hengels, the problem today is too much mobility of people, not enough mobility of the urban fabric. Once people moved to a place for the work and built roots to their community. Now they only move for work and then leave once they are wealthy enough to do so.
I don't want to add to your despair Dabido, but Chicago was running on a very different economic model than Phoenix is running. A much smaller grid of blocks with more flexible building regulations meant that it was a lot easier for people to improve their community.
In Phoenix you may not have much choice but to buy up whole subdivisions in order to change things. That's not an activity that's available to many people.
Economic opportunity is no longer what keeps people moving, it is what keeps them immobilized.
I don't see the causation. What is the basis for your assertion?
Recent research at MIT has shown that there is positive correlation between mobility and income, which makes a good case against subsidizing home ownership, rent control, and other mobility-stifling policies.
Your comments about nomadic populations stopping in a place only long enough to use up its resources are spot on when it comes to places like Phoenix, where I live. Almost everyone I know fantasizes about leaving, but stays only because of family or work.
Then again, I Saul Bellow described the Chicago of his youth as a vast, gray industrial zone where there were no cafes, culture or other places to write or create. Though this sounds depressingly familiar to me if we substitute suburban ranch houses for industrial buildings, the fact that such changes take place gives me hope.
really glad to see this post, Mathieu! i've been fascinated by this issue recently... of 'how they build in Palestine.' both b/c of current events in the region (i.e. Gaza) and b/c of a book i think you and your blog followers would be interested in:
"Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation", by Eyal Weizmann.
peace :)
mohamad
Great post. It's funny to see developers try to imitate organic settlements yet fail so miserably. Suburban residential developments in North America try to do the same thing, really - curvilinear streetstrying to imatate organic growth, as if housing has naturally grown up along some old and winding farm road.
Design through the manufactured process can't imitate the design of natural process. It is the process which must form the deisgn, not the other way around, I think.
The traditional landscape of Holland is as much its cities as it is the farmland. It has not been preserved. The Dutch are no longer making traditional cities. It is important to know the difference between preservation and protection. The preservation of a culture is the renewed practice of it, and that means building more cities in the traditional process to keep it alive. Because that is now zoned out the landscape is not being preserved, merely protected from change. That means change in the food being consumed, which means fewer cows today than yesterday, but perhaps more cows in the future. Who knows? If that becomes necessary, the landscape can revert to farming, but the process of change should not be stopped. A zoned landscape is never going to feel natural.
I'm a bit mystified by this post. You seem to be implying that food production, in close proximity to urban centres, is somehow anachronistic. Or that the traditional landscape of Holland is not worthwhile preserving either for the food it produces, the aesthetic appeal it affords, and the sense of visual relief it provides in an environment that due to its unrelenting flatness, can feel clautrophobic. If long range food supply chains are ultimately ruptured due to future energy scarcity, the green heart of Holland may be considered less as an act of cultural nostalgia, but rather a wise application of the precautionary principle. In the meantime, it provides one of the singular pleasures of the Netherlands: the ability to have the intensely urban immediately juxtaposed to the pleasantly rural.
Mathieu, thanks for the link to A Town Square. I have added a link to Emergent Urbanism. Nice work - keep it up.
Howard Decker
I agree: the obsession of modern architects with elementary geometric forms - minimalism, glass structures and grey colour is terrible, and is creating placelessness, even in architecturally rich cities like London. There are numerous old buildings here which have been appended using glass structures looking awfully out of place.
Saurabh
Designer
London
So, what are the factors that determine a sense of place? Can you enumerate?
A very interesting blog - even for a nonarchitect!
http://trinklebean.wordpress.com
I'm afraid that McKenzie Towne is very much New Urbanist. It has a town center and blocks of homes with alleys to keep the cars off the street. It has many squares and a lake that creates a very large public waterfront. Honestly, from an urban design point of view, it is a great project.
If the uses tend to be overwhelmingly housing, that is just a normal consequence of the development model itself. You can't ask a developer to plan a real mixed used neighborhood; it is too complex a venture. It can only come from a large number of people growing around each other. You can mimic it by spending an enormous amount of money to subsidize the mixed uses, and in so doing win an award, but that is the opposite reason why someone like Jane Jacobs praised the mixed used neighborhood.
You are developing some very interesting arguments here and it will be interesting to see them develop.
But, I wouldn't by any stretch of the imagination define Mackenzie Town as New Urbanism. Maybe the developer is calling it that, but it is just dense connected sprawl as you say. There are no uses other than housing visible, and the road layout is essentially pods of unconnected groups of streets. That's not NU! You have a good argument, but you need to start with some good examples of NU to critique, not the developer dross shown here.
How about critiquing some CNU Charter Award winning projects? I'd be very interested in reading your analysis of those.
Also, if you look at the scale of Calgary as a whole, Mackenzie town is an additive chunk that shares many of the same structural qualities as the rest of suburban Calgary. So, it is emergent, but not at a fine grain, and not in the nice way that traditional Mediterranean towns were emergent.
Finally, I thought your response to Andrew (a different Andrew)'s post was too dismissive. The fellow has taken the time to comment, give him a good response!
Keep up the good work,
Matthew.
I think the problem with New Urbanist codes is not that they are prescriptive - ultimately all codes need to become prescriptive in order to be effective - but that they are Cartesian instead of contextual. A rule like "Specific to zone T3, a. A minimum of two trees shall be planted within the first Layer for each 30 feet of Frontage Line or portion thereof." is not adaptive to context.
Wonderful read!
I agree that Prof. Hakim's fine distinction between proscriptive vs. prescriptive codes has dramatic applications in the way we ground an approach to urbanism today. I'd be game to follow any further erudition on your last suggestion.
I think New Urbanists attempt to achieve generative urbanism through proscriptive means with the Transect, but end up falling into Julian's trap the more they attempt to indoctrinate with pattern books or rely on overly-prescriptive urban design codes/review processes to affect their ends. (Of course, the Transect does not a city make,...but that's another issue.)
There are also proscriptive processes embedded in all forms of art and self-expression...The room provided for self-expression should not be forgotten in your work. Julian Beinart, for example, did wonderful work on the tacit proscriptive processes at work with mural painting in Johannesburg's shanty towns. Something of that process is implicit in the way suburbanites decorate their lawns for very dissimilar reasons.
You might be interested to know that Louis Kahn advocated a return to proscriptive Mediterranean "vista zoning" for the overlooking ridges surrounding the Old City of Jerusalem. He had a wonderful way of looking at the street as a space for "cross-invitation"...a place of "agreement"...some of this which, to be fair to Moshe Safdie, was executed in spirit when he followed Kahn's plan for the rebuilding of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City.
Very interestingly, there are very notable exceptions to proscriptive approaches in Mediterranean town planning which can be found in the utopian literature of apocalyptic sects. The first modernists. The New Jerusalem Scroll of the absolutist Essene sect that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls depicts a "Cartesian" paradise.
Of course it is not possible to create a link between two parts of the urban fabric if they are not already spatially connected. Even if L.A. was to abolish all of its zoning codes, it would just turn out to be like Houston unless the design of the public space, the connective fabric of promenades, streets, avenues and expressways, is properly balanced. That cannot be regulated onto developers, it has to come from the city's own initiative.
I was in fact a guest at the TU in Berlin, which is how I was able to sit on the Kenneth Jackson conference. It's on Ernst Reuter Platz isn't it?
I have to confess that I am not much for the philosophical approach to urbanism. I am an extreme rationalist and materialist, (can't help myself on that point) and that's why I am trying to "materialize" all the research on complexity.
You wrote: The solution to sprawl is not increasing density, but increasing complementarity. "
That is part of it, but note also that Los Angeles has very high complementarity is many areas, but remains extremely auto-oriented. I'd say that's because the experience of walking is so horrible on much of L.A.'s streets. And a lot of that is the result of L.A. development regulations that mandate ever-increasing accommodations for autos with every increment of new development.
Thank you for your outstanding post.
I am a PhD candidate of urbanism at Technical University of Berlin which we call Berlin University of Technology (TU-Berlin) in there, under the supervision of a number of master of critics and urban planners/designers of the school, and currently living in the US. My research aims to study the common sense(s)/features and factors in recent urban theories, but, my supervisors who has a long experience of teaching out of Germany including within the States in their resume, always address the problems of current American cities to the economical and epistemological approaches of planners in here, and ask me; why you are working on this subject! Obviously, to the persons and professionals living and working in and on Berlin is a pre-answered question that the solution could have come out of the American planners’ attitude rooted in capital.
Nevertheless, in a very first glance out of sight point about Berlin planning and may be for overall German cities and planning system is they are trying to avoid any chaotic behavior of cities prior to development process of cities through controlling one of the three well-known features addressed in Chaos Theory. They have been learnt through their experience since 19C; when French was involved in politics instead of policy-making for urban fabrics (Baron Haussmann’s planning for Paris) or Utopian thinkers (like Saint Simon or the others) and while British thinkers following American ideas for planning (Howard’s notions of Looking Backward from Edward Bellamy) or hierarchal battles between honored families of traditional Britain, that they should have strong philosophical attitude/background for their works for the future (20C) which will be involved in Technology and Modernism to face the new out coming problems of those. Therefore, it is explicable having a city like Berlin based on extended literature of philosophy rather than a grid shaped city and full of chaotic phenomena which are now utterly out of control, would be a desirable ultimate form of American city.
All I can say about your well-written essay about Berlin and your comparative case Detroit is that would be my pleasure if we can have a chat about planning theories or even a joint paper to publish which I have ever dreamed to work on chaotic approaches in contemporary planning of cities.
Thanks again and good luck
Reza P Far (Eric)
I like your idea of small-grain, sprawl swallowing urbanism very much.
Your term "Frankenstein Urbanism" reminds me of a memorable critique of New Urbanism that appears in the book Snooze by the Dutch think-tank firm Studio Sputnik (which I think you'll love). They termed it the Doppelganger effect...New Urbanism appropriates Siena semiotically without actually having any of the behaviors and qualities that create a Siena. It is the fast food version of Siena. Somewhat like the argument in Learning from Las Vegas, they advocate actually studying more carefully that fast food. We need to first understand how to wield the tools of contemporary mass culture to avoid Doppelganger Urbanism. Their argument for how to implement urbanism in sprawlburg falls somewhat along your suggested lines, but I'd recommend you read the book to see the fascinating way they tackle mass culture.
Your quite right about the stark differences between Jane Jacobs and New Urbanist conceptions of her work, while she mildly tolerated them. She advocated not just that fine grain, but, you're exactly right, the variagated nature of the community inhabitting it. New Urbanists allow their developers to design highly regulated mono-cultures as required by pro-formas. As long as that relationship exists we will never get to Jacobs. She did not require "mixed-use" but more correctly, "mixed activity" for "a mix of users", this at a diversity of times. Miss any of this and you don't have functioning urbanism in the Jacobs sense. Jacobs advocated 30 foot wide sidewalks, for petesake, and the kind of stoop intoxicated public realms that allow children to play on city streets. In Charlotte, there is a New Urbanist development called Birkdale Village that actually has signs barring the use of skateboards. There are also quite often a pod-like quality about these developments that still favor self-contained environments that despite their rhetoric often do their best to avoid a well-connected street fabric.
But I won't go on...You seem to have a great grasp of these things...Cheers!
Hopefully, the quality of construction will also revert back to pre-1930 levels. It is ridiculous that buildings built in the 1920's and earlier are still the best buildings to live in.
or they move for better opportunities, better lifestyles, etc.