban Land Institute 109
Urban Process 3
urban redevelopment 12, 263
Urban Revisions 93
urbanism 120, 159, 247–8; see also cities
urbanization 54, 380
U.S. Green Building Council 109, 188
U.S. Housing Corp. 178
utopian project 26, 45
Van der Ryn, Sym 70, 71
Van Eyck, Aldo 231, 233
Vastu-Shilpa Foundation 17–18
Vaux, Calbert 222–3, 225
Velvet Turtle 268
Vendalores Ambulates 276
Venetian Casino, Las Vegas 240
Venice 379
Venice Hospital 121
ventilation 320–1, 340
Venturi, Robert 28, 158, 197, 210, 267
vernacular cultures 73, 107–8, 168
Vienna 65–6, 134, 135, 166, 282
Viennese Social Democracy 166
Villa Dall’Ava, Paris 209
Virilio, Paul 333–4
visibility/invisibility 363–4
visualization technologies 363
Vitruvius 349
voids 123, 221, 222
voyeurism 252, 360, 364
Wachsmann, Konrad 334
Wagner, Otto 165
Wagnerschuler 166
Wajcman, Judith 351
Waldheim, Charles 120, 121, 126
walking 9; de Certeau 38, 40, 44; cities/
suburbs 12, 35–6, 379; distances 190;
mental map 34; Phoenix 56
walking projects 36, 37, 43–4
Walton County, Florida 169
Washington, D.C. 49, 50, 51, 128
waste facility 145–6
water quality 151, 152, 342
Watercolor 173
waterfront sites xx
waterways 152–3
wealth inequalities 129, 186, 248
Webb, Michael 225n12
Webber, Melvin 338
Weber, Max 347
Webler + Geissler Architekten 358
Weese, Harry 197
Weimar Bauhaus 155
Weiser, Mark 360, 371
West, Cornell 80–1, 147–8
wetlands, drained 140
Wexner Center 93, 94
Whiteread, Rachel 64
Whittier Boulevard, Los Angeles 90, 91–2
wind-catching techniques 73
wireless technologies 367, 370
Wolch, Jennifer 277n7
women’s rights 272
Woodhull, Joel 149
woodlands 140, 148
Woods, Lebbeus 202
Woodstock 284
Works Progress Administration 377
World Columbian Exposition, Chicago 96
World Financial Center xix, 70
World Trade Center xix, 35, 69, 183, 208,
367
World War I 177–8
World War II 179–80
Wright, Frank Lloyd 25, 314
Wright, Richard 82
Yasgur, Max 284
Yeang, Kenneth 71, 73
Zimbabwe 73
Zizek, Slavoj 72, 73
Zona Centroamericana, Los Angeles 276
zones 77, 94–5, 171, 298–302
Zupan, Jeffrey 50
397
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