Writing Urbanism (A.C.S.A. Architectural Education)

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WRITING URBANISM

Urban design continues to grow and mature as a field of study, research, and professional endeavour. This welcome collection of both invited and published essays is panoramically broad and comprehensive in its scope. Combining essays from both practice and academia, this volume includes some of the most significant texts on urban design from the last two decades, a period of transformational growth in the field and exponential growth in the metropolis. Writing Urbanism asks how cities can become more coherent, sustainable, authentic, and equitable, as well as aesthetically compelling and culturally meaningful. The essays probe such issues as community, social equity, design theory, technology, and globalism. How does a rapidly urbanizing and polarizing world embrace these and other issues, and how can urban design translate them into consequential and workable urban form? By assembling a range of voices across different institutions and generations, Writing Urbanism offers the most multifaceted portrait of urban design today. Scholars, students, and design professionals alike will find this collection to be a useful resource for understanding this increasingly important design field and for insights into the forces that shape the city itself. Douglas Kelbaugh F.A.I.A. is Dean and Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He is a leading practitioner, teacher, and thinker in urban design, is the author of several books on urban design, and has taught design at eight schools of architecture in the USA, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Kit Krankel McCullough is a lecturer at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. She is Principal of Kit Krankel McCullough Urban Design, and has significant and broad experience as a practitioner of urban design as well as having taught a variety of courses 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 for use across the curriculum in architecture and design programs matching current lines of scholarly inquiry with curricular needs. Each reader focuses on a thematic topic and is composed of chapters presented originally at A.C.S.A. conferences along with invited chapters. Leading edge design work and scholarship are included to give faculty, students and professionals resources for the studio and classroom. SERIES EDITORIAL BOARD

Michael Benedikt, University of Texas at Austin Luis Carranza, Roger Williams University Thomas Fisher, University of Minnesota Lisa Iwamoto, University of California at Berkeley Fernando Luiz Lara, University of Michigan John Stuart, Florida International University ABOUT A.C.S.A.

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (A.C.S.A.) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1912 to enhance the quality of architectural education. School membership in A.C.S.A. has grown from 10 charter schools to more than 200 schools in several membership categories worldwide. Through these schools, more than 5,000 architecture faculty members are represented in A.C.S.A.’s membership. A.C.S.A., unique in its representative role for professional schools of architecture in the United States and Canada, provides a major forum for ideas on the leading edge of architectural thought. Issues that will affect the architectural profession in the future are being examined today in A.C.S.A. member schools. Additional information is available at www.acsa-arch.org.

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WRITING URBANISM A design reader

EDITED BY DOUGLAS KELBAUGH AND KIT KRANKEL McCULLOUGH

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First published 2008 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2008 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Writing 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 Schools of Architecture. NA9105.W75 2008 307.1′2160973–dc22 2007047375 ISBN 0-203-92702-8 Master e-book ISBN

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)

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CONTENTS Notes on contributors ix Foreword xv Robert Fishman Preface xxi Douglas Kelbaugh and Kit Krankel McCullough Acknowledgments xxv

I URBAN PROCESS 1

Introduction 3 Kit Krankel McCullough Observations The virtues of cities 6 Alex Krieger Working cities: Density, risk, spontaneity 12 J. Max Bond, Jr. Meaningful urban design: Teleological/catalytic/relevant 14 Aseem Inam Mathematics of the ideal roadtrip 24 Christopher Monson City walking: Laying claim to Manhattan 34 Ben Jacks Preservation, re-use, and sustainability Green Manhattan 45 David Owen Stewardship of the built environment: The emerging synergies from sustainability and historic preservation 57 Robert A. Young DROSS; Re-genesis of diverse matter 61 Lydia Kallipoliti The shared global ideology of the big and the green 69 David Gissen Community Levittown retrofitted: An urbanism beyond the property line 75 Teddy Cruz The mnemonic city: Duality, invisibility, and memory in American urbanism 80 Craig Evan Barton v

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Mapping East Los Angeles: Aesthetics and cultural politics in an other L.A. 87 José Gámez Celebrating the city 96 Alan J. Plattus Skid 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 infrastructure Everyday urban design: Towards default urbanism and/or urbanism by design? 115 John Kaliski Without end: Mats, holes, and the promise of landscape urbanism 120 Karen M’Closkey Boston’s New Urban Ring: An antidote to urban fragmentation 127 George Thrush Infrastructure for the new social compact 138 William R. Morrish and Catherine R. Brown New urbanism Whatever happened to modernity? 155 Daniel Solomon The town of Seaside: Designed in 1978–1983 by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. 168 Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk The impact of ideology on American town planning 176 Tony Schuman and Elliott Sclar New Urbanism as a counter-project to post-industrialism 185 Ellen Dunham-Jones Integrating urbanisms: Growing places between New Urbanism and Post-Urbanism 194 Carl Giometti Post urbanism Rem 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 vi

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Habraken and Koolhaas: Two Dutchmen flying over Bijlmermeer 229 June P. Williamson Heterotopias and Urban Design 237 David Grahame Shane III URBAN SOCIETY 245

Introduction 247 Douglas Kelbaugh The public realm Big Brother is charging you 250 Michael Sorkin Communitas and the American public realm 254 Spiro Kostof Contesting the public realm: Struggles over public space in Los Angeles 271 Margaret Crawford Action space 281 Richard Scherr The inscription of “public” and “civic” realms in the contemporary city 291 Michael E. Gamble Globalism and local identity Zone 297 Keller Easterling Dis-assembling the urban: The variable interactions of spatial form and content 303 Saskia Sassen Tropical Lewis Mumford: The first critical regionalist urban planner 313 Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis The luxury of languor 324 Michael A. McClure and Ursula Emery McClure Technology Technoscience and environmental culture: A provisional critique 333 Kenneth Frampton Technology, place, and the nonmodern thesis 345 Steven A. Moore Immanent domain: Pervasive computing and the public realm 360 Dana Cuff City of dreams: Virtual space/public space 372 Eugenia Victoria Ellis Index 383 vii

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Craig Evan Barton is an associate professor of urban design and the Director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Virginia. He is a founding principal of RBGC Associates. He investigates issues of cultural and historical preservation and their interpretation through architectural and 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. He established the Architects Renewal Committee of Harlem, where he served 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 York Chapter for his commitment to design excellence, activism, and diversity in the profession. Catherine R. Brown (1950–1998) was a Minneapolis landscape architect, civic leader, and director of special projects at the Design Center for the American Urban Landscape at the University of Minnesota. Along with her husband, William Morrish, she is the author of Planning to Stay. Margaret Crawford is a professor of urban design and planning theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research focuses on the evolution, uses, and meanings of urban space. Her book Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns examines the rise and fall of professionally designed industrial environments. Her most recent book, Nansha Coastal City: Landscape and Urbanism in the Pearl River Delta, was published in early 2006. Teddy Cruz is principal of Estudio Teddy Cruz and associate professor of architecture at Woodbury University. His practice and pedagogy reflect his commitment to advancing architectural and urban planning projects that address the global, political, and social problems that proliferate on international borders, with special focus on San Diego and Tijuana. Dana Cuff is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her expertise concerns social issues in the built environment, which she engages as a practitioner and as an academic. Her book The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism was supported by the Getty and the National Endowment 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. has become a major leader in the practice and direction of urban planning, having designed over 300 new and existing communities in the United States and overseas. He is a co-author of Suburban Nation and The New Civic Art. Ellen Dunham-Jones is the Director of the Architecture Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She serves on the Board of Directors of ix

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the Congress for the New Urbanism, and the advisory boards of the journal Places, the Phoenix Urban Research Lab and the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Sustainable Urban Design in Sweden. Her current research focuses 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 of Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades, Organization Space: Landscapes, and Highways and Houses in America. Her forthcoming book, Extrastatecraft, examines global infrastructure networks 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. She has practiced for over 25 years in the states of Illinois, Florida, and Pennsylvania 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 Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan. He is the author of Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier and Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. He is a past president of the Urban History Association, and Public Policy Fellow at the Wilson Center. Kenneth Frampton is the Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia University. He has worked as an architect and as an architectural historian/critic in England, Israel, and the United States. His books include Le Corbusier and Labor, Work and Architecture. An expanded and updated edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History was published in summer 2007. Michael E. Gamble is an associate professor of architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a principal with Gamble and Gamble, Architects. His design research is focused on contemporary urban practices. His firm has received several awards, including the American Institute of Architects Georgia Chapter Honor Award, and has been exhibited in a variety of regional and national venues. José Gámez is an assistant professor of architecture and a member of the Latin American Studies faculty at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research and design practice explores questions of cultural identity in architecture and urbanism. Carl Giometti is a project coordinator with JTS Architects in Lincolnshire, IL. His graduate thesis, “Integrating Urbanisms . . .”, was selected for presentation at the 2006 A.C.S.A. Annual Meeting. He is active in several local and national organizations dedicated to advancing the theory and practice of urban development. David Gissen is a professor at Pennsylvania State University where he teaches architectural and urban theory and design. His research focuses x

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on the architectural production of nature. He is the author of Big and Green and curator of the eponymous exhibition shown at Yale University, Museum of the City of New York, Chicago Architecture Foundation, and The National Building Museum. Aseem Inam is Senior Project Manager at Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists in California. Prior to that, he conducted research and taught urban design at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the book Planning for the Unplanned and a number of award-winning journal articles. He has worked as an architect, urban designer, and planner in Canada, France, India, and the United States. Ben Jacks is an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture and Interior Design at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. A licensed architect, he practiced for fifteen years prior to beginning an academic career. He once hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. He is currently writing a book about walking and the built environment. John Kaliski is a principal of Urban Studios in Los Angeles. A key component of his work is his ability to integrate public concerns into design processes. He has led workshops, charrettes, and meetings nationally and has worked collaboratively with communities and professionals on a broad range of project types. He is the co-author of Everyday Urbanism with John Chase and Margaret Crawford. Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program in the history and theory of architecture at Princeton University. She is the recipient of the 2006 Lawrence Anderson Award from M.I.T. for the creative documentation of architectural history, the Marvin E. Goody award for excellence in the use of materials, and a Fulbright scholarship. For her dissertation, “Mission Galactic Household,” she has been awarded the 2006–2007 Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Spiro Kostof (1936–1991) was Professor of Architectural History at the University of California, Berkeley. His many books include The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, and America by Design, the companion to a five-part television series he presented. He received a posthumous award 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 Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and former Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design. A practitioner as well as a teacher, author and lecturer, he is a founding principal of Chan Krieger Sienewicz in Cambridge, M.A. Liane Lefaivre is the Chair of Architectural History and Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and a research fellow at the Delft University of Technology Urbanism Department. Her work and numerous books are devoted to architectural culture and criticism in the xi

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framework of cognitive history, architectural history, and creativity in Western culture. Karen M’Closkey is an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a founding partner of PEG office of landscape + architecture. PEG’s award-winning work spans small-scale retail and residential work to large landscape infrastructure. Michael A. McClure is an assistant professor at the University of LouisianaLafayette and Ursula Emery McClure is an associate professor at Louisiana State University. Their firm, emerymcclure architecture, has developed a wide range of research and design projects and has been recognized by the 2006 Venice Biennale and the A.I.A. Their work and writing 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 College of Architecture, Art + Design at Mississippi State University. Built around issues of ethics and inter-subjective communication, his research interests include pedagogies of professional design education, contemporary American architecture, theories of formmaking and objecthood, and the philosophical structures of architectural practice. Steven A. Moore is the Bartlett Cocke Professor of Architecture and Planning at the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches design and courses related to the philosophy, history, and application of sustainable technology. He is Director of the graduate program in Sustainable Design and Co-director of the University of Texas Center for Sustainable Development. William R. Morrish is the Elwood R. Quesada Professor of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban and Environmental Planning, at the School of Architecture, University of Virginia. His work approaches infrastructure as a cultural landscape that knits citizens, public spaces, social institutions, cultural expression, and the natural environment into multi-operational urban landscape networks. Jorge Otero-Pailos is Assistant Professor for Historic Preservation at Columbia University. His research probes the boundaries between contemporary preservation and architecture. A founder and director of the journal Future Anterior, his forthcoming book, Inside Postmodernism: Architectural Phenomenology and How Experience Came to Matter More Than History, traces the struggle to deploy a historical consciousness within modern architecture during the 1970s. David Owen has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1991. He is the author of a dozen books, most recently Sheetrock & Shellac, published in 2006, and Copies in Seconds, which was published in 2004. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is the Dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture and a principal of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (D.P.Z.). She is also a co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism. xii

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D.P.Z. has become a major leader in the practice and direction of urban planning, having designed over 300 new and existing communities in the United States and overseas. She is a co-author of Suburban Nation and The New Civic Art. Alan J. Plattus is a professor of architecture and urbanism at Yale University, where he teaches courses on architectural history and theory, urban history, and design, and directs the School’s China Studio. He founded and directs the Yale Urban Design Workshop, a community design center that has undertaken urban design and building projects throughout Connecticut. Saskia Sassen is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University after many years at the University of Chicago and is Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Sassen is the author most recently of Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. William S. Saunders is GSD Assistant Dean for External Relations, editor of Harvard Design Magazine and a founding editor of GSD NEWS and Harvard Design Magazine. He is the author of Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller and the editor of eight other books. He has written numerous articles on architectural issues, education, and theory. Richard Scherr is Professor of Architecture at Pratt Institute, where he was previously Chairman of the Graduate Programs in Architecture and Urban Design (1989–1999). He is the author of The Grid (2001), and has written extensively on urban design and theory. Tony Schuman is Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His is past president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (A.C.S.A.). He was a founding member of a series of advocacy and activist organizations including Urban Deadline, The Architects’ Resistance (T.A.R.), Homefront, and Planners Network. Elliott Sclar is Professor of Urban Planning and International Affairs at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and the director of the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He was a co-coordinator of the United Nations Millennium Project’s Taskforce on Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers. 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 and City College. He co-edited with Brian McGrath the Architectural Design Special Issue “Sensing the 21st Century City; Upclose and Remote.” He has lectured extensively and has published widely. His book Recombinant Urbanism; Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory appeared in 2005. Daniel Solomon is Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Urban Design at xiii

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the University of California, Berkeley. He is the founder of Solomon E.T.C., a W.R.T. Company. Residential architecture and urban design have been the main focus of his work. He is a co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism and an author, most recently of Global City Blues. Michael Sorkin is Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at City College of New York and the principal of the Michael Sorkin Studio. He lectures widely, is the author of many books and articles, and is currently contributing editor at Architectural Record and Metropolis. For ten years, he was the architecture critic of The Village Voice. His most recent book is Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State (2007). George Thrush is Director of the School of Architecture at Northeastern University in Boston, M.A. His work seeks to connect transportation, urban design, and civic image in an increasingly privatized economic arena. Alexander Tzonis is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Architectural Theory and Design Methods at the Delft University of Technology and current Director of Design Knowledge Systems, a multi-disciplinary research center on architectural cognition. A prolific writer, he is author or co-author of a number of books and has contributed over 200 articles on architectural theory, history, and design methods. Camilo José Vergara is a writer, photographer, and sociologist. He has been photographing American urban landscapes since 1977, documenting the changes taking place in the country’s inner cities. His books include Twin Towers Remembered, Subway Memories, and How the Other Half Worships. Vergara has received numerous awards, among them a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2002. June P. Williamson is a practicing urban designer and architect in New York City specializing in the practice and theory of mixed-use suburban redevelopment. She has been a visiting professor of architecture at Georgia Tech, the University of Utah, and the Boston Architectural Center. With Ellen Dunham-Jones, she is writing a case-study book about retrofitting suburbs. Robert A. Young is an associate professor of architecture and the Historic Preservation Program Director at the University of Utah. His teaching and research focus combines historic preservation and sustainability in the stewardship of the built environment. He has served on numerous boards related to preservation and revitalization issues.

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FOREWORD ROBERT FISHMAN After the near-death experience of the postwar urban crisis, the American city over the last fifteen years has seen a remarkable resurgence. The articles in this remarkable collection embody a new hope, for they were written in precisely the years when the seemingly indissoluble coupling of “urban” and “crisis” was decisively broken and urban design could begin to re-imagine the American city as the site of a new public culture. Yet the tone of these articles is far from triumphalist. Urban design today necessarily bears the burdens of the “urban renewal” years, when a grand vision of a totally rebuilt modern city led to near-total failure. Partly as a result, urban design in practice tends even now to be self-marginalizing in scale and ambition, struggling to challenge imaginatively the limitations of an increasingly privatized urban world. But as the American city renews its material base, seeks to overcome the crippling segregation of the past with a vitally diverse urban culture, and begins to provide models of sustainable energy use for the rest of our society, there is the danger that urban design will remain cautious and constricted. The articles in this book seek in very different ways to challenge our urban design vision to match the historic opportunities. To understand the limitations under which American urban design operated during the urban crisis years, one must go to Detroit and perhaps to a few other lagging metropolitan areas. There one can see the fate that as late as the 1990s was predicted by many experts to be the inevitable one for all American cities: a downtown marginalized and semi-abandoned; once-bustling factory zones turned into depopulated, de-industrialized and racially segregated “inner cities”; suburbs in the “first-ring” just beyond the central city caught in a rolling wave of abandonment about to engulf them; and—at the edge—the feverish, fragmented, low-density growth we know as sprawl.1 This “anti-city,” as the great urbanist Lewis Mumford in the 1960s called our dysfunctional metropolitan regions, reached its peak of disorganization 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 rates of urban crime, concentrated poverty, and flight from the city. Mumford’s despairing 1975 prescription for New York City seemed fifteen years later to apply to all major American cities. “Make the patient as comfortable as possible,” he advised. “The case is hopeless.”2 In fact, the 1990s saw a dramatic recovery of most American cities, a profound reurbanism of American life that made the city again the center of American culture. As Saskia Sassen was perhaps the first to observe, the very forces of globalization that had devastated the factories of our inner cities xv

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1 Reynolds Farley et al., Detroit Divided (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000).

2 Lewis Mumford, quoted in B.I. Shenker, “18 experts advise, castigate and console the city,” New York Times, July 30, 1975, p. 35.

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3 For further defense and elucidation of “reurbanism,” see my “The Fifth Migration,” Journal of the American Planning Association, vol. 71 #4 (Autumn 2005): 357–367.

4 Julia Szabo, “Regarding Henry,” New York, vol. 28 #3 (June 16, 1995): 42.

were also inexorably re-building the major American downtowns as crucial nodes for global finance and knowledge-production. This “downtown reurbanism” was complemented by another aspect of globalism: “immigrant reurbanism” that repopulated many of the most devastated urban economies and built a new small-scale economy from the ground up. Moreover, after the turmoil of the great black migration to northern cities, a black middle class committed to the cities was finally emerging. Finally, one saw 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 had described the gentrifying areas of the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, this “white middle-class reurbanism” complemented the immigrant and black middleclass reurbanism to reinvigorate whole neighborhoods and districts that had seemed lost to the urban crisis.3 Reurbanism meant rising rather than falling urban population, rising tax receipts, jobs to replace those lost by deindustrialization, and a significant shift in the regional balance of power from suburb to city. Perhaps more importantly, reurbanism has been a major cultural force, challenging the suburban car culture with the classic urban virtues of density, walkability, and diversity. Cities are now hip, especially for the growing cohort of the young for whom the city is the natural environment after college, and, increasingly, after marriage and children as well. And if much of this hipness is merely ease of consumption, especially the luxury goods and services lavishly provided in the centers where global capital and large immigrant populations meet, there are also some deeper lessons that perhaps only a dense urban environment can convey: respect for social difference, and the need to limit the “consumption of space” and ultimately the consumption of all other scarce resources. Here surely is a social and cultural movement that could be the basis for a new era in urban design. And yet urban design has, in my view, not yet risen to the challenge of embodying the best of reurbanism. In part this is because the early successes of reurbanism—both in theory and in practice—took place apart from and even in opposition to an urban design still identified with the massive clearances, highrise towers, and top-down power of urban renewal. Jane Jacobs’s seminal Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) saw large-scale development as essentially a threat to the “closegrained diversity” and sidewalk life that she identified as the essence of the urban experience. The truly seminal urban design “project” for reurbanism therefore was New York City’s Soho district, because it involved the renovation of existing urban fabric. Here a gritty district of semi-abandoned industrial lofts accidentally spared from demolition by the cancellation of Robert Moses’ Lower Manhattan Expressway was re-imagined and re-occupied by artists as an ideal environment for the production of contemporary culture. This radical transvaluation of modernist urban design— “artists are real estate geniuses,” as art critic Henry Geldzahler explained4— xvi

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proclaimed that the seemingly obsolete nineteenth-century city was in fact better adapted to modern urban life than anything that modern architecture or urban design had been able to produce. So what was left for urban design beyond some modest “contextual” work? One major urban design project, however, met the challenge of Jane Jacobs and Soho: Battery Park City on the Hudson River at the tip of Manhattan 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 an even more elaborate “megastructure”—languished until 1979 when two young urban designers, Alexander Cooper and Stanton Eckstut, were given the challenge of coming up with a wholly new masterplan in just twelve weeks.5 What they produced not only saved that project but established a paradigm for urban design that remains perhaps the most powerful in today’s practice. Indeed, the “Battery Park City model” lies behind many of the articles in this book where it functions as a “default mode” for urban design. Conceived at a low point for the American city, the model’s strengths 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: that there was no need for a “new city,” not even on new land. If New York’s traditional fabric worked so well, the key to success was to build more of it. This meant first abandoning the superblock and megastructure ideas and instead 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 townhouses, low-rise and high-rise apartments, architecture echoing New York’s golden era of the 1920s, would all be built out to the street to achieve that sense of enclosure and sidewalk vitality of the best old neighborhoods. Instead of the flowing modernist space of the superblock, the plan provides small, enclosed parks modeled on the nineteenth-century squares. New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger immediately hailed the Cooper/Eckstut plan as one that was “not a visitation from the world of Buck Rogers” but one that “understands the essence of Manhattan.”7 As the plan was gradually built out (it is still not complete) to include both housing and the Cesar Pelli’s World Financial Center opposite the Twin Towers, we have come to understand that Cooper and Eckstut’s neo-traditionalism, a predecessor of so much that we have learned to call “New Urbanism,” was only the beginning of the meaning of this remarkable plan. First, the Battery Park City plan foreshadowed the new balance-of-power between the public and private sectors that has come to define real estate practice. No longer could a public authority strictly define the concept, program, and phasing of a major project, as in the earlier megastructure which had to be built as a complete “total design” or not at all. The xvii

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5 David L.A. Gordon, Battery Park City: Politics and Planning on the New York Waterfront (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1997).

6 Alexander Cooper and Associates, Battery Park City Draft Summary Report and 1979 Master Plan (New York: Battery Park City Authority, 1979). The firm was subsequently renamed Cooper Eckstut and Associates.

7 Paul Goldberger, “A Realist’s Battery Park City,” New York Times, November 9, 1979, p. B4.

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8 Tim Love, “Urban Design After Battery Park City: opportunities for variety and vitality in large-scale urban real estate development,” Harvard Design Magazine #25 (Fall 2007): 60–70.

9 Goldberger, p. B4.

“market” was now in control. As Tim Love has observed in a highly perceptive recent article,8 Battery Park City’s reliance on the grid was more than an hommage to the 1811 Commissioner’s Plan. Each block in the masterplan represented a convenient unit for a single developer, thus allowing development to occur sequentially in relatively independent phases and with the variations in program and architecture that mark each developer’s adaptations to a changing market. Moreover, the landscape of Battery Park City aptly expressed the emerging responsibility of the private sector to provide public amenities such as the highly successful Esplanade along the river that municipal government could no longer afford. If Battery Park City reflects the new balance of public and private that took hold during the Reagan years, the project has also come to embody the design/siting principle I would term “finding lost space.” The older urban renewal projects had cleared their own space out of the most thickly inhabited central districts of the city through the ruthless use of eminent domain. The massive human suffering that these projects imposed has now made such displacements politically impossible. Hence the need to find space, and the best places to look are precisely those waterfront sites where disused, obsolete dockyards and wharves can be replaced without significant 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 waterfront locales but abandoned factory and warehouse sites; railyards that can be replaced or covered; or once-polluted waterways whose long-shunned banks can now be lined with new development. As reurbanism extends its reach from the downtown core into a recovering inner city, such “lost space” potentially available for redevelopment increases exponentially. Paul Goldberger termed the 1979 Battery Park City masterplan “a product of the hard-nosed, practical idealism of the end of the 1970s.”9 Such practicality was no doubt necessary and appropriate during the worst years of the urban crisis. Nevertheless, the Battery Park City model had its faults. Although the use of different developers phased over decades makes design variety theoretically possible, the actual result here and at comparable projects is a corporate blandness in design that cannot match the vitality of the best urban neighborhoods that supposedly inspired the model. As Elliott Sclar and Tony Schuman observe in their contribution to this volume, Battery Park City eschewed the social diversity that it originally promised by abandoning the goal of including affordable housing in each new apartment house. Instead, the profits from luxury development have been used to subsidize affordable housing in other neighborhoods in the city. Ironically, these resurgent neighborhoods have provided the most intense competition for the Battery Park City model. Opposite Battery Park City on the east side of Manhattan lies the Lower East Side, a century ago the most overcrowded slum in the world and, as late as the 1980s, a grim and xviii

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dangerous place to avoid. Today the Lower East is one of the liveliest neighborhoods in the world, an ever-fascinating mix of old tenements and new luxury apartments; discount stores that date a century to the “pushcart era” alongside New York’s hippest new bars and restaurants; and a population that blends not only artists and the new-rich young from the nearby financial district, but also Jewish and Italian remnants of the old immigration with newer black, Hispanic, and Asian residents. Can urban design somehow capture this vitality, or perhaps complement 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 constantly meet the burden of hard-nosed practicality in a market-driven system? These are the underlying questions that all the contributors to this volume are ultimately facing. Moreover, we are beginning to see some of the answers in a variety of built projects, including, I would argue, the best of the HOPE VI affordable housing that has replaced failed high-rise housing projects with 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 Park City tradition, the park is both “found space” and a “public–private partnership.” It occupies the site of some highly unsightly railyards between the Loop and the lakefront in the heart of the city that Chicago designers since Daniel Burnham and the 1909 Plan of Chicago had been trying to capture for civic purposes. And the remarkable public quality of the park could never have existed without the remarkable generosity of Chicago’s private philanthropists, who contributed over 175 million dollars to the project. But Millennium Park finally is an expression of the best of America’s “age of reurbanism.” The park masterplan began as a hardnosed, practical effort to build a massive underground parking garage for the Loop, covered with a modest park. With the political leadership of Mayor Richard M. Daley, the philanthropic leadership of John Bryan, and the design leadership of SOM’s Adrian D. Smith, the plan metamorphosed into an underground intermodal transportation center covered by the most important civic space that America has built since 1945. In contrast to the “festival marketplaces” of the 1970s and 1980s, people are brought together not as consumers but as citizens. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this civic space is the way in which the best of avant-garde design—Anish Kapoor’s sculpture Cloud Gate; Jaume Plensa’s multimedia Crown Fountain; Gustafson Guthrie Nichol’s ecologically inspired Lurie Garden; and above all Frank Gehry’s serpentine bridge and Jay Pritzker Music Pavilion—forms the basis of a space that is genuinely a people’s park. To visit the park is to join a community as diverse as Chicago itself, sharing a space that brings together the best of American design culture. xix

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10 The fairest assessment of HOPE VI can be found in Susan J. Popkin et al., A Decade of HOPE VI: Research Findings and Policy Challenges (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, 2004).

11 Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Millennium Park: creating a Chicago landmark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) is a history worthy of the park itself.

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In a deeply felt contribution to this volume composed in 1987, just four years before his untimely death, Spiro Kostof meditates on what he fears is the irreversible loss of a true “public realm” in America and the “communitas” it once represented. Writing when the urban crisis still held the American city in its grip, Kostof fears that the “urban beauty” in the broadest sense that had been the ultimate goal of urban design “is now a thing of the past, beyond resuscitation,” and that, as a result (quoting Paul and Percival Goodman), “our city crowds are doomed to be lonely crowds, bored crowds, humanly uncultivated crowds.” Although there is much in American life that, two decades later, still bears out Kostof’s negative judgment, one especially regrets that he never lived to see the resurgence of American urbanism, or to join the crowds at Millennium Park. Without triumphalism or false optimism, this book points the way toward that recovery of the public realm through urban design that Kostof rightly asserts “holds our pride as a people.”

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PREFACE DOUGLAS KELBAUGH AND KIT KRANKEL McCULLOUGH It might be helpful to start with what Writing Urbanism is not meant to be. It is not, for instance, meant to be the canon of definitive writings on urbanism and urban design—or even an exhaustive survey. Neither is it a compendium of urban design case studies, or a collection of writings about particular cities. Nor is it about urban planning, as the text’s underlying bias is design-based rather than policy-based. Nor does the book bear any connection to fictional urbanism, such as the surreal short stories of Italo Calvino or the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. Last, it is not international in scope or voice, as the authors are, with a few exceptions, American. Put simply, the book is a compilation of what we the editors thought were the best articles on urbanism to be found among contemporary American academicians. Many articles were drawn from the Journal of Architectural Education ( J.A.E.) and the conference proceedings of the Association of Collegiate 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 series A.C.S.A. intends to publish with Routledge. The articles are primarily from the last decade or so, although some date back to the 1980s. To this collection, we added essays by nine guest contributors, who were carefully chosen to either complement, clarify, contest, or broaden the collection. We also invited Robert Fishman, our colleague in Taubman College at the University of Michigan, to write the Foreword. As editors, we wrote the introductions to each of the book’s three sections, which divide the material into Urban Process, Urban Form, and Urban Society. The structure and contents are entirely our doing, and reveal our priorities and betray our predilections, although we have attempted to be open-minded and inclusive in both our selections and invitations. Why did we accept the A.C.S.A.’s and Routledge’s invitation to edit such a book? The first reason was that we feel that urbanism is an underappreciated subject and that urban design is an under-developed sensibility in architectural schools and the profession. The hegemony, even fetishization, of the individual building in both the design studio and professional practice continues to plague architectural culture. The singular building— whether signature or vernacular—remains the digit of design in the built environment. The building is still seen as the morphological, legal, financial, and operational unit of urban development. Buildings too rarely engage in dialogue with their urban, not to mention their climatological, setting or cultural context. Designers have fixated on the pixel rather than the picture. And the individual architect—whether a star or journeyperson—is still xxi

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romanticized as a solo artist. This heroic notion is becoming anachronistic and romanticized in an era when projects, their design teams, sites, and cities are all becoming larger and more complex. Project planning by real estate developers has increasingly replaced urban planning, as the private sector continues to displace the public, in our often unexamined, headlong rush to privatization of government services and the public realm. American architecture seems to have lost its social conscience and civic compass and, as a result, is faced with some basic challenges. Can contemporary architecture and architects be less self-centered? Can today’s cities be more legible, coherent, holistic, authentic, and equitable, as well as aesthetically compatible and consistent? Can we still share common values, even ideals, in today’s fast changing, diverse cultures, or are proliferating pluralism and commodification inevitable? And, if so, can we translate them into compelling, meaningful, and consequential urban form? These essays address these and related questions. The second reason we agreed to work on this volume is the tsunami of urban development that is sweeping the planet and overtopping our cities and their physical, social, and institutional infrastructures, with the attendant issues of inequality, poverty, disease, and geo-political tension. The rate of global urbanization has been accelerating at an alarming rate. There’s been a tripling of the population living in cities since 1950. Suddenly, the first urban century is upon us, with over half of the world’s population living in urbanized areas now and two-thirds expected to by the year 2030. The rapid pace of urbanization is one of the defining and dramatic phenomena of our time. Massive influxes of people from the countryside are swelling and stressing many existing cities, turning them into teeming agglomerations of ten, fifteen, and even twenty million people, with fifteen of the twenty largest conurbations 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 the city-state starting to eclipse the nation-state as its fundamental economic unit. Ironically, as cities elsewhere have been densifying in recent decades, many American cities have been decanting residents and jobs to the suburbs and exurbs. And some of their least sustainable aspects, single-use zoning and auto-dependency, are being emulated and exported around the world. The third raison d’être for this anthology is the crisis-cum-emergency of ecological deterioration. It is now an article of faith that our carbon-based economy is on a collision course with global climate change, with a guaranteed 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 increasingly difficult trade-offs. Because cities are inherently more energy-efficient than suburbia and exurbia, urbanism will be an essential part of any strategy xxii

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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 will in turn also play a critical role in sustainability. As the effects of human enterprise and consumption spread to every corner of the planet and invade every environmental niche, we are beginning to be much more mindful of our ecological footprints. While acknowledging that the practice of ecology is often socially constructed, dynamic, and emergent, we also recognize that it is ultimately based on the laws of nature, which are for all practical purposes absolute. We are aware that technology is as much a socio-political as an engineering act, and also that the law of unintended consequences is unrelenting and cannot be repealed. And many of us believe the relativism of the post-structural “critical project” during the last quarter century, as insightful and liberating as it may once have been for many designers and theorists, is giving way to more pragmatic theory and “projective” practices. As we move from a critical-distancing-from-theworld to a critical engagement with it, we must be wary of the embrace of corporate capitalism, with its branding and commodification of just about everything, from architecture to zoos. The burgeoning interest in urban design is a significant and positive part of this sea change, and represents more than a jump to larger-scale design; it also represents a paradigmatic shift to a more inclusive and comprehensive agenda. Today’s students and designers need a better understanding of the emerging megalopolis if they are to design buildings that are more than megaforms inserted into a miasma of urban disorder. In America, this means empirically sensitizing ourselves to the contemporary metropolis and our evolving sense of urbanism. It means understanding the nature of community, with all the collateral issues of diversity, distributive justice, social and environmental equity, and citizen participation, as well as the impacts of technology, especially the remarkable promise and pitfalls of the digital revolution. It also means understanding the geo-political and cultural differences between urbanism in North America and in Europe, Asia, and South America, where more and more American designers will work. (We also need to educate more architects and urban designers from the developing world.) Architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and planners could potentially play a more central and activist role in this century than any in history. Their skills and talents have never been more critical or in more demand. They need to be better prepared for the deluge of environmental, economic, political, and social problems and opportunities that come with rapid global growth and urbanization. And they need to fully understand and utilize the ecological leverage they wield in designing and planning, as well as redesigning and replanning, the built environment. We hope this jostle of writings and images will raise the urban consciousness and conscientiousness of architecture students, faculty, and practitioners, as well as their counterparts in the other design and planning xxiii

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disciplines and professions. In our opinion, the conversation became too private and insular while critical theory dominated the academy for several decades. After the overly heroic and overly rational ambitions of Modernism failed, the academy over-reacted—understandably, arguably—by becoming too disciplinary, theoretical, and pure. It narrowed the agenda to primarily aesthetic issues, first symbolic and historicist, then speculative and avant-garde, more recently digital. The focus on form and surface has been sophisticated and skillful, if too esoteric and rarefied in its original encounter and intrigue with literary theory and post-structuralist philosophy. Some of the authors in this volume and some readers may disagree with this thumbnail analysis, but few would disagree that architecture became more autonomous, disciplinary, and focused on design per se in the last quarter of the twentieth century. (And some would say this shift was for the better.) As we begin to broaden our cone of vision and respread our interdisciplinary wings, urbanism and urban design deserve more and more attention. The math of urbanization, the imperatives of ecology, and the scales of justice suggest a mandate to reboot and to rethink our mission and methods, as well as our ideals, if idealism is still possible in our era of postmodernity. We believe that the knowledge and insights of our academic and professional colleagues, from different generations and institutions, illuminate and develop ways to think about urbanism and urban design. This is not to say that the authors agree or even converge. The discourse is divided, and the intellectual turf is contested and factionalized. Indeed, the territory is as diverse, fascinating, and complex as the city itself. We hope the range of essays and articles conveys the depth and the breadth of the intellectual terrain and will focus attention on these issues in our schools and the professions. But we cannot risk paralysis from over-analysis. Compelled and inspired by discourse and dialogue, we need to act in the world in new and more effective ways. Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning University of Michigan October 2007

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, we must thank the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture for spearheading this series of readers, and for inviting us to edit this volume. We are particularly indebted to Michael Monti, Executive Director of the A.C.S.A., who provided able direction and guidance, with the assistance of Kevin Mitchell of the A.C.S.A. national office. Our trans-Atlantic thanks go to Caroline Mallinder, who was in charge of publications on the built environment for Taylor & Francis Books, and Georgina Johnson, Assistant Editor. Working with them was a pleasure. We wish to also thank our colleagues at the Taubman College of Architecture 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 (who is down the hall in the School of Art & Design) shared images from their collections. And of course there were the many contributors, especially those who wrote new essays for the book. These authors are the sine qua non of such a reader, and, like urban design itself, their individual essays combine to form a compendium that is greater than the sum of its literary parts. We are encouraged by the growth of interest and activity in urbanism and urban design, both in the academy and the profession. Like sustainability and social justice, urbanism is one of those bonds that is almost chemical in its strength. They can unite the world in ways that are both common and profound, and we hope this book adds to the conversation and ultimately to the bond itself. As ever, we are grateful for the unflagging support and forbearance of our respective families, especially our spouses Kathleen Nolan and Malcolm McCullough. Kit McCullough Doug Kelbaugh

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I URBAN PROCESS

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INTRODUCTION KIT KRANKEL McCULLOUGH When asked to compile essays for an urban design reader we jumped in without first establishing for ourselves what constituted urban design. Consequently everything we read was fair game for inclusion in this volume—as long as it touched on urbanism, design, or both. To define urban design is difficult; indeed, there is no accepted definition. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the symposium at Harvard University at which José Luis Sert coined the term, Alex Krieger attempted a definition. Drawing from definitions of the word territory in the dictionary, he came up with “spheres of urbanistic action to promote the vitality, livability and physical character of cities.”1 With this definition in mind, we open this book with Urban Process, in which we consider urban design as “spheres of urbanistic action.” While urban design is often defined as architecture at the largest scale, these essays fit comfortably within “spheres of action” as opposed to physical artifact. There is a preference for small actions over big ones, as well as for collective action, with many participants—in short, an emphasis on the “urban” over the “design.” This preference implies that it is the participants that determine the city more than the physical form. The beauty of the expression “spheres of action” is that it implies a community of actors. In other words, it is ultimately people that define the city, and their actions that constitute its design. Which raises the question, what is the role of design in the city? Perhaps the notion of urban design is undesirable, if not unattainable. Often, the urban areas that are most valued and appreciated are ones that seem to have sprung 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 la Howard Rourke in The Fountainhead, making heroic design decisions on the behalf of others. History is littered with examples of architects who have attempted to design in this mode at the scale of the city, with failed, even disastrous results. Rather, the role of the urban designer is to enable citizens to act on their own behalf—to design the structure that allows the possibility of the city, rather than to design the city itself. There can be no single designer of the city because the design of the city is not a finite process; rather it is continual and unending. By necessity, the physical form of the city is shaped by multiple forces, players, and parameters. 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, crossing the boundaries of architecture, planning, landscape architecture, and 3

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1 Harvard Design Magazine, Spring/Summer 2006.

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engineering. Like planning, urban design is a creature of policy, political decision-making, and power structures. Yet it is distinct from urban planning, because it is predicated on three-dimensional form. The process of urban design is to resolve the political, economic, and social vectors with the goal of arriving at urban form that works. Although urban designers focus on built form, their design mode differs from that of the architecture profession, with its emphasis on the new and the inventive. Urban designers instead take a more empiricist and pragmatic approach, observing human interaction with the built environment in an effort to discern which design moves will hold true for a longer time horizon. Cities are meant to last for a very long time. They do not represent the art of any one era, but evolve over time to reflect both the current and cumulative aspirations of their inhabitants. The essays in this chapter make different observations regarding those aspirations, and arrive at different conclusions as to what makes a city work, but they all describe a working city as one that tries to provide equity, sociability, and urbanity. But it should be recognized that not all spheres of urbanistic action are so ideal, or even so visible or recognizable. Many of the actions that shape the city occur within entirely separate spheres and with entirely different motives, from the traffic engineer whose only objective is to move more cars through an intersection to the financial markets that only wish to maximize the returns and minimize the risk of global capital. Many of the essays in this section describe underlying cultural currents that direct our urbanistic actions without our even realizing it. So rather than orchestra conductor, a more apt metaphor for the urban designer may be Greek chorus. Often the urban design process is one of trying to make people more aware of their actions and how those actions impact and ultimately shape the city—a process of not only enabling, but one of education. Some of the processes described in this section are meant to deliberately counter the global, corporate, financial, and cultural forces that act on our cities: charrettes bring direct public participation into the design process. Finance and zoning mechanisms allow average citizens to act as their own developers to build their own homes and neighborhoods. Artists stage art works, protests, and celebrations that help people to see their city differently, and uncover the hidden forces that shape it. Perhaps there is no sphere in which actions shape our physical environment more, or where it is more crucial to raise awareness and enable people to act, than that of environmental sustainability. Sustainability has emerged as the critical issue facing the design professions, one reason why the first volume in this series of readers focuses on this topic. But beyond sustainability as a specific design strategy, we argue in the Preface that urbanism is in and of itself an important contribution toward sustainability. The essays here remind us that urbanists, as stewards of the built environment, are participating in sustainable design. Re-use is a central tenet of sustainability, 4

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be it the re-use of existing buildings or urban fabric through preservation or through the regeneration of waste materials and spaces. As we noted in the Preface, cities are innately more energy-efficient on a per capita basis than suburban or exurban sprawl; denser is inherently greener. As David Owen points out in his essay, the mere act of living in a city is one of the most sustainable choices one can make. And so, perhaps we arrive at another definition of urban design, one also posed by Alex Krieger: urban design is a frame of mind, a shared commitment to the totality of the built environment—to urbanism, to the city.

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THE VIRTUES OF CITIES OBSERVATIONS

ALEX KRIEGER (1995)

We Americans have long shown ambivalence towards the city. We have been ambivalent about the value of urbanity to our culture, about the appropriate form that the city should take and, especially, about where one is best placed in relationship to the city. How is “a good place to live” typically represented: a charming porch, a conversation held across a trimly kept yard, a bicycle 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 work against establishing good urban places to live. Among our yearnings, for example, 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 it better the next time around. We want to spread out, to stand apart, to express 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 that on it a good place to live and happiness will be found. Notions of rootedness, stability and permanence of place, which in many cultures are identified with good places to live and with urbanity, have been among Americans a less pressing matter. Such yearnings for progress, mobility, individuality and space continue to determine thousands of choices for dwelling on the periphery of existing cities. Not surprisingly, municipal officials, town planners and mayors frequently remark on the diminishing urbanity within their towns. They decry the popularity of regional malls, lament the lack of activity along main street, worry about falling downtown investment and the migration of residents and businesses outward. They blame sprawl for their problems while 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 of life on the periphery. It is not certain whether such emulation ever brings residents back to town, or merchants or places of work, but contributes to the erasure of distinctions between towns, suburbs, hamlets and other forms of settlement. Without its ramifications fully considered, such homogenization has also been an American goal. Pondering human nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson often reflected on the difficulty of acquiring (much less maintaining) both “rural strength and religion” and “city facility and polish.” Less philosophical by nature, nor inhibited by metaphysical opposites, town boosters before and especially since Emerson sought, and often claimed, to have overcome this difficulty. Their efforts to establish what others have ennobled as the “middle 6

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landscape,” “borderlands,” “garden cities,” “edge cities,” or “greenfields” ultimately reinforce Emerson’s doubts. The great swaths of development between the ever-receding country and the decongested town seem conducive to acquiring neither rural strength and religion nor city facility and polish. So perhaps Woody Allen’s claim that he is “two with nature” contains a useful insight about town design. The long-standing American yearning for a state of settlement in which the benefits of urbanity and nature are enjoyed simultaneously has been exposed as a form of fool’s gold that devalues both town and country. To compete with their ever-spreading peripheries cities and towns might best maintain their own virtues. Under the leavening forces of rampant disaggregation, however, we need frequent reminders of what these virtues are. Density. An essential ingredient of a town is its density, measured not in square feet but in the juxtaposition of artifice with human activity. “I have three chairs in my house:” Thoreau wrote, “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” He may have preferred solitude but understood the civilizing force of aggregation. Density, as distinct from congestion, promotes engagement. Interaction, made possible by proximity, is crucial and far more difficult to sustain where things are spread out across great distance, e-mail notwithstanding. The photographer, Alfred Steiglitz, urged his students to move in a little closer, to crop their scene a little tighter, after they composed a shot. Similar advise would benefit those who build the American city. Outside of a few pockets of genuine congestion, greater proximity among buildings and activities would benefit sociability. Propinquity. In an age promising ever more instant communication it is easy, but wrongheaded, to assume that physical proximity is no longer important. Each day some 75,000 people visit the Mall of America, located in Bloomington, Minnesota, conveniently outside both Minneapolis and St. Paul. Are they there merely to shop, or does the popularity of the place lie partially in enabling a primitive kind of propinquity to occur? Some do shop, while more seem to be riding the indoor roller coaster, posing with the giant Snoopy, building Lego castles and enjoying the crowd. Our need for contact with others is such that we will commute great distances to places like mall concourses, forgetting that they are but simulations of environments traditionally found in cities such as Minneapolis and St. Paul. The popularity of recreational shopping, tourism, theme parks, sporting events, specialized museums, trade shows, movie theaters (despite five hundred cable channels), even charity walk-a-thons, expresses a subliminal need for social contact—for the sheer pleasure of it. Heterogeneity within an ordered fabric. This is a corollary to locating many things and activities close together. The beauty of Boston’s Back Bay lies in the tension between the similarities and differences among the facades along a block, and the repetition of such blocks along streets which 7

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themselves subtly differ in dimension, landscaping, edge definition and principal use. Buildings, like citizens, warrant their idiosyncrasies so long as each behaves civilly toward neighbors. Spaced at intervals of a half-acre or more, the need for civility lessens. There is a kind of illusion of autonomy about buildings spread over a vast landscape. Juxtaposed realms. Lewis Mumford once defined a town as the place where the greatest numbers of choices are available in the smallest geographical area. Nodding approval, we go so far as to label “Central Business District” on our zoning maps and mix offices with shops. The demise of vital downtowns generally parallels the rise in the use of the term Central Business District. Why would anyone want to live, shop, dine, relax, meet a friend, 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 called the Central Business District? Because our downtowns have become mere business districts their appeal diminishes even for businesses that eventually leave in search of environments that offer their employees a wider array of amenities. Instead of pining for the return of business interests to the downtown we should turn our attention to overcoming the absence of all other interests. Neighbors unlike ourselves. Some of the most charming early suburbs, like Forest Hill Gardens in Queens or Roland Park in Baltimore, contained a rich mixture of dwelling sizes and clusters. Diversity in house types is more likely to accommodate diversity of social, economic and age groups. This is not particularly popular among contemporary suburban developers, many of whom cater their subdivisions to increasingly narrow segments of the population. A growing concern about such environments is that they breed indifference, or worse, intolerance, towards social groups beyond their gates. Such indifference is unlikely to enhance democracy. While towns were always made up of defined neighborhoods, and even enclaves, proximity among them, along with shared streets and public spaces, assured regular interaction. Such interaction, or the mere promise of it, remains one of the advantages of town life. Social landmarks. A statue of President McKinley graces and organizes traffic in an otherwise graceless rotary in North Adams, Massachusetts. The center of Riverside, Illinois, one of the nation’s earliest planned suburbs, is marked by a modest train depot and a beautiful water tower. Landmarks confer coherence and legibility, not status. They highlight things that are dear to a community—like remembering a president or the storage of water. They are not produced by labeling, or through form alone. This is apparently beyond the comprehension of those who name their shopping strip “Center Place,” their office park “Landmark Square,” and mark each with a faux campanile. Texture, detail and narrative. The many buffalo gargoyles on the face of the city hall in Buffalo, New York are not only endearing, but relate a 8

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place-name to an entire epoch of frontier urbanization. An old storefront in New Bedford, Massachusetts may carry reminders of ships, whaling and trade, not unlike a street in modern Tokyo that exhibits the near-cacophony of a culture obsessed with digital technology. Public environments benefit from such excesses. Robert Browning’s “less is more” was not intended to describe a town’s public realm. The aphorism’s principal modern proponent, Mies van der Rohe, could also be heard to say, “God rests in the details.” A preponderance of detail invested with qualities characteristic of a place was for Kevin Lynch essential to good city form. These details are what Italo Calvino’s Marco Polo describes to Kubla Khan in order to make him see the cities of his travels. Connectivity. Some of today’s most frustrating rush hour snarls occur on the perimeter highways, which pass through the uncrowded suburbs. Arterial highways channel traffic and, therefore, limit choice. A network of streets, narrow, crooked and even redundant, provides actual choice and, more importantly, the promise of choice. On a congested highway relief is no closer than the next set of exit ramps, assuming one knows where they lead. By taking a quick left followed by a right while negotiating an urban street grid, a less busy parallel street is found, a traffic back-up may be avoided, a “short-cut” is imagined, a sense of control or freedom is maintained. This is an advantage that every city cabbie understands, but few highway engineers ever acknowledge. Streetfronts. In a typical contemporary subdivision the elements furthest away from the street right-of-way seem to receive the greatest design attention. Unfortunately, this leaves much of what influences the experience of the public realm under-designed. On the inside of the fence in a Phoenix subdivision there are beautiful homes, immaculate lawns, wonderful terraces, decks and gardens. On the public side there is simply a road for circulation assumed to require none of the pleasures provided by fronting on a street, instead of an artery. Immediacy of experience. Americans are known for their dislike of walking. Yet they actually walk hundreds of yards each day through parking lots, through shopping malls, through corridors of large buildings, through airport terminals. Much of this walking is caused by providing for the convenience of the automobile, and much of it is forgettable. In a car, or on foot, we commute to a destination. The suburban landscape seems to only offer destinations. But it is the seductions along an interesting path that make walking—and cities—enjoyable. Sustainability, persistence, and adaptability. While few parts of any city warrant strict preservation, virtually all have potential for reuse. Unfortunately this is often overlooked in the zeal to build anew, usually somewhere else, under the dubious supposition that rebuilding will enable us to get it right the next time. The town of Southfield, a few miles north of Detroit, now boasts a daily commuter population greater than Detroit’s. 9

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Largely made up of office parks strung along a highway, Southfield’s chief advantage seems to be that it is new and not Detroit. And so with each new Southfield a Detroit withers, but, one suspects, only temporarily. Long after the single-function office towers of Southfield become outmoded (or simply less new and less profitable) enough of the infrastructure, street grid, building stock, cultural institutions, historic monuments, and neighborhood domains of Detroit will have survived to initiate, perhaps even inspire, reuse. The archetypal suburban landscape, with its coarse grain of development, relative absence of history, and single-use zoning has yet to prove as adaptable 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 carefully, sometimes imperfectly registered. Subtle or precise, such overlapping of precincts is crucial to place-making. An environment without perceivable boundaries is amorphous, indistinguishable from its surroundings and generally place-less. This is sadly characteristic of much of the modern metropolitan landscape. With apologies to Robert Frost, good fences may not insure good neighbors but neither does their absence foster connectivity or communality. Public life. A large downtown shopping mall is a marvel of design and a magnet for activity. But a careful observer will note the limited range of activities that takes place inside. You will be ushered out unto the street for behavior deemed inappropriate by the management. On that street, lowly or grand, you have rejoined the town. In a city the sense of proximity to a public realm remains palpable, with standards of acceptable public behavior discreetly reinforced. An urban environment cherishes this relative openness and, therefore, yields to privatization only with considerable reluctance. The potential for a centered life. Against most planners’ predictions, Los Angeles—the proverbial score of suburbs in search of a town—has recently grown a visible downtown. It is really mostly a collection of corporate office towers, the product of speculative land economics at work. Yet perhaps there is something in human nature that seeks comfort in centering, and such vertical outcroppings of commerce satisfy that impulse, at least scenographically. While there may be fewer economic and technological reasons for concentration, the new Los Angeles downtown or, for that matter, the continuing reinvestment in Boston’s much older center, are expressions of support for centering—concentration as a matter of choice rather than as an historic imperative. There are those who believe that we will continue to disaggregate, leaving cities to live in closer proximity to the splendors of nature, with technology providing a modicum of (digital) social contact. Then how does one explain the invention of the “internet” cafe? Will not the very convenience of being able to perform most daily errands, most work functions and most business transactions from the privacy of our own homes (or anywhere else for that 10

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matter) compel us to escape the attendant disengagement from society? Retarding isolation will remain the special virtue of the contemporary city. In it, and nowhere else as poignantly, a citizen can still partake of the pleasures of overlap, the pleasures of proximity, the pleasures of propinquity.

This essay is abridged from the original, which first appeared in Places: Forum of Design for the Public Realm, September 1995. 11

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WORKING CITIES Density, risk, spontaneity J. MAX BOND, Jr. (2001)

Cities reflect social and cultural norms as well as economic and technical means. They are also expressions of belief and will. The current state of our cities reflects much about our time: mobility, governmental policies, technical shifts, race relations, materialism. Notwithstanding the continuing growth of suburbs and their attendant “edge cities” there is also evidence of a renewed interest in our older cities. Urban redevelopment is being driven by a number of factors, from retooling of the local economy to creative re-use of former industrial districts. While this redevelopment is welcome in any guise, contemporary urbanism in the U.S. betrays tendencies that are antithetical to true urban regeneration because they don’t deal with the whole city. We are witnessing the suburbanization of our cities through the replacement of multi-family dwellings with single family homes and row housing. This makes inefficient use of the existing urban infrastructure and impairs the ability of neighborhoods to generate the local commerce that distinguishes walking cities from car-dependent suburbs. Our cities are undergoing a process of sanitization, an effort to redesign complex urban environments with a narrower palette pitched to bourgeois sensibilities. New York City’s Forty-Second Street, for example, was not only a sleazy precinct but also an entertainment center for working class kids. The redevelopment sponsored by Disney may make tourists more comfortable, because it is so familiar, but at the cost of the city’s messy realism. Urban regeneration is often propelled by the gentrification of working class districts into expensive upper middle class enclaves. This process is frequently attended by cultural cleansing and the withdrawal of support systems for people of low income. There is a palpable fear of risk in current American culture that wants to make everything safe and predictable. As a nation we are ambivalent about the very diversity we value. The success of the ersatz townscapes at Disney World’s Epcot and Universal Studios’ City Walk confirms both our attraction to and fear of close encounters with other cultures. The city offers the possibility of the unexpected, even shocking, encounter. These phenomena reinforce the consumerism that is the bedrock of our national economy and ideology. They manifest an imbalance in spending on private as opposed to public amenities, an emphasis on consumer products instead of buildings and places. The shopping mall and festival marketplace remove the agora to privately owned and controlled settings. 12

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Government policy favors the private automobile over mass transit despite the cost in congestion, pollution and personal injury. Budget surpluses are targeted for tax cuts rather than improved services and environments. We may participate in a global society but we live in geographically specific places. A list of what makes good cities is fairly obvious, encompassing physical, economic, social and environmental elements. But in U.S. cities these elements are rarely applied with equal resources and commitment to the vast areas inhabited by the majority of people—working people in need of working cities. I speak here of quality housing, schools and libraries; of reliable and efficient municipal services; of properly funded and maintained public transportation of parks and playgrounds. In poorer neighborhoods 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 and create the city that reflects our goals. What will it take to create a working city? An emphasis on ordinary buildings as well as the exceptional. A focus on the public realm and systems. Increased emphasis on the visual quality of the environment. A merging of the disciplines of architecture and urban design. A shift in government priorities to support desirable land uses and urban systems. Support for the local economy, including the informal sector. Cities must be well designed. Urban populations will only grow significantly if cities provide services, amenities and an attractive physical environment for all people. For poor people cities offer opportunity; for artists and dissidents they offer freedom. For all they present the possibility of social interaction and cultural growth. These qualities have been intrinsic to cities throughout history and explain why people still flock to vibrant urban neighborhoods. The range of possibilities offered by cities is also why our urban future does not reside in a risk-free bourgeois vision but in a denser, more broadly based, model of a pluralistic, dynamic and public urbanism.

This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 89th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2001. 13

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MEANINGFUL URBAN DESIGN Teleological/catalytic/relevant ASEEM INAM (1999)

MEANINGFUL URBAN DESIGN

The conventional approach to defining the field of urban design is morphological; that is, according to the way it is structured and organized. Urban design is often regarded as an ambiguous combination of architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, and civil engineering. This definition puts urban designers at odds over power and resource with architects, planners, landscape architects, and civil engineers, and thereby dilutes the leading role urban design can play in the blossoming of cities. Furthermore, much of the recent interest in urban design repeats the familiar deficiencies of the past, such as a focus on the superficial aesthetics and picturesque aspects of cities; an over-emphasis on the architect as urban designer and a singular obsession with design; an understanding of urban design primarily as a finished product; and a pedagogical process that is comfortably rooted in architecture and design (e.g. matters of visual composition). One major problem with current urban design thought and practice is the sense that it is architecture, only at a larger scale and within an urban context. In this school of thought, there is far too much emphasis on the “design”, and not enough of an understanding of the “urban.” Attempting to design a city as one designs a building is clearly misleading and dangerous, because unlike individual buildings that tend to be objects, cities are highly complex, large scale, active entities, and contain a bewildering multiplicity of communities. Few contemporary urban designers demonstrate a fundamental understanding of the complex ways in which cities function. Especially glaring is the naiveté of contemporary urban designers vis-à-vis power structures and decision-making processes, which are dominated by politicians, bureaucrats, corporations, developers, and interest groups. I propose a meaningful approach to urban design, one that is truly consequential in improving the essential qualities of city life. The approach consists of being teleological, that is, driven by purpose rather than defined by disciplines; being catalytic, that is, generating or contributing to longterm development processes; and being relevant, that is, grounded in first causes and pertinent human values. In my view, then, urban design is driven by the purpose of addressing fundamental urban challenges, circumscribed by urban scale and complexity, and rests upon an interdisciplinary set of skills, 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, it is a stimulus to other goals that are more critical to society and to the substantive challenges facing contemporary cities. These goals include community empowerment and social integration, inner city revitalization, cross-cultural learning and collaboration, effective land use, and a wider range of urban form choices for citizens. A teleological urban design would address three critical aspects of the urban experience, which are the relationships between the city and the economy, the city and society, and the city and power. The relationship between the city and the economy considers the economic functioning of the city, including the city as a point in the production landscape as well as a site of investment, the changing international division of labor, and the consequent effects on the specific urban economies. The relationship between the city and society focuses on the city as an arena of social interaction, the distribution of social groups, residential segregation, the construction of gender and ethnic identities, and patterns of class formation. The relationship between the city and power is the representation of urban structure and political power, and considers the city to be a system of communication, a recorder of the distribution of power, and an arena for the social struggles over the meaning and substance of the urban experience. Such an approach would address the question: Why should the field of urban design even exist when there are far more powerful actors shaping cities? Because urban design is the only field that is geared specifically to shape the three-dimensional urban environment at multiple scales, and to constantly assert an effective symbiosis between urban form and society and its political-economic structures. CATALYTIC

Urban design projects and processes would generate or contribute significantly to three types of socio-economic development processes while enhancing the built environment of cities: community development; economic development; and international development. Urban design as a catalyst for community development consists of intelligent community participation in projects, facilitated by: dialogue between community representatives and urban designers; community leadership which is representative of broader community views; institutional partnerships, for example between private and nonprofit sectors; decision-making systems such as simulations and games; and the soft-programming of urban design, like the incorporation of public art into projects, and the integration of designed activities, events, programs, and services integrated into built form. 15

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1 Urban Design Group, “Involving local communities in urban design.”

2 Jones, Pettus and Pyatok, Good Neighbors: Affordable Family Housing.

For the urban designer, design communication is inherent in the act of design, both as internal communication in the thinking process, and as an external communication with the client, user, or broader community. The people within a given context, such as homeowners in a residential neighborhood or business owners in a commercial downtown, are the agents of change, aided by a communication process that speaks to the formal aspects of their environment. The better this communication process of design is, the higher the level of public awareness and sense of ownership, and the better the internal decisions of change. There are conventional public 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 more powerful and effective mechanisms for active and intelligent community participation. The Urban Design Group in the UK1 provides a series of clear, concise, and extremely useful community participation forums, including innovative mechanisms such as street stalls and interactive displays. The popularity of the computer program SimCity, a city building simulator, attests to the possibility of designing urban simulation models with broad public appeal. These examples point to creative, engaging, and beneficial forms of not only community participation, but more significantly, community development, because they increase community awareness, generate community strategies, and suggest modes of community intervention in the future of their own environments. An example of soft-programming as a long-term process of community development is illustrated by the Hismen Hin-nu Terrace housing project in Oakland, California.2 With a grant from the City of Oakland, the architect Michael Pyatok studied development scenarios for housing and neighborhood services on several sites in the city and organized a series of workshops using participatory modeling kits to help over 30 neighborhood participants to 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 main boulevard with housing over shops. Family housing with a day care center around quiet courtyards is built behind a ground-floor market, niches for street vendors, and a job-training center, all of which contribute to community development in the neighborhood. A multi-ethnic mix of tenants is depicted in exterior murals, frieze panels, decorative tiles, and steel entry gates in the form of a burst of sunshine. The art is intended to prove that America’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 designing projects that generate employment on a long-term basis, that attract investment into deprived areas, and that increase business and tax revenues. 16

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Horton Plaza, a highly successful shopping center in San Diego, generated jobs for local residents when city officials utilized their position as stakeholders in the project to fill half of the nearly 1,000 new jobs, with 70 percent minority workers and 60 percent from high-unemployment, low-income neighborhoods. Urban design as a catalyst for international development takes the guise of sensitivity to indigenous and cosmopolitan contexts, the generation of cross-cultural learning, and urban mediations of economic globalization. Cross-cultural learning arises out of understanding and applying in a sympathetic and appropriate manner, urban design methodologies, processes, and forms from different cultural contexts.3 For example, housing authorities in the United States could learn from Henri Ciriani’s social housing projects in France, which serve as a demonstration of how largescale low-income housing projects built by the government can constitute positive 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 that forms a corner in an otherwise loosely structured urban space. By creating a visually strong plan of geometrical precision, the project inspires a still-life composition device in urban design. Transformed into a picture plane, the various free-standing buildings as well as high-rise buildings that surround the project integrate into a more harmonious urban setting. The courtyard side of the building is a pure, right-angled figure containing a perfectly defined square space. The layering of the facades facilitates the articulation of the decreasing volumes, contains the apartments’ balconies and terraces, and mediates between the architecture of the building and the urbanity of the neighborhood. In this manner, La Courdangle constitutes a low-income housing project that is rich in architectural spaces and detail, while helping define and enhance the urban space around it. The ongoing phenomenon of globalization suggests some strategies for urban designers. Urban designers must be able to understand and react to influences impinging on their communities, regardless of where those influences originate (e.g. World Bank funded housing projects in developing countries) and which actors are responsible (e.g. American architectural firms designing office complexes in London). Furthermore, urban designers must develop associations and networks that extend beyond their spatial reach through collaborative endeavors and thereby provide another mechanism for responding to the multitude of actors who shape their communities. For example, the Indian architect B.V. Doshi utilized an institution, the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation for Studies and Research, to develop an internationally funded (i.e. World Bank), local (i.e. Indore, India) housing project in India, Aranya Nagar.5 The project has been largely a success due to the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation, which carried out considerable research, including surveys to understand the physical and economic factors that 17

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3 Inam, “Institutions, routines, and crises: post-earthquake housing recovery in Mexico City and Los Angeles.”

4 Ciriani, Henri Ciriani, pp. 66–73.

5 Serageldin, The Architecture of Empowerment: People, Shelter and Livable Cities.

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determine the size, type, and density of the housing plots that were specific to the local context. The project translated international expectations into local needs through grassroots research. RELEVANT

6 Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History, p. 13.

7 Ibid., p. 100. 8 Ibid., pp. 10–11.

Urban design that is relevant is pertinent to matters at hand, and is based on fundamental human and natural conditions. I highlight three such relevant approaches to urban design: (1) a history of urban form that analyzes the determinant processes and human meanings of form, (2) a theory of urban form that is normative and based on human values, and (3) a design methodology of urban form that is empirically based and derived from patterns of human behavior. Urban form is related directly to urban process over time; that is, the conjunction of people, forces, and institutions that brings about urban form. A way to examine this historical process is to ask probing research questions: Who actually designs cities? What procedures do they go through? Which are the empowering institutions and laws? Urban process also refers to physical change through time. The tendency all too often is to see urban form as a finite thing and a complicated object, but thousands of witting and unwitting acts every day alter a city’s lines in ways that are perceptible only over a certain stretch of time. City walls are pulled down and filled in; once rational grids are slowly obscured; a slashing diagonal boulevard is run through close-grained residential neighborhoods; railroad tracks usurp cemeteries and waterfronts; and wars, fires, and highways annihilate city cores.6 As an example, let us consider the grid in history. The point is made regularly that grids, especially in the United States, besides offering simplicity 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 considerable property, but rather that the basic initial geometry of land parcels bespoke a simple egalitarianism that invited easy entry into the urban land market. The reality, however, is much less admirable. Ordinary citizens gained easy access to urban land only at a preliminary phase, when cheap rural land was being urbanized through rapid laying out. To the extent that the grid sped this process and streamlined absentee purchases, it may be considered an equalizing social device. Once the land had been identified with the city, however, this advantage of the initial geometry of land parcels 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 a visual theme upon which to play variations: he or she might be concerned with issues like using a true checkerboard design versus syncopated block 18

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rhythms, with cross-axial or other types of emphasis, with the placement of open spaces within the discipline of the grid, with the width and hierarchy of streets. For the meaningful urban designer, on the other hand, how, and with what intentions, the Romans in Britain, the builders of medieval Wales and Gascony, the Spanish in Mexico, or the Illinois Central Railroad Company in the American Midwest employed the same device of settlement is the principal substance of a review of orthogonal design. In fact, the grid has accommodated a startling variety of social structures, including territorial aristocracy in Greek Sicily, the agrarian republicanism of Thomas Jefferson, the cosmic vision of Joseph Smith in Mormon settlements like Salt Lake City, and capitalist speculation. There have been few serious attempts at a comprehensive and normative theory of urban form. The book Good City Form is an impressive and daring attempt by Kevin Lynch9 at a systematic effort to state general relationships between the form of a place and its value to society. Lynch generalizes performance dimensions, which are certain identifiable characteristics of cities due primarily to their spatial qualities and are measurable scales along which different groups achieve different positions. These performance dimensions are based on the following thinking: The good city is one in which the continuity of [a] complex ecology is maintained while progressive change is permitted. The fundamental good is the continuous development of the individual or the small group and their 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 which enhances the continuity of a culture and the survival of its people, increases a sense of connection in time and space, and permits or spurs individual growth: development, within continuity, via openness and connection . . . [a settlement that is] accessible, decentralized, diverse, adaptable, and tolerant to experiment. 10 In Lynch’s theory of good city form, there are seven basic dimensions. First is vitality, which is the degree to which an urban form supports the vital functions, biological requirements, and capabilities, and protects the survival of human beings, for example, via adequate throughput of water, air, food, and energy. Second is sense, which is the degree to which an urban form is clearly perceived and mentally differentiated as well as structured in time and space, and the degree to which that mental structure connects with the residents’ values and concepts, for example, via a distinct identity and unconstrained legibility. Third is fit, which is the degree to which urban form matches the pattern and quantity of actions that people usually engage in, for example, via compatibility between function and form. Fourth is access, which is the ability to reach other people, activities, resources, and 19

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9 Lynch, Good City Form.

10 Ibid., pp. 116–117.

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11 Moore and Marans, Advances in Environment, Behaviour, and Design.

places, including the quantity and diversity of the elements that can be reached, for example, via ease of communication and movement. Fifth is control, which is the degree to which the creation, access, use, maintenance, and modification to urban spaces and activities is managed by those who use, work or live in them, for example, via localized power. Sixth is 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 distributed among people, according to a principles such as intrinsic worth or equity, for example, via equal protection from environmental hazards such as traffic and pollution. A problem-solving approach to urban design would explicitly render its design methodology, and describe how a meaningful urban designer might draw directly from empirical evidence and systematic research. The book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al. is most useful as a series of thoroughly analyzed and empirically based guidelines to solving common problems of urban form. Each suggested solution is described in a way that provides the key relationships, for example, between human behavior and spatial setting, needed to solve the problem, but in a general enough manner to allow for adaptation to particular lifestyles, aesthetic tastes, and local conditions. Each pattern describes a problem that occurs repeatedly in the built environment. The authors outline an urban design methodology that is based on archetypal problems (e.g. neighborhood size), analyses of built examples, descriptions of historical precedents, and the explicit unpacking of design solutions to render them clear, relevant, and thoughtful. The basis for the design patterns was extensive and thorough empirical research carried on over an eight-year period. There continues to be voluminous research on environment and behavior (e.g. Moore and Marans11) that is highly relevant and useful for urban designers. DESIGNING THE FUTURE OF URBAN DESIGN

12 Inam, “City, catalyst of hope.”

Urban designers are beginning to question what in fact is “urban” in the contemporary environment. A city is and will continue to be a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement (or network of settlements) of socially heterogeneous individuals, and a point (or points) of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. A city is, and will continue to be, a catalyst: its power of attraction providing a concentration and diversity of peoples and purposes; its form celebrating the rich complexity of the human condition; its essence the true nature of human potential.12 In this vein, urban designers should focus more on the “urban” of urban design, and become less infatuated with the “design” of urban design. Urban design must begin with cities: how they work, how they change, and what impacts they have in creating enabling versus destructive impacts. 20

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For example, urban design has to be seen as both, within the framework of investment 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. An illustration of these “webs” is the dependence on private investments and initiatives for downtown rebuilding in American cities that has changed urban politics and the nature of the public realm. Private investment is generally seen as performing functions in the public interest. The public sector has become a facilitator; it responds to, reacts to, and regulates private initiatives. There is give-and-take in these public–private transactions as developers demand enhanced development rights, zoning variances, land write-down, financial guarantees, or improvements in order to initiate investment in American downtowns, while planners require in return certain urban amenities, usually public open space, street improvements, public art, housing, or even day care centers.15 The form of the contemporary urban downtown is a product of negotiation, bargaining, and deal-making between city governments and private developers, and not simply the product 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 design as a finished product: Does it look good? By the means of compressing its meanings into a concise formal expression, a poetic urban design project draws the mind to a level of perception concealed behind the conventional presentations of urban form. The second is the sense of the project as an object that functions in an affordable, convenient and comfortable manner for its users: Does it work well? By the means of a meticulous understanding of human behavior and human needs, a truly utilitarian urban design project creates an environment that satisfies its users. The third is to have the urban design project generate or substantially contribute to socio-economic development processes: Does it produce significant long-term impacts? In this framework, urban designers and urban design projects become catalysts for long-term human development processes such as community betterment, economic improvement, and cross-cultural understanding. The critical question that guides this meaningful future of urban design is: So what? That is, what consequential purpose has been achieved by particular urban design theories, urban design methodologies, urban design practices, and urban design projects? In order to further develop this line of thought, we can look to the American school of philosophy known as pragmatism. Pragmatism may be best characterized as the attempt to assess the significance for human value of technology in the broadest sense; that is, technology as the totality of means employed to provide objects necessary for human sustenance.16 The primary question that pragmatism raises is the question of meaning. Under what conditions does a statement 21

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13 David Crane, Planning and Design in New York: A Study of Problems and Processes of its Physical Environment.

14 Richard Lai, Law in Urban Design and Planning: The Invisible Web.

15 Loukaitou-Sideris and Banerjee, Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form.

16 Kaplan, The New World of Philosophy, p. 14.

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have meaning, and what meaning attaches to it in the light of those conditions? What these formulations amount to is this: What conceivable bearing does a proposition, such as meaningful urban design, have on the conduct of our lives? Meanings, above all, involve purposes: and a meaningful urban design should involve the most substantive purposes of generating long-term processes of human development and ensuring that outcomes of those processes are highly pertinent to fundamental human values. Such an approach to urban design requires profound cultural understanding, social sensitivity, political savvy, and an in-depth grasp of the nature of cities; but in order to be truly meaningful, it needs to be driven primarily by a moral imperative. We can no longer afford to conceive of critical urban challenges—such as poverty and homelessness—and the socio-economic development processes that address them as being separate from urban design practices and projects. To be effective urban designers, we must help design the processes that shape our cities and foster true human development. REFERENCES

Alexander, C., S. Ishikawa, M. Silverstein, M. Jacobson, I. Fiksdahl-King and S. 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 University Press). Bratt, R. (1986) Public housing: the controversy and the contribution, in: R. Bratt, C. Hartman and A. Meyerson (Eds.) Critical Perspectives in Housing (Philadelphia, 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 Public Administration). 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, Los Angeles, University of Southern California. 22

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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 potentials 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 the 87th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1999. 23

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1 Jean Baudrillard, America, Chris Turner trans. (London: Verso, 1988), p. 81.

CHRISTOPHER MONSON (1986)

[We Europeans] shall never enjoy the same freedom—not the formal freedom we take for granted, but the concrete, flexible, functional, active freedom we see at work in American institutions and in the head of each citizen. Our conception of freedom will never be able to rival their spatial, mobile conception, which derives from the fact that at a certain point 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 British Columbia to Missoula and on south eventually to Arizona, lies the city of Kalispell, Montana. Save for its spectacular mountain setting, this small city might be mistaken for any typical American place, being formed by two intersecting highways and orthogonally gridded, with streets numbered north to south and avenues east to west. Through Kalispell, U.S. 93 becomes the city’s Main Street. On its south end, Main Street is forced around a plot in the middle of the roadway, the site of the Flathead County Courthouse. This physical fact would be unremarkable—the building being neither particularly handsome nor its siting unusual—except for the curious experience of driving around it. One can sense clearly, even without benefit of a map, that the Courthouse occupies the singular instance in the entire city grid where the regulation of order, of movement, was denied for another public domain: the symbolic center of regional government. Certainly the reading intended at Kalispell is that of the “noble city,” of a citizenry made virtuous by the centrality of government. And yet traveling around this plot, full with its civil aspirations of both place and polity, remains a distinctly troublesome act, not merely in the discomfort of following short curves in a road that by rights should be straight, but with the nagging fact of that particularly American feeling—by rights it should be straight. Such a thought might be dismissed as anti-authoritarian American populism if it were not for the suspicion that it is exactly such populism the siting of the Courthouse seems to be resisting. After all, broad avenues topped with courthouses are more Haussmann than Everyman. But the concern may be less a question of unwarranted authority than one of deference to an outside tradition. It appears that the Courthouse’s placement—a site deviation of a mere 150 feet from the grid in which it might have easily been built—is construed to be a civil act of profound consequence. The clear suggestion is that the grid itself does not contain this political necessity; that the Courthouse site, as a dis-placement of both the ordered field and of 24

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movement through it, is seen to exhibit some ideal civility that its surrounds apparently lack. The denial of movement for the institution of a traditional center strikes at the heart of the American social compact. It is this assault put to the possibility of indigenous form which makes Kalispell and places like it so disconcerting, both to the citizen and the enlightened critic. Baudrillard makes the point that it is exactly such urban civil traditions that have been superseded by the American project: a “historical centrality” overcome by the spatial and mobile conception of American freedom. If Baudrillard offers reason for the anxiety caused by Kalispell’s formal nature, then we have a right to wonder about the recurring attempts to institute a civil order in America through this Trojan Horse of historic form. Should this challenge to an indigenous American civil form go unquestioned? Confronted with the rapid academic and legislative legitimization of postmodern urban strategies, Americans might do better by revisiting those who have offered criticism of these appropriated traditions. Frank Lloyd Wright made a career out of it (most notably with Broadacre City), a practice largely indebted to the eloquent plea of Horatio Greenough nearly a century before: “The want of an illustrious ancestry may be compensated, fully compensated; but the purloining of the coatof-arms of a defunct family is intolerable.”2 Perhaps the issue is not that Americans haven’t thought it incorrect to appropriate the forms of history— certainly, thinkers have long offered arguments to the contrary. But there still appears to be a lack of faith in the possibility of a commensurate democratic order outside of this history and its aristocratic ideals. This is indeed a problem. Against the backdrop of history’s great intellectual and 25

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Main Street in Kalispell, Montana, with axial view toward the Flathead County Courthouse. (Photo: Karen Nichols.)

2 Horatio Greenough, “American Architecture” in Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design, and Architecture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), p. 64.

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3 These thoughts, and the subsequent issues of maintenance and reciprocity, are indebted to the work of Christopher Risher, Jr., and illuminated in his unpublished manuscript “The Problem with Natchez,” p. 2.

artistic achievements, it is not certain whether we might produce comparable successes which exemplify a society of equality.3 To what then can a truly American ideal aspire? The lesson from Kalispell is that the movement expected within the American landscape instills some possibility toward giving form to the collective. The functions of the road which manifest this notion—one could suggest its “mathematics”—give reason to suspect imposed hierarchy, precisely because the road’s nature, its equanimity, diversity, and individuality, is seen counterpoised to such traditions. The search for the proper American collective begins with the fact of movement. THE INDIVIDUAL

4 Baudrillard, p. 75.

5 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 23.

Movement was an undertaking begun long before the actual transformation of the American continent. But its earliest manifestation was intellectual, not physical. The political philosophies of the Enlightenment, which had become pregnant with the possibility of an Arcadian world of complete social reorganization, were persistently thwarted by entrenched western governments. Bound from above, Europe was a place that required political and ideological revolution; Arcadia was this, but moreover a moral revolution as well. Such a utopian project, impossible from within the world it was designed to escape, was in search for entirely new ground on which to birth and develop. It is this “fantasy of emigration”4 that from the very beginning defined America. More than the simple physical leap from the Old world to the New, this movement, through the free act of abandoning the historic sociopolitical structure, brought the individual to new light. Movement became the construct by which the newly discerned citizen was gleaned from the sovereign order. But more importantly, emigration materialized the individual in space and the new body politic that this dramatic departure could define. Movement has become the very lore of American life, from the Clipper ship, the DC-3, the ’57 Chevy, to the conquest of space. America’s stories are those told through windshields: Steinbeck, Pirsig, and Kerouac all searched for America on its roads, as did those from the old culture whose perceptions have proved insightful here—Baudrillard’s late twentiethcentury roadtrip mirrored Alexis de Tocqueville’s original tour in the early nineteenth century. Reyner Banham put his finger to it saying, “like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.”5 Much of this necessity for firsthand experience is legacy to the formal organization of the land. It is nearly inconceivable that the great American enterprise of movement would ever have been as intense or productive without the very shape of the landscape—the fact of the grid. 26

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The institution of the continental grid, the six-square-mile township divisions outlined in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, was a dramatic invention of the young democracy, even though colored by the dissension and misjudgments one would expect from an undertaking so radically unproven.6 But of larger interest here is the sympathy of the idea to the intrinsic American condition. Thomas Jefferson defended the grid as an assurance that “as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land,”7 and its application was designed as a formal demonstration of that belief. The grid also had the conceptual advantage of providing—in a single legislative idea—the spatial delineation of the entire continent, incorporating lands both urban and rural, undeveloped and never intended for development.8 In that sense, the grid system contained within itself the complete social integration of place, and the landscape was thus marked with equality’s fundamental sign: a social and spatial congruency as in the Buddhist mandala, or the South American Jesuit villages ordered around the cross.9 The grid has always been about fluidity and movement, rather than place or centrality. Even the surveyor’s graceful path of subdividing a township was evidence of this. But nothing could be more illustrative than the fact that towns through the grid were located abstractly every sixth square mile, as a consequence of the system of calibration.10 This was a conscious attempt to objectify the landscape such that the whole existed as agency for the individual. In this schema, one would not be able to find any reference to center, because the basic unit of land was produced through the orthogonal system and its disseminating network of movement.11 It is the grid’s utter denial of center which explains its criticism through comparisons with traditional urban types. As a pure formalist exercise, theorists have always found it both amazingly cogent and maddeningly naïve. It is this apparent “obviousness” that has made the grid a sort of magic talisman for democracy; its emblematic simplicity reduced to an abstraction of orthographics. But it is not this type categorization that best suits the political reality, in fact quite the opposite. If movement is, as suggested, the concretized form which describes and maintains the individual 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 issues that are more active than simply demonstrative. The economy of the grid, the construction of property rights, personal liberties and jurisprudence are not only manifestations of societal norms, but they also act as methods: procedures which allow for the maintenance of these utopian ideals. Both manifestation and method are inherently necessary for the exemplification of the individual, and together with that individual define the spatial construct of the democratic collective. In this field of democracy, the 27

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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 City in America: Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1992), p. 51. 9 This paraphrases Foucault’s observation of the Jesuits. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” in Diacritics Spring 1986, p. 27. 10 Benjamin Gianni, Bryan Shiles, and Kevin Kemner, Dice Thrown (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1989), p. 18. 11 Corboz, p. 51.

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12 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, George Lawrence trans. (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 507.

13 Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), p. 49. 14 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1990), p. 104.

citizenry is identified and enabled by these actions it generates: the image of collectivity, its manifestation, and the fact, the method, of its making. This is a particularly important issue in understanding the place of America. Unlike the metaphorical grounding of perspectival space—where the citizenry becomes a pawn in a transcendent order which exceeds them— the mutuality inherent to the operation of the grid is real reciprocity in real time, without the mediating influence of either outside authority or representation. It is, in effect, a physical achievement of equality. This too is the craft of the Constitution: a social pact not by egalitarian imposition, but through the fact that all are equal from the outset. A democracy attendant with equality is thus both manifestation and method, living within a utopian ideal while at the same time enabling its very possibility. Many would attribute this startling product of the American system to the achievement of individual freedom. Certainly Tocqueville employed this analysis. Yet, as Jefferson maintained throughout his life, the great threat to free societies was their inherent tendency toward individual excess at the expense of the common good. Tocqueville spent a good deal of his energy assessing what he called “individualism,” which “at first only dams the spring of public virtues, but in the long run it attacks and destroys all the others 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 dangerous problem of democracies. Individualism remains an issue that, despite the brilliant Constitutional development of balances to keep it in check, no doubt still exists in various disturbing forms in contemporary America, as it always has to greater or lesser degrees. And despite the recent wholesale repudiation of Marxism, we cannot ignore the great political struggles that have been borne worldwide to overcome the ideological excesses of both capital and individual freedom. It is this same excess of American formal freedom that Peter Blake denounced in his categorical dismissal of New Orleans’ Canal Street compared to what he considered the lost possibilities of Jefferson’s lawn at the University of Virginia. In the face of Blake’s assertion that Canal Street was banal and completely without civil character,13 Robert Venturi was eventually to defend the natural condition of Main Street by quipping that it was instead “almost all right.”14 In large part, the present argument might be represented by these two American forms: the compelling image of new world order proposed at Charlottesville and the functional pragmatic of street life in New Orleans. But neither alone is the proper paradigm. Instead, it might indeed be the “almost all right”—the middle ground between the pleas of Blake and Venturi—that offers fertile ground: not in the Venturian sense, that Main Street would be all right if only architects had reordered its present peculiarities, but in the possibility that the civil ideal may yet be latent in forms of the commonplace. 28

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We begin to see that both of the extreme conditions—historic hierarchy and pure excessive freedom—thrive only by subjugating their systems to their own very particular requirements. It is instead the operation of the “temperate between” which might appear more proper as an indigenous system, realizing that the natural American “place” must be between these two poles; its manifestation, its things, and its people, exist as indivisible with the method which both generates and defends them. This give and take between being liberated and producing liberty is the proper and necessary project of equality. 29

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Peter Blake’s comparison of the University of Virginia lawn and Canal Street in New Orleans. [Photos: UVA by George Cserna. Canal Street by Wallace Litwin. From Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), p. 48.]

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THE OBJECT AND THE GRID 15 This reevaluation of the determinism of rationality is perhaps the most useful work of deconstruction theory. Baudrillard goes as far as to suggest that these concepts are already realized in America: “[E]verything we have dreamed in the radical name of anticulture, the subversion of meaning, the destruction of reason and the end of representation, that whole antiutopia which unleashed so many theoretical and political, aesthetic and social convulsions in Europe . . . has all been achieved here in America . . .” Baudrillard, p. 97.

The question is, as it perhaps has always been, how does society maintain its formal condition of equality? America appears to provide a particularly rich opportunity for its social order to be exhibited through form. We are taught to believe that this has always been the case: that form “tells” us a collective history—primarily through symbol, formal evolution, and all explained by criticism and contemporaneous events. This is the methodological essence of architectural history. But the definition of this process is recognized by the contemporary theories as highly suspect. Its primary fault lies in the fact that such history is produced by interpretation, and subsequently cannot contain its own structural subjectivity.15 History’s defense is to denigrate form’s ambiguity and put its own procedural truth above and beyond the objects to which it lays claim. The result is form being “prostituted” by history making, and in the brothel of typology, style, and representation, form cannot and does not have any truly autonomous reality. In distinction, the American ideal of democracy necessitates form: not to define the society through visuality or a history, but as physical means and ends for its very existence. This is revealed through the American themes of movement and equality. Movement is a construct of three dimensions and time, while equality is a process of coextensive reciprocity. Both of these operations are questions of space, and so, ultimately, of objective form. Mindful of the requirement to both make visible the indigenous social order (manifestation) and act as its system of production (method), it is the necessity of form that maintains the work of this equality. Form as evidenced by the work of America becomes a maintenance of its ideological basis as well as its proof. Such plurality could not be more distant from the historic reading of form. It is in the ensuing search for form sympathetic to the ideal of equality that we must define those objects and processes which deny this democratic work of maintenance. But such conclusions are better seen through a direct inquiry into form, into architecture. These two paradigms of form— historic subjectivity and American objectivity—might be illuminated by an examination of architecture within that demilitarized zone between the old world of history and the new one of modern democracy, New York City. At the center of this question between history and equality is the comparison of two notable Manhattan landmarks, both sited on its “Main Street”—Fifth Avenue—and suggested as culturally important vehicles for American formal invention, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Rockefeller Center. The contrast between these two forms is defined by two disparate conditions: Rockefeller as the “center in the grid,” and the Guggenheim as the “thing illuminating the grid.” Comparatively, Rockefeller Center exists less in its “thingness” or 30

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“objectness” and more in terms of its delineation of a public space, the famed lower plaza fronting the RCA (now GE) Tower. The entire building project has become known by this trademark feature, one defined by most as memorably American. But, beyond its site and the gigantic systems of engineering and economics necessary for its realization, the formal aspects of the complex come clearly from a historic tradition of centered public spaces. Indeed, the building massing and detailing—its setbacks, materials, and art program—defer thoroughly to the nature of the plaza space which is defined by them. Even a private street was cut through the New York grid and 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 is exactly how it has always been criticized as a piece of urbanism. Indifferent to the street and its context, by the rules of historiographic analysis its spiral stands 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 determinant reciprocity with the buildings around it. That is to say its aspects of individuality, or its realization of a “thingness” within the grid, is the process by which it maintains the very same individuality in its neighbors. This operation is evident nearby: no one can now deny the uniqueness of the plain apartment blocks behind the Guggenheim, for it was the Museum building which gave them a reality which themselves they had not had until its construction.16 The normative critique would argue, of course, that it was Rockefeller Center which best represented the fullness of form within the grid. Orthographically detailed from the pedestrian, to the street, to the very skyline of Manhattan, its skillful manipulation of scales speaks to every possible analytical reading. Subsumed by this evaluation, subsequent additions to the Rockefeller complex were burdened with the task of repeating its analytical successes, rather than pursuing the more individual possibilities inherent to the grid (the trite plazas at the feet of both the McGraw-Hill and Exxon Towers are heirs to this fault). The Museum building, on the contrary, presumes no such universalist parti. One would never expect to see another “Guggenheim” aped somewhere down the Avenue, because it speaks not to a reusable formal language, but instead to the real operation of individuality within the larger American schema. Of course, the argument leveled against objects like the Guggenheim is the claim of terror that a city of architectural individuality would be to people; 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 or analysis; that they, in fact, become interchangeable. André Corboz notes that such critiques are inclined to believe Americans “would as readily 31

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16 This operation is now somewhat compromised. By bringing the contrast of the spiral on Fifth Avenue into submission, the Guggenheim’s recent Gwathmey Siegel addition creates a composition by which the building can be occluded into the reasonability of the grid. See Carter Wiseman, “Guggenheim GoAround” in Architectural Record October 1992, pp. 102–3.

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17 Corboz, p. 43.

number their cities . . . as they do their streets.”17 But these arguments fail to differentiate between their deceitful dismissal of all formal individuality, and the appropriate criticism of excess in places like Houston and Denver, or the suburban vapidity of Orange County in California. These instances are far beyond the reciprocal relationship of the properly manifest “thing in the grid,” and must be seen for what they are. The agency of the grid remains, as it always must, but objects within these oft-cited examples exist only as the collusive economies of capital, development, and tax law will allow. There is nothing of the play of object and system, no suggestion that these places maintain any formal equality. Giving nothing back to the grid, they become the bad objects of a misdirected egoism. THE STREET

It is the reciprocal possibility of form and place, object and grid, which appears most applicable in America, a possibility which is neither Houston nor History. Objecthood is the unique component of the process: it is the maintenance of equality among individuals and the form necessary to accomplish that fact which in essence produces democracy. We can observe such effect from objects which exhibit a particularly American urbanism outside that of tradition, in the manner of architectures like the Guggenheim, as well as from the problematic situations which deny those instances, the Kalispells which rely on the centering operation of history. It is the manifest equality promised in the first case, and the question of unwarranted hierarchy in the second, which tell us that it is through the reciprocities of objecthood that the lessons of democracy are told. Moreover, it is the construct of movement that makes such objects both visible and probable. The individuality of objects is heir to the formal possibilities of the grid, and it is the delineation of this orthogonality—its mathematics—which in turn elucidates the ideal of the road in American placemaking. Movement is both parent and progeny in the process of making equality into form. This is the task of many honest American civil conditions, but none more evocative or telling than that of the street. The condition of the street is subject to both the legislative process of order, the irreducible aspect of the grid, and the public desire for the display of its inherent individuality. By fronting objects on the edge of a collective movement system—which both defines the operation of the individual forms and their very possibility—the street brings forth the essence of a reciprocal relationship of public life, individual liberty, equality which allows for its maintenance, and the formal aspects of an architecture which demonstrate the system as both achieved and becoming. We cannot lose sight of the fact that this American civil ideal is difficult to achieve in the face of tradition. If predisposed to history, Main Street is a 32

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myth like that of most fairy tales.18 This handicap of interpretation is also why Kalispell looms ever larger. The imperative of history is widely entrenched, and its ability to satisfy the intellectualization of space without absorbing its true indigenous potential is difficult to battle against. But sustaining the work of an architecture which supports the practical ideals of democratic worth and dignity remains the only real way to manifest the idea of America.19 We must deflect the coercion of history and rein in the excesses of freedom, both of which represent grave threats to civil form: history, in its willful ignorance of equality’s defeat of centrality, and the intemperance of freedom which mindlessly creates vulgarity, ego, and spectacle. 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 tells us of the essential work of form in expressing the values and tenets of our society.

This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 74th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1986. 33

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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 the effect of EuroDisney on Europeans is much like that of a large sculpture park, because “the myth of Main Street is as unrecognizable as the myths of all the characters in the Disney stories.” Noted in a studio review at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, December 1992.

19 Risher, p. 2.

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1 Michel de Certeau (tr. Steven Rendell), The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 107.

2 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990). 3 Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: the Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 4 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1960).

5 Because of space limitations this particular paper cites nine of approximately three dozen specific New York examples. New York serves as both an arbitrary and a unique frame for walking practices; similar projects have been undertaken elsewhere, in many cases by practitioners who have also practiced in New York. 6 Edward W. Soja, “Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the Geographical Imagination” (ed. Alan Read), Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday (New York: Routledge, 2000); Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996). 7 “Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the Geographical Imagination,” p. 14.

BEN JACKS (2006)

The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order. Michel de Certeau1 We conceive of the postmodern city as a fragmentary assemblage of fractured parts of the traditional city, districts of modernist reform, and jumbles of 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 the city of the past.3 We may now know places in fragments, but to begin to assemble a sense of a city or an urban region or an extensive territory requires more than the relatively straightforward “mental map.”4 For the individual in the postmodern city, the territorial practice of walking is complicated to the point of chaos. How does walking, an old way of laying hold of the city, still help us in this altered spatial, temporal, and conceptual field? This essay documents a range of recent projects in Manhattan by citizens, artists, activists, and revolutionaries who seek to understand and address city concerns through walking.5 Each project represents a subversive means of re-asserting a territorial hold on the character and space of the city in light of the conditions of postmodernity. Through the projects, practitioners attempt to deal with the daily challenge of alien and alienating territory to which one nevertheless wishes to reassert some claim. We find evidence in these intentional walking projects—many of which are mediated through digital technologies—of the coalescence of communities around what geographer Edward Soja has called a “shared spatial consciousness.”6 In “Thirdspace,” Soja cites a recent trend in spatial studies toward rebalancing the traditional oppositional dualism of history and society, of breaking down the dialectic between perceived and conceived space. This ontological shift toward what Soja calls “the trialectics of being” unites “historicality, sociality, and spatiality.”7 Describing the long-term political dimensions of this shift, Soja says: Inspired by the breakdown of totalizing modernist political epistemologies . . . and the possibility of a radical postmodernism . . ., a new socio-spatial movement or “community of resistance” is beginning to develop around 34

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what I am describing as a Thirdspace consciousness and a progressive cultural politics that seeks to break down and erase the specifically spatial power differentials arising from class, race, gender and many other forms of marginalizing. . . . Rather than operating in separate and exclusive channels, this new movement/community is insistently inclusive . . ., searching for new ways of building bridges and effective political coalitions across all modes of radical subjectivity and collective resistance. In this coalition-building, it is a shared spatial consciousness, and a collective determination to take greater control over the production of our lived spaces, that provides the primary foundation—the long missing “glue”—for solidarity and political praxis. 8

8 Ibid., p. 29.

As Soja points out, this new critical spatiality, the ethos surrounding a shared spatial consciousness, is a recent phenomenon in its earliest stages of development. As shared frames of reference for experience, whether of social life or material culture, the projects documented here illustrate specific manifestations of the new consciousness Soja points to. For architecture and the urban landscape, the implications of these practices are that digital means do not trump bodily experience, and that design establishes relevance through daily life and the everyday world. CITY WALKING

Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it “speaks.” Michel de Certeau9 In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau opens his chapter on city walking from a vantage point on top of one of the two World Trade Center towers.10 He views our walking from afar, as a surveillant unable to identify 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 (or stuck within) the frame of the dominant rational consumer-capitalist order so that we might be able to see beyond the official frame to the everyday. But in the remainder of the text he likens walking to reading and cooking, and he 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 within which some maneuvering is possible. In light of de Certeau, we can consider walking from two very different perspectives: from above and afar, from a perspective in which walkers are subjects and objects, controlled by the dominant order, or intimately, from our 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 35

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9 de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, p. 99.

10 Ibid., p. 91.

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11 Ibid., p. 37. 12 Walking artists and projects directly influenced by situationist ideas, in addition to those described here, include the Italian group Stalker, and the English group Wrights & Sites. Some recent situationist-influenced design projects and speculations are partially documented in Iain Borden and Sandy McCreery, eds. New Babylonians, Architectural Design, June 2001, 71–73. 13 Simon Sadler, The Situationist City, (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1998), p. 3. 14 Most situationist histories explain that delegates from two or three small groups formed the Situationist International—four groups counting The “London Psychogeographical Committee,” a name invented by its only member, artist Ralph Rumney. See Ralph Rumney (tr. Malcolm Imrie), The Consul, Conversations with Gérard Berréby (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002), p. 37. Acknowledged also is that the term delegate is perhaps too formal a term, reflecting both the earnestness, and the mock seriousness of participants, who met at Alba “in a state of semidrunkenness.” See Stewart Home, The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War (London: Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, 1988), p. 30.

and the vernacular. The first perspective belongs to what de Certeau calls the strategy of the hegemonic order, and the second to the tactics of the powerless. The walking projects documented here reveal the contours of tactical maneuvering: as complex, localized, territorial, interwoven, and constantly negotiated and renegotiated practices. The practices range from the unconscious everyday to the politically informed and motivated. The more overt practices of resistance—such as surveillance camera mapping—have much in common with those that appear on the surface to take a more cooperative stance toward the dominant order. Alone, each way of walking may seem a bit desperate, deranged, or even silly, but this is perhaps the disguise or the ruse of the everyday, which, as de Certeau argues, makes revolution beside the point: a tactic like walking takes place “within enemy territory.”11 De Certeau defines tactics in terms of the powerlessness of the practitioner: the weak practice tactics in response to the force employed by the dominating power through its strategy. In some of the practices documented here walking is a conscious counter-strategy, a tactic used as a strategy to reclaim public space. As public space has become more limited, controlled, and circumscribed, the tactics of the powerless have had to become more explicitly about using actual public space. Walking is more than a utilitarian way of getting from one place to another: walking is an everyday practice that may be taken up as a tool. Walking, however, crosses overlaid terrains: it may be impossible to separate ideal and practical territorial walking from everyday walking that tends to habituate the walker to surroundings under the control of a dominating and unwanted authority. This lack of clarity about the efficacy of walking has led some proponents of walking as a critical spatial practice to turn to situationist ideas to theorize their activities. At the very least, the situationist’s dérive and psychogeography illuminate the potential of walking to shake the dominion of habit.12 SITUATIONIST AND SITUATIONISM

In The Situationist City, Simon Sadler points out, “one is not even meant to use the word situationism.” He quotes an early dictum from the journal Internationale Situationniste: “The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationists.”13 Generally credited with forming the Situationist 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 had been a substantially Dadaist and surrealist-inspired aesthetic vision under the Lettrist International and IMIB and an anti-functionalist architectural aesthetic under COBRA became a stronger renunciation of art and a strengthening of the politics of the “situation” through the new organiza36

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tion. Headed by Guy Debord, the group published twelve issues of the journal Internationale Situationniste between 1958 and 1969, and trumpeted its vision for anarchist social democracy.15 Perhaps because he developed intentionally misleading histories, or because he incited dramatic excommunications and resignations of members, or because his The Society of the Spectacle has been widely read, Guy Debord is identified with the set of ideas called situationist.16 Of these situationist ideas, psychogeography and the dérive show up explicitly in the walking projects documented here. The dérive is an intentionally aimless walk, involving both structure and chance, designed to provide a fresh encounter with the city and to uncover its fragmentary nature. Psychogeography broadly refers to the study of the effects of the physical environment on individuals. Guy Debord would have denounced and disowned most new situationist projects for failing to advance revolutionary goals. As Sadler points out: “Situationism was founded on the belief that general revolution would originate in the appropriation and alteration of the material environment and its space. Activities that have not shared this aim have a poor claim to being situationist.”17 Lettrist and situationist ideas, and their predecessors in Dada and surrealism, should be understood as an index of the power of walking, not as unique points of origin for walking practices. If we wish to value walking—its potential for encounter and knowledge—we must look beyond avant-garde provenance. We have an instinct for fresh encounters, for “the end of boredom,” tapped by psychogeography and the theory of the dérive. In a footnote to The Situationist City, Sadler recognizes the connection between Michel de Certeau and the situationists, commenting that de Certeau “vastly expand(s) upon and make(s) explicit what was only inferred in situationism.” Sadler remarks that de Certeau’s “tender, almost poetic tone” has made the constellation of situationist ideas “more palatable to academe.”18 The walking practices documented here, some quiet and gentle, some bearing the overt mark of situationist politics, nevertheless begin to constellate something like a grounded theory of walking. Perhaps the development of community around a fundamentally human attribute like walking is radical, indicative of the new “shared spatial consciousness,” remarked by Edward Soja, and as revolutionary a practice as the current political environment will allow. The walks range from the personal undertaking of Caleb Smith to the more or less mainstream cultural productions of the walking artists, from the organized walks around Manhattan to advocate for a better environment to the radical protest of the Surveillance Camera Players.

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15 Internationale Situationniste (reprint, Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1997).

16 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994). As Sadler and others have enumerated, in addition to spectacle, the main lettrist and situationist ideas 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”

19 Caleb Smith, “New York City Walk,” December 2004, (accessed May 19, 2005).

20 Ben McGrath, “The Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, January 3, 2005, pp. 22–23.

The possibility, the idea, of walking every street in the grid of Manhattan occurred to Caleb Smith as the result of coming across a church—the Church of the Transfiguration, “The Little Church Around the Corner,” on 29th Street near 5th Avenue.19 The church is set back from the street, like a jewel in the insistent street grid, and it occurred to Smith then that countless other 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’s hidden treasures. Accomplishing the task of walking every block was not Smith’s initial goal, but rather he wished to explore, to sightsee, and to revel in what he called the celebrity and glamor of New York, in contrast to his hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Besides, he had learned to sightsee and wander from his parents in the open spaces of the west— urban exploration was just an extension of that early experience. He began by walking in a new neighborhood every time he went out of his apartment 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 the necessity of walking every Manhattan street to discover the city’s secrets, he decided upon a few rules to define the “official” walk: he would walk alone, 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 years to finish. In reporting Smith’s walk in New Yorker magazine, Ben McGrath invokes the trope of the task-obsessed eccentric.20 Beginning with Smith’s decision to finish his walk on the day that Thomas J. Keane had completed his walk of every block in Manhattan fifty years earlier, and ending with his “passing the torch” to another every-block-walker, McGrath slyly suggests that only a complete nut-case would waste his time on such an activity. What McGrath overlooks in his focus on the odd statistics of Smith’s long-distance walk is the care and concern with which Smith looked at the city. Even this point is twisted in the direction of suggesting monomania: he quotes Smith as saying, “Greeenwich Village and the Financial District were almost a total loss, because you’re looking at the map the whole time. I’m clearly going to have to go back and do them again.” Though highly personal, Smith’s walk is motivated quite simply by a love of the city and a willingness to explore, and it is documented without a trace of irony or posturing. Smith’s walk repeats, unselfconsciously and unintentionally, de Certeau’s walking tactic: to walk every street is to insist that the city may be and should be known.

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JIM NAURECKAS, “NEW YORK SONGLINES”

“New York Songlines,” an interactive map of Manhattan streets in the form of a simplified grid organizing a collection of hyperlinks, also insists on the knowability of the city.21 The introduction compares Manhattan’s streets to Australian aboriginal songlines, explaining how the song-stories of Aboriginals guided people across the land by way of physical features. Concluding that the aboriginal songline was a way of organizing large amounts of information, the site’s author, Jim Naureckas, argues “the Web is our technological society’s closest equivalent.” Naureckas feels that a certain mindlessness has developed because it is so easy to get around the city 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 really looking; many lack a sense of place. In answer to this condition, “New York Songlines” offers “virtual walking tours of Manhattan’s streets” that may uncover New York’s own “giants, heroes, and monsters.” The songlines are the result of a kind of reverse engineering; their power comes from the congruity of the hyperlinked Web and the grid organization of the city.

21 Jim Naureckas, “New York Songlines: virtual walking tours of Manhattan’s streets,” (May 23, 2005).

SHOREWALKERS, “THE GREAT SAUNTER”

Shorewalkers, a non-profit environmental/recreational group, takes an onthe-ground approach to knowing Manhattan. Every first Saturday in May since 1985 it has been possible to take a walk around the approximately thirty-two-mile long waterfront edge of the island of Manhattan on “The Great Saunter.”22 The event begins early in the morning at South Street Seaport and proceeds clockwise. Involving in some years as few as seventeen people, and one year more than 500, Shorewalkers’ mission is “to enhance, enjoy and protect the parks, promenades, and paths along the waters throughout the New York metropolitan area.” The group’s activism has

22 Shorewalkers, <www.shorewalkers.org> (May 13, 2005).

Walkers on “The Great Saunter” in 2004, near 150th Street west of Harlem, with the George Washington Bridge in the background. (Photo by Mark Lentz.)

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23 Cy A. Adler, Walking Manhattan’s Rim: The Great Saunter (New York: Green Eagle Press, 2003), p. xiii. 24 See Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town (London: Faber and Faber, 1976).

contributed to the establishment and development of the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, a continuous path around Manhattan linking numerous public parks, providing recreational opportunities and waterfront access. Walking, as de Certeau explored, is a speech act. In the case of “The Great Saunter,” the walk, like much successful protest and advocacy, is explicitly for fun, but it also makes a clear political statement. Cy Adler, a founder of Shorewalkers, in his guidebook, Walking Manhattan’s Rim: The Great Saunter, remarks on the citizen’s ability to speak out in support of the environment, that “no activity symbolizes the essence of conservation more than walking.”23 The act of walking the edge of Manhattan suggests the city foundation ritual.24 In this case the ritual has been repeated annually for the past twenty years, reflecting ongoing concern for the limits and environmental impact of human inhabitation of earth. As citizens and claimants, Shorewalkers walk to advocate an environmental understanding of territory. SURVEILLANCE CAMERA PLAYERS AND THE INSTITUTE FOR APPLIED AUTONOMY

25 Surveillance Camera Players, (May 26, 2005).

Surveillance Camera Players map used on the walking tour of Chelsea. (Drawing by Kelly Shields.)

Advocating against the growing police state, Surveillance Camera Players has protested the use of surveillance cameras in Manhattan since 1996, creating plays for “the bored people who must watch the cameras,” continuously updating maps, authoring position papers, encouraging other security camera protesters, and, beginning in 2000, offering walking tours.25 Each walking tour (nine offered in the summer of 2005) is based on maps of all known cameras in a particular zone. Cameras, reasons S.C.P., do not aid in the prevention of crime, nor are operators interested in the prevention of crime. Rather, vendors promote private security cameras to document events surrounding insurance losses. In wealthy neighborhoods building owners receive discounts on insurance if they install cameras, so cameras proliferate. On the other hand, contends S.C.P., there are few cameras in poor neighborhoods regardless of the level of crime. While arguments in favor of surveillance cameras claim they induce paranoia selectively in criminals, S.C.P. counters that surveillance cameras are intended to induce paranoia in everyone—they cannot do so selectively. In a delightful analysis of press coverage that attempts to position Bill Brown and other members of S.C.P. as paranoid, Brown simply turns 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 join him in this refusal to become paranoid. On the contrary, paranoia is a condition of the spectacular society, a condition of the people who supported and continue to support the installation of more than 15,000 surveillance cameras in Manhattan. Now it is almost impossible to walk in Manhattan without encountering a surveillance camera—there are perhaps five to ten cameras for every block. 40

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But if one wanted to take a walk without being watched, the Institute for Applied Autonomy has created iSee, an interactive web-based map of surveillance camera locations.26 The user can enter a starting and stopping point 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 the question, “Who should use iSee?: minorities, women, youth, ‘outsiders,’ activists, and everyone else.” I.A.A. points out surveillance cameras are unregulated and do very little to reduce crime. Police and security guard surveillants watch minorities and young men because of their appearance, women voyeuristically, “outsiders” (including people surveying for surveillance cameras), activists engaged in legal dissent, and others who might be caught kissing a lover in the street or visiting a psychiatrist. In answer to the question, “But what’s the harm?” I.A.A. points out that footage from surveillance cameras is mostly privately owned and may be broadcast without consent. Increasing sophistication—networking and facial recognition software—will compound these problems. Perhaps of greatest concern to I.A.A. is the effect of the surveillance society in social and psychological terms. The iSee map is designed to mirror the use of surveillance cameras, paranoia for paranoia, social caution for social caution. While the issues raised by anti-surveillance groups remain unresolved, anti-terrorist intelligence-gathering efforts have expanded greatly in response to September 11, including the coordination of cameras controlled by New York City police.27 The projects by S.C.P. and I.A.A., responding to the proliferation of surveillance cameras, directly address the worst fears expressed by de Certeau and the situationists.

26 Institute for Applied Autonomy, (May 17, 2005).

27 William Finnegan, “Terrorism Beat: How is the N.Y.P.D. Defending the City?” New Yorker, July 25, 2005, pp. 58–71.

GLOWLAB AND CONFLUX

Explicitly inspired by situationist history and theory, the annual PsyGeo Conflux (held in New York in 2003 and 2004), is both a conference and a public festival concerned primarily with “current artistic and social investigations in psychogeography.”28 Taking place over four days, the conference brings together “visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers and the public to explore the physical and psychological landscape of the city.” Most of the events involve some form of walking around and direct experience of the city. Many of the presenters acknowledge situationist origins in psychogeography, the dérive, and détournement. As a clear and significant change from earlier psychogeographical experiments, many of the projects involve digital mapping, transmitted instructions, and other uses 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 to view and share the aesthetic experience of framing.29 Cappello’s instructions state the city is filled with “narrative artifacts, points of visual, or aural 41

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28 PsyGeo Conflux 2004 press release, (May 20, 2005).

29 PsyGeo Conflux, projects: Navigazing, (September 14, 2005).

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Odin Cappello sends participants into the city to frame and discover “narrative artifacts” in “Navigazing.” (Courtesy Odin Cappello.)

30 PsyGeo Conflux, projects: Street Stripes with Memory, (September 14, 2005). 31 PsyGeo Conflux, projects: Footprint Mapping, (September 14, 2005). 32 PsyGeo Conflux, projects: One Block Radius, (September 14, 2005).

interest that suggest the existence of a story, either real or fictional.” Participants use the viewfinder cards to frame something that they consider to be a narrative artifact, and use chalk to record positions on the pavement. Other participants, and passersby, are drawn into the story. Cappello intends for participants to develop both a physical and psychological awareness of environment. Participants develop such awareness by sighting, measuring, and communicating about narrative objects among a community of peers. Dario D’Aprile uses flour to stencil faux pedestrian crossings, in “Street Stripes with Memory.” A video camera records the effects over time of people and cars using the crossing. D’Aprile’s interest is in the “resistance time of urban furnishings made by flour,” and “to characterize and create traces and ways inside the urban space.”30 In a similar vein, Noriyuki Fujimura’s “Footprint Mapping” uses a backpack with a pedometer, a compass, a webcam, and a computer “to create a digital map of streets and public spaces by gathering ‘footprints’ of participants.”31 Fujimura later collates the walks into a single map. “One Block Radius,” a project of Christina Ray and Dave Mandl (founders of Glowlab and the PsyGeo Conflux), provides a website to serve as a repository of information concerning the city block completely destroyed to build the New Museum of Contemporary Art.32 Conceived as a navigable online map and database, the idea of “One Block Radius” is to collect “the amount of information one would normally find in a guidebook for an entire city.” Included are photographs, video, historical, narrative, and creative writing, and other forms of information gathered from a wide 42

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variety of people having direct experience with the block. The idea is to create a website environment capable of receiving an enormous volume of data at scales not normally considered important, and to make the data available to anyone wishing to navigate the site. The “multi-layered portrait of the block as it has never been seen before (and never will be seen again)” is intended to constitute “an extensive psychogeographic survey.” A revised version of the project allows for the assemblage of similar kinds of information on a citywide scale.33 The psychogeographical projects of the PsyGeo Conflux reflect perhaps the most intentional and self-conscious forms of territorial practice. CONCLUSION

Each of these projects illuminates a particular frame or theme through which we might understand the territorial practice of walking and local negotiations with the dominant order. Walking every street in the grid temporarily unearths an apparently comprehensive collection of memories in physical things. A virtual walking tour similarly contends the city is knowable. Walking the shore consecrates the earth as home. Walking on a 43

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Noriyuki Fujimura creates a digital map of a walk in the city using a backpack outfitted with a pedometer, microprocessor, webcam, and laptop in “Footprint Mapping.” (Courtesy Noriyuki Fujimura.)

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 makes a surprisingly poetic experience out of the raw material of the city. In de Certeau’s terms, each such act of walking is a speech act. Each constitutes a “rhetoric of walking,” making dialogue out of the everyday and the rational. Each reconnects us, no matter how temporarily, to the alienating infrastructure of the contemporary city. It seems the list of intentional and self-conscious tactics has only grown since the historical moment of the situationists, and the dissemination of de Certeau’s thought. Is this in response to the proliferation of academic theory or to conditions? Is this merely the playful illusion and delusion of intellectuals, 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 playful ideas, is the backbone of walking (as well as of reading and writing). Quotation lets us move forward as a community. When we walk we are quoting the walkers who have come before us, and performing communal turns on each quotation. The myriad ways we walk the city seem to yield ever more turns, 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 the Proceedings of the 94th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2006. 44

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GREEN MANHATTAN Why New York is the greenest city in the U.S.

PRESERVATION, RE-USE, AND SUSTAINABILITY

DAVID OWEN (2004)

My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naïve and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years, we lived, quite contentedly, in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn’t have a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot, and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space at home 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 Sixtyninth Street, between Second and Third.) Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it’s a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the midnineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two percent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use. “Anyplace that has such tall buildings and heavy traffic is obviously an environmental disaster—except that it isn’t,” John Holtzclaw, a transportation consultant for the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “If New Yorkers lived at the typical American sprawl density of three households per residential acre, they would require many times as much land. They’d be driving cars, and they’d have huge lawns and be using pesticides and fertilizers on them, and then they’d be overwatering their lawns, so that runoff would go into streams.” The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s 45

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population density is more than eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inherently energy-efficient residential structures in the world: apartment buildings. It also frees huge tracts of land for the rest of America to sprawl into. My wife and I had our first child in 1984. We had both grown up in suburbs, and we decided that we didn’t want to raise our tiny daughter in a huge city. Shortly after she learned to walk, we moved to a small town in northwestern Connecticut, about ninety miles north of midtown Manhattan. Our house, which was built in the late seventeen-hundreds, is across a dirt road from a nature preserve and is shaded by tall white-pine trees. After big rains, we can hear a swollen creek rushing by at the bottom of the hill. Deer, wild turkeys, and the occasional black bear feed themselves in our yard. From the end of our driveway, I can walk several miles through woods to an abandoned nineteenth-century railway tunnel, while crossing only one paved road. Yet our move was an ecological catastrophe. Our consumption of electricity went from roughly four thousand kilowatt-hours a year, toward the end of our time in New York, to almost thirty thousand kilowatt-hours in 2003—and our house doesn’t even have central air-conditioning. We bought a car shortly before we moved, and another one soon after we arrived, and a third one ten years later. (If you live in the country and don’t have a second car, you can’t retrieve your first car from the mechanic after it’s been repaired; the third car was the product of a mild midlife crisis, but soon evolved into a necessity.) My wife and I both work at home, but we manage to drive thirty thousand miles a year between us, mostly doing ordinary errands. Nearly everything we do away from our house requires a car trip. Renting a movie and later returning it, for example, consumes almost two gallons of gasoline, since the nearest Blockbuster is ten miles away and each transaction involves two round trips. When we lived in New York, heat escaping from our apartment helped to heat the apartment above ours; nowadays, many of the BTUs produced by our brand-new, extremely efficient oil-burning furnace leak through our two-hundred-year-old roof and 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 human habitation. New York City is one of the most thoroughly altered landscapes imaginable, an almost wholly artificial environment, in which the terrain’s primeval contours have long since been obliterated and most of the parts that resemble nature (the trees on side streets, the rocks in Central Park) are essentially decorations. Ecology-minded discussions of New York City often have a hopeless tone, and focus on ways in which the city might be made to seem somewhat less oppressively man-made: by increasing the area devoted 46

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to parks and greenery, by incorporating vegetation into buildings themselves, by reducing traffic congestion, by easing the intensity of development, by creating open space around structures. But most such changes would actually undermine the city’s extraordinary energy efficiency, which arises from the characteristics that make it surreally synthetic. Because densely populated urban centers concentrate human activity, we think of them as pollution crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot, New York City generates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and produces more solid waste than most other American regions of comparable size. On a map depicting negative environmental impacts in relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an intense hot spot, surrounded, at varying 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 four thousand residents, spread over 38.7 thickly wooded square miles, and there are many places within our town limits from which no sign of settlement is visible in any direction. But if you moved eight million people like us, along with our dwellings and possessions and current rates of energy use, into a space the size of New York City, our profligacy would be impossible to miss, because you’d have to stack our houses and cars and garages and lawn tractors and swimming pools and septic tanks higher than skyscrapers. (Conversely, if you made all eight million New Yorkers live at the density of my town, they would require a space equivalent to the land area of the six New England states plus Delaware and New Jersey.) Spreading people out increases the damage they do to the environment, while making the problems harder to see and to address. Of course, living in densely populated urban centers has many drawbacks. Even wealthy New Yorkers live in spaces that would seem cramped to Americans living almost anywhere else. A well-to-do friend of mine who grew up in a town house in Greenwich Village thought of his upbringing as privileged until, in prep school, he visited a classmate from the suburbs and 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 is loud and dirty, and the subway is depressing, and the fumes from the cars and cabs and buses can make people sick. Presumably for environmental reasons, New York City has one of the highest childhood-asthma rates in the country, with an especially alarming concentration in East Harlem. Nevertheless, barring an almost inconceivable reduction in the earth’s population, dense urban centers offer one of the few plausible remedies for some of the world’s most discouraging environmental ills. To borrow a term from the jargon of computer systems, dense cities are scalable, while sprawling suburbs are not. The environmental challenge we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s non-renewable resources, is not how to make our teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The true 47

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challenge is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan. This notion has yet to be widely embraced, partly because it is counterintuitive, and partly because most Americans, including most environmentalists, tend to 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 visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. What could it possibly teach anyone about being green? New York’s example, admittedly, is difficult for others to imitate, because the city’s remarkable population density is the result not of conscientious planning but of a succession of serendipitous historical accidents. The most important of those accidents was geographic: New York arose on a smallish island rather than on the mainland edge of a river or a bay, and the surrounding water served as a physical constraint to outward expansion. Manhattan is like a typical seaport turned inside out—a city with a harbor around it, rather than a harbor with a city along its edge. Insularity gave Manhattan more shoreline per square mile than other ports, a major advantage in the days when one of the world’s main commercial activities was moving cargoes between ships. It also drove early development inward and upward. A second lucky accident was that Manhattan’s street plan was created by merchants who were more interested in economic efficiency than in boulevards, parks, or empty spaces between buildings. The resulting crush of architecture is actually humanizing, because it brings the city’s commercial, cultural, and other offerings closer together, thereby increasing their accessibility—a point made forty-three years ago by the brilliantly iconoclastic urban thinker Jane Jacobs, in her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. A third accident was the fact that by the early nineteen-hundreds most of Manhattan’s lines had been filled in to the point where not even Robert Moses could easily redraw them to accommodate the great destroyer of American urban life, the automobile. Henry Ford thought of cars as tools for liberating humanity from the wretchedness of cities, which he viewed with as much distaste as Jefferson did. In 1932, John Nolen, a prominent Harvard-educated urban planner and landscape architect, said, “The future city will be spread out, it will be regional, it will be the natural product of the automobile, the good road, electricity, the telephone, and the radio, combined with the growing desire to live a more natural, biological life under pleasanter and more natural conditions.” This is the idea behind suburbs, and it’s still seductive. But it’s also a prescription for sprawl and expressways and tremendous waste. New York City’s obvious urban antithesis, in terms of density and automobile use, is metropolitan Los Angeles, whose metastatic outward growth has been virtually unimpeded by the lay of the land, whose early settlers came to the area partly out of a desire to create space between themselves 48

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and others, and whose main development began late enough to be shaped by the needs of cars. But a more telling counterexample is Washington, D.C., whose basic layout was conceived at roughly the same time as Manhattan’s, around the turn of the nineteenth century. The District of Columbia’s original plan was created by an eccentric French-born engineer and architect named Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, who befriended General Washington during the Revolutionary War and asked to be allowed to design the capital. Many of modern Washington’s most striking features are his: the broad, radial avenues; the hublike traffic circles; the sweeping public lawns and ceremonial spaces. Washington is commonly viewed as the most intelligently beautiful—the most European—of large American cities. Ecologically, though, it’s a mess. L’Enfant’s expansive avenues were easily adapted to automobiles, and the low, widely separated buildings (whose height is limited by law) stretched the distance between destinations. There are many pleasant places in Washington 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 obstacle courses, and the grandiloquent empty spaces thwart pedestrians, by acting as what Jane Jacobs calls “border vacuums.” (One of Jacobs’s many arresting observations is that parks and other open spaces can reduce urban vitality, by creating dead ends that prevent people from moving freely between neighborhoods and by decreasing activity along their edges.) Many parts of Washington, furthermore, are relentlessly homogeneous. There are plenty 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 the surrounding countryside. The fastest-growing county in the United States is Loudoun County, Virginia, at the rapidly receding western edge of the Washington metropolitan area. The Sierra Club, an environmental organization that advocates the preservation of wilderness and wildlife, has a national campaign called Challenge to Sprawl. The aim of the program is to arrest the mindless conversion of undeveloped countryside into subdivisions, strip malls, and S.U.V.-clogged expressways. The Sierra Club’s Web site features a slideshow-like demonstration that illustrates how various sprawling suburban intersections could be transformed into far more appealing and energyefficient developments by implementing a few modifications, among them widening the sidewalks and narrowing the streets, mixing residential and commercial uses, moving buildings closer together and closer to the edges of sidewalks (to make them more accessible to pedestrians and to increase local density), and adding public transportation—all fundamental elements of the widely touted anti-sprawl strategy known as Smart Growth. In a recent telephone conversation with a Sierra Club representative involved in Challenge to Sprawl, I said that the organization’s anti-sprawl suggestions 49

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and the modified streetscapes in the slide show shared many significant features with Manhattan—whose most salient characteristics include wide sidewalks, narrow streets, mixed uses, densely packed buildings, and an extensive network of subways and buses. The representative hesitated, then said that I was essentially correct, although he would prefer that the program not be described in such terms, since emulating New York City would not be considered an appealing goal by most of the people whom the Sierra Club is trying to persuade. An obvious way to reduce consumption of fossil fuels is to shift more people 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 York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Department of Transportation account for nearly a third of all the transit passenger miles travelled in the United States and for nearly four times as many passenger miles as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority combined. New York City looks so little like other parts of America that urban planners and environmentalists tend to treat it as an exception rather than an example, and to act as though Manhattan occupies an idiosyncratic universe of its own. But the underlying principles apply everywhere. “The basic point,” Jeffrey Zupan, an economist with the Regional Planning Association, told me, “is that you need density to support public transit. In all cities, not just in New York, once you get above a certain density two things happen. First, you get less travel by mechanical means, which is another 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 you cross that line, a bus company can put buses out there, because they know they’re going to have enough passengers to support a reasonable frequency of service.” Phoenix is the sixth-largest city in the United States and one of the fastestgrowing among the top ten, yet its public transit system accounts for just one percent of the passenger miles that New York City’s does. The reason is that Phoenix’s burgeoning population has spread so far across the desert— greater Phoenix, whose population is a little more than twice that of Manhattan, covers more than two hundred times as much land—that no transit 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 efforts to nurture public transit by simultaneously spending huge sums to make it easier for people to get around in cars. When a city’s automobile traffic becomes congested, the standard response has long been to provide additional capacity by building new roads or widening existing ones. This approach eventually makes the original problem worse, by generating what 50

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transportation planners call “induced traffic”: every mile of new highway lures passengers from public transit and other more efficient modes of travel, and makes it possible for residential and commercial development to spread even farther from urban centers. And adding public transit in the hope of reducing automobile congestion is as self-defeating as building new highways, because unclogging roads, if successful, just makes driving seem more attractive, and the roads fill up again. A better strategy would be to eliminate existing traffic lanes and parking spaces gradually, thereby forcing more drivers to use less environmentally damaging alternatives—in effect, “induced transit.” One reason New Yorkers are the most dedicated transit users in America is that congestion on the city’s streets makes driving extraordinarily disagreeable. The average speed of crosstown traffic in Manhattan is little more than that of a brisk walker, and in midtown at certain times of the day the cars on the side streets move so slowly that they appear almost to be parked. Congestion like that urges drivers into the subways, and it makes life easier for pedestrians and bicycle riders by slowing cars to a point where they constitute less of a physical threat. Even in New York City, the relationship between traffic and transit is not well understood. A number of the city’s most popular recent transportationrelated projects and policy decisions may in the long run make the city a worse place to live in by luring passengers back into their cars and away from public transportation: the rebuilding and widening of the West Side Highway, the implementation of EZ-Pass on the city’s toll bridges, the decision not to impose tolls on the East River bridges, and the current renovation of the F.D.R. Drive (along with the federally funded hundredand-thirty-nine-million-dollar Outboard Detour Roadway, which is intended to prevent users of the F.D.R. from being inconvenienced while the work is under way). Public transit itself can be bad for the environment if it facilitates rather than discourages sprawl. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is considering extensions to some of the most distant branches of its system, and those extensions, if built, will allow people to live even farther from the city’s center, creating new, non-dense suburbs where all other travel will be by automobile, much of it to malls and schools and gas stations that will be built to accommodate them. Transit is best for the environment when it helps to concentrate people in dense urban cores. Building the proposed Second Avenue subway line would be environmentally sound, because it would increase New Yorkers’ ability to live without 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 that couldn’t support it otherwise. On the afternoon of August 14, 2003, I was working in my office, on the third floor of my house, when the lights blinked, my window air-conditioner 51

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sputtered, and my computer’s backup battery kicked in briefly. This was the beginning of the great blackout of 2003, which halted electric service in parts of eight Northeastern and Midwestern states and in southeastern Canada. The immediate cause was eventually traced to Ohio, but public attention often focused on New York City, which had the largest concentration of affected power customers. Richard B. Miller, who resigned as the senior energy adviser for the city of New York six weeks before the blackout, reportedly over deep disagreements with the city’s energy policy, told me, “When I was with the city, I attended a conference on global warming where somebody said, ‘We really need to raise energy and electricity prices in New York City, so that people will consume less.’ And my response at that conference was ‘You know, if you’re talking about raising energy prices in New York City only, then you’re talking about something that’s really bad for the environment. If you make energy prices so expensive in the city that a business relocates from Manhattan to New Jersey, what you’re really talking about, in the simplest terms, is a business that’s moving from a subway stop to a parking lot. And which of those do you think is worse for the environment?’ ” People who live in cities use only about half as much electricity as people who don’t, and people who live in New York City generally use less than the urban average. A truly enlightened energy policy would reward city dwellers and encourage others to follow their good example. Yet New York City residents pay more per kilowatt-hour than almost any other American electricity customers; taxes and other government charges, most of which are not enumerated on electricity bills, can constitute close to twenty percent 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 a lawyer in Consolidated Edison’s regulatory affairs department, spurred by his thinking about the environment. He believes that state and local officials have historically taken unfair advantage of the fact that there is no political cost to attacking a big utility. Con Ed pays more than six hundred million dollars a year in property taxes, making it by far the city’s largest propertytax payer, and those charges inflate electric bills. Meanwhile, the cost of driving is kept artificially low. (Fifth Avenue and the West Side Highway don’t pay property taxes, for example.) “In addition,” Miller said, “the burden of improving the city’s air has fallen far more heavily on power plants, which contribute only a small percentage of New York City’s air pollution, than it has on cars—even though motor vehicles are a much bigger source.” Last year, the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C., held a show called “Big & Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century.” A book of the same name was published in conjunction with the show, 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 52

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tower between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets, a few blocks west of Grand Central Terminal. (The New Yorker’s offices occupy two floors in the building.) When 4 Times Square was built, in 1999, it was considered a major breakthrough in urban development. As Daniel Kaplan, a principal of Fox & Fowle Architects, the firm that designed it, wrote in an article in Environmental Design & Construction in 1997, “When thinking of green architecture, one usually associates smaller scale,” and he cited as an example the headquarters of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit environmental 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 hillside about fifteen miles north of Aspen. It was erected in the early eighties and serves partly as a showcase for green construction technology. (It is also the home of Amory Lovins, who is R.M.I.’s co-founder and chief executive officer.) R.M.I. contributed to the design of 4 Times Square, which has many innovative features, among them collection chutes for recyclable materials, photovoltaic panels incorporated into parts of its skin, and curtain-wall construction with exceptional shading and insulating properties. These are all important innovations. In terms of the building’s true ecological impact, though, they are distinctly secondary. (The power generated by the photovoltaic panels supplies less than one percent of the building’s requirements.) The two greenest features of 4 Times Square are ones that most people never even mention: it is big, and it is situated in Manhattan. Environmentalists have tended to treat big buildings as intrinsically wasteful, because large amounts of energy are expended in their construction, and because the buildings place intensely localized stresses on sewers, power lines, and water systems. But density can create the same kinds of ecological benefits in individual structures that it does in entire communities. Tall buildings have much less exposed exterior surface per square foot of interior space than smaller buildings do, and that means they present relatively less of themselves to the elements, and their small roofs absorb less heat from the sun during cooling season and radiate less heat from inside during heating season. (The beneficial effects are greater still in Manhattan, where one building often directly abuts another.) A study by Michael Phillips and Robert Gnaizda, published in CoEvolution Quarterly in 1980, found that an ordinary apartment in a typical building near downtown San Francisco 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 a significant part of their daily coming and going in elevators, which, because they are counterweighted and thus require less motor horsepower, are among the most energy-efficient passenger vehicles in the world. Bruce Fowle, a founder of Fox & Fowle, told me, “The Condé Nast Building contains 1.6 million square feet of floor space, and it sits on one acre of land. If you divided it into forty-eight one-story suburban office 53

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buildings, each averaging thirty-three thousand square feet, and spread those one-story buildings around the countryside, and then added parking and some green space around each one, you’d end up consuming at least a hundred and fifty acres of land. And then you’d have to provide infrastructure, the highways and everything else.” Like many other buildings in Manhattan, 4 Times Square doesn’t even have a parking lot, because the vast majority of the six thousand people who work inside it don’t need one. In most other parts of the country, big parking lots are not only necessary but are required by law. If my town’s zoning regulations applied in Manhattan, 4 Times Square would have needed sixteen thousand parking spaces, one for every hundred square feet of office floor space. The Rocky Mountain Institute’s showcase headquarters has double-paned kryptonfilled windows, which admit seventy-five percent as much light as ordinary windows while allowing just ten percent as much heat to escape in cold weather. That’s a wonderful feature, and one of many in the building that people ought to copy. In other ways, though, the R.M.I. building sets a very poor environmental example. It was built in a fragile location, on virgin land more than seven thousand feet above sea level. With just four thousand square feet of interior space, it can hold only six of R.M.I.’s eighteen fulltime employees; the rest of them work in a larger building a mile away. Because the two buildings are in a thinly populated area, they force most employees to drive many miles—including trips between the two buildings—and they necessitate extra fuel consumption by delivery trucks, snowplows, and other vehicles. If R.M.I.’s employees worked on a single floor of a big building in Manhattan (or in downtown Denver) and lived in apartments nearby, many of them would be able to give up their cars, and the thousands of visitors who drive to Snowmass each year to learn about environmentally responsible construction could travel by public transit instead. Picking on R.M.I.—which is one of the world’s most farsighted environmental organizations—may seem unfair, but R.M.I., along with many other farsighted environmental organizations, shares responsibility for perpetuating the powerful anti-city bias of American environmentalism. That bias is evident in the technical term that is widely used for sprawl: “urbanization.” Thinking of freeways and strip malls as “urban” phenomena obscures the ecologically monumental difference between Phoenix and Manhattan, and fortifies the perception that population density is an environmental ill. It also prevents most people from recognizing that R.M.I.’s famous headquarters—which sits on an isolated parcel more than a hundred and eighty miles from the nearest significant public transit system—is sprawl. When I told a friend recently that I thought New York City should be considered the greenest community in America, she looked puzzled, then asked, “Is it because they’ve started recycling again?” Her question reflected 54

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a central failure of the American environmental movement: that too many of us have been made to believe that the most important thing we can do to save the earth and ourselves is to remember each week to set our cans and bottles and newspapers on the curb. Recycling is popular because it enables people to relieve their gathering anxieties about the future without altering the way they live. But most current recycling has, at best, a neutral effect on the environment, and much of it is demonstrably harmful. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart point out in Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (2003), most of the materials we place on our curbs are merely “downcycled”—converted to a lower use, providing a pause in their inevitable journey to a landfill or an incinerator—often with a release 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 from the newspapers we throw away but from the eight hundred and fifty million or 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 cars have grown bigger, heavier, and less fuel-efficient at the same time that scientists have become more certain and more specific about the consequences of our addiction to gasoline? On a shelf in my office is a small pile of recent books about the environment 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 being snatched from life in my prime. At the top of the pile is Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, by David Goodstein, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, which was published in 2004. “The world will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap oil,” Goodstein begins. In succeeding pages, he lucidly explains that humans have consumed almost a trillion barrels of oil (that’s forty-two trillion gallons), or about half of the earth’s total supply; that a devastating global petroleum crisis will begin not when we have pumped the last barrel out of the ground but when we have reached the halfway point, because at that moment, for the first time in history, the line representing supply will fall through the line representing demand; that we will probably pass that point within the current decade, if we haven’t passed it already; that various well-established laws of economics are about to assert themselves, with disastrous repercussions for almost everything; and that “civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.” Standing between us and any conceivable solution to our energy nightmare are our cars and the asphalt latticed country we have built to oblige them. Those cars have defined our culture and our lives. A car is speed and sex and power and emancipation. It makes its driver a self-sufficient nation of one. It is everything a city is not.

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Most of the car’s most tantalizing charms are illusory, though. By helping us to live at greater distances from one another, driving has undermined the very benefits that it was meant to bestow. Ignacio San Martín, an architecture professor and the head of the graduate urban-design program at the University of Arizona, told me, “If you go out to the streets of Phoenix and are able to see anybody walking—which you likely won’t—they are going to tell you that they love living in Phoenix because they have a beautiful house and three cars. In reality, though, once the conversation goes a little bit further, they are going to say that they spend most of their time at home watching TV, because there is absolutely nothing to do.” One of the main attractions of moving to the suburbs is acquiring ground of your own, yet you can travel for miles through suburbia and see no one doing anything in a yard other than working on the yard itself (often with the help of a riding lawnmower, one of the few four-wheeled passenger vehicles that get worse gas mileage than a Hummer). The modern suburban yard is perfectly, perversely self-justifying: its purpose is to be taken care of. In 1801, in his first Inaugural Address, Thomas Jefferson said that the American wilderness would provide growing room for democracysustaining agrarian patriots “to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” Jefferson didn’t foresee the interstate highway system, and his arithmetic was off, in any case, but he nevertheless anticipated (and, in many ways, embodied) the ethos of suburbia, of anti-urbanism, of sprawl. The standard object of the modern American dream, the single-family home surrounded by grass, is a mini-Monticello. It was the car that put it within our reach. But what a terrible price we have paid—and have yet to pay—for our liberation from the city.

This essay was originally published in The New Yorker October 18, 2004. 56

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STEWARDSHIP OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT The emerging synergies from sustainability and historic preservation

PRESERVATION, RE-USE, AND SUSTAINABILITY

ROBERT A. YOUNG (2004)

AN OVERVIEW

Sustainable architecture looks at long-term socioeconomic goals rather than just near-term financial ones. In the United States, the predominant longterm goal has been to extract maximum profit from the land. Natural and built environments have always been vulnerable to wasting due to perceptions that there was always more land somewhere else and that any land use could change when something more profitable could be built upon or extracted from it. In this fashion, land could also be cast aside when easier development choices existed elsewhere. As such, current economics-driven practices continually reshape the built and natural environments. This recurring paradigm is clearly evident in how “undeveloped” lands initially prized for their extractable natural resources were subsequently turned into agricultural lands and then finally were smothered by suburban sprawl, or in how previously developed lands are left to deteriorate. These cycles will affect all open and developed land, eventually leaving them undifferentiated, lacking vitality, and having little to no regional identity. This can readily be seen by the homogeneity of franchise architecture and seemingly identical suburban housing tracts across the country that have proliferated since the advent of the interstate highway system. STEWARDSHIP OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Stewardship of the built environment counters this extraction and consumption-based economic philosophy. Despite the growing emergence of sustainability as a viable design medium, the goals of stewardship of the built environment, based on long-term environmental sustainability, are viewed by many as contrary to the endemic approach of seeking near-term immediate economic gain. Long-term sustainability, while attractive in principle, pales economically against the near-term economic benefits gained from “standard” practices of the past half-century. While defenders of the natural environment have existed as a minority, the current cultural landscape of the United States reflects the premise that the majority has long adopted the depletion-extraction economic perspective as the justifiable paradigm. Today, the fact that vast tracts of the built environment remain underutilized demonstrates how suburban sprawl drains vitality from central cities. Continuing development of the suburban periphery overwhelms 57

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previously individual smaller towns adjoining a central city, consumes open or agricultural lands, and subsequently results in increased traffic congestion, air pollution, and infrastructure costs for highways, utilities, and school systems. The concept of stewardship, rather than extraction, is a critical aspect of sustainable design that evaluates how changes in the built and natural environments act as a singular system rather than two separate ones. A primary outcome of stewardship is that it can act to engage the practice of redevelopment and in turn reverse the outward suburban flow back towards the neighborhoods and business districts that already exist within many core cities. Many neighborhoods in older communities already have existing infrastructure, access to public transit, and a far less homogeneous architectural heritage that can act to reduce overall construction expenses, make housing more affordable, and engender a higher and more affordable quality of life than their suburban counterparts. Concurrent to the emergence of sustainability, the recognition of the economic and social value recaptured in existing buildings has resulted in a steadily growing interest in historic preservation nationwide. While the preservation movement has often been derided as being opposite to the “accepted” concepts of growth and profitability, successful historic preservation projects nationwide have shown that preservation can be a strategy that not only retains a cultural identity of a given community but also can be successful in generating renewed community development and maintaining a long-term sustainable aspect of the environment. A NEXUS

1 Lucy, W., and Phillips, D. Confronting Suburban Decline. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000. 10.

The renewed interest in preserving and/or rehabilitating buildings at the turn of the twenty-first century can be directly traced to the American Bicentennial. Tax laws enacted between 1976 and 1986 made rehabilitating historic buildings attractive and spawned significant growth in the rehabilitation industry. The 1986 tax act, however, has virtually eliminated investment opportunities in historic property rehabilitation. This catalytic decade of rehabilitation activities created an awareness of the amenities that a revitalized central city could provide. Many central city neighborhoods are likely to have the advantages of more non-profit institutions, interesting architecture, walkable neighborhoods, and access to mass transit. Recognition of these amenities brought about the new urbanist movement of the late twentieth century. While this movement ascribes to providing housing that adopts the amenities common to existing central city neighborhoods, the tyranny of “easy development decisions” still generates a greater increase in development at the suburban periphery rather than the redevelopment of the original built environment that first held (and often still does hold) these features. As described by Lucy and Phillips:1

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In land development, business calculations may lead to options that are relatively easy to accomplish, such as . . . greenfield residential subdivisions . . . They receive extra weight with options that are difficult to implement such as mixed-use residential and commercial developments on infill sites even if the more difficult options hold potential for higher profits. Accordingly, many central city buildings and land have been left fallow as the suburbs push further outward. Since large-scale residential projects are often perceived as more profitable due to the realizable economy in mass production, these projects tend to be large in scope and require large tracts of open (or cleared) land. While new urbanism projects occur in both the suburban and central city contexts, the vast majority still appear to be in suburban locations. As a result, open suburban land is still being developed or central city buildings are being removed to create a “tabula rasa” for new development and existing building stock that can be reused is often removed. Due to the perceived difficulty in navigating regulatory procedures and the expense of assembling tracts within the central city, particularly in historic districts, the developers initiate suburban developments more frequently and at a large scale rather than at the individual homeowner scale. Sustainability, stewardship, and preservation seemingly having reached a nexus in that they all are beginning to reach for the same economic, ecologic, and social viability values. However, misperceptions, miscommunications, and outright arrogance and ignorance quite often lead to multiple parties standing in opposition to one another while these common long-term values and goals become imperiled. All parties want certain aspects 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 lead to an “all or nothing” attitude from all parties involved. A possible alternative having greater implications for sustainability in the long term is the historic preservation/stewardship approach that adapts and reuses the existing built environment rather than continuing to build in the suburban periphery or worse, remove existing buildings to simply replace them with new construction. The concepts of sustainability, stewardship, and preservation have gained increased visibility in the past fifteen years. Surprisingly, all have moved along parallel paths without significant interaction and each in its own way substantiates the goal of long-term viability of the built and natural environments. Sustainability recognizes the need to do things in the present that can protect the future. Stewardship recognizes the trade-offs that need to be assessed to protect both the natural and built environments. Preservation recognizes the importance of understanding the past while promoting older buildings as part of the future of the built environment. From the large-scale collaborative efforts common with the conversion of military 59

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bases for contemporary civilian uses to the growing number of private homeowners respectfully rehabilitating inner-city houses, there is a growing list of examples that demonstrate how all three perspectives are compatible with one another. The sustainable aspects demonstrate how existing building stock can fit into promoting redevelopment within the urban core and thereby promote long-term revitalization. Extending the idea, appropriate stewardship can cultivate a renewed social and economic vitality in the community while reducing the net cycle of extraction and consumption all along the rehabilitation/reuse spectrum. And lastly, the integration of the sustainability and preservation financial incentives directly helps to make the process even more acceptable from an economic perspective while fostering the retention of our cultural roots. CONCLUDING COMMENTS

With the further recognition at a broader scale of the synergies that these three concepts interactively generate, a longer term sustainable built environment can be realized. Through the appropriate stewardship of both the natural and built environments, the relationship between reused buildings and the retention of a healthy natural environment will become increasingly evident. Through recognition of the social and economic values offered by historic preservation, the connections of the cultural past to the future societal viability of reused buildings can result in the reduced pressures of expansion at the suburban periphery and renewed use of the urban core. Individually, each is a potentially significant strategy to undertake but collectively they form a synergistically coherent perspective that can hold a tremendous potential for (re)shaping a sustainable cultural landscape and ecosystem.

This essay is abridged from the original published in the Proceedings of the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2004. 60

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DROSS; RE-GENESIS OF DIVERSE MATTER PRESERVATION, RE-USE, AND SUSTAINABILITY

LYDIA KALLIPOLITI (2005)

The word dross refers to matter that is foreign, worn out and impure; it is a phantom material condition that is unnoticeable to such an extent that it almost does not exist in our perception. Dross is worthless; it is an incidental, displaced material, and a side effect of chemical reactions that serves no purpose. Nevertheless, when it appears, a necessity is created for its removal. In time and through the use and misuse of language, the word has signified waste, impurity or any incongruous accumulation of disparate elements, pieces and material fragments.1 However, the etymological origin of the word refers to a residual substance that emerges in transitional material stages,2 such as the process of melting a metal or the sedimentation of a liquid. Therefore, dross signifies more than an entropic landscape: it depicts material derailment and the production of displaced matter. Along with the compelling will to subvert, invert or transmute matter unceasingly to higher states, the occurrence of dross reminds us that pure operations of making seem to belong to the sphere of impossibility. The purpose of analyzing the ingredients and the properties of dross substance lies beneath the wonder of metamorphic materials. Dross may be a spin-off of alchemical endeavors and a phantom material condition, but at the same time it is a product, or better stated a by-product, of social reality, paraphrasing Donna Haraway.3 The intrinsic properties of dross substance are analyzed to serve as a medium for the comprehension of a cultural phenomenon of incidentally displaced matter that is automatically rendered meaningless and serves no purpose whatsoever. Based on the perception of material impurity, this paper will attempt to encompass the generative potential of obsolete objects and spaces, or in other words waste material that is displaced culturally or functionally from either its previous or its original identity. The cultural fabric for this condition revolves around the material ramifications of unprecedented technological evolutions in communications that have irreversibly shifted our production and consumption modes during the past two decades. The technological evolutions in computer software and hardware that have been producing novel tools, have been in parallel producing immense quantities of “techno-junk,” tons of purposeless and

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1 See Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, 2 Middle English “dros” originates from Old English drOs—DREGS. Dregs, grounds and settlings are sediments that have settled at the bottom of a liquid, or small amounts of residue. For the etymology of the word “dross,” see the Cambridge Dictionary Online,

3 I am borrowing here Donna Haraway’s definition of the “cyborg” as a cultural product of emerging socio-political regimes and practices of everyday life. Specifically, Haraway writes: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” See Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149.

Dross materials.

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4 The rates of computer obsolescence are so extreme that “in the year of 2005, one computer will become obsolete for every new one put on the market.” See Jim Puckett, Leslie Byster, Sarah Westervelt, Richard Gutierrez, Sheila Davis, Asma Hussain and Madhumitta Dutta (2002), “Exporting Harm. The High-Tech Trashing of Asia,” The Basel Action Network (BAN) & Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVT SVTC) (February 25, 2002), . Accessed February 25, 2004. 5 “Exporting Harm,” The Basel Action Network & Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. 6 Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, .

7 Sheila Kennedy writes how secondary and tertiary methods of post-industrial production produce recombinant materials: materials within materials. For example, many sheet claddings are made of chopped up or reconstituted bits of other materials. See Sheila Kennedy and Christoph Grunenberg, KVA: Material Misuse (London: AA Publications, 2001), 63.

indestructible matter, almost impossible to dispose of. Over the past decade, concerns related to waste streams have shifted in their orientation. Waste is no longer an issue that relates solely to quantity. It now also relates to the intricacy of the waste matter and its material composition. With the advent of highly advanced manufacturing methods and processes, many products that reach the end of their useful lives quickly and unexpectedly, are highly complex in form and material composition, containing in parallel high amounts of embodied energy. Electronic waste, known as e-waste, is the largest growing industry of waste on a global scale.4 Alongside the numbers, a personal computer “contains over 1,000 different substances, many of which are toxic, and creates serious pollution upon disposal.”5 Its subsequent recycling becomes an excruciating and elusive task that requires numerous preparatory stages of shredding and segregating into constituent components and materials; this new type of intensive manual labor is reportedly exported to Asia and prison houses.6 Considering the socio-political conditions directly linked to this rising material reality, there seems to be a necessity to use defunct circuitboards as larger readymade complexes or as components embedded in other materials for entirely new uses. Such a practice is supported through the production of materials by recombinant methods and assemblies: materials within materials.7 Spanning scales, from the scale of obsolete “objects” to the scale of obsolete “rooms” and “buildings,” a mundane reality of big defunct objects— displaced building parts—is overwhelming the contemporary city. “Technojunk” is an emerging city-born condition; defunct oil tanks, air-conditioning tubes, advertising billboards, containers and other apparatuses articulate a new urban language that violates the building envelope or attaches itself to it as an outgrowth. If one identifies in the city fabric a stratum of buildings that can be easily mapped due to their longevity, equivalently one could identify a stratum of mechanical appendages that cannot easily be mapped due to their ephemerality. The significantly different lifetime of the two strata is the cause for an erosion of the outer building shell that cannot adapt to the change taking place in it or around it. The un-mappable urban condition of this “floating matter” in the city has not yet been explored by contemporary architecture. The necessity of such a discourse is not only driven by the formulation of an ecological awareness, but also by the need to manipulate this kind of raw material and engage with “techno-excrements” as an emerging city-born condition, derivative of the urban system’s internal erosion. 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 bars and the bicycle seat I made a bull’s head, which everybody recognized as a 62

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bull’s head. Thus a metamorphosis was completed; and now I would like to see another metamorphosis take place in the opposite direction. Suppose my bull’s head is thrown on the scrap heap. Perhaps some day a fellow will come along and say: “Why there’s something that would come in handy for the handle bars of my bicycle . . .” and so a double metamorphosis would have been achieved. 8 By engaging a strategy of irony as a legitimate method of approaching phenomena, Picasso asserts that there is no social or constructed reality “that we have to accept in toto,”9 but a composite present realm consisting of fragments. A discourse of “collaging” fragments is ironic, because it resists utopia. It recognizes a loss in objects, buildings or urban domains that have misplaced their previous fixed identity and encompasses this loss 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 it undergoes a metamorphosis. In this sense, the tactic of re-use is not solely an environmental strategy directed to the ethics of the world’s salvation. It becomes a psycho-spatial or mental disposition, “fueling a reality of change, motion, action.”10 Along the same lines of thought, the condition of flow and unremitting transformation is characterized by Gyorgy Kepes as a fundamental reorientation of the twentieth century. He explains that, The dominant matrix of nineteenth-century attitudes was the use of Marx’s term “reification”; relationships were interpreted in terms of things, objects or commodity values. Today a reversal of this attitude has begun to appear; there is a steadily increasing movement in science and in art toward processes and systems that dematerialize the object world and discredit physical possessions. What scientists considered before as substance shaped into forms, and consequently understood as tangible objects, is now recognized as energies and their dynamic organization. 11 Stretching strategies of appropriation, re-use and transformation, dross praxis does not begin from scratch, but from the reality of an existing inoperative component; therefore, meaning is inevitably shifted. It can no longer be located in the process of representing an abstract concept, but in the act of manipulating matter and bonding new functions to objects that have lost their previous, fixed identity. Instead of a genesis of meaning, there is a regeneration of meaning and identity. A dross post-praxis dwells conceptually 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 63

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8 Alfred Barr, Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art (New York: Published for the Museum of Modern Art by Arno Press, 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 and Ecological Consciousness” in Gyorgy Kepes (Ed.), Arts of the Environment (New York: George Braziller, 1972), 11.

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12 David J. Furley argues that this philosophical position is credited to Democritus and the theory of atomism in ancient Greek philosophy. See David J. Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967). According to Democritus, “the nature of the eternal things is small existences (ουσαι) unlimited in number, and in addition to these he assumes space (τπο ) infinite in extent.” See Cyril Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus (New York: Russell & Russell Inc, 1964), 117.

Re-use paradigms of building parts and components, using “molding” techniques. Work by Lo/Tek and Rachel Whiteread.

physical entities; it engrafts a copiousness of thought, defying pure, virginal creations. If we assume that nothing emerges “out of zero,”12 a post-praxis aims to retain the energy induced in creative systems and exploit the accumulative effect of knowledge and materiality. COLLAGE VERSUS MOLDING

The issue of re-use has emerged as monumentally appealing, as an offspring of rapidly advancing industrialized processes. Marcel Duchamp’s declaration of the urinal as a work of art emancipated a syllogism that disconnected the reminiscence an object was carrying along with it from its materiality. The object could then be viewed as raw material utilized for further spatial deployments. In the same spirit, Kurt Schwitters gathered material from the street and collaged it to make interior artifices in his Hanover apartment and created the compelling work of the “Merzbau.” Schwitters’ declaration was to build out of nothing—merz—meaning out of displaced material that experienced the loss of its identity. However, the importance of the “Merzbau” extends to the material techniques Schwitters deployed; he did not simply put together his collected materials in an additive manner. Instead, he created a second smooth membrane that sealed the realm of “collage.” Eventually, the compositions of the prosthetic art became latent building material, revealed locally through openings called “grottos.” Schwitters’ wrapping of his collected waste material depicts two fundamentally different principles that constitute simultaneously bipolar and inherent drives in creative praxis. These principles are collage and molding; where the first denotes an additive logic of juxtapositions and superimpositions and the latter denotes a procedural, evolving logic of transfusion. Collage, as a process of bringing fragments together and interrogating their newly formed relationships in new assemblages, constitutes a prime artistic revolution of the twentieth century. Collage embeds the notion of

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re-use in an elemental sense. It is a practice that “violates ‘property’; a kind of theft.”13 Although molding also involves the appropriation of existing objects and contexts, its case is vitally different. The obsolete matter is interrogated for its textural and formal potential and successively used either as a matrix or as material that can be plastically manipulated. Then the matrix is subjected to a process of many stages: a process that essentially feeds itself as molds and casts change roles in and out without a definitive ending. By putting the two principles of collage and molding in opposition, one can draw the following assumptions: if collage signifies the change of context, then molding signifies a material transfer; if collage’s scope is a syntax change, then molding’s scope is a substance change; if the intrinsic principle of collage is prosthesis of parts, then the intrinsic principle in molding is fusion of parts; if collage is about transformation, molding is about transmutation. COMPOSITE RE-USE

Experimenting with dross strategies, two methodologies are engaged: composite graft and plastic matter. Composite grafting denotes the combination of actual obsolete objects with their molded by-products, where “by-product” refers to new artificial objects that can be formed by using an obsolete component as a reproductive matrix; or a mold where new materials can be cast. This operation functions under the premise that the occurring by-product components will retain partially characteristics of the original object, but will have different properties, creating assembly lines of materials with new local behaviors and properties, according to the material synthesis of the by-products. Composite materials make a useful analogy to the methodology of a composite graft; they are composed of elements that work together to produce material properties that are different to the properties of those elements on their own. The method also touches on some of re-use’s most deeply rooted conventions, such as the conviction that re-use should be structured as a precise analogue of the way that natural systems deal with their waste: in closed loops. By considering the production of new components out of casting on found objects, artificiality becomes part of the equation for effectively managing waste streams. Plastic matter refers to a condition of material indeterminacy, where material is malleable and deformed slightly from its original status, while retaining some of its primary characteristics. In reality, this condition occurs in a wide variety of thermoplastic polymers when heat is applied to them and they reach a mesophase where they are neither liquids nor solids. Heating is a method that is considered distinct from any tools linked to the architectural design process; however, the effects of heating in materials such as thermoplastic polymers that directly affects their chemical composition could be described as a physical analogue of currently available digital tools. 65

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13 Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism” in Hal Foster (Ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: The New Press, 1998), 102.

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In order to test my selected methodological operations, I have created a matrix of objects escalating in scale that can serve as a pool for design exploration. The items of this matrix are a circuitboard, a helmet, a plastic container, a bikelid, a watertank, a partition wall and a building part. In the selection of objects, a number of parameters were considered, ranging from the textural and formal complexity of the obsolete objects, disposability difficulties and other factors. Each object of the matrix ran through different digital molding processes, escalating in complexity and varying the relationship between the cast and the mold. Consequently, the objects themselves along with the by-products that emerge from the molding operations will be used in design experiments, each in a different site and location. In this sense, the matrix plays the role of a generating device for new material, new images and new concepts. Each obsolete object delivers innumerable and variable by-products that can either open the imagination through an apocalypse of the material plasticity in each case, or can be directly used in new assemblages. An example of a dross design experiment is sited in the basement infinite corridor of M.I.T.’s main building. This location has become a depositor and a pick-up point for obsolete electronics, such as outmoded computers and 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 pocket device that accommodates within it the obsolete matter and also registers its flux in and out of the corridor. The installation was conceived as a second skin on the wall—a double layer created of circuitboards and elastomer circuitboard by-products—that can be opened and “stuffed” with more obsolete items. The combination of flexible and rigid components successively into assembly lines of double-skin stripes yields a heterogeneous performance to the device, where the stripes open up and deform in multiple ways according to diversified local material properties of the new skin. In the experiment, both collage and molding operations were implemented. Molding was put in effect via the direct selection and use of the matrix’s objects as molds for the production of new elements with different material properties. Collage was put in effect via the repetition of different types of components joined in assembly lines. The combination of actual obsolete components with their occurring by-products—differentiated in texture, elasticity, form and performance—was a decision that initially made little sense, given standard environmental ethics that reason the reduction of haphazard material compositions. However, the process entailed a disclosure; 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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“Pocket Wall” made of obsolete circuitboards and their molded byproducts, located in the basement infinite corridor of M.I.T., and accommodating and recording the flux of obsolete items. 14 The term “adhoc ecology” is based on Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver’s definition of “adhocism,” as in situ design decisions taken for specific needs and purposes. See Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (New York: Doubleday, 1972).

be described as an enhanced mosaic of new and preexisting properties, where the re-use of obsolete matter was no longer semantically linked to its previous use. In this sense, the strategies of composite graft and plastic matter unravel an unorthodox field of ad hoc ecology,14 meaning a methodology of re-use for specific needs, places and purposes. Withholding the burden of precise future predictions for a “natural” or metabolic, closedloop material re-use, composite graft could be useful in dealing with a new genealogy of materially intricate waste objects, so that they can be re-used as they are; launched by the drive of material synthesis, rather than the task of cautiously segregating materials in constituents.

This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 93rd Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2005. 68

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THE SHARED GLOBAL IDEOLOGY OF THE BIG AND THE GREEN

PRESERVATION, RE-USE, AND SUSTAINABILITY

DAVID GISSEN (2003)

Many of the massive proposals for the World Trade Center site exhibited this past year at the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center contained references to their “green-ness,” but of all the projects that made such claims, the proposal by Norman Foster and Partners stood out. The text of Norman Foster and Partners’ entry to the competition claimed that the striking twin-tower proposal “would be the biggest and greenest building ever built.” Through a variety of building technologies and subtle articulations of architectural form, Foster would certainly be able to realize such a structure, but his statement raises several theoretical issues: why would an architect want to achieve both of these contradictory goals; and how can a building be the most massive building ever built and the most environmentally sensitive? It would seem that massive development and environmental sensitivity are contradictory projects and therefore are not compatible. The unprecedented scale of Foster’s proposal demands a rethinking of the increased weaving of what might be called the theories of the “big” and the theories of the “green.” Foster’s project is not alone; recent buildings by his firm and buildings by many other firms employ environmental technologies and siting techniques at huge scales. Collectively, these projects force us to understand why and how “bigness” and “greenness” are conflated, and how we ever imagined these theoretical approaches as opposed. DEFINING BIGNESS AND GREENNESS

The large-scale architecture that defines late-modern, post-industrial, “global” urbanism was first dubbed “colossal architecture” by Mario Gandelsonas in 1990 and then “bigness” by Rem Koolhaas in 1993. Gandelsonas came up with his concept of colossal architecture by examining the work of Cesar Pelli through the writings of Jacques Derrida and Saskia Sassen.1 Koolhaas arrived at his concept of bigness as a way to describe his firm’s large-scale architectural approach that was being exhibited at M.O.M.A. in 1993 (the concept of bigness extended his critique of twentieth-century urbanism, first laid out in Delirious New York).2 Both “colossal” architecture and “bigness” described building types such as skyscrapers, high-rise buildings, mid-rise buildings, large-span buildings, among numerous other large-scale constructions. Both Gandelsonas and Koolhaas claimed that these structures emerged from the economic forces of globalization, forces that demanded universal architectural 69

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1 “Conditions for a Colossal Architecture” in Cesar Pelli: Buildings and Projects, Mario Gandelsonas and John Pastier, 1991, Rizzoli: New York. 2 “Bigness” in S,M,L,XL, Rem Koolhaas et al., 1995, Monacelli Press: New York.

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3 “Conditions for a Colossal Architecture,” p. 12.

4 “Bigness,” p. 502.

5 Hassan Fathy, “Natural Energy and Vernacular Architecture: Principles and Examples with References to Hot Arid Climates” Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture, Charles Jencks and Karl Kropf (eds.), 1975, Academy Editions, p. 145. Kenneth Frampton, “Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” in The Anti-Aesthetic, Hal Foster, 1983, Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, p. 17. Roland Rainer, Livable Environments 1972, Zurich: verlag fur Architektur Artemis.

solutions for living, working, and the sites for the production and consumption of goods. Using Cesar Pelli’s World Financial Center and Pacific Design Center as examples, Gandelsonas described colossal architecture as an architecture of endless growth and infinite verticality: “By cutting the towers’ shafts at different heights, Pelli provides a way to indicate the concept of the infinitely tall tower . . . This same concept of cutting something infinitely long is present in the colossal length of the Pacific Design Center, a skyscraper on its side . . . the colossal implies the enormous, the immense, the excessive, the lack 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 technology to 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 radical break: Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue. It exists; at most it coexists. Its subtext is fuck context.”4 Between the 1960s and the 1990s, “green” or “environmentally conscious” architecture theorists, such as Maxwell Fry, Roland Rainer, Hassan Fathy, Sym Van der Ryn, and Kenneth Frampton, attacked the same buildings and building practices that Gandelsonas, and more particularly Koolhaas, used to outline their vision for a new global architecture. Green building theory can roughly be surmised as an ideology that professes the maintenance of local resources and cultural building traditions through a form of ecological and cultural mimesis. In “Natural Energy and Vernacular Architecture,” Hassan Fathy argues that large buildings with their equally large air-conditioning packages are causing people to “forget” local responses to the environment. Fathy calls for the use of vernacular low-tech approaches to mitigate the financial and environmental impact of large buildings. In his book Livable Environments, Roland Rainer derided the skyscraper’s and the highway’s consumption of land, calling for regionally based, small scale development. Pictures of German farmhouses and Japanese gardens were used as illustrations of a more environmentally sensitive way to build. Kenneth Frampton has repositioned the ideas in his famous “Critical Regionalism” essay in more recent and explicitly environmentalist works including his essay “Architecture and Ecosophy.” Frampton continues to maintain that large-scale speculative developments are at odds with a more local, climatically and topographically based architecture, and that these developments were responsible for the destruction of unique landscapes and cultural features.5 Frampton, Fathy, Van der Ryn, and Rainer cite the product-like nature of skyscrapers, the bulldozing of land, and the use of artificial lighting and ventilation, as symptoms of rampant international development that has gone out of control. In response, these thinkers call for humanly scaled 70

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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 capacity to transcend the mere appearance of the technical,” while withstanding “the relentless onslaught of global modernization.”6

6 Fathy, p. 145; Frampton, p. 17.

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 architects have made claims that their projects were both “big” (in the way outlined by Gandelsonas and Koolhaas) and green (by many of the standards presented by Rainer, Fathy, Van der Ryn, and Frampton). Architects such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, William McDonough, and Kenneth Yeang claim that several of their recent projects simultaneously owed their form to the forces of international capitalist development and green ideology. Among the many projects, the Gap San Bruno Headquarters (1996) by William McDonough and Menara Mesiniaga (1996) by Kenneth Yeang are significant “big and green” projects, particularly described in this way. William McDonough describes Gap’s San Bruno Headquarters as a key feature of his “green business revolution,” and Kenneth Yeang received the Aga Khan award for the way he fitted IBM’s regional headquarters into its Malaysian eco-system. Numerous magazines, architectural journals, and architectural institutions have praised these projects for “tempering” the forces at work in international business that destroy context. On Kenneth Yeang’s Menara Mesiniaga, the jury of the Aga Khan prize reported: “designing with the climate in mind, it brings an aesthetic dimension to [Menara Mesiniaga] that is not to be found in typical glass-enclosed air-conditioned high rise building. The tower has become a landmark, and increased the value of the

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Below left: Gap San Bruno Headquarters, William McDonough + Partners. (Image courtesy of William McDonough + Partners.) Below right: Menara Mesiniaga, Hamzah & Yeang. (Image courtesy of Hamzah & Yeang Architects.)

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7 Aga Khan Prize, Jury Report, 1996;

8 “Making the Business Case for Going Green,” Michael Fainelli, Christian Science Monitor, October 18, 2001.

9 “From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism,” Slavoj Zizek in Cabinet Magazine, issue 2.

10 “Multiculturalism’s Silent Partner: It’s the New Globalized Consumer Economy, Stupid,” David Reiff, Harpers Magazine, August 1993, p. 62.

land around it. The jury found it to be a successful and promising approach to the design of many-storied structures in a tropical climate.”7 William McDonough often is praised in architecture and business magazines for showing that good business practices can incorporate green perspectives. The Christian Science Monitor wrote: “His statements encapsulate his efforts to bring about a rapprochement between corporate America and the environmental movement. One colleague in the environmental movement calls him ‘our great translator,’ because he can defend the dreams of the environmental movement with arguments that an MBA can understand.”8 The “success” of McDonough and Yeang is largely due to their ability to rectify what are presented as “opposing” forces of greenness and bigness within contemporary business. Yeang and McDonough should be praised for their commitment to reducing building energy consumption, their sympathy to local resource availability, and their constant incorporation of natural light and air in almost all of their projects. Yet the oppositional rhetoric that they have inherited from the early green movement, and that they and others use to describe their method of mediating “big” architecture, needs to be examined. Rather than seeing projects such as Menara Mesiniaga and the Gap San Bruno building as remarkable because they adjust or “translate” between global business practices and local and ecological issues, these projects actually reveal the international, global ideology that big business and environmentalism 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 of business. These important observations force us to re-think whether “green” architecture is a movement about corporate resistance, which is how it has been traditionally positioned, or whether it shares some fundamental feature with the capitalist flow. Both the Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek and the American writer David Reiff 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 globalization and the survival of local traditions is false. Globalization directly resuscitates local traditions, it literally thrives on them.”9 Zizek here is talking about tourism, spice trades, language and cultural classes, and other instances where business thrives off what is “local.” David Reiff makes a similar argument when he claims that globalization is not a form of “westernization,” as is so often claimed. “Western Civilization does not occupy a sacred place in the heart of capitalism. In fact, the dominant ideal of a ‘white, European male’ stands in the way of capturing whole new markets of non-white, non-European, non-male consumers . . . Everything is commodifiable . . . there is money being made on all the Kinte cloths and Kwanza paraphernalia.”10 72

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In a related argument, Alan Calquhoun has demonstrated that the supposed “resistance” within a locally based, small-scale culture is often false. What are often called vernacular “responses”, ideological systems that certainly would not produce a 2,000,000 square foot office tower, are nonetheless often the very same “products” of cultural elites. One need not look too far back in history to see the way local and vernacular cultures are maintained as ways to maintain cultural cohesion, in the name of centralized or globalized forms of power.11 Using these arguments as a new interpretive framework, the supposed distance between bigness and greenness might be false. Like the American business man who imagines himself to learn “Japanese-ness” in order to conduct a highly competitive business in Japan, big projects now learn the particularities of the local in order to better position the needs of a business enterprise. According to a thinker such as Slavoj Zizek or David Reiff, the presence of Western corporations does not automatically result in the attitude “f k context”; often corporations embrace the local, and the forces of globalization are often needed to resuscitate local features. Menara Mesiniaga and Gap San Bruno have brought attention to the unique architecture and climatology of Malaysia and California. Menara Mesiniaga and Yeang’s other realized Malaysian towers, such as ABN-AMRO, incorporate traditional methods of air ventilation found in traditional Malaysian houses and they incorporate local plant species, all in a skyscraper format. Gap San Bruno’s habitat roof for local birds and plant life has brought increased attention to its local Californian eco-system, and put wildlife firmly within the matrix of corporate experience. Another big and green project, Eastgate, located in Zimbabwe and designed by the Pearce Partnership, is based upon termite mounds found in Zimbabwe, which use a form of natural air-conditioning to keep the mound cool. The architects studied the termite mounds and local houses, which also use local cooling methods, and incorporated them into a massive office and shopping mall building made from locally available resources and covered with native plant species.12 In an effort to affirm the inherent resistance that green architecture theory is supposed to offer, many green theorists might argue that what is being recovered is not the “real” culture, just the one that big business enterprises find useful. The wind-catching techniques that Kenneth Yeang claims are based on Malaysian traditions are not the “real” wind-catching techniques used by “real” Malaysian builders, because they are only being used for resource efficiency and their cultural meaning has been lost. The designers of Eastgate are not interested in maintaining local ecology and are not operating within a business format that resists the impact of capitalist production. The local cultures that Alan Calquhoun refers to are not the type green theorists want to revive, and so on. But what philosophical system could possibly sort through these types of divisions without resorting to a 73

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11 Alan Calquhoun, “Critique of Regionalism,” Casabella Magazine, 630–631, pp. 51–55.

12 In a similar development, books such as Sol Power, by Sophia and Stefan Behlig (New York: Prestel, 1996), interpret all local, indigenous, regionalist architecture through the lens of Western energy use. Malaysian long houses are “good” because they do not require airconditioning; igloos and grass houses of the steppes are “good” because they do not require heat. The actual economic or cultural conditions that shaped these buildings are ignored in lieu of a Western search for indigenous smarts. Interpreting local architecture based on the thrifty use of commodities that a building’s inhabitants never even had the opportunity to use to heat or cool their homes is a questionable enterprise.

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problematic epistemology? These are difficult questions that big and green projects raise and that must be addressed for those green thinkers that continue to position themselves against the “big.” A big and green project suggests alarming correlations and contradictions located within the contemporary theories of bigness and greenness. It is virtually impossible to argue with any architect who is interested in mitigating the environmental impact of buildings, especially large ones. Recent buildings such as M.V.R.D.V.’s “Pig City,” a multi-story slaughterhouse, begin to operate on an ideological plane that acknowledges the massive scale of nature production under capitalism, that is the intertwining of the big and green. The architects of this building do not emerge as “enobled” subjects who have tamed global forces by making an environmentally sensitive place to destroy thousands of animals. M.V.R.D.V. demonstrate how efforts to be “good” environmentally result in a larger and more massive factory environment. Similar thinking is behind their “stacked garden,” realized as the Dutch Pavilion at Expo 2000. In this exhibition pavilion, regional natural forms actually “de-naturalize” a global building type toward its surroundings, exposing the global ideology of environmentalism, while making a very environmentally responsible building, nonetheless. The fact that environmentalism can so easily be incorporated or extend out of twenty-first-century forms of global business practice may cause some environmentalist or politically active architects to shrink away from the big and green project. The fear is that one might be participating in some larger unstated corporate enterprise, yet the linkages between what were once imagined as opposed theories provide the circumstances for an evolving site of investigation. Hopefully we will be able to look to many more architects who examine the inter-dependence of the forces of globalization and environmentalism on some conceptual level. There is still much need for an architecture that brings attention to the destruction and maintenance of international material conditions as this moves through the parameters of international business. The ideological issues and conflicts of big and green projects should not result in an abandonment of the seeming hypocrisies advanced by them, but in a renewed reflection on the liberatory momentum contained within architecture’s paradoxes. ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author wishes to thank Rachel Schreiber who provoked the question about Foster’s project, and forced a re-examination of many of the author’s arguments about this subject. Dutch Pavilion, M.V.R.D.V. (Image courtesy of M.V.R.D.V.)

This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 91st Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2003. 74

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LEVITTOWN RETROFITTED An urbanism beyond the property line

COMMUNITY

TEDDY CRUZ (2007)

1. THE POLITICAL EQUATOR

Along the newly reconstituted global border that this post-9/11 world has produced between first and third worlds (a division, freshly reconceptualized by the Pentagon’s New Map, between “The Non-Integrating Gap” and the “The Functioning Core”), we are witnessing how societies of overproduction and excess are barricading themselves in an unprecedented way against the sectors of scarcity they have produced out of political and economic indifference. On one hand, the increasing migration of people across this global border gives shape to an unprecedented illegal flow from the non-integrating gap as the migrant communities from Latin America, Africa, and Asia move northward in search of the “strong” economies of the functioning core. On the other hand, the redistribution of centers of manufacturing moves in the opposite direction, as the functioning core targets the non-integrating gap as the site to enact its politics of outsourcing and its search for the world’s cheapest labor markets. The dramatic images emerging from this political equator converge and are intensified through the prism of the current politics of fear manifested at the border between the United States and Mexico. As the U.S. Congress passes regulation to build 700 more miles of border wall, the fusion of antiterrorism and anti-immigration sets the stage for the current confrontations over immigration policy and the further hardening of social legislature in the American metropolis. Geographies of conflict such as the San Diego– Tijuana border become anticipatory scenarios of the twenty-first-century global metropolis, where the city will increasingly become the battleground where strategies of control and tactics of transgression, formal and informal economies, legal and illegal occupations meet.

2. STRATEGIES OF SURVEILLANCE: TACTICS OF TRANSGRESSION

But despite the apocalyptic implications of a more fortified border with intensified surveillance infrastructure, the growing tension between the various communities of San Diego and those of Tijuana have elicited a multitude of insurgent responses—new opportunities for constructing alternative modes of encounter, dialogue, and debate, sharing resources and infrastructure, recycling at the most outlandish levels the fragments and situations of these two cities, and constructing practices of encroachment into the increasingly privatized and controlled public realm. 75

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Flow of waste moves north to south: migrant housing.

A series of “off the radar” two-way border crossings—North–South and South–North across the border wall—suggests that no matter how high and long the post-9/11 border wall becomes, it will always be transcended by migrating populations and the relentless flows of goods and services back and forth across the formidable barrier that seeks to preclude them. These illegal flows are physically manifested, in one direction, by the informal land use patterns and economies produced by migrant workers flowing from Tijuana and into San Diego, searching for the strong economy of Southern California. But, while “human flow” mobilizes northbound in search of dollars, “infrastructural waste” moves in the opposite direction to construct an insurgent, cross-border urbanism of emergency. This cross-border urbanism is made, for example, of nomadic disposable houses that literally move on wheels from San Diego into Tijuana, and also of a large amount of left over materials and systems, including garage doors and rubber tires that are recycled into new spatial narratives and informal infrastructure. Most recently, this invisible flow was made visible, when the general public was finally made aware of the thirty or so tunnels that have been dug in the last eight years, a vast “ant farm”-like maze of subterranean routes crisscrossing the border from California to Arizona. An archaeological section map of the territory today would reveal an underground urbanism worming its way into houses, churches, parking lots, warehouses, and streets. Not only were the fantastic images of cross-border two-way tunnels, all equipped with retaining walls, electricity, water extraction, and ventilation systems, exposed here, but also the undeniable presence of an informal 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 is reenacted at the San Diego–Tijuana border and later reproduced in many US neighborhoods, as the expansion of a social legislation of fear is transforming the 11 million illegal laborers who live there into criminal suspects. What are the implications of these forces of control on one hand and of non-conformity on the other in the reshaping of the American city? Our participation in the 2007 Rotterdam Architecture Biennale reflects on these trans-border urban dynamics, using this territory of conflict as backdrop to critically observe the clash between current top-down discriminating forms 76

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of urban economic re-development and planning legislature (as expressed through dramatic forms of unchecked eminent domain policies supporting privatization and NIMBYism), on one hand, and the emerging American neighborhoods nationwide made of immigrants, on the other, whose bottom-up spatial tactics of encroachment thrive on informality and alternative social organizational practices. Our project primarily engages the micro scale of the neighborhood, transforming it into the urban laboratory of the twenty-first century. The forces of control at play across the most trafficked checkpoint in the world have provoked the small border neighborhoods that surround it to construct alternative urbanisms of transgression that infiltrate themselves beyond the property line in the form of non-conforming spatial and entrepreneurial practices. A migrant, small-scale activism alters the rigidity of discriminatory urban planning of the American metropolis, and searches for new modes of social sustainability and affordability. The political and economic processes behind this social activism bring new meaning to the role of the informal in the contemporary city. What is interesting here is not the “image” of the informal but the instrumentality of its operational socioeconomic and political procedures. The counter-economic and social organizational practices produced by non-profit social service organizations (turned micro-developers of alternative housing prototypes and public infrastructure at the scale of the parcel) within these neighborhoods are creating alternative sites of negotiation and collaboration. They effectively search to transform top-down legislature and lending structures, in order to generate a new brand of bottom-up social and economic justice that can bridge the political equator.

4. CASA FAMILIAR: PRACTICES OF ENCROACHMENT

The most experimental work in housing in the U.S. is not in the hands of private development or government. It is instead in the hands of progressive, community-based non-profit organizations such as Casa Familiar 77

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Human flow moves south to north: illegal zoning.

Tijuana subdivision: mini tract homes retrofitted to accommodate growth.

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working at the border neighborhood of San Ysidro, California. These types of agencies have been the primary social service organizations engaging and managing the shifting cultural demographics caused by immigration within many 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. can occur without advances in its housing policy and subsidy structures, our collaboration with Casa Familiar has been grounded on the shaping of counter political and economic frameworks that can, in turn, yield tactical housing projects inclusive of these neighborhoods’ informal patterns of mixed-use and density. In San Ysidro housing will not be only “units” spread indifferently across the territory. Here, housing is dwelling in relationship to a social and cultural program managed by Casa Familiar. In this context, 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 Familiar that can act as an informal process of urban and economic development for the neighborhood, and empower the community of San Ysidro to become a developer of alternative dwelling prototypes for its own housing stock. This “Affordable Housing Overlay Zone” (A.H.O.Z.) micro-policy proposes that community-based non-profit organizations such as Casa Familiar can become mediating agencies between the municipality and the neighborhood, facilitating knowledge, policy, and micro-credits. In essence, these agencies will incrementally become informal City Halls, managing and supporting the shifting of socio-cultural demographics within many of these inner city neighborhoods. LIVING ROOMS AT THE BORDER

“Living Rooms at the Border” is the small housing project that emerges from the micro-policy and serves as a catalyst to anticipate San Diego’s needed densities and mixed uses, while becoming a political instrument to enable Casa Familiar to further transform existing rigid zoning regulation for the border city of San Ysidro. The informal negotiation of boundaries and spaces typical of this neighborhood becomes the basis for incremental design solutions that have a catalytic effect on the urban fabric. In a small parcel where existing zoning allows only three units of housing, this project proposes, through negotiated density bonuses and by sharing kitchens, twelve affordable housing units, the adaptive re-use of an existing 1927 church on the site as a community center, offices for non-profit in the church’s new attic, and a community garden that serves as social armature to support this community’s nonconforming micro-economies and improvisational public events. Connected 78

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Counter tactics of development, as a community-based non-profit organization (Casa Familiar) becomes a facilitator of political and economic frameworks for affordable mixed housing (in the border neighborhood of San Ysidro).

to the garden and the church, this armature is composed of a series of openair rooms that contain electricity, serving as a site for a variety of neighborhood activities. The ambiguity of these spaces takes a different meaning as they are inscribed with a social program and community organization managed by Casa Familiar. The pairing of ambiguity and specificity is the essence of this project. The tactical interweaving of dwelling units and social service infrastructure transforms the small parcel into a system that can anticipate, organize, and promote social encounter. Furthermore, Casa Familiar injects micro-economic tactics such as time banking through sweat equity to produce alternative modes of affordability (barter housing units, exchange of rent for social service, etc.). In a place where current regulation allows only one use, we propose five different uses that support one another, suggesting a model of social sustainability for the neighborhood, one that conveys density not as bulk but as social choreography and neighborhood collaboration.

This essay is drawn from a paper presented at Global Place: Practice, Politics and the Polis, a conference at the University of Michigan in January 2007. 79

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THE MNEMONIC CITY Duality, invisibility, and memory in American urbanism CRAIG EVAN BARTON (1996)

Ask your wife to take you around the gin mills and the barbershops and the juke joints and the churches, Brother. Yes and the beauty parlors on Saturdays when they’re frying hair. A whole unrecorded history is spoken then, Brother. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952 This essay explores the effect of race upon the development of the urban fabric of cities in the American South. While these cultural issues are present throughout America, the American South is a particularly interesting field of inquiry because of the historical relationship between black and white cultures, their proximity to one another throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and ultimately because so many of the critical events of the Civil Rights Movement took place there. Using the work of Hannah Arendt, Pierre Nora and Maurice Halbwachs, the text examines the issues of duality, invisibility, and memory and proposes to integrate them into a critical reading of the southern city in an effort to better understand the imprint of the phenomenal cultural forces left upon the physical form of cities. In “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” Cornel West proposed that in attempting to control the means and practices of representation, the late twentieth-century cultural worker faced three critical challenges which he defined as intellectual, existential and political.

Aerial view of Selma, Alabama.

1 “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in West, Cornel, Keeping Faith Philosophy and Race in America (New York: Routledge Press, 1993), p. 5.

The intellectual challenge . . . is how to think about representational practices in terms of history, culture and society. How does one understand, analyze and enact such practices today? An adequate answer to this question can be attempted only after one comes to terms with the insights and blindnesses of earlier attempts to grapple with the question in light of the evolving crisis in different histories, cultures and societies. The existential challenge requires that the cultural worker acquire the requisite cultural capital necessary to produce and survive. The political challenge necessitates a view toward the coalescing of black and white peoples based upon a commonalty of moral and political intent. 1 It is in light of West’s existential challenge that I would like to examine issues of race, culture, spatial representation and urbanism. As architects 80

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and urbanists we are among the cultural workers to whom West refers; the cultural capital which we need to acquire lies in the invisible history and memory of the city. Intellectually we bear the responsibility through our work to investigate, discern and ultimately to make legible the “invisible histories” to which Ellison refers. The nature of this investigation is speculative and as such is incomplete. But I feel the discussion which these issues prompt is critical to our conception of the city of the future. I find that the questions and issues which I keep returning to are those which seek to understand the role of race in our conception of the historical city (by which I mean the city of collective memories), and in a vision for the city of the future. My interest lies not so much in using the lens of architectural design and history to acquire a synthetic understanding of the chronological development of architectural typology and in so doing to review the development of urban form in America, but rather to go beyond the orthodox methods of architectural history and design to comprehend, within the city, the relationship between space, form, history and memory. In doing so I find that I am more compelled by that to which architecture does not yet speak directly: issues of race, ethnicity and recognition of cultural identity. These have become the resonant concerns of my work. I speak from the margins, as a witness to an architectural culture and history which has yet to adequately represent the diversity of the culture which it shelters. Left unquestioned, architecture, and the architectural history of America, would leave us with the succinct impression that the worldview reflected in its interpretation of built form, is one which contains little or no reference to any of us living and working at the margins: no women, blacks or any group understood to be “other.” Is it simply a question of historical oversight, corrected by tardy acknowledgment of the contributions of many of these groups? I suspect not. Contemporary cultural criticism has attempted to re-focus the debate from object to subject; forcing us to ask whom and what does history seek to interpret and represent. The history of the United States is largely mute about the presence and contribution of marginal cultures, and specifically black culture, to the development of American culture. The discursive language of the city speaks to few of the components of cultural identity to which I feel a proprietary interest. As a discipline, architecture proposes that the city is the synthesis of the memory of its political, social and economic histories. Moreover, this synthetic, collective urban history is understood to be legible and as such is subject to a variety of modes of formal analysis. The theoretical and pragmatic investigation of American urbanism has typically focused on issues such as technology and its impact upon typology and morphology, and on the significance of style in the evolution of urban fabric. Because cities have traditionally been understood as artifacts of the dominant cultures which built them, the impact of their marginalized cultures has not been thoroughly examined, and yet the form and image of 81

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2 Wright, Richard, White Man Listen! (New York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 109.

3 Plessy v. Ferguson was argued before the United States Supreme Court in April 1896 and decided in favor of the plaintiff later that year. In this case the court affirmed a lower court ruling supporting the constitutionality of a statute enacted by the State of Louisiana which provided for separate railway cars for white and black travelers. The ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court provided for a revised reading of the obligations of the Thirteenth Amendment (which made illegal the practice of slavery) and modified the scope of the language of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which provided for equal protection under the law for all citizens). In the case of the Fourteenth Amendment the interpretive revisions of the scope of the amendment’s language allowed the doctrine of “separate but equal” to be articulated.

American urbanism, particularly in the American South, is clearly linked to the presence of a black population and culture. The problem of course is that history is subjective, constructing a narrative, which with its gaps and omissions has tended to render black culture historically “invisible.” Writing in 1957, Richard Wright noted that, “The history of the Negro in America is the history of America written in vivid and bloody terms; it is the history of Western Man writ small.”2 For the black cultural worker, West’s tenets of “production and survival” are inextricably tied to a responsibility to augment the narratives of dominant history through the “excavation” and construction of those objects and devices capable of evoking memory. In this context memory becomes a tool with which to construct a critical reading of the city by making visible that which is invisible. Historically the construction of American black culture has been cast in terms of duality and of opposition. To be black is to be the “other,” separate and subordinate to dominant culture. Black culture has been defined not so 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 nor culturally affluent. The oppositional nature and the terms of the definition of this cultural construction have resulted in a singular and monolithic representation of black culture, when in fact black culture is rich and diverse. The irony of course is that in America, black culture serves as a sort of avant-garde testing ground for popular culture in general. Fashion, music, art and language draw heavily and directly from contemporary black culture. Black culture is nothing if not diverse, yet the myth of a singular black experience prevails, and when accepted as fact serves only to demodulate the complexity of black culture, marginalize it, remove it from the discourse about the construction of culture and ultimately render it invisible. The invisibility of black cultural narrative is largely due to the informal traditions and formal statutory practices of racism, which with its separation of black and white cultures formed a series of racially distinct social, physical and spatial structures. Within the form and structure of American cities, particularly cities in the American South, the physical and spatial legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson3 (in which the social and political doctrine of “separate but equal” was articulated) and its interpretation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment is an urbanism of separation, duality and invisibility, where the forms and spaces of black culture were separate from and subordinate to those of white culture. By separating one culture from the other and by establishing a hierarchy of space and form, black culture was effectively isolated and rendered invisible in the public realm of the dominant culture. The concept of “separate but equal” identities creates a hierarchy of value which elevates the products of the dominant culture and relegates to a 82

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subordinate status the products, forms and spaces controlled or conditioned by marginal culture. Because the urban artifacts of black culture were so devalued within the fabric of the city they have become both phenomenally and literally invisible. As a result, the urban artifacts produced and/or conditioned by black culture have largely been excluded from the theoretical discourse about the conception and re-invention of American urbanism and so the impact of black culture upon it has been minor. Yet a critical reading of American urbanism is incomplete if it fails to include the forms and spaces influenced by black culture. There are many ways in which invisibility can be defined. Literally we understand that which is invisible is that which is unseen. Contemporary culture ascribes a generally positive value to invisibility, nominally equating it with the freedom to move unseen. Within the context of architecture and urbanism invisibility is a cultural construction, achieved by consciously removing from the public gaze that which is neither intended nor desired to be seen. Within an understanding of the phenomenal forces of culture operative in the city, “invisibility” is as much a social and political phenomenon as it is a literal and physical one. Considered in this context Hannah Arendt’s concept of “spaces of appearance” provides a critical tool with which to understand the construction of invisibility. For Arendt “the space of public appearance”4 is that “space” “which comes into being whenever men are together in the manner of speech and action.”5 Further it is the space

Segregated drinking fountain. (Photo by Elliot Erwitt, courtesy Magnum Photos.)

4 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 199. 5 Ibid.

where I appear to others as others appear to me . . . This space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them—like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, like the laborer or craftsman prior to the modern age, the jobholder or businessman in our world do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality which humanly and politically speaking is the same as appearance.6

6 Ibid., pp. 198–199.

Yet to be visible in this space one must be able to “appear through speech and action” in the public realm. The duality of American urban structure particularly in the South made “visibility” for black culture virtually impossible. Perhaps the most important legacy of the American Civil Rights Movement was its challenge to enter and to be visible in the space of public appearance. 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 “cultural landscape.” 7 If by analogy a fragment of the city is the medium and culture the agent that acts upon it, the result can be defined as a “cultural fragment.” It is axiomatic, then, that the memory of culture is inscribed onto these fragments, and that these fragments, conditioned by social, political and cultural forces, form the fabric of the city. Individually and collectively

7 Sauer, “Landscape,” in Lark, Robert P. and Gary L. Peters, eds., Dictionary of Concepts in Human Geography (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 sites where

8 Fabre, Genevieve and O’Mealley, Robert, eds., History and Memory in African American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 284.

9 Halbwachs, Maurice, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 50b.

10 Ibid.

memory crystallizes and secretes itself at a particular historical moment, a turning where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with a sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists.8 Linked through “excavation,” construction, or forms of intervention, the “collective memory” or mnemonic narrative of the city is made visible in these fragments. The narratives evoked by these sites of memory provide a means to further explore the idea of the American city as a cultural artifact; to examine the dominant and marginalized cultures which form the city. Further they offer the opportunity to investigate alternative readings of the fabric of the American city by examining the issues of site, form and memory as they relate to the spatiality of culture and to the construction of “place” within the urban landscape. Within this proposition lies the idea that “place” is codified by the relationship of form and space to a series of social, political and cultural forces which historically have shaped the form of any given city. When they are made “visible” in the urban fabric these forces provide a narrative structure with which to comprehend the memories of a city. Here it is important to understand the concept of memory which Maurice Halbwachs defines as the “group or collective memory.”9 For Halbwachs collective memory allows an individual to “act merely as a member of group helping 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 relative transparency and opacity of the cultural fragments reflects the explicit hierarchy of social values and status. The most opaque fragments are historically connected to the dominant culture, and are literally the most solid and visible, while the fragments of marginalized cultures tend to be transparent, invisible and ephemeral. For these marginalized cultures, the power of the fragment as a mnemonic device lies in its ability to supplement the gaps of dominant history. With greater legibility these fragments hold the potential to alter the context in which urban history is read, and through this altered context to develop architecture derived from the reading and analysis of these fragments and thus expressive of that culture. The cities of the American South provide an opportunity to examine the construction of invisibility, the legibility of various “sites of memory” and the articulation of narratives of collective memory. As an example, in a city 84

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like Selma, Alabama, one finds an urbanism of duality, where there are in fact two separate “cities,” one black and one white with areas of overlap or superimposition. These cities are constructed or formed by a series of fragments codified by responses to the specific narratives of black and white culture. However, these dual cultural narratives are distinct and in their distinction are not equally legible, so that most of the narratives and fragments of black Selma recede and become “invisible.” The dual structure of the city in fact provided for the construction of separate sites of memory, and spaces of appearance. The sites of memory for Selma’s white culture are the spaces of the public realm. The political, social and culture spaces formed by the morphological structure of the city are coincident with the conveyed meanings of the courthouse (the Dallas County 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. The equivalent spaces of the black city contain narrative structures which are more disparate, not supported by a morphological structure, and in fact are superimposed upon an urban form that never intended to support them. For example, the major political and social space in the black city is found in the street, Sylvan Street, which connects two of the city’s major black churches (First Baptist and Brown’s AME Chapel). This street does not read as a space of public assembly, yet within the dual nature of southern urbanism, where entrance is denied to the more formal public realm, this is precisely its role. The dual structure of the urban fabric creates spaces where this is a discontinuity between site, form and meaning. This phenomenon forces certain spaces to derive meaning from a use superimposed onto them, while allowing other spaces to derive meaning directly from the form of the city. The segregated school house, the separate “colored” entrance to a movie theater, the unpaved street, the shotgun house, the separate cemetery and the inaccessible public building are but a few of the examples of the types of mnemonic fragments still extant in the fabric of American cities. Within them lie the formal devices of hierarchy of scale, material and implied permanence useful for the conception of architectural intervention. In contemporary society many of these devices with which “invisibility” was built lie obscured and unseen, bearing a muted witness to an era recalled by only a few. Left obscured, these fragments, their memories, and the narratives derived from them are once again marginalized. These elements form a critical part of our cultural history which needs to be preserved. It can be argued that the challenge of the late twentieth century American architect/urbanist is to be able to discern the “sites” of memory and from them “build” the mnemonic city by creating those interventions that increase the opacity of specific cultural fragments. With increased “visibility” these fragments can provide the narratives that alter the 85

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Dallas County Courthouse, Selma, Alabama. (Author’s photo.)

Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama. (Author’s photo.)

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Brown’s Chapel and First Baptist Churches, Sylvan St, Selma, Alabama. (Author’s photo.)

perception of the history of the city. This task is significant because within the urban fabric of cities in the American South lie sites seminal to understanding the evolution of the American Civil Rights Movement and the social, political and cultural transformations which emerged from it. As such these cities provide a unique opportunity to examine the strategies and methodologies for discerning, analyzing and interpreting the fragments and narratives of black and white culture. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, many of these sites are now so difficult to discern that we may say that they are “invisible.” Their “invisibility” contributes to an incomplete reading of the history and culture of these cities. Legible, these fragments constitute the basis for the mnemonic city, a city of memory.

This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 84th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1996. 86

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MAPPING EAST LOS ANGELES Aesthetics and cultural politics in an other L.A.

COMMUNITY

JOSÉ GÁMEZ (2000)

INTRODUCTION

During the 1980s and early 1990s, scholars in both Europe and Latin America began to look to the Chicano experience in the United States as a means of understanding global processes of differentiation and ethnic identification.1 This interest in Chicano identity is due, in part, to its position within processes of cultural production; cultural practices tied to the politics of Chicano identity have made visible the conditions of internal colonization and 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—particularly East Los Angeles—has become an integral part of the social identity of many Chicanos and Latinos. Here, place and identity intersect creating both a real and an imagined geography that has served as the place of and inspiration for a range of critical practices. These conscious and creative explorations have contributed to the production of distinctly Chicano and Latino cultural landscapes. In this sense, the politics of Chicano identity have helped to translate, re-inscribe, and re-claim the (post)colonial center—the modern metropolis.2 This paper explores three areas of Chicano cultural production rooted in East Los Angeles in order to illustrate their importance to understandings of contemporary Latino L.A.: street muralism, the spatial narratives of Asco and Frank Romero, and the architectural investigations of James Rojas and the team of Margaret Crawford and A.D.O.B.E. L.A.. By revisiting these past manifestations of an other Los Angeles, this paper will illustrate how the politics of identity can inform the contemporary city.

1 See: Hector Calderón and José David Saldívar, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994) 1.

2 See: Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

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 and South and neither simultaneously.3 For Martínez, L.A. is shaped by social and spatial divisions that are rooted in global political geographies and realized in local cultural landscapes. Los Angeles and the American Southwest have been understood as Atzlán, the Chicano cultural homeland; Los Angeles was once a Mexican territory and became an American city via military occupation and cultural domination. The same is true of much of what is 87

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3 Rubén Martínez, The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City, and Beyond (New York: Vintage Departures, 1993).

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4 See: Edward Murguia, Assimilation, Colonialism, and the Mexican American People (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975); see also Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Postcolonialism,” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 291–304. 5 See: Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “The Chicano Movement: The Movement of Chicano Art,” Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1991) 128–129. 6 See: Shifra M. Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “The Political and Social Contexts of Chicano Art,” Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965– 1985, edited by Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery/ University of California Press, 1991) 83–95.

7 Guillermo Gomez-Peña, “A New Artistic Continent,” High Performance 9.3 (1986): 27.

now considered the southwestern region of the U.S. As an occupied territory and, later, as an annexed state, California became a colonized space—a space overtaken by American westward expansion. The local Mexican populations therefore became internally colonized peoples.4 In this sense, Los Angeles became and continues to be a cultural and physical borderland in the sense described by Martínez. In many ways, this need to negotiate cultural worlds provides a tie to the Chicano movement in both art and politics. As an outgrowth of the 1960s era of social struggles, the Chicano movement, or El Movimiento, was ideologically aligned with the civil rights movements in the U.S. as well as international student and Third World liberation movements.5 Although it shared common goals with a wide range of struggles, the Chicano movement aimed to address the marginalized condition of Mexican-American groups 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 including artists’ statements, oral histories, and the influential publication, El plan espiritual de Atzlán (“The Spiritual Plan of Atzlán”), that emerged from the Chicano 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 help define the cultural identity of the Chicano communities. This link between cultural identity and manifestations of that culture in material form provides a key to understanding Chicano socio-spatial practices as they apply to architecture and the city. Chicano art provides evidence of clearly motivated cultural practices: Chicano art, by definition, seeks to bring to light colonial legacies and forces of marginalization by drawing upon and re-defining the cultural landscape of the city. In this sense, Chicano art actively embraces the politics of identity in order to engage a wide range of urban audiences. To be clear, it is not the production of the urban barrio per se that this paper takes as its focus; rather, it is the conscious expression of Chicano identity as a representational practice that lies at the center of this investigation. However, Chicano art often draws its strength from everyday barrio life in which “art objects are embedded in a network of cultural sites . . . that express the community’s sense of itself, the aesthetic display projecting a sort of visual biculturalism.”7 This bicultural expressiveness illustrates the cultural hybridity necessary to navigate the contemporary postcolonial metropolis. The location of Chicano culture within a borderland between the social worlds of the U.S. and Mexico is its greatest asset—one that has drawn the attention of scholars and cultural theorists worldwide. In the words of Guillermo Gomez-Peña, an internationally respected artist and cultural critic, the “strength and originality of Chicano-Latino con88

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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 allows Chicano and Latino artists to operate within what both Gomez-Peña and cultural theorist Homi Bhabha have described as a third-space of cultural expression that confronts the postcolonial present.9 The border, in this sense, becomes a site for intervening into the present that “demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not a part of the continuum of the past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation.”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 developed as a medium of expression that helped to reclaim the public realm of the city and contributed to a larger struggle to overcome racism and poverty. Urban murals, as components of a political visual voice, became one of the most enduring modes of insurgent cultural translation available not only to Chicano communities in Los Angeles but also to marginalized communities in general.11 Influenced by the Mexican muralists of the 1930s, the Chicano movement called for a monumental public art easily accessed in everyday life. This was often translated into the appropriation of available surfaces for the dissemination of information and images. By mixing longstanding symbolic iconography rooted in cultural tradition with images tied to local settings, murals provided cultural commentaries tied to contemporary struggles. As Coco Fusco, an artist and cultural theorist, has pointed out,

Figure 1. Willie Herrón’s The Cracked Wall (photo by Ramón Ramírez). 8 Ibid., 27.

9 See: Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

10 Ibid., 7.

Symbolic action expressed via artistic creation . . . has become the primary arena for innovative self-definition among politically disenfranchised peoples. This syncretic fusing of different forms of belief and practice has enabled disempowered groups to maintain their traditions while endorsing various cultural recycling methods that infuse old icons with new meanings.12

11 See: Alan W. Barnett, Community Murals: The People’s Art (London: Associated University Presses/Cornwall, 1984).

Murals, as representations of political identity, have also helped to shape debates within the Chicano community. In the work of artists such as Judith Baca, urban murals serve as symbolic reminders to greater Los Angeles of an other L.A. often subsumed under a mythologized Spanish heritage.13 Her work has attempted to create a unified identity that confronts dominant cultural (mis)representations and re-inscribes an often overlooked Mexican past into the contemporary urban realm. But for others, attempts to define unified notions of identity are themselves limiting. Willie Herrón’s mural, The Cracked Wall, illustrates that the Chicano community is not easily defined (see Figure 1). Herrón’s mural, located in a back alley rather than 89

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12 Coco Fusco, English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: New Press, 1995) 33–36.

13 A similar project to memorialize African American, Asian American and Latino urban histories in Los Angeles has been Dolores Hayden’s Power of Place Project. See: Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes 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 at large but rather as a commentary internal to the Chicano community and as a reminder of local problems such as gang activity, drug abuse, and provincialism. In this sense, Herrón did not seek a homogeneous unity; rather, he sought to draw the community together around a set of issues critical to the development of Latino Los Angeles. In so doing, muralists like Baca and Herrón initiated a dialog that has contributed to both the physical and social shape of east L.A.. WALKING IN L.A.: ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE

14 Asco consisted of Harry Gamboa, Jr., Gluglio “Gronk” Nicandro, Willie Herrón, and Patisse Valdez.

15 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 331.

The internal critique begun by Herrón in The Cracked Wall carried over into 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 Chicano conceptual/performance art group to come out of East Los Angeles. Utilizing improvisation, performance, and guerrilla theater, Asco transformed the city into their canvas; through a series of performances beginning with Stations of the Cross on December 24, 1971, Asco began their cultural assault on institutions shaping the barrio. Staged unannounced along a one-mile stretch of Whittier Boulevard in East L.A., Stations of the Cross appropriated and re-deployed Catholic iconography in order to challenge local institutional power structures while simultaneously locating the politics of identity within the space of the city. The choice of Whittier Boulevard itself was not haphazardly made; Whittier connects the east side to downtown Los Angeles and has often been called the symbolic heart of East L.A.. Additionally, Whittier was the site of the Chicano Moratorium—a Vietnam protest rally that ended in police violence and the death of Rubén Salazar, an active Chicano journalist with the Los Angeles Times. Asco returned to Whittier Boulevard several times over the following years and each new performance continued to explore the connections between the politics of identity, space, and place (see Figure 2). Additionally, each new performance introduced investigations into various media—film, muralism, and photography—thereby providing numerous opportunities to appropriate and re-articulate the image of the city. Through the use of site-specific performances, film, and guerrilla tactics, Asco put the politics of identity of East Los Angeles in general, and Whittier Boulevard specifically, into play within a broad discursive landscape. While created prior to the present state of media technologies, Asco’s place-based interventions are early examples of what cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai has labeled the ideoscapes of contemporary cultural flows— the “concatenations of images . . . and counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it.”15 Chicano urban art, in this sense, served to mobilize landscapes of images that 90

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challenged notions of a unified Chicano identity, of established artistic practices, and mainstream perceptions of the East Los Angeles. In doing so, East L.A. became a symbolic and physical center in the production of Chicano identity and served as evidence that public space is tied to socio-spatial action. POST-ASCO TACTICS: COLLECTIVE URBANISM

The influence of Asco’s urban theater spread as other groups, among them Los Four, took on the politics of identity in Los Angeles.16 Grupos, or collaborative artistic groups, are in many ways a legacy of the Chicano movement that persists to this day; grupos were often formed around local arts centers and aimed to promote grassroots artistic practices including social and spatial action. Los Four grew out of this tradition by incorporating street imagery into their work, particularly graffiti, as a means of bringing the politics of everyday life into the realm of artistic production. After the group’s demise in 1983, Los Four co-founder Frank Romero continued to paint scenes of East Los Angeles in order to bring the message of Chicano struggle to outside audiences. This agenda remained a central part of Romero’s work and provided a lens onto the politics of identity in Los Angeles for both Chicano and mainstream art audiences. For Romero, Whittier became a paradigmatic site of cultural resistance; two of his paintings, The Closing of Whittier Boulevard and The Death of Rubén Salazar, represent clashes between the dominant society of Los Angeles and the Chicano community in East L.A. (see Figure 3). As with the previous efforts of Los Four, Romero intended to further the agenda of the Chicano movement by introducing the politics of identity into established artistic circles. However, the importance of place remained; by addressing sitespecific events, Romero maintained a dialog with East L.A., contributed to the on-going development of Chicano identity, and connected the space of 91

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Figure 2. Left: Asco performing First Supper (After a Major Riot) in 1974 (image copyright held by Harry Gamboa and reprinted courtesy of the artist). Figure 3. Right: Frank Romero’s The Death of Rubén Salazar (image copyright held by Frank Romero and reprinted courtesy of the artist).

16 Los Four were contemporaries of Asco and the group was active from 1973 to 1983. The members of Los Four were: Carlos Almaraz, Roberto de la Rocha, Gilbert “Magu” Luján, and Frank Romero.

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17 The Closing of Whittier Boulevard was painted in 1984 and The Death of Rubén Salazar was painted between 1985 and 1986.

18 See: George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

19 Mike Davis, “Chinatown Revisited?” in Sex, Death, and God in L.A. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 35. 20 James T. Rojas, “The Enacted Environment: The Creation of ‘Place’ by Mexicans and Mexican Americans in East Los Angeles,” Master’s Thesis, Department of Architecture, M.I.T., 1991, 14.

the gallery to the streets of the barrio. In doing so, the often de-politicized context of artistic display was disrupted through the introduction of the politics of identity. Interestingly, Romero did not participate in either of the events he depicted in The Death of Rubén Salazar or in The Closing of Whittier Boulevard; each event occurred in the early years of the Chicano movement while Romero’s paintings were executed some fifteen years later.17 Here, Romero drew upon the collective memory of East Los Angeles for his inspiration. In this sense, the works of Asco, Los Four, and Romero are not only related but are, in many ways, successive projects within a particular family of resemblance—entities within an on-going set of cultural negotiations.18 EVERYDAY PRACTICES AND THE OBJECT OF STUDY

By delving into social and political issues, Chicano artists began the process of re-writing the history of Los Angeles in order to include pieces of a story previously left out. This was not simply a process of historical revision: this was a spatialized project that took the urban realm 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 rigid plan; rather, it is a set of collective inheritances to be continually re-articulated. In this light, the socio-spatial “praxis” and “material force” of Chicano and Latino communities illustrate processes of urban transformation and provide ways to re-think contemporary urbanism.19 For urban planner James T. Rojas, East Los Angeles is an enacted landscape where the “identity of place . . . is created through the culturally related behavior patterns of the residents.”20 Through his work as a graduate student in the Department of Architecture at M.I.T., Rojas illustrated the means by which the city is tailored to meet the cultural preferences of Mexican and Mexican American communities in East Los Angeles. This process of place-making through enactment involves various forms of architectural and urban props—murals, fences, vendor carts—that are incorporated into the existing urban fabric and help to create distinctive cultural landscapes. Although unpublished, Rojas’ master’s thesis has been widely influential within architectural, urban design, and urban planning circles (particularly in academia) where both faculty and students have drawn upon his work as the basis for further research. Rojas provided not only a reading of a Chicano cultural landscape but also a new academic terrain largely overlooked by schools of architecture and urbanism. The importance of Rojas’ work can be gauged by more recent research into Chicano Los Angeles; by 1994, this line of work had entered the mainstream of artistic, architectural, and academic practices. Rodolfo F. Acuña, a 92

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Chicano Studies Scholar whose work has chronicled the history of East Los Angeles, included a section on Chicano urbanism in his book, Anything But Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles, that is based largely upon the work of Rojas.21 Similarly, the collaborative art and architecture group, A.D.O.B.E. L.A. (Architects and Designers Opening the Border Edge of Los Angeles), has also taken the cultural landscapes of L.A.’s Latino neighborhoods as the objects of both academic and professional pursuits.22 Through continued investigations into the cultural trans-formation of urban spaces and through design practices that actively engage Chicano and Latino communities in Los Angeles, A.D.O.B.E. L.A. has both continued the line of inquiry begun by Rojas as well as the tradition of the grupo—a central component of the Chicano art movement. Further illustrating the growing influences of non-traditional architectural investigations within mainstream circles was the inclusion of A.D.O.B.E. L.A.’s work in two major architectural and urban design exhibitions: Urban Revisions: Current Projects for the Public Realm, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art (M.O.C.A.) in Los Angeles and House Rules, which was held at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and later published in the architectural journal Assemblage.23 Urban Revisions intended to focus attention on a number of selected urban design and planning projects from around the country addressing a range of social, cultural, economic, ecological, and political concerns. In response to M.O.C.A.’s call, A.D.O.B.E. L.A. submitted a proposal that highlighted an absence from the exhibition: “vernacular design on behalf of cultural survival.”24 Conceding the oversight, M.O.C.A. invited A.D.O.B.E. L.A. to intervene in the main exhibit. In response, A.D.O.B.E. L.A. created pieces that worked themselves into the gaps of the larger exhibit in order to metaphorically illustrate the appropriation of urban landscapes common in many Latino communities in Los Angeles: gallery spaces were tagged with cultural markers; East L.A.’s ubiquitous vendor carts were parked between project displays; and an urban map detailing the overlaps of toxic waste sites, sites of under-employment, and Latino neighborhoods, served to remind M.O.C.A.’s visitors of an other urban reality. House Rules grappled with the problem of re-thinking the American ideal of the single-family detached home through design interventions and theoretical speculation. Here, A.D.O.B.E. L.A. was paired with urban theorist Margaret Crawford, further illustrating the infiltration of Chicano politics into the main-stream. Using a hyper-realistic architectural model depicting a typical Californian suburban bungalow transformed to meet the cultural needs of Mexican Americans in East L.A., the project by A.D.O.B.E. L.A. and Crawford illustrated cultural practices of appropriation while challenging accepted architectural representational standards. Additionally, the Crawford/A.D.O.B.E. L.A. project added critical theoretical depth to the 93

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21 See: Rodolfo F. Acuña, Anything But Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1996) 11–12. 22 A.D.O.B.E. L.A. was established in 1992 as a collaborative and activist group of architects, artists, and designers in Los Angeles whose members have included Ulises Diaz, Ignacio Fernandez, Gustavo Leclerc, Alessandra Moctezuma, Elipio Rocha, Leda Ramos, and Rosa Velasco.

23 See: Assemblage 24 (1994); see also: Elizabeth Smith, ed., Urban Revisions: Current Projects for the Public Realm, exhibition catalog (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1994); Richard M. Carp, ed., Saber es poder/Interventions (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 1994).

24 Carp n. pag.

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25 Margaret Crawford and A.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, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1989).

28 Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place.

29 Appadurai 326.

work of Rojas by illustrating how the “heroic bricolage” described in the work 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 which the margins have entered into the center of theoretical debates. Largely overlooked in both theory and design, the politics of identity have made in-roads primarily via cultural critique. The power of making visible the previously invisible exposes not only formerly silenced voices but also the mechanisms by which silence is maintained. However, as with any marginalized position working from within the center itself, the project of speaking the unspoken is simply not enough. The charge must be one of “developing a vigilance for systematic appropriations of the unacknowledged social production of a differential” within the practices of the center.26 This calls for a continual re-reading of past cultural productions in an on-going effort to keep culture in motion—to free cultural 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 an understanding of the politics of identity that seeks to reclaim histories while preserving the power that critique holds. Therefore, the practice of revisiting past forms of cultural production remains a necessary project, given that the ability to consume and maintain space as transparent and/or ordered is tied to operations of power. As Dolores Hayden has stated, “[o]ne of the consistent ways to limit the economic and political rights of groups has been to constrain social reproduction by limiting access to space.”28 In this sense, the re-enactment of place through both symbolic and physical means is a vital part of the continued struggle towards visibility and to stave off cultural disappearance. In this on-going battle, creative and imaginative practices are now important aspects of cultural expression. As Arjun Appadurai states, the “image, the imagined, the imaginary—these are all terms which direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice.”29 This is not to say that the works described above present true images of urban life; rather, they provide momentary glimpses of another reality. In this sense, the works of Chicano artists such as Asco, Los Four, and Romero as well as more recent works by Rojas, A.D.O.B.E. L.A., and Crawford provide ways to examine the public realm that avoid reductions to zero-degree cultural categories implicit in many contemporary urban and architectural practices. These views frame the city as something more than the site of nostalgia or cultural consumption. Here, the city provides an important zone of interaction—a space of cultural hybridity within which to explore the politics of identity. By looking to various forms of cultural production, both formal and informal, one finds that murals, architectural props, spatial practices, and artistic 94

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representations emerge as important tools in the development of an aesthetic and an ability to exhibit culture from within a marginalized community.

This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 88th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2000. 95

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CELEBRATING THE CITY COMMUNITY

ALAN J. PLATTUS (1987)

The urban festival provides a bridge between the ordinary city of everyday experience and the extraordinary city—projected in part by the festival— of idealistic and technological urbanism; of utopian hopes, projects, and illusions. The extraordinary city provides a glimpse of the city as it might be—for good or ill—as certain groups, certain constituencies within the city, would like it to be. We are quite familiar with some of those moments of heightened, intensified, highly concentrated urban vision. They are often key episodes in the most ordinary histories of architecture: for example, Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition of 1893. Such events may be arrière or 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 so dialectically, in a way that reveals as well as conceals, that—as the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin has argued—liberates as well as represses or oppresses. Festivals—both the singular, one-time-only special events, and the reiterated festival calendar (now much reduced from its peak in the late middle ages, but certainly still with us) which charts the rhythms of our seasonal religious and social life in cities—provide an index for both the continuity of tradition fundamental to the existence of cities and the disjunctions of change, programmed and spontaneous. They are then, not surprisingly, among the most significant vehicles for understanding the city, but also for more active interpreting, and therefore ultimately shaping the city. To paraphrase Clifford Geertz’s famous description of the Balinese cockfight, they are stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—and about our cities.

This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 75th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1987.

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Parade of Fools, Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 1, 2007. (Photo by Rebekah Modrak.)

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Omar Avenue at Boyd Street, 2007.

San Julian at Sixth Street, 2007.

CAMILO JOSÉ VERGARA (2007) Making toys, furniture, artificial flowers, storing and processing fish, and serving the homeless are the main activities of L.A.’s Skid Row. As one learns more about the individual complexity of each of these businesses, their interdependence, and their relationship to the missions and the street people, the more extraordinary this urban economy seems, thriving as it has for decades among the misery, disease, and despair. Skid Row has been the largest public display of human misery in the United States and it has been so since I started documenting the area in 1995. Numbering in the thousands, derelict people have been concentrated in a small area of about fifty square blocks. The missions came to the area first. The Fred Jordan Mission is over forty years old, and the Union Rescue Mission, now in a new building, has been here for ninety years. Many of the hotels built long ago to accommodate travelers became S.R.O.s after the train station was relocated, providing another cheap place to live; some offer a bed for as little as twenty five dollars a night. The missions were followed by soup kitchens, health facilities, and methadone clinics. People know to drive to this part of the city to bring food and clothing for the homeless, and their charity gives further impetus for the down-and-out to congregate here. Now, in addition to corporate and government buildings, old industrial buildings have been transformed into lofts, galleries, restaurants, and hotels. L.A.’s old downtown is becoming the city center officials had proudly declared unnecessary. Since the fall of 2006 the climate in the streets of Skid Row has changed when 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 many searches and arrests in Skid Row, but none impressed me more than one in May 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 looked and saw a policeman standing in front of a sleeping person on South Fourth Street. The person under the blanket had overslept. It was 9 a.m. When I asked who was pushing the homeless a woman explained “the city, 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 the L.A. River. They are going to the missions, but some don’t want to go there.” The police finally have gained control of Skid Row. I had the feeling that I was seeing its last days. In a decade Skid Row will perhaps become L.A.’s equivalent of Greenwich Village. I heard a Whole Foods is coming to downtown. 98

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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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INTRODUCTION Further thoughts on the three urbanisms DOUGLAS KELBAUGH

It is an article of faith that we design the built environment in an everchanging social, cultural, economic, technological, and ecological milieu. Contemporary urban development has responded to these changing factors in ways that might loosely be called “market urbanism.” This term is used here to refer to current conventions and modes of land acquisition, professional planning and design services, government regulation, financing, and construction for the thousands of real estate development projects that spring up in places and at times determined by macro and micro market forces and by the decisions of private developers. This market-driven redevelopment is kin to what Robert Fishman refers to as “reurbanism” in the Foreword, although his two exemplars—Battery Park City in Manhattan and Millennium Park in Chicago—are of a higher and more exalted order. Most of these projects are small or unremarkable, or both. However, their accumulation inevitably changes the face of America in ways that are not planned, organized, or self-conscious. Thus, the recent conversion of downtown office buildings into hotels and condominiums, or factories and warehouses into residential lofts, has transformed many urban centers. Post-World War II suburbia has likewise been transformed by the tsunami of subdivisions, gated communities, arterial strips, and retail malls. There are, however, three contemporary paradigms of urbanism that are self-conscious: New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism, and, to a lesser extent, what I call Post Urbanism. These three approaches or attitudes (other than New Urbanism, it is hard to call them movements) represent the cutting edge of theoretical and professional activity in Western architecture and urbanism. I would like to contend that all three paradigms are basic and somewhat inevitable conditions and that each has its merits and demerits, but not in equal proportion—at least for most American cities at this point in their evolution. This essay examines their overlaps and oppositions, methodologies and modalities, strengths and weaknesses, in hopes of sketching the outlines of a more integrated position. Although the essays assembled in this section do not all fit smoothly or completely in these three categories, the taxonomy helps structure the conversation about urban design. Indeed, for better or worse, we’ve divided the section into subsections under these three titles. We invited several provocative urban designers/writers to punctuate the papers. The collection 105

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attempts to characterize the dialogue over the last decade about urbanism in general and urban form in particular. THE FORMAL/CLASSICAL PARADIGM

New Urbanism is by far the best known of these three paradigms. It is the most organized, with the Congress for the New Urbanism (C.N.U.) to promote and defend its tenets. It is also the one with which I am most familiar and aligned, albeit with reservations and criticisms. The Charter of the New Urbanism, ratified in 1996, aspires to truly utopian goals. The aspirations are an explicit mix of both noble ends and practical means: to equitably mix people of different income, ethnicity, race, and age; to build public architecture and public space that makes citizens feel they are part of, and proud of, a common culture and community; to weave a tighter urban fabric that mixes land of different uses and buildings of different architectural types; to sponsor and integrate transit, revenue sharing, planning, and governance at the metropolitan scale; and to be economically sound and ecologically responsible at the scale of the building, neighborhood, and region. Rarely, it must be said, are its ideals fully achieved, especially in a single project or community. As these ambitious, lofty principles indicate, New Urbanism seeks to counter the physical fragmentation, social dislocation and polarization, and functional compartmentalization of the modern city. It envisions a structural relationship between social behavior and physical form, and maintains that good design can have a measurably positive effect on the sense of place and community. Its basic model is a compact, mixed-use, diverse, transit-friendly, walkable city with a hierarchy of buildings and places that promotes face-to-face social interaction. In more specific terms, New Urbanism’s Charter advocates mixed-use centers where low- and mid-rise buildings form a continuous street wall, and where offices and affordable housing can be located above retail shops. It is not dense by European or Asian standards, but it is denser than conventional American sprawl. Its idealized urban hierarchy runs the gamut from background housing and private yards to foreground civic and institutional buildings, with public squares and parks. The built environment is organized along the urban “transect,” which, like the ecological transect, subdivides and codifies a prototypical cross-section of development from natural countryside to urban core. The continuum has six zones of gradually increasing building density and height, with a seventh zone for special districts. To engage with these practices, the C.N.U. has popularized a set of alternative principles and practices throughout North America, Australia, and parts of Europe. Among these are models for Transit Oriented Development (T.O.D.) to reduce auto-dependency and Traditional Neighborhood Development (T.N.D.) to encourage mixed-use. 106

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In terms of historical antecedents, New Urbanism is reminiscent of the City Beautiful movement, and it embraces open spaces and housing typologies that recall the Garden City tradition. Typically, its architecture is also 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 physical planning and design. For instance, its adherents have sought to reform contemporary financial and banking practices that encourage developers to build and “flip” projects for quick profits. They seek the patient capital of investors who would stay in a project for the long haul. And they 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 as New Urbanism. Nor is it even an established movement. Nevertheless, it has a body of literature and a clearly stated goal: to celebrate and build on ordinary life, with little pretense about the possibility of a perfectible or ideal 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 and top-down, and unlike New Urbanism, it downplays, and even denies, the relationship between physical form and social behavior. Its advocates frequently celebrate the ability of indigenous and migrant groups to respond in resourceful and imaginative ways to ad hoc conditions and marginal spaces. Its aim is to help people adapt and improvise, often in spite of physical design and planning. In practical terms, proponents of Everyday Urbanism support such activities as the appropriation of space on sidewalks and in parking lots (as well as on vacant lots and in private driveways) for informal commerce 107

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Above left: Denver’s former Stapleton Airport is being converted into a 4,700 acre New Urbanist community with 12,000 homes, master-planned by Calthorpe Associates. (Photo courtesy of Calthorpe Associates.) Above right: Mixed-use buildings at Stapleton designed in a background, contemporary architectural style, and built to the sidewalk to define a continuous street wall with residential and office uses above retail shops— a traditional but still compelling configuration that should be the norm in urban developments. (Photo courtesy of Calthorpe Associates.)

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and festivities. It champions the vernacular architecture and street life and art of vibrant, ethnic neighborhoods such as those of Los Angeles. An international example might be Curitiba, Brazil, with its populist ethic and low-tech, bus transit system. Despite its grassroots quality, however, Everyday Urbanism should not be confused with conventional real-estate development. It is more personalized, politicized, and democratic than the standard “product” built and financed by mainstream developers and banks. Its very ability to fly below the organized financial radar and work in the gaps and on the margins has allowed it to empower disadvantaged and disenfranchised people and communities. THE AVANT-GARDE/INVENTIVE PARADIGM

Parking lots, sidewalks, driveways, and vacant lots are productively taken over by informal markets in Everyday Urbanism. (Photo courtesy of Margaret Crawford.)

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 here to refer to the avant-garde paradigm that has grown out of what has been called the post-structuralist or critical architectural project of the last several decades. With its embrace of dynamic global information and capital flows, this urbanism is critical of most traditional norms and conventions, although sometimes in a playful, satiric way. Relativistic, predictably unpredictable, and without formal orthodoxies or principles, it favors bold form—either broken and fractal, or continuous and flowing. At its purest, Post Urbanism argues that shared values or metanarratives are no longer possible in a world increasingly fragmented and composed of heterotopian ghettoes of the “other” (e.g. the homeless, the poor, minorities) and mainstream zones of fantasy commerce, information exchange, and free-range tourism. These liminal and exciting zones of taboo and fantasy and 24/7 zones of unfettered consumerism are viewed as liberating because they allow “for new forms of knowledge, new hybrid possibilities, new unpredictable forms of freedom.” Espousing ever wilder and more provocative design, Post Urbanism also aspires to engage an increasingly sophisticated, celebrity-conscious consumer of the built environment. Urban works born of these ideas include the mega-forms of Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and some less strident proposals of Steven Holl. Frank Gehry’s proposals for Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn and Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, as well as Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum complex, are other examples. In formal terms, the abstract architectural language and topological explorations of Post Urbanism are often one of surface and skin. There is little direct reference to the physical context, even if it’s contemporary. A variety of avant-gardist shock tactics may also be deployed, no matter how modest the building program or unimportant the site. However, it is sometimes difficult to know if a project is neo-avant-garde or truly avant108

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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 possibility of change. Nevertheless, Post Urbanists have described their discordant and exceptional insertions into the city as examples of open, democratic urbanism. And they criticize New Urbanist communities as stultifying and irrelevant in light of modern lifestyles and technology, especially digital media and what I call the Electronic Now. For them, New Urbanism’s desire for orderliness embodies nostalgia for a romanticized past that never existed. Meanwhile, the ad hoc liveliness of Everyday Urbanism, while less scenographic and predictable, would lack aesthetic cohesion and ambition for them. Despite their theoretical and aesthetic sophistication, however, it is questionable whether Post Urbanist works give back as much as they take from the city around them. The projects themselves are typically selfcontained, if not self-centered, with little faith in the work of others to complete a fragmented urban fabric. Meanwhile, sprawling auto-centric cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Las Vegas are sometimes held up as models of a liberating mobility. METHODOLOGIES AND MODALITIES

Underlying these paradigms are three very different methodologies. New Urbanism is clearly the most precedent-based. It aims to extrapolate from enduring architectural principles and typologies, as well as historical examples 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, and adapted to local conditions through the relatively standardized tool of the community design charrette. Politically active, the C.N.U. has also built coalitions with other movements such as Smart Growth, and other organizations such as the Urban Land Institute, U.S. Green Building Council, and the A.I.A. These links have given it traction and clout as a national organization, as seen in the postKatrina 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 complex mixture of land uses and buildings that cities have always possessed and are now requiring. They have thus lambasted the post-World War II zoning that separated and compartmentalized land uses, as if, in Ken Greenberg’s words, it could only juggle one ball at a time. To be sure, mixed-use urbanism, with its walkability and chance encounters, is now the one and only urban approach that everyone, from Leon 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 109

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The BMW plant by Zaha Hadid overtly expresses flows of industrial assembly. Its Post Urbanist architecture is visually dynamic and aggressive, with laminar forms invading the site and surrounding the existing buildings like solidified lava. (Photo courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects.)

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way to create urban order is needed. A new appreciation for architectural typology, New Urbanists believe, can provide this foundation. Thus, in place of zoning codes focusing on function and bulk, they advocate form- and typology-based codes promoting normative architectural and urban forms. New Urbanist emphasis on typology partly derives from a desire to dignify the many background buildings needed to make a coherent city. Builders and designers are freed to refine details and building form rather than overhaul or re-invent them. A typology also provides familiar architectural vessels into which new functions can be poured, helping to preserve the memory of the city. And it makes future architectural and urban form more predictable. Indeed, without agreed-upon design typologies, the effective practice of urban design and planning is almost impossible. Everyday Urbanism is far less normative and doctrinaire. Where New Urbanism grew out of concern for precedent and typology, it emerged from the community design movement that has stubbornly survived since the 1970s in a few cities, and recently been revived in others. It views the design professional as a student of the popular and the quotidian rather than the ideal and elite, and a participant more than a leader of public dialogue. Everyday Urbanism’s concern for citizen control makes it the most open-ended and populist of the three urbanisms. And because it is about celebrating the ordinary rather than starting over with a new and presumably more sophisticated model, it is also the most modest, incremental, and compassionate of the paradigms, with the strongest commitment to social and economic justice. However, if the New Urbanist romanticizes the past, the Everyday Urbanist overestimates the power of the commonplace. 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, both real and virtual. Rather than seeking accommodation, its projects are bold and experimental rather than normative, and often relish the chance to violate design guidelines, zoning codes, existing typologies. Post Urbanists also don’t tend to engage the public as directly in open dialogue—perhaps because they feel the traditional “polis” is increasingly obsolete, and its civic institutions too calcified to promote new possibilities. Celebrated in the media as solo artists or lone geniuses, they cultivate Howard Roarkish personas, despite the reality that large multidisciplinary teams are needed to realize their designs. Perhaps the quintessential Post Urbanist is Rem Koolhaas, the vanguard Dutch designer and brilliant provocateur. He has proclaimed, perhaps as a trope but irresponsibly in any case, that urbanism is dead; that there is no longer any hope of achieving urban coherence or unity. Like the 110

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talented and less nihilistic Steven Holl, he has dropped typology in favor of topology. Rigorously consistent within their own architectural vocabulary and physical site, Post Urbanist projects often seem to be designed within an invisible envelope, with almost zero attention to offsite relationships. For this reason, they tend to be perceived as confrontational, even brazen. Like mid-twentieth-century Modernist projects, they want to make a radically new start and are comfortable and even like and depend on being at odds with their surroundings. But unlike Modernism, form is now increasingly un-tethered from a sense of common, shared values and is free to be arbitrary, even bizarre. Yet, in spite of their hubris, many a Post Urbanist building is a spatial and formal tour de force. They can be sophisticated foreground 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 centers and neighborhoods as aesthetically consistent wholes—beautiful in the traditional Viennese or Parisian sense—Post Urbanists may be criticized as too willing to settle for the city of internally unified but disparate fragments. Where New Urbanists want to be normative at too many scales, Post Urbanists want to be free at too many scales—from the baluster to the building to the bioregion. And, if New Urbanism tends to hold too highly the best practices of the past and Everyday Urbanism overrates a prosaic present, the Post Urbanist is overinvested in endlessly exciting topology and an audacious future. It must be said that the differing clientele for the three paradigms may explain some of these proclivities. Everyday Urbanists often work for nonprofit and community groups with limited resources and political power; thus, their commissions and projects are more modest, sometimes built with volunteer labor. New Urbanists often work for land developers, especially on the suburban greenfield projects for which they are best known; however, their lesser-known but numerous urban redevelopment projects, including Hope VI, may be sponsored by government agencies or public/private partnerships. Post Urbanists projects are typically the result of prestigious competitions and commissions by wealthy and powerful institutions, corporations, and patrons who seek high profile, iconic buildings. These different client groups have different missions and audiences, ranging from subaltern minorities to middle-class consumers to urbane cognoscenti and glitterati. In this sense, it is no surprise that the three paradigms lead to different physical outcomes. However, this is not to tautologically imply that they are solely the result of different clientele. The paradigms do seem to represent and resonate as deeper, more intrinsic modes of thought, design, and production.

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OUTCOMES

New Urbanism, with its Latinate clarity and order, achieves the most aesthetic unity and coherent sense of community, in my opinion. It orchestrates different uses at a human scale in familiar architectural types and styles. However, its formal harmony is usually achieved in historical styles 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. It is less excusable for nonresidential buildings, especially public structures that are allowed to break the design code, but all too rarely rise to first-rate design. Many New Urbanists claim that the issue of architectural language or style is irrelevant or overblown. But clearly it does matter to design professionals and academics, judging from the ferocity of the debates. And if style is of little consequence to developers (and their public), why isn’t there more contemporary architecture in their projects? Clearly, architectural style is important because it embodies and expresses values, meanings, and attitudes that are deeper than outward and visible form. By contrast, Everyday Urbanism has trouble achieving any aesthetic coherence, day or night, micro or macro. But it is egalitarian and lively. And while Post Urbanist site plans look exciting, with their laser-like vectors, fractal geometries, jumbled fragments, and sweeping circulatory systems, when realized, they are often overscaled and empty of pedestrians. Tourists in rental cars experiencing the city through their windshields may be better served than actual users, for whom there is less human-scale nuance and architectural detail to reveal itself over the years, especially to pedestrians. Ironically, Post Urbanism suggests local citizens are tourists in their own city, just as tourists have become citizens of the world. Everyday Urbanism is, in a sense, already ubiquitous in the informal squatter settlements of global cities, where the working- and under-classes seek a stake in the urban economy. But it doesn’t make much sense in the cities of Europe, where a wealthier citizenry has the luxury of punctuating a mature and dense urban fabric with Modernist commercial and institutional buildings as counterpoint to the traditional architecture. And the heavy masonry fabric of European cities sets off the new, highly glazed, gravitydefying buildings of Post Urbanism better than North American cities, which are more spatially open and sporadic, and where glass curtain-wall buildings already dominate. Because our cities lack the horizontal viscosity of European cities and are often underprogrammed and made empty by parking lots, New Urbanist infill usually adds the greatest value. NAGGING QUESTIONS

What can be said then about the possibility of a more integrated approach to urbanism in America, one that might merge the best of these three 112

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approaches while avoiding their weaknesses, and be more sustainable than any of the three on its own? Is there any hope for integrating these three paradigms into a richer and more lasting urbanism? Everyday Urbanism is too often an urbanism of default rather than design. It is a bottom-up approach that is “too much bottom, not enough up” in Michael Speaks’ words. Can it raise its design expectations and standards as its clientele becomes more mainstream? New Urbanism is too often formulaic, realized in banal and cloyingly historicist architecture. It often fails to deal with either regional or economic issues, such as jobs/housing balance. Can it move beyond “the post-modern notion of the city as solely a place to live, not to work,” and embrace a more raw and potent mix of uses, including industry? Post Urbanism is too often an urbanism of trophy buildings, of which a city needs and can absorb only so many. Can it produce good but quiet background buildings that are more urbanistically sensitive and architecturally contextual? Certainly, Americans can expect a more physically ordered and architecturally ambitious commons than Everyday Urbanism offers and a more humane one than Post Urbanism promises. Although Europe may delight in Post Urbanist avant-gardism and the developing world may embrace the informality of Everyday Urbanism, wouldn’t the typical American metropolis 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 enriched by Modernist “exceptions that prove the rule.” For most North American cities, New Urbanism represents the responsible middle path, less glamorous than Post Urbanism and more ambitious than Everyday Urbanism. But can it learn from the other two paradigms and their cultures? Despite being the most comprehensive and successful design and planning movement of its generation, New Urbanism must evolve if it is to remain responsible and responsive. Like all movements, it will ultimately ossify and lose its meaning and value as it runs the inevitable and ever faster historical course from archetype to type to stereotype. There are a number of serious questions that New Urbanism needs to address if it is to evolve into a more integrated paradigm. Can its exemplary urban principles be realized in contemporary architecture, especially the public and institutional buildings, and employ the talent and skill of Post Urbanist architects? Can it live up to its egalitarian ideas of social diversity and affordability as seriously as Everyday Urbanists? And can it fully address ecological challenges and develop a bio-urbanism? Last, is New Urbanism flexible enough to align with and harness the emerging forces of the global economy? Or will it rely too heavily on top-down formal templates, form-based codes and regulations, outdated technics, and moral mandates? As the late Jane Jacobs pointed out in Dark 113

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Age Ahead, sprawl will densify and diversify, and inner cities will rebound and redevelop, only if underlying economic and social forces make it an 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 DESIGN Towards default urbanism and/or urbanism by design?

EVERYDAY URBANISM, LANDSCAPE URBANISM, AND INFRASTRUCTURE

JOHN KALISKI (2007)

Whatever happened to “Everyday Urbanism?” Is it an organized urban design movement? Does it actively influence urban policy and shape cities? I ask these design-oriented questions because this is an ill-defined area of inquiry left open in the book, Everyday Urbanism, co-edited by John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and me.1 Certainly there is no “Everyday Urban Design School.” Everyday urban design is also not taking over planning departments. I know of few people who have constructed explicitly “everyday” design practices. Still, one can argue that the concept of the everyday remains a notion that all designers reckon with at some point in their professional life. However, this hardly constitutes a design movement; everyday urban design is better described as an attitude that needs better definition. When Douglas Kelbaugh wrote “Three Urbanisms and the Public Realm” in 2001, he claimed there were three competing urbanisms: New Urbanism, Post-Urbanism, and Everyday Urbanism.2 While he stated that other forms of urban design were relevant including “environmentalism, regionalism, historicism, etc,” the first three were the ones that most succinctly encapsulated for him the millennial moment. In contrast, the everyday as expounded in Everyday Urbanism was grounded in a reaction against the determinism of any defined urban design practice.3 We were seeking means to observe and remain open to the diversity of cities. We were interested in the neglected places and experiences of cities that other urbanisms ignored. We thought these could be a starting point to construct a practice of inclusive, non-dogmatic urbanism. Given our interest in exploring the complexity of the whole city, championing of the role non-experts play in ameliorating neglected urban environments, and our sense that professional designers would do well to acknowledge the vitality of the tactics of the everyday to produce urbanism, I am not surprised that Kelbaugh reached the conclusion in his essay that our efforts were potentially “urban design by default rather than by intention.” Despite the critique, we were pleased Kelbaugh put us in the same league as people who have changed urban design. Time has demonstrated that he was one of the few commentators who trucked faith in our ideas. Most critics of Everyday Urbanism dismissed the ideas as irrelevant to professional design practices.4 While Kelbaugh was an articulate advocate for the idea that three urbanisms were wrestling with each other, in truth his match 115

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1 John Chase, Margaret Crawford and John Kaliski, editors, Everyday Urbanism (The Monacelli Press, New York, 1999).

2 For this essay I am utilizing the following version of this article: Douglas Kelbaugh, “Three Urbanisms and the Public Realm” (from Proceedings, 3rd International Space Syntax Symposium, Atlanta, 2001). 3 Our first collective act as likeminded individuals was to help organize a symposium for the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. “Urban Design, Urban Theory and Urban Culture” sought to broaden discussion of urban design practices in the context of “Urban Revisions,” a 1994 exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art curated by Elizabeth Smith. 4 Dell Upton, “A World Less Ordinary,” Architecture, February 2000, pages 54–55. In this review Upton states that Everyday Urbanism is, “best read as essays in architectural ethics, meant to sensitize designers to the intellectual and political contradictions inherent in their professional positions rather than to recommend specific design practices.”

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5 See Andrés Duany, “Restoring the Real New Orleans,” Metropolis, February 2007.

6 See Michigan at Trumbull: Turning the Corner (A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning—University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2000), pages 6–11 and pages 32–39. The student team was led by myself, Kelli Kavanaugh, Doug Kelbaugh, Patricia Machemer, James Singleton, and Andrew Zago. Andrew Zago and I concentrated on developing zoning game theories that were performance oriented as opposed to prescriptive and working with the students tried to animate the land use implications of the approach through time. 7 February 22, 2007 e-mail from Andrés Duany to John Kaliski.

was never a contest, just a good narrative that highlighted the preeminence of New Urbanism. New Urbanism, Kelbaugh’s middle-way, was the champion in 2001 and six years later is the near hegemonic approach to urban design in the United States. It is demanded by publics, adopted by developers, and accepted by decision-makers. Its preeminence amongst planners is simple. It provides straightforward place-making principles that are imageable, reassuring, and communicable. New Urbanism’s appeal is also related to its fleetfootedness. New Urbanists quickly adopt concepts from outside their canon, a smart tactic that creates constant renewal within the movement. For example, Andrés Duany, the keenest New Urbanist of them all, recently proclaimed the need to consider “opt-out zones” in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.5 In these free zones, New Urbanism’s bread and butter— codes—would be forgiven. Presumably landowners and developers, freed from the restrictions of government, will feel incentivized to rebuild. Notwithstanding Duany’s right to utilize anything that works, I recall the moment in 2000 when a team of professionals working with students in a design charrette sponsored by the University of Michigan proposed just such an approach for a shrinking area of Detroit, the Briggs neighborhood near the old Tiger Stadium.6 Our belief then, like Duany’s now, is that in certain cases it is useful to free individuals from the miasma of constraining regulation, a tactic of self-help set loose to revitalize a community. Despite our convictions we were not surprised when the Mayor at that time, Dennis Archer, walked right by our project and enthused about the certainty of the picket fences, traditional infill house forms, and prescriptive pattern language proposed by a team led by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. When I reminded Duany of this incident (and the possibility that perhaps he had evolved into a closet everyday urbanist), he explained to me, “(y)ours is but one of the tools, but an important one and increasingly so.”7 So, are everyday practices becoming a treasured hammer in New Urbanism’s toolbox? 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 a singular position in urban design. Starting and ending points in everyday planning and design remain always contingent upon the variable situation at hand. The consequence of this is that I am compulsively programmed to state in response to questions regarding my underlying principles acknowledgement of New Urbanism followed by the negative sounding phrase, “but I am not a New Urbanist because . . .” Why can’t I find constructive language to respond to the same question, for instance, “I am an everyday urbanist because . . .”? Can one construe everyday urbanism as inspiration for a set of urban design principles without being forced into essentialist proclamations? The following thoughts are an attempt to frame a practice of city design through an acknowledgement of the everyday. 116

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Everyday urban design begins with respecting and honoring the daily rituals and cycles that shape communities. The forms and places of communities are therefore most justly formed through incremental design processes implemented through time. In everyday contexts designers are asked to facilitate the portraits that communities desire to draw for themselves. In this regard a framework of democracy becomes the most cogent means to shape citizens’ as well as designers’ ideas regarding the space of the city. The ideas contained in these discourses are most often memorialized through codes. The incremental legal changes that shape everyday environments, like an organic urbanism, are far superior to either acts of book burning or wholesale clearance. Designers, working with communities, also benefit from the scrutiny of public debate. While some good designs are constrained, on balance, weak ideas are strengthened. With regards to design, awareness of the everyday as a motive force encourages each individual to learn equally from the traditional as well as the new, the present, and the ubiquity of the present in the past and the future. Precedence can thus meld with innovation. Consequently the North American everyday urban designer is simultaneously accepting and critical of automobility, suburbia, single-family houses, shopping malls, sprawl, and all the other accretions of contemporary urbanisms, believing that each addresses a human need and that all remain a subject for betterment as opposed to obliteration. Reform thus is built into or anticipated by each act of urban design. Under these conditions urban design becomes a specific and singular opportunity to nurture daily life—hardly an “urban design by default.” While one might question openness to all urban experiences in a harsh world that demands ready and predictable solutions to pressing needs, I prefer the beginning everyday stance described above. I believe that it leads to the possibility of specific design subtlety and complexity. I remain confident that this leads to urban design where each project is necessarily different, shaped by individual circumstance, not connected by common design tropes, themes, or practices, but stitched together through careful observation and evolution of highly specific situations and conditions. Each everyday urban design realized is unique unto itself. While it is useful to have a framework to describe the potentials of urban design shaped by the everyday, are there specific places and principles that exemplify the approach? With a sense of speculation I recently turned to Archinect, a web-based design community, and asked this virtual world what they felt were the “designed” places that best exemplified the everyday and everyday practice.8 There was a wide range of response: examples proffered included Jon Jerde’s orchestrated shopping centers as well as Louis Kahn’s monumental central court at the Salk Institute. Some bloggers felt the everyday was best exemplified by informal spaces or pathways to and about local scenes. One person mentioned a specific bench in 117

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8 See www.archinect.com, “Discussions.” I want to thank all who participated in the post and thread for their generous and open thoughts.

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Montserrat, Spain; another, leftover space just off a sidewalk where people gather to talk. Rem Koolhaus’ architectural work was discussed as well as Covent Garden in London, downtown Culver City, California, Douglas Loop in Louisville, Kentucky, Jackson Square in New Orleans, and Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Oregon. Moore Ruble Yudell’s student center at the University of Cincinnati was nominated, as was The Grove, a shopping center in the middle of Los Angeles incorporating architects Koning-Eisenberg’s renovations of the historic 3rd and Fairfax Farmer’s Market. The vitality of developing world favelas and the rawness of Downtown Los Angeles’ skid row were each seen to have qualities that, if not always comfortable, were certainly related to the range of everyday experiences that need to be learned from. While no canon of everyday design was fixed through this discussion, the thread on Archinect also featured a less evolved discussion of everyday urban design principles. In this regard the range of places that were mentioned demonstrated a core principle of inclusiveness. Another principle that came up in the posting was the idea of both acknowledging and anticipating uses of time in urban design and architecture. Others emphasized that designing the informal and formal spaces and land in-between structures is of greater importance than the buildings themselves. Jane Jacobs’ notions of incremental city making were mentioned as well as more intentional urban tactics, such as the scripting of spaces. All of these principles suggest that there is a nascent theory of everyday urban design that transcends narrowly drawn urban ideologies or fetishized place making. The broadness of response solicited on Archinect constitutes a critical recognition that everyday urbanism, within the context of the design act, constitutes a true middle ground, because unlike its new urban or posturban cousins, all possibilities can be vetted with equanimity. Everyday equanimity forces one to eschew the notion that there should be a formal “Everyday Urbanism” or “Everyday Urban Design” movement. Yet everyday urban design could nevertheless be construed as an approach to a broad-based and inclusive critical practice with case studies and approaches that seek to promulgate more humane and liberal approaches to the production of the city. Notwithstanding an aversion to fixed theories or outcomes, there are givens that distinguish design practitioners interested in the everyday from their colleagues who adopt more focused approaches. Amongst these are three key concepts that relate to the open approach just suggested: interest in present contexts as starting points, acceptance of democratic design discourses to reform these starting points, and application of design intelligence to addressing the concerns and needs of everyday design discourses. Communities necessarily start with the present. Even within extraordinary situations without any pre-existing pattern of human inhabitation, environmental factors establish an almost infinite network of present clues 118

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to guide any prospective urbanism. The consequent urban program based upon the here-and-now emphasizes an ideal of betterment, reform, and the retrofit of an existing situation. The urban designer influenced by the everyday imagines the present, as opposed to precedent, as the first source for inspiring a better future.9 Communities are also made up of competing interests that have varying visions for urban life. Democracy is the increasingly accepted tool to debate and shape neighborhood, community, city, and region.10 Democratic urban form making demands urban design nimbleness. The individual urban designer is asked by publics to contribute a broad palette of ideas and approaches. The process is more akin to the decorating of individual domestic environments for highly particular clients, each with a different opinion, than many designers steeped in universal approaches would care to admit. In short people want their Downtowns, and their suburbs, and their transit, and their freeways, and their cars, and their Main Streets and they expect urban designers to use collaborative talents to illustrate, educate, and frame unique approaches to each new situation. Urban design in these circumstances is an opportunity on the part of communities to utilize designers, as opposed to design ideologues or ideologies, and through the medium of design allow for the illustration of alternative points of urban departure. In essence, what the everyday demands is not so much design leaders as designers who deploy design intelligence, the visualization of urban options for the citizenry at-large in order to facilitate decisions that reflect the consensus of an open and democratic community. In the seven years since the publication of Everyday Urbanism, a book that described how practices of everyday life are related to and can influence understandings of urbanism, this is what I as a designer have been attempting to realize. Returning to the original question, whatever happened to “Everyday Urbanism,” urban design within the context of everyday urbanism is never an organized movement but a critical, humbling, and creative attitude towards practice open to any designer interested in the ecumenical practices and productions of the contemporary city.

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9 This concept establishes a crucial difference with New Urbanism that at its root utilizes precedent as the source for an inspired future. 10 See John Kaliski, “Democracy Takes Command: New Community Planning and the Challenge to Urban Design,” Harvard Design Magazine, Spring/Summer 2005.

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WITHOUT END Mats, holes, and the promise of landscape urbanism

EVERYDAY URBANISM, LANDSCAPE KAREN M’CLOSKEY (2005) URBANISM, AND INFRASTRUCTURE 1 See Anne Whiston Spirn, “The Authority of Nature: Conflict, Confusion, and Renewal in Design, Planning, and Ecology” in Bart R. Johnson and Kristina Hill, eds., Ecology and Design: Frameworks for Learning (Washington: Island Press, 2002). Spirn describes the dogma associated with appeals to nature as given or original, which promulgate a “nature” apart from cultural construction.

2 See footnote 27 in Charles Waldheim and Marili Santos-Munne, “Decamping Detroit” in Georgia Daskalakis, Charles Waldheim and Jason Young, eds., Stalking Detroit (Barcelona: Actar Press, 2001), p. 110. For an excellent review of this book, see Grahame Shane. “The Emergence of Landscape Urbanism,” Harvard Design Magazine (19, Fall 2003/Winter 2004): www.gsd.harvard.edu/hdm. 3 For a related discussion on erasure and void, see James Corner, “Landscraping” in Daskalakis, Waldheim and Young, pp. 122–125.

The authority of nature has been usurped by the authority of landscape.1 Though no longer appealing to an idealized nature as the measure of morality and counterpoint to the city, landscape has, in a sense, replaced the word nature in that it is used as the measure of freedom, and as an emancipator from architecture. For architects, the widespread adoption of landscape terminology and ecological metaphors is a means to expand the techniques by which architecture is produced, providing alternatives to conventional master planning, which is perceived as the great failure of modernism. One way this shift has become manifest is in the emergence of the “field” of landscape urbanism, which positions landscape “as the most relevant medium for the production and representation of contemporary urbanism.”2 While reflecting many positive changes, including more reciprocal relationships among design disciplines, the current framing of landscape urbanism has not gone far enough beyond the simple replacement of master planning with the equally generic term landscape. In other words, landscape as a representation of urbanism is more developed than landscape as a production of it. In tracing the lineage of landscape urbanism, the recurring notion of the “hole” becomes evident.3 This paper positions Alison Smithson’s essay “The City Center Full of Holes” (1977) as a direct antecedent to contemporary landscape urbanism, suggesting that, though we have adopted her use of landscape infrastructure as a holding strategy for unpredictable futures, we have not yet fully advanced her conception of landscape as a healing salve to decentralizing post-industrial cities. I briefly outline the role of “holes” as they relate to landscape and will argue why they must be delineated more specifically if landscape urbanism is to productively combine both its architectural and landscape architectural predecessors. While covering the same geographic territory as landscape architecture or urban design, landscape urbanism is described as an interdisciplinary model, which positions landscape as the generator, rather than backdrop, of urban development. Rather than relying on the formalistic solid/void of older models where void and, by extension, landscape is a residual of architecture, landscape urbanism suggests the opposite, wherein the public landscape infrastructure organizes and shapes urban development. Charles Waldheim, who coined the phrase landscape urbanism in 1996, positions Tschumi’s Parc de La Villette as its progenitor, suggesting an architectural lineage that 120

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draws landscape out of its position within landscape architecture and regional planning and more closely aligns it with architectural critiques of the 1970s and 80s.4 In the primary texts outlining the theoretical impetus for landscape urbanism, several authors distance themselves from landscape architecture in two ways: first, landscape architecture’s legacy of the picturesque, which foregrounds formal and pictorial representations; and secondly, from the environmental determinism of the 1960s and 70s, which gave ecology a central role, as evidenced strongly in the work of Ian McHarg. In Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape, Alejandro Zaero-Polo states, “the [landscape] discipline never developed a means of producing complexity away from imitation, and never evolved beyond the picturesque.” 5 Though this is a common and reductive sentiment, there is no doubt that both landscape and architectural practices today increasingly emphasize diagrammatic processes and organizations over pictorial representations, using ecology as a paradigm for connectivity and indeterminacy.6 The conflation of cultural and natural processes, and the incorporation of humans into ecological systems, are very promising developments that position landscape urbanism as a viable, less formulaic and more site-specific alternative to New Urbanism or the generic city. Waldheim points out that this strategy is particularly suited to the postindustrial, decentralized or so-called Shrinking City, where inward vacancy and outward expansion are its defining characteristics.7

The greening of the depleted city centre may even be the most obvious characteristic of the future city centre. Alison Smithson 8 The inversion from conventional planning using architectural solids to a green infrastructure of holes was introduced by Alison Smithson in 1977, in her essay “The City Center Full of Holes.” Alison and Peter Smithson’s work has recently been positioned as a progenitor to contemporary architects’ interest in flexibility, indeterminacy and landscape. The Smithsons were instrumental in prompting a shift from fixed functionalism to one in which time was recognized as a primary factor in design, and Team X members criticized many practitioners of their day as being stuck in a static and deterministic “Euclidean Groove.” 9 The concept of mat building, outlined by Alison Smithson in 1974, focused on flexible frameworks for accommodating growth and change and challenged the separation of architecture and urbanism. Her essay “How to Recognize and Read Mat-Building” became the basis for a recent Case Series book on Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital.10 The last essay in the book, by Stan Allen, eloquently lays out the shift from mat building, which uses architecture as the primary method of ordering, to what he terms mat urbanism, which uses infrastructure and 121

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4 Charles Waldheim, “Landscape Urbanism: A Genealogy,” Praxis 4 (2002): 10–17.

5 Alejandro Zaero-Polo, “On Landscape” in Mohsen Mostafavi and Ciro Najle, eds., Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape (London: Architectural Association, 2003), p. 133. See also essays by Christopher Hight and Michael Hensel in the same publication and Waldheim, Praxis. 6 See Julia Czerniak, ed., Case: Downsview Park Toronto (Munich, London, NY: Prestel, 2001). 7 In addition to Praxis, see Waldheim and Marili Santos-Munne, in Daskalakis, Waldheim and Young, pp. 105–121. 8 Alison Smithson, “The City Center Full of Holes,” Architectural Association Quarterly 9/2, 3 (1977): p. 11.

9 Alison Smithson, ed., Team X Primer (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968), p. 20. The term “Euclidean Groove” was used by Aldo van Eyck.

10 Hashim Sarkis, ed., Case: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital (Munich, London, NY: Prestel, 2001).

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11 “If on the one hand, the Smithsons were among the first to recognize the potential of infrastructure to influence the future development of the city, they also unwittingly endorse the conceptual apparatus of modern sprawl”. Stan Allen, “Mat Urbanism: The Thick 2D” in Sarkis, p. 124. 12 Smithson, “The City Center Full of Holes,” p. 11.

13 Ibid., p. 13. Though Smithson did not speak to environmental concerns as the basis for her thesis, she does footnote the necessity of natural resource conservation. Also, on the necessity for framing ecological function within aesthetic convention, see Joan Nassauer, “Cultural Sustainability: Aligning Aesthetics and Ecology” in Joan Nassauer, ed., Placing Nature: Culture and Landscape Ecology (Washington: Island Press, 1997).

landscape as organizing frameworks. Yet in 1977, just three years after the publication of her “Mat-Building” essay, Alison Smithson’s seemingly overlooked essay “The City Center Full of Holes” is the first to explicitly propose a landscape strategy to address the depopulation occurring in postindustrial cities. This was, at the time, a unique proposition for architects. If Smithson’s infinitely extendable mat inadvertently leads to expansive development and sprawl,11 then “The City Center Full of Holes” addresses its corollary: vacancy and abandoned infrastructure. While she laments the deteriorating 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 railroad right-of-ways and areas adjacent to freeways, she proposes that these infrastructures be appropriated to provide connective tissue from the city centers to dispersed regions beyond. Positive associations with large scale connective landscapes, well-known to the English via garden cities, would encourage the acceptance of wildness in small vacant city sites without negative allusions to abandonment. Smithson states “If we can see what to do with the disused railway yards, using them as connective places, we might begin to indicate to people how to behave towards small vacant sites, interstical [sic] places.”13 These derelict sites and outdated infrastructures become conduits for the future reorganization of the post-industrial landscape. Therefore, sustainability in this context refers to the construction of provisionary uses and infrastructures which hold together disparate and changing urban circumstances. Though Smithson did not directly combine the “mat building” concept with the “green holes” concept, the part-to-whole relationship of the mat is akin to the site-to-system connectivity of the strategy of holes. The “Holes” essay is an outgrowth of earlier writing by the Smithsons and other Team X members, who differentiated between fixes, such as roadways and associated greenways, and more transient uses:

14 Smithson, Team X Primer, p. 68.

If this distinction between the changing and the fixed were observed there would be less need for elaborate control over things for which no good case can be made for controlling, and legislative energy could be concentrated on the long-term structure. 14

15 “This project is more a discourse on what should not happen at Melun-Senart than on what should.” Rem Koolhaas et al., S,M,L,XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), p. 974.

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 master plan. This strategy has been the basis for several of O.M.A.’s large-scale projects. For example, in the planning framework for the new town of Melun-Senart (1987), Koolhaas describes their approach as outlining what should not happen rather than what should.15 122

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A system of bands . . . is inscribed on the site like an enormous Chinese figure. We propose to invest most of the energies needed for the development of Melun-Senart in the protection of these bands, in maintaining their emptiness. 16

16 Ibid., p. 981.

By Team X’s definition, these bands would be fixes. O.M.A.’s ambition is to render more flexible measures absent in the solid/void of master plans, while being able to retain the projective order of the plan. Even so, the landscape is described by Koolhaas as “void” or “empty” and the criteria by which it is generated remain largely hidden; the Chinese figure self-contained. They no doubt had criteria by which the bands were determined, but these were not elucidated. Without being specific about how they are generated, implemented, maintained or connected, the holes, like the voids of the master plans, appear to be another formal device unrelated to the specificities of the site. As mentioned earlier, Waldheim distinguishes landscape urbanism from landscape architecture’s roots in regional planning, yet still acknowledges that one of the most pressing issues facing contemporary designers is “the relationship between natural environments and processes of urbanization globally.”17 To this end, Ian McHarg’s work has been criticized due to his neglect of cities and dogmatic belief that ecology was the only relevant basis for design.18 McHarg, founder of the Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning department at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the highly acclaimed book Design with Nature (1969), was unquestionably narrow in his view of designers as mere objective collectors of data, yet he recognized the underlying geologic and hydrologic aspects of landscape process which could give rise to defining appropriate locations and uses. McHarg’s mappings, comprised of transparent overlays each containing a different value with both social and natural characteristics, provided the basis for the location of design interventions and resulted in gradations of grey which “revealed” areas best suited to certain types of development. The blackest areas represent “no-build” zones and resemble O.M.A.’s Melun-Senart. In the examples shown, Smithson, Koolhaas and McHarg all use the instrumentality of the hole as a way of guiding action. For Smithson, the ways in which the landscape could be framed were essential to a landscape’s function. Knowing that the entire network could only be selectively maintained or occupied, the appearance of the landscape and its performance are inseparable.19 For Koolhaas, the holes provide an infrastructure of protection, but still present landscape generically. And for McHarg, the instrumentality of the hole is based on the materiality of landscape and natural processes, though he neglects the design repercussions at the site or human scale. Despite McHarg’s reductive conception of design, he was concerned with the connectivity of systems and performative aspects of landscape as 123

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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 with permission from O.M.A.

17 Waldheim, Praxis, p. 10.

18 Ibid., p. 12. Also, see Anne Whiston Spirn, p. 36.

19 I am referring to Julia Czerniak’s introduction to the Downsview Park competition where she states that the projects, in general, privileged performance over appearance. See “Appearance, Performance: Landscape at Downsview” in Czerniak, pp. 12–21.

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McHarg’s mapping of physiographic obstructions in order to determine road alignment, in Design With Nature, Ian McHarg (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1992 edn.), p. 37. Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons.

20 It was Corner’s phrase “landscape as urbanism” to which Waldheim has acknowledged his debt. See footnote 1 in Waldheim, Praxis, p. 17. 21 James Corner, “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention” in Denis Cosgrove, ed., Mappings (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2002), pp. 213–252.

22 James Corner, “Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity” in George F. Thompson and Frederick R. Steiner, eds., Ecological Design and Planning (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997), p. 81.

material. He also emphasized the use of mapping as a generative tool. This had a great influence on his students, such as James Corner, without whom there would be no “landscape urbanism” as it is currently defined.20 Corner has made a significant contribution to the conceptualization of landscape by devising methods of representation to better explain the processes of change inherent to landscapes, with conflating natural and cultural systems, and with 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 competing interests but must be creatively incorporated together. While I am encouraged by the aspirations and collaborative framework of landscape urbanism, our fear of repeating the mistakes of the modernist master planners and apprehension regarding the reductivist nature of environmental determinism risks leaving landscape urbanism without criteria. In describing the influence of ecological thinking on landscape practice, Corner states that “There is no end, no grand scheme . . . just a cumulative directionality toward further becoming.” 22 While it is true ecological processes have no goal, that is not necessarily the primary characteristic towards which we should strive. Complete openness can be as reductive as complete control. I share the ambitions of this work, but am concerned about the generalizations and flattening out of precedent. Right 124

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McHarg’s successional diagrams of dune development, in Design With Nature, Ian McHarg (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1992 edn.), p. 8. Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons.

Phasing Diagrams of Fresh Kills “Lifescape” by Field Operations, in Praxis 4: Journal of Building + Writing (New Orleans, Cambridge: Praxis, Inc. 2002), p. 25. Image courtesy of PRAXIS, Writing + Building.

now, there is an over reliance on bracketing landscape as urbanism primarily through park design—Central Park to Parc to La Villette to Downsview and Fresh Kills—but parks are only one necessary aspect of urbanism. Instead, we should construct a much broader history of precedents and begin to incorporate, albeit in reconstituted relationships, the criteria of dwelling, 125

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working, transportation and recreation set forth in the C.I.A.M. functionalist city, critiques of which began with the Smithsons and Team X over fifty years ago. Landscape urbanism will in future, with its temporal and political characteristics, set the scene (albeit momentary) for democracy in action. 23 23 Mohsen Mostafavi, “Landscapes of Urbanism” in Mostafavi and Najle, p. 9.

24 Alison Smithson, Team X Primer, p. 64.

Just as the modernists and New Urbanists are criticized for tying architectural form to social betterment, we cannot assume that adopting a landscape 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 still representative in many descriptions and projects—representative of freedom, democracy or ameliorative to architecture. Architects have already answered the call of Team X, which was to move beyond the “Euclidean groove.” Now we have to take on their other challenge of disciplining dispersal “so that any resultant development does not become absolutely structureless.”24 NOTE

This essay was written in 2004 and I have left its content unaltered though the discourse supporting landscape urbanism has been advanced since then. The essay is framed within the context of how landscape urbanism has been positioned by those involved in developing programs of landscape urbanism within schools of architecture. In particular, I am referring to Charles Waldheim, founder of the Landscape Urbanism concentration at University of Illinois, Chicago and current Director of Landscape Architecture at the University of Toronto, and Mohsen Mostafavi and Ciro Najle’s involvement with the post-graduate certificate in landscape urbanism at the Architectural Association and work as editors of Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape. Since then, Waldheim has published The Landscape Urbanism Reader (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), which includes essays from fourteen authors whose diversity positively expands the historical and theoretical framework of landscape urbanism. While the term is useful for describing collaborative practice, and individual project examples and essays demonstrate its potential and complexity, the question about its efficacy as a “disciplinary realignment” remains when considering its pedagogical implications.

This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 93rd Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2005. 126

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BOSTON’S NEW URBAN RING An antidote to urban fragmentation GEORGE THRUSH (1996)

The premise of this paper is that clear spatial order and hierarchy are necessary if we are to attain meaningful social, political, and cultural diversity in our cities, and in the space between them and the suburbs. We should not expect, simply because buildings look different from one another, and because the landscape between them seems fractured and uncontrolled, that we are representing the heterogeneity that today is taken in architectural discourse to be synonymous with political pluralism. We are not. Our contemporary urban and suburban landscape is often a homogeneous assemblage of meaningless commercial difference. If we want a heterogeneous landscape capable of representing real differences in culture, politics, and social order, we need, paradoxically, a strong, centered, spatial order that can lend hierarchy to public life. What follows is a proposal to transform the metropolitan area centered on Boston, Massachusetts, into just such a meaningfully heterogeneous landscape by means of an urban design strategy called the New Urban Ring. The New Urban Ring is a proposal to assemble a ring of space (composed largely of under-used parts of the city such as railroad right-of-ways, turnpike air-rights, some neighborhood streets, bridges, tunnels, bikeways, and even parts of the airport) around the central core of Boston to serve the following purposes: 1) to provide a circumferential transportation system to link the existing radial subway and transit lines between the city center and Route 128; amid the neighborhoods, nearby suburbs, and under-developed industrial land; 2) to provide a continuous boulevard for pedestrians, cyclists, and other citizens to move through, rather than between neighborhoods; 3) to act as a catalyst for urban development in the area between the city and the suburbs, and thereby allow the urbanity of the city to grow to metropolitan dimensions, rather than allow it to continue to wither in the face of competition from edge cities, and suburban sprawl; and 4) to provide a place for civic representation; for public buildings, spaces, and monuments to accrue meaning and express difference by virtue of their relationship to one another. The objective of the New Urban Ring is to address large-scale urban design, and regional forces. This scope mimics that of earlier utopian schemes, but with an important difference. The New Urban Ring engages this metropolitan scale while allowing for the kind of deference to local historical urban fabric that so often eluded earlier utopian schemes. Indeed the very act of making a figure-ground drawing of a 25 square mile area 127

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Figure 1. Regional Figure/ Ground Drawing: Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea & Everett 1996, George Thrush. (Drawing by Salvatore Raffone.)

centered on downtown Boston (Figures 1 and 2) speaks to the desire to address both scales. The New Urban Ring is in some important ways a proposal to resist the commercial forces that make our society and its built environment increasingly homogeneous. If we desire that meaningful difference in our society be reflected in the built environment, we must find a way to make difference recognizable. The New Urban Ring is a proposal to establish a shared realm: a datum around Boston that conforms to and reinforces the city’s urban morphology. In relation to this “common ground,”1 differences in ethnicity, race, politics, style, and ideas will be more recognizable, and therefore more meaningful. Many architectural, social, and political critics, including Richard Sennett,2 Mike Davis,3 and Mickey Kaus,4 have discussed the ways in which we avoid the social, cultural, and political pluralism promised by American cities, and create artificially homogeneous communities instead. They make distinctions between public and private life (Sennett), actual and pseudopublic places (Davis), and “social” versus “civic” spending by the government (Kaus). Sennett and Davis speak to the fact that architecture and urban design are often complicit in this descent into individual isolationism, and the concomitant loss of public life. Kaus attempts to re-define public expenditures in terms of public, rather than individual, good. These critiques rely on making distinctions between economic identity on the one hand, and political or civic identity on the other. HOMOGENEITY AND HETEROGENEITY

Figure 2. Regional Figure/ Ground Drawing with New Urban Ring: Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea & Everett 1996, George Thrush. (Drawing by Salvatore Raffone.)

1 Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, Lukas, Anthony J., 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 New Left Books, 1990. 4 The End of Equality, Kaus, Mickey, New York: Basic Books, 1992.

When we look around us at even the most successful of today’s urban developments we see commercial culture as the only source of our collective identity. From the waterfront developments of The Rouse Corporation to the “Eisner-ization of America” (to call it “Disney-fication” seems unfair to the real Walt Disney, who had nothing to do with creating the current confusion between fantasy and reality) and the increasingly eerie similarity of experience that one finds in such formerly disparate places as Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Harvard Square (Cambridge, MA), Halsted Street (Chicago, IL), and a host of other increasingly “mall-like” new urban districts, the shops, wares, people, food, habits, and activities of the participants all seem remarkably alike. This phenomenon is the source of a very real fear about the increasing homogeneity in our society. It is often taken to be the most pressing problem in our rapidly changing culture. We buy the same products; watch the same TV shows; eat the same fast foods; experience the same landscape—indeed, the latent heterogeneity of American society seems to be evaporating despite the fact that the country is composed of more different kinds of people than ever. Meaningful differences between people and places seem to be disappearing in the face of rampant commercialism and burgeoning communi128

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cation technologies that further minimize the importance and character of actual, rather than virtual, place; the effects of which we have not even begun to understand. But it is in the nature of capitalism to standardize products, increase market share, and reduce difference in the world. We also know that capitalism also widens gaps in income5. These are not new observations, but if we are serious about trying to forge prescriptive connections between the form and content of our society in our roles as designers of the built environment, they are not observations that we can afford to ignore. But by fretting about the physical and spatial results of our economic system (which the electorate shows no signs whatever of wanting to change), many critics miss the opportunity to resist the cultural and spatial homogenization of our society through non-economic, or civic means. The idea behind the New Urban Ring suggests that it is not the aforementioned commercial homogeneity that is the problem so much as its opposites: excessive heterogeneity, psychological isolation, lack of meaningful contact with others, and impoverished civic life. This lack of civic commonality threatens us much more than the fact that we will soon all buy everything we own from “The GAP”. Because, while it is disturbing that we all may one day wear the same tasteful plum colored shirts and khaki pants, it is more disturbing that we may take this to be the total measure of our social worth. Mickey Kaus, the author of a strategy for the renewal of 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 private economic fortunes) with “civic liberalism” (a more direct strategy of renewing civic life and civic obligations).6 but they are all means by which we might resist the superficial heterogeneity of capitalism with some elements of a more substantive homogeneity associated with a more cohesive society: a more cohesive society that might, it almost goes without saying, actually see benefits to the community as clearly as we now see benefits to ourselves. Because our political discourse is so dominated by discussion of individual rights (to have abortions, to desecrate the flag, to own and shoot guns, to smoke pot, to not pay taxes, to build on wetlands, etc.) we do not discuss what we would like to have as the common property of the community. Is the promise of America truly “the right to be left alone” (what Isaiah Berlin would call negative liberty)?7 Or is there an affirmative good that resides in his conception of its opposite, “positive liberty”? Is the freedom to support something as a society not also a very important freedom? Finally, is there a way to revise our public life so that it is both accepting the kind of difference that Richard Sennett describes,8 while at the same time retaining the strength of our shared political will? If the answer is 129

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5 The End of Equality, pp. 7–16.

6 Kaus describes the failure of what he calls money liberalism, or the traditional liberal agenda that “seeks to prevent income differences from corroding social equality by the simple expedient of reducing the incomes differences—or, more accurately, suppressing the income differences continually generated in a capitalist economy.” In its place, he offers civic liberalism, which “pursues social equality directly, through government action, rather than by manipulating the unequal distribution of income generated in the capitalist marketplace.” This distinction between money liberalism and civic liberalism holds tremendous opportunities for programming a re-designed landscape for America’s cities. The End of Equality, p. 18. 7 Four Essays on Liberty, Berlin, Isaiah, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. xxxvii–lxiii (Introduction). 8 “The Passive Body,” Sennett, Richard, GSD News, Winter, 1995, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, p. 28.

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9 “Ring Dreaming and Making,” Krieger, Alex, from Catalogue #2: The New Urban Ring, Thrush, George, Boston: Northeastern University, 1994, pp. 12–16.

yes, and if spatial order can be said to play a role in the construction of such public life, then the urban design program of the New Urban Ring is a call for such an affirmative step. It holds the possibility to serve as what we might call the footprint of an improved social order. Various rings for Boston have been conceived by different people at different times along a number of different routes, but they all share a similar animus. They are all responses to what Alex Krieger calls the lack of “rims” to connect the “hub and spoke” structure of the Boston region.9 This article will describe the history of that spatial order, its political and social ramifications, and the accompanying transportation strategies that have evolved to serve the region. In keeping with the rationale for the New Urban Ring itself, the essay will first address these issues with respect to the city, then the suburbs, and finally the New Urban Ring. The New Urban Ring derives its strength from synthesis. It joins the regional scale of transportation planning to the human scale of urban design; it relates the importance of spatial order to political identity; and it focuses its energy on the crucial space between city and suburb, the most vexing segment of the “middle landscape.” So to understand the importance of this proposal for Boston, we must first look at the forces that have pulled the region apart and how, by weaving it back together, a new metropolis could be born. BOSTON’S GEOGRAPHY: ISOLATION AND IN-FILL

10 Boston: A Topographical History, Whitehill, Walter Muir, Cambridge, MA: Belknap/ Harvard University Press, 1968, p. 1.

Figure 3. City of Boston Evolving Landmass, 1630–1995 from Mapping Boston by Krieger, Alex and Cobb, David, p. 118, M.I.T. Press, 1999 (copyright The Muriel G. and Norman B. Leventhal Family Foundation, cartography by MapWorks, Herb Heidt and Eliza McClennan, Norwell, MA).

The evolution of Boston as a geographical entity is interesting in its own right. What began as a “hilly peninsula, almost completely surrounded by water”10 has been transformed through landfill over the past three and one half centuries into a much larger, flatter, and more contiguous land mass (Figure 3). One can follow the evolution from the original Shawmut peninsula; to the early town with its active waterfront; to the thickened “neck” connecting the peninsula back to Roxbury; to the enlargement of Charlestown 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 the construction of Fan Pier; and finally, the completion of the in-fill at Fort Point Channel, Charlestown, and East Boston for what is now Logan Airport. But much of the city’s original form came from civic divisions that remain to this day. Charlestown, Cambridge, Brookline and Boston Proper, South Boston, and East Boston, can all trace aspects of their distinctiveness today to the physical separation of their pasts. All of these places existed in Boston’s earliest days, but they were more a series of islands than part of a cohesive city. And it was due to their separation that the system of spokes connecting 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 130

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initial radial routes from the center of Boston Proper became the primary roads in the adjoining communities as well. As the city grew, however, the watery voids that separated the landmasses began to shrink. A prolonged series of landfill projects began to construct the Boston that we know today. But the system of radial arteries lived on. Moreover, they became even more important than ever as orientation devices, because even as the city became a more contiguous piece of land, its neighborhoods remained quite distinct. They were created at different moments during this evolution of landmass and shoreline, and independently of one another, so they often shared little in the way of orientation, density, and urban morphology. In a 1986 design studio at Harvard’s GSD, Mario Gandelsonas directed his students in describing some of this complexity through a series of drawings which are very helpful in making this point about the city’s inherent morphological contradictions (Figures 4–6). So, from a physical standpoint, Boston was conceived as a collection of parts: both with respect to the parts of the city that remain separated from the “hub” by water, such as Charlestown, East Boston, and to a lesser extent, South Boston; and with respect to its internal “islands” of Roxbury, Dorchester, Brookline (politically distinct but virtually surrounded by Boston), and Allston/Brighton. Landfill has subsequently made whole that which was separated at the start, though it has never fully succeeded in re-connecting the fabric of the region. PAROCHIALISM IN POLITICS

The physical distinctions that describe Boston’s neighborhoods and nearby suburbs are reinforced by political distinctions that mark their ideals and prejudices. The city has had a long history of conflict between local and 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 (traditionally English, Republican, and suburban). This has evolved over time, but what is remarkable is the extent to which one can still describe the area’s politics in these terms. After the great migration of the Irish to Boston in the middle of the nineteenth century, they quickly began to emerge as a political force in the city. In a town that had been politically dominated by Protestants since the 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 politics for some time, they sought to limit the power of their urban brethren by limiting the political power of the city. The most powerful tool in this repressive arsenal was (and remains) something called “Home Rule,” a State law under which the City of Boston must gain the approval of the legislature before levying any new taxes.11 By controlling the city’s ability to raise 131

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Figures 4–6. Diagram of Boston, 1986 from “The Order of the American City”, Gandelsonas, Mario Assemblage #3, 1987, p. 65 (figures 2a–c).

11 The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1874–1958), Beatty, Jack, New York: Addison-Wesley, 1992, Chapter 7, p. 263 and p. 269.

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revenue, the Protestant suburbanites limited the potential power of the Catholic Irish. But this mutual animosity also caused Bostonians and their political leaders to resist other, more beneficial regional alliances that might have served the metropolitan area much better than the latent parochialism and separatism that emerged. American politics is filled with ethnic and religious conflicts like these, but in Boston they were particularly destructive to planning and designing the built environment because this conflict between the city and all of its neighbors restrained inter-municipal cooperation and regional planning. Due to its inherently fractured and separated physical character, the area known as “the Boston Region”—which is actually no larger than an average-sized metropolis—could not be planned like one. So, in a place where cooperation between small political entities was essential, there were profound political obstacles to coordinating the physical planning of the city as a whole. REGIONALISM IN TRANSPORTATION, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND RECREATION

The most important precursors to the regionalism of the New Urban Ring were Arthur Shurtleff and the Boston Society of Architects’ (B.S.A.) Committee on Municipal Improvements. The Committee’s proposal for an Inner and Outer Boulevard was remarkably like today’s proposed New Urban Ring. It consisted of circumferential (or ring-like) boulevards that would cross municipal, class, and racial boundaries. Shurtleff’s analytical drawings of both existing and proposed radial and circumferential routes throughout the region offer the evidence that such boulevards were necessary then, and remain so today. To reinforce the similarity of conditions which support the need for the New Urban Ring (in any of its variants) today, refer to the images of the contemporary city with overlays of the B.S.A.’s 1907 plan, its 1994 plan, and the author’s alignments of the New Urban Ring. While they are all different, each alignment takes advantage of the same latent morphology in the region, and each connects radial routes through circumferential connections. Each of these urban boulevards has the added regionalizing effect of crossing economic, ethnic, class, and racial boundaries. Perhaps the most profound regionalization of Boston’s transportation planning and infrastructure came in the 1970s under the leadership of Fred Salvucci, then Governor Michael S. Dukakis’ Secretary of Transportation. This is important because it is the regional scale of transportation infrastructure that can serve as the armature for the regionalized urbanism of the New Urban Ring. He certainly benefited from the previous administration’s decision (with his encouragement) to abandon the so-called “Inner-Belt” expressway that would have so fractured Boston’s physical landscape as to make it nearly irreparable. But Salvucci inherited a Metropolitan Transit Authority whose range was limited to fourteen municipalities, and as such 132

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had little regional impact. He left with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority serving seventy-eight cities and towns, and extending far out into suburban Boston. The key to his overall regionalization efforts was the Boston Transportation Planning Review of 1974, which ultimately led to many important improvements in this area. The most critical improvements were the extension of the Red Line subway route; the Orange Line extension/Southwest Corridor Park; the purchase of commuter rail lines to the north and south of the city from the Boston-Maine and Conrail respectively; and finally, most influentially, the depression of the Central Artery and the construction of the Third Harbor Tunnel.12 SUBURBANIZATION: POLITICS REDUX

The regionalization of the Boston area’s transportation infrastructure made the entire region much more accessible. It became possible to commute between the city center and the more distant suburbs. There were even steps taken toward making “inter-modal” stations, such as those at Quincy and Alewife, that offered automobile commuters the chance to exchange their cars for public transit while still well outside of the city. The resuscitated transportation network also took the concerns of inner-city pedestrians to heart for the first time since the advent of the large-scale highway systems after World War II. Special attention was given to the quality of stations and, in the case of the Southwest Corridor Park, an entirely new pedestrian sequence was created alongside the new Orange Line. But there remained an aspect of even these enlightened transportation planning efforts that continued to segregate the region. For even as the area’s radial 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 neighborhoods were being ignored. The interests of the suburban commuters to downtown were being served at the expense of the even greater needs of the residents of the space “in-between.” So it became clear that some sort of ring, or belt, or loop was needed; something that approximated the scale and connectivity of the Inner Belt, but that served instead as more of a urban development generator, much as Route 128 had for the suburbs a generation earlier. THE NEW URBAN RING: AN ANTIDOTE TO URBAN FRAGMENTATION

So the mission of the New Urban Ring is a complex one. It is to resist the latent parochialism of the Boston region from both a political and bureaucratic standpoint and to take advantage of the opportunities for regionalism. The intersection of these goals could create the physical landscape for a new kind of politics, one that political writer E. J. Dionne calls 133

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12 From an interview with Claire Barrett, former Member of M.B.T.A. Board of Directors, 8/22/95.

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13 Why Americans Hate Politics, Dionne, E. J., New York: Touchstone, 1991, Chapter 13, pp. 329–355.

14 Ibid., p. 333.

15 The End of Equality, pp. 7–16.

the need for a strong political middle:13 a political movement that could harness that great deal about which Americans do not disagree. This will not be easy. As Dionne notes, “conservatives and liberals are suspicious of an ethic of the ‘public good’ for very different reasons. Conservatives who dislike government see the revival of a civic politics as a way of invoking old language to justify modern big government. Liberals, fearful of too much talk about virtue and community, fear that civic talk will mean the creation of a homogeneous community. When liberals hear talk about ‘the common good’, they often think of Jerry Falwell.”14 Mickey Kaus, another astute observer of the contemporary political scene, is more specific in his description of exactly how we might physically achieve this “common good.” His “civic liberalism” is a program for required national service, national health care, the draft, public day care, and civic celebrations; all as a means of encouraging 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 designed specifically to make a place for Kaus and Dionne’s vision of a renewed public sphere. Of course it must also serve as the kind of infrastructure that can create jobs, provide transportation, and play other more prosaic roles in contemporary life. In addition, it should serve as an especially safe place in the city, where travel through previously unwelcoming neighborhoods would now be possible. Perhaps most importantly, it would allow for the representation of Boston’s rich (and parochial) character along a regional route. As discussed earlier, the commercial (or artificial) heterogeneity of haphazard development patterns could be replaced by a heavily structured public sequence where key sites would have tremendous opportunities for real civic, rather than commercial, meaning. Physical homogeneity could make cultural and political heterogeneity possible. URBAN DESIGN STRATEGIES

In order for all of these opportunities to find their way into the real experience of the city, however, different ring typologies would have to be developed to accommodate the widely varied spatial conditions found in the Boston area. There would be three basic cross-sectional typologies. One would be a single, complex boulevard, along the lines of Vienna’s Ringstrasse, that would include dedicated lanes for rapid transit, ample pedestrian paths, and controlled vehicular lanes (Figure 7). The second would be a two, or even three, road system of parallel streets that would allow the separation of truck service and automobile traffic from the transit- and pedestrian-based central boulevard. Such a system would create the possibility of two-sided building types like supermarkets which could sit directly on the street front on the central boulevard, while retaining ample parking access from one of the secondary circumferential streets. Finally, in some of the tighter existing conditions, the Ring might continue with only 134

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allées of trees and building setback and height regulations to help transform existing streets into parts of the New Urban Ring. Another way that the Ring could be apprehended is as an episodic series of nodes, rather than as a continuous spatial corridor. In this configuration, the character and definition of the nodes (presumably at key transportation transfer points) would be especially important. In either case, however, the Ring could perform a critical role in the spatial orientation of both visitors and residents alike, helping to form a mental map of one’s surroundings; something which has always been notoriously difficult in Boston—even for long time residents. By making constant reference to a single center (the downtown core, or center of the Ring), both the physical and political structures of the city are reinforced. Building regulations would, of course, depend on the selection of either the continuous or episodic structure for the Ring (and there is no reason why both could not be employed along different portions of the Ring). For the continuous type, building setbacks, height limitations, and colonnade dimensions would be part of the visual guidelines used to inform development along the alignment. This type of urban design strategy would work best with a surface transportation system, such as a trolley or dedicated bus line, because its visibility along the route would be important for maintaining the Ring’s “continuity.” The episodic, node-based Ring would rely more on landmarks, towers, and other identifiable elements visible from a great distance, and as such would be able to work with a subway type transportation system, because the stations would occur at the specified nodes and their route beyond the nodes would be of less importance.

Figure 7. The Ringstrasse, Vienna, Austria.

REGIONAL MASTER PLAN

Many neighborhood-specific proposals could grow from the New Urban Ring. The idea has tremendous power because it need not, and indeed could not and should not, be implemented all at one time. Instead it can serve as the backbone of a regional “master plan” that would encourage development in the Boston region that would be integrated, progressive and morphologically appropriate, without being unnecessarily nostalgic in the process. Using the New Urban Ring as a regional “master plan” would do more for maintaining the oft-cited and presumably much-loved “character” of Boston than any collection of historical stylistic guidelines. Such a plan could have a major impact on many important projects that are being considered right now. The location of a “megaplex,”16 either as a whole or, more preferably, as a series of parts connected by the New Urban Ring, is one example, but there are several others. There are tremendous development opportunities along the Conrail railroad right-of-way in Cambridge and Somerville; vast tracts around Sullivan Square; large 135

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16 A combination of a large convention facility and a domed football stadium currently under review by the Massachusetts State Legislature.

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portions of Charlestown’s waterfront that are now underutilized; Central Square 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 underused land looking for a vision of how it might all work together. THE FUTURE

17 “Turning Point”, The Boston Globe Magazine, October 30, 1994, p. 29.

A 1989 state transportation study reviewed circumferential transit. In 1994, Harvard, M.I.T., and The Boston Globe convened The Boston Conference on “the accessible region” at which a national jury admonished the city and state to get together and “build the Urban Ring,”17 and in 1996, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority will commission a study of the idea. But the power of this fundamentally urban design proposal must not be allowed to dissolve into merely a question of ridership estimates based on current conditions. The New Urban Ring is a proposal that could repair and re-make the region by re-connecting its citizens, ideas, beliefs, and activities into a greater whole. But it will not happen merely because designers think it is a formally attractive idea. Citizens must be persuaded that there is more to American life than pure individualism; more than separatism and commerce. If we desire a heterogeneous public life in place of the commercial homogeneity that we currently endure, the space between Boston’s downtown core and its nearby suburbs offers the perfect place to 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 have been extensively studied as a prelude to some form of implementation, but because the region still lacks a regional planning authority, the larger and even more critical physical and economic development aspects of the proposal 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. 136

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Figure 8. Boston’s New Urban Ring, with two case study areas built-out in Boston University/ Cambridgeport and Melnea Cass Boulevard, Roxbury; 1996, George Thrush. (Drawing by Salvatore Raffone.)

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 of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1996. 137

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EVERYDAY URBANISM, WILLIAM R. MORRISH AND CATHERINE R. BROWN (1995) LANDSCAPE URBANISM, AND INFRASTRUCTURE Infrastructure is a metaphor for a much bigger set of issues or a much deeper reckoning about the future. It’s a metaphor for how we care about and cope with the future. It’s not just concerned about structures. Structures are important. They provide a service that has value. But the highways, bridges, dams and water systems are also a means by which we relate to each other as humans and this fragile and beautiful planet. It’s these built systems that create our hoped-for protection—and connection. I believe a starting point for any kind of strategy on infrastructure is to think about the built environment with as much discipline and passion as the most concerned bring to the question of the natural environment. Nancy Rutledge Connery Executive Director National Council on Public Works Throughout his 1992 election campaign, President Clinton spoke of the need to establish a new compact between the national leadership and its citizens in a common quest to rebuild America’s economy as well as its communities, emphasizing infrastructure development as one of the primary tools for accomplishing both. Before long, infrastructure became the buzz word of the day, tossed about as casually in the media as it was at cocktail parties. When the Clinton Transition Team contacted us regarding our thoughts as urban designers on the role and function of infrastructure in the remaking of community, we found ourselves reexamining some fundamental questions. What is infrastructure? How can an expanded understanding of it maximize the benefits of new infrastructure dollars for human, plant, and animal communities? Unfortunately, we found that infrastructure is often narrowly equated with public works. Each community has a public works department responsible for the planning, design, and maintenance of the “practical” aspects of city services, such as transportation, water supply, sewage, garbage disposal and, in many cities, parks and recreation. To describe infrastructure as public works, and to define public works as those utilitarian functions which merely support the economic productivity of the community, hides the broader possibilities of infrastructure as the repository of cultural imagination, the network for community connections, and a vivid display of local ecological resources. 138

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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 from form in infrastructure, regarding the city’s network of transportation, power lines, water supply, sewage, and garbage disposal as mere utilitarian systems rather than cultural artifacts or forms of public art. This split is clearly illustrated by Le Corbusier’s central text on urbanism, The Radiant City, published in 1933. One of the book’s infrastructure diagrams is particularly telling. In it, Le Corbusier illustrates how he and many other designers have selectively edited infrastructure out of the new urban utopia, treating it as a mere utilitarian system to tap for needed services. In his scheme the landscape is green, the sun bright, and the highway skillfully hidden in foliage. Infrastructure blight—electrical lines, sewers, power plants, and factories—is drawn below the picture frame, tied to the houses in this idyllic landscape by neutral thin lines. The messy, ugly workings of infrastructure are stowed out of sight like the power plant of a transatlantic ship, which performs the dirty job of transforming natural material into head, clean water, and power below the water line of the ship. With the unsightly clutter of infrastructure hidden beneath the drawing, the residential landscape takes on the contours of a 19th century park, a tranquil place to re-create oneself far from the modern world’s assaults upon the well-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 postWorld War II American cities under the illusion that infrastructure was a utility to be placed out of sight and separated from the landscapes that nurture us spiritually as well as economically. The results have been mixed. We assumed that the landscape had an ever-increasing capacity to absorb growth and remain a pristine scenic backdrop. Since the 1950s, many suburbanites have believed that they could escape the ugliness of the urban infrastructure and environmental degradation of the city and start over in the woods and wetlands of the surrounding suburban communities. Landuse planning would protect their “room with a view”—their uninterrupted “view” of the sun, their patch of green, and the purity of their water. Infrastructure would be constructed outside the picture frame. Thus, most suburban comprehensive plans are based on the separation of two worlds: the utilitarian and the natural. Utilitarian structures were conceived as benign, single-function service systems that by-passed homes as they supplied the needs 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 systems remained inconspicuous and little in number, and there was enough undeveloped land to buffer subdivisions from infrastructure. 139

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Consequences of the split view of infrastructure: “From the backyard into the front yard.”

But the newness of the suburban landscape has begun to wear off and the older infrastructure of the inner city is collapsing. In the suburbs, wetlands have been drained and channeled into storm sewers; woodlands have disappeared. Small county roads are being expanded into trunk highways to meet increased demand. New thoroughfares are treated as mere functional conduits whose sole purpose is to move goods, services, and people fast and efficiently. Today, the infrastructure, which was supposed to remain in the alley at the rear of the house, has crept into full view in the front yard, fracturing, destroying, and homogenizing a landscape which was supposed to be a safe, comfortable refuge from the grittiness of the city. WHERE DO WE LOOK FOR ANSWERS?

The city and suburb are beginning to find that degraded and degrading infrastructure is an issue they have in common. Both are learning that infrastructure is a cultural utility, a civilizing amenity, not a necessary evil to be placed “below the picture frame.” Infrastructure is the visible underpinning of civic life, which can instruct citizens about their values and relationships to each other and highlight the connections between the city, suburb, and the hinterland whose natural resources sustain it. Infrastructure can—and should—make those lines of connection clear and vivid. To build infrastructure that participates this deeply in the imaginative life of its community requires a fundamental shift in our attitude toward the landscape. In his book Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the noted scholar of American landscape, says that the most magnificent city complexes “recognize the need to integrate infrastructure, or civil engineering, with landscape, or architecture.” Beautiful 140

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and brilliant schemes are created when “they both reorganize space for human needs, both produce works of art in the truest sense.” To do this we need 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 synthetic space, a man-made system of spaces superimposed on the face of the land, functioning and evolving not according to natural laws but to serve a community—for the collective character of the landscape is one thing that all generations and all points of view have agreed upon. He points to Holland, an engineered landscape largely reclaimed from the North Sea, or Frederick Law Olmsted’s design for the Boston Fens as examples of this synthetic landscape whose “organizations of space have been so well assimilated into the natural environment that they are indistinguishable and unrecognized for what they are.” For Jackson, infrastructure not only provides the backdrop for culture but the very ingredients that make it possible: In the contemporary world it is by recognizing this similarity of purpose that we will eventually formulate a new definition of landscape: a composition of made-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence; and if background seems inappropriately modest we should remember that in our modern use of the word it means that which underscores not only our identity 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 collective existence, identity, presence, and history, we believe that infrastructure must fulfill broader cultural, social, and ecological functions. The infrastructure in these human-made landscapes should serve multiple goals. Chief among these goals is enriching our sense of place, by bridging our commonwealth and 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 a fear of distracting the motorist or drawing attention to the messy plumbing of the city. Sometimes we neglect exploring the cultural possibilities of infrastructure under the misguided policy, “If it looks good, it costs too much.” We must remember that these pieces and systems perform the essential 141

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Three infrastructure backgrounds to our collective existence: “Enrich, connect and enhance, place, ecology and commonwealth.”

“cultural workings” of our society. They enrich our sense of who we are and characterize the places we inhabit. We need, then, to give priority to infrastructure projects that improve formal, spatial, and aesthetic connections and create a heightened sense of place for our citizens. Beautiful infrastructure that is inspired by and responsive to the physical and topographic features of the locale is primary to creating community identity and a personal sense of orientation. One of America’s most outstanding examples of the rich layering of cultural and function in infrastructure is Philadelphia’s Fairmount Waterworks, built in 1815. Among the country’s first urban water systems, the steam-driven 142

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plant pumped water from the Schuylkill River into the homes of Philadelphia residents. To house these waterworks, the city chose a group of Greek Revival temples, designed by Frederick Graff, a utilitarian acropolis set into Fairmount Park that symbolized the new democratic urban landscape amid the park’s natural systems. Though newer facilities have been built to meet the city’s increased demands for water, the waterworks stand today as a historic landmark, an infrastructural “ruin” that provides a tangible reminder of the cultural values that have shaped the city. Following the Fairmount Waterworks, our whole web of infrastructure—roads, water mains, pumping stations, garbagetransfer facilities, and water treatment plants—need to be more broadly conceived 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 provide a clear curriculum of civic instruction on how to use and value this investment. Where do we go from here?

Garrison Keillor once joked, it’s “remarkable that all the towns in Iowa were named after their water tanks.” Keillor, in his way, underscored the basic legacy among American cities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries of building public temples and parks to house infrastructure. Not only did they define the public realm and symbolize democracy’s collective power, but these landmarks remind us of our daily struggle to shape the forces of nature into the landscapes which provide the foundation for our modern cities, as in New Orleans, for example, where city water pumps battle round the clock to prevent the groundwater from flooding the slim crust of elevated land upon which the city’s character is defined. Just as it provides the lines of continuity between the past and the present and provides the foundation upon which our future rests, infrastructure can also shape a spatial framework for cognitive path-finding to help citizens find their way across a metropolitan landscape. In the past we have used historic monuments, civic buildings, parks, and prominent topographic features as visual landmarks that help us orient ourselves in the city and 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 that can guide us through the complex web of places in urban landscapes. The city of Phoenix has taken steps to capture this opportunity. As part of a proposed $1 billion infrastructure development, the city asked us in 1987 to assist the Phoenix Arts Commission in constructing a unique urban design plan which used public works to improve the physical quality of the community. The city’s goal, according to the Phoenix Public Arts Plan, is the construction of 143

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. . . a series of sites linked to the spatial and public infrastructure systems of Phoenix. This approach allows for not only the provision of sites suitable for artists’ works, but also for the creation of a public orientation system. The public art “system” idea helps a person locate oneself within the expansive urban landscape partly by creating a heightened sense of orientation. This can be created by responding to the context of natural and built landscape, climatic conditions and the historic/cultural tradition of the desert Southwest. Collectively individual works of art and the public art system as a whole can help the citizen to better understand and comprehend both the city and the region. This plan has resulted in several public artworks, including the transformation of a new cross-town expressway into a desert parkway heavily planted with native vegetation; a standard highway overpass into a new neighborhood gateway; and a garbage-truck transfer station into a public landmark and environmental education center. Infrastructure is now part of Phoenix citizens’ “mental map.” These cognitive landmarks help them define themselves and the place in which they live. These infrastructure facilities were also designed to be didactic—instructing citizens about the meaning, value, and function of the systems that support their communities. Incorporating instructional devices establishes a connection between the community and the engineered utility, transforming basic facilities into attractive public places in which citizens experience key lessons of public responsibility. That connection provides a common set of experiences that facilitate a clearer understanding of how we, as individuals, are related and how our actions are connected to maintaining the quality of the place. For example, Phoenix citizens have learned that the city’s infrastructure legacy dates to the irrigation canals of the Hohokam that crisscrossed the valley floor nearly 1600 years ago. Today, these irrigation canals provide the basis for linking neighborhoods and the city with the basic life-giving force of the area’s water. In a city dominated by streets and highways, these canals and water systems have become new focuses of community activity and development, and a framework for a new community map. The city of Phoenix has extended this kind of civic instruction into one of the most banal of urban infrastructures—a garbage-transfer and recycling center—with impressive results. “I would like this facility to become one of the features visitors come to Phoenix to see,” says Ron Jensen, director of the city’s Department of Public Works. Supported by the Phoenix Arts Commission, artists Linnea Glatt and Michael Singer— with the help of consulting engineers Black and Veach—transformed this standard landfill project into an educational landmark. Described as a multi-functional marketplace, the facility not only serves as a site for solid-waste transfer, recyclable materials sorting, and vegetation recovery 144

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Phoenix Public Art Works “cultural infrastructure.”

and mulching, but also hosts educational and demonstration projects for the public. Designed as much more than the standard single-use dump, Phoenix’s new waste facility includes a desert landscape built upon a mound of discarded concrete sidewalk and demolition material; recycling displays that chronicle the history of waste disposal; a solid-waste library; amphitheater for films and lecture; and an elevated walkway that allows visitors to view 145

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waste operations. In 1992, the public got its first glimpse of the facility at a black-tie event called “Dance at the Dump,” fulfilling a goal outlined in a project brochure: “Unlike most recycling or transfer facilities that operate in an ‘out of site, out of mind’ context, this facility will encourage visitors to view the entire operation.” Though the costs for this innovative and imaginative investment are comparable to those of building a standard landfill transfer station, the payoffs are much greater in the long term. For one thing, the facility teaches more responsible “refuse” habits. By teaching citizens how to be better consumers of the service, the system is more efficiently used and maintenance costs are reduced. Furthermore, visitors learn about the impacts of their waste behavior on the larger eco-community. Site landscaping and connections between the building and the surrounding mountains remind visitors about how good waste management can help to reduce degradation of the area’s fragile desert. An adjacent storm-water recharge landscape, currently under construction, teaches lessons about desert water harvesting. And by making this facility a civic showpiece rather than a dumping ground, the city multiplies the land-use possibilities of surrounding sites. The waste complex, for example, could serve as an anchor for new private and public development centering on education, recycling, and the environment. INFRASTRUCTURE: BRIDGING OUR COMMONWEALTH

In our earnest efforts to provide the needed infrastructure to service a vital economy, we’ve often forgotten that infrastructure is one of the most visible fruits of a community’s collective labor. As a result, we’ve pursued a wasteful, inequitable course that squanders this collective infrastructure investment, subdivides what we share, and abandons poorer communities. Starting in the 1950s and ending in the 1980s, we focused our natural resources on building an infrastructure system for our cities across our nation. In some areas, these systems exist with underutilized excess capacity; in others, aging infrastructure is in rapid decline. Instead of building upon this foundation, since 1980, we have diverted system maintenance funding to capitalize on new infrastructure at the outer limits of urban centers—at the expense of our networks in our existing city. We’ve stretched our resources to such an extent that gaps have begun to appear in the fabric of 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 public resource that requires continual maintenance. Recent federal reports state that deferred maintenance has contributed to America’s economic decline. By some estimates, more than $3 trillion are needed nationwide to upgrade our existing systems. Not surprisingly, few citizens are aware of the magni146

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tude of the investment we have made—in money, energy, and social upheaval—to construct and maintain existing infrastructure in our cities. We have so successfully placed it out of sight that we have lost contact with its fundamental role in shaping our collective existence. In cities such as Cincinnati, Ohio (population 350,000), however, greater awareness of this investment is changing urban attitudes and policies. As part of a recent public assessment of the city’s infrastructure, city officials and 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 waterfiltering stations, not to mention more linear miles of retaining walls than any other American city to keep neighborhoods on the hills overlooking the Ohio River from sliding down its banks—provides civic identity and ensures Cincinnati’s competitive edge as a regional marketplace. Aware of its valuable heritage, Cincinnati has begun to rebuild a stronger sense of community by leveraging its infrastructure heritage. One of the most positive results of this public effort was the enlistment of the larger community in the making and maintaining of public works. With the help of neighborhood groups and individual citizens, a city commission of business and community leaders recently inventoried city facilities and procedures. The commission’s final report presented more than 100 recommendations, including an earnings tax proposal that voters passed as one of the first steps towards rebuilding the city’s infrastructure and neighborhoods. This community involvement proved so valuable that citizen committees are now appointed on an ongoing basis to advise a variety of city departments. The lasting benefit of this civic exercise is an engaged public, involved in the long and difficult task of making public infrastructure contribute to community revitalization, from economic prosperity and social vitality to the physical quality of the city’s neighborhoods. The success of these efforts rests on the recognition that infrastructure is 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 to divide us. But this hasn’t happened. In our eagerness to use infrastructure primarily to maintain the wealth of central marketplaces, we have ignored the possibility 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 that undergirds our national and global destinies. The vitality of any public square ultimately depends on how much we care about the quality of our lives together. The neglect of our public infrastructure and sewage systems, 147

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bridges, tunnels, highways, subways and streets—reflects not only our myopic economic polities, which impede productivity, but also the low priority we place on our common life. Already, many city residents have lost control of their streets to commuter traffic and their trees to disease and pollution. In the outer suburbs, residents find that they have lost their cherished natural resources, the woodlands, fields, and streams that enhance the quality of their lives and underpin the basic economic value of their home investments. In their place, they find woodlands cleared and streams channeled into box culverts for warehouse discount stores, office parks and massive highway rights-of-way, whose traffic spews heavy metals and noise into the air. As we lose these features, we lose our sense of security, orientation and, most importantly, our sense of community. The resulting isolation makes it easy to abandon established neighborhoods for “safer” places ever farther out on the metropolitan fringe, thereby despoiling even more open space. Where do we go from here?

Infrastructure systems must improve both the functional and physical sense of connection between neighborhoods and the larger community. We should give priority to infrastructure projects that address basic inequities between inner city and suburban neighborhoods. Despite the fact that inner-city residents are taxed at higher rates to maintain the basic core of water and power systems that serve the outer edges, they are increasingly segregated from the growing range of jobs, goods, and services available to middle- and upper-middle-class residents in suburban areas. Dispersed employment centers in the suburbs are poorly serviced by transit, restricting job access to low-income families without automobiles. Yet, highways subdivide inner-city neighborhoods to accommodate job commutes for suburban workers crisscrossing the metropolitan area via the central core. The narrow utilitarian focus of past infrastructure has created invisible barriers between economic classes and ethnic groups, reinforcing in some cases and causing in others a de facto form of class segregation. To balance the existing investment disparity between city and suburb, new development growth should be forced to pay the true cost of infrastructure at the expanding metropolitan edges rather than simply the construction price tag. Before we consume more raw land, we should successfully capture the full potential of our existing investment. We should give priority to new infrastructure projects that build on past investments and seek to reunite the segmented parts of the commonwealth—projects that link and integrate development with compact, mixed land-use development. 148

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Transportation planning should begin with the premise that we must reduce travel time to work, through consolidating destinations and providing convenient access to alternate modes of travel. We must recognize that there is no such thing as truly free parking (even if the driver does not pay for the privilege). Instead we must promote projects that underwrite employer-based transportation programs, to incrementally change worker habits and locational decisions. “The key to integrating our thinking about transportation and land use,” says planner Joel Woodhull of Southern California’s Rapid Transit Development, “is to focus on access rather than mobility. Mobility means going faster and farther. Access means getting to more places conveniently. With access, the focus is on places. Mobility focuses on paths, often to the neglect or even the destruction of places.” We should encourage infrastructure projects that evolve out of public participation. Traditionally, the supply side of the economy—businesses and manufacturing—has been seen as the primary client of infrastructure development so that we’ve produced industrial systems rather than a public realm for community. The primary users of infrastructure, however, are average citizens. Federal programs should encourage projects which incorporate their needs and demands while improving service and the quality of place. Public participation, if properly orchestrated from the beginning, does not add cost. On the contrary, in the long term it increases the effectiveness and acceptance of the system as a cultural amenity and minimizes the possibility of protracted citizen protests and environmental lawsuits. Countering our municipal funding crises, public participation produces solutions that leverage each dollar to improve both service and quality of place. And public involvement produces educated users of the system, reducing abuse and decreasing maintenance costs, while it builds the long-term commitment necessary to support both construction and operating costs. Finally, to assist this dialogue we need to develop a new vocabulary for infrastructure that enlarges functional engineering terms to include words that describe the cultural and social life of a community and its qualities of place. Because we have viewed infrastructure as the servant of industry and national defense, the terms for its planning and design are technical and standardized. To create infrastructure that bridges the diverse social patterns and needs of our metropolitan commonwealth, we need a language that transforms “arterial streets” into community avenues and “detention ponds” 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 149

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stripping away complex wealth from the landscape. The engineering approach creates a single-use network that moves goods, services, and people over the land through capital-intensive concrete and steel conduits that neither give nor receive much support from the landscape through which they pass. Unfortunately, we have crisscrossed the American landscape with such simple systems in our attempt to create a standardized national system of support for our nation’s participation in the global market. In the process we have ignored the diverse physical and cultural features of regional geography in our construction of a rational infrastructure system. On the other hand, an alternate complex design approach mimics ecological 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 are indistinguishable and unrecognized for what they are.” This system seeks to use the ecological features, functions, and character of the landscape to benefit both society and natural systems. Designed to be integrated into the landscape, complex systems are also multiuse, providing twice the benefit from a single investment. Using this new definition of infrastructure, even the most mundane and “un-public” of urban functions—the sewage-treatment plant—can become a beautiful ecological civic landmark. In 1990, the village of Alvo, Nebraska, hired Minneapolis artist and engineer Viet Ngo to create a sewage-treatment system. Using a serpentine form inspired by Native American earthworks, Ngo created a sewage-holding pond covered with a carpet of duckweed. As plant-massings drive from the pond’s intake pipe to the outflow in an adjacent lake, they metabolize excess algae while absorbing and bio-concentrating harmful chemicals. “We chose it because it costs less and we believed it would be environmentally kind,” says Barbara Hollinger, village vice chairperson, in a 1991 Artnews article on the project. “The results have just been excellent, cleaner and clearer in appearance, and it’s prevented any algae’s growth. And it totally transforms the area. It no longer looks like your typical sewage lagoon at all—it’s beautifully artistic.” This project and others like it clearly point to a new type of artistic ecological engineering that provides public service while adding beauty and fiscal value to our civic investment. We have created infrastructure to turn “straw into gold,” to control nature and make it the supporting foundation for our lives. As we collect the gold, we should not forget to maintain the fields that grow the straw. Even in a global “information” market, we still need living forests to supply the timber for our houses and replenish the air we breath with oxygen. If natural resources are fundamental to our lives, then the maintenance of natural systems should be the starting point for the creation of future 150

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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. The recognition that our infrastructure facilities and natural systems are interdependent, and that long-term viability of the systems is necessary in order to support social and economic stability, changes the way we define the word landscape. Infrastructure is more than a utility. It is a foundation for our sense of being and place and carries within its veins the lifeblood of many different communities—the neighborhoods and habitats for human, plant, and animal populations. Ultimately, there is no economy without a living nature. Without it, infrastructure ceases to function, the marketplace withers and dies, and individuals lose the common ground of community. Where do we go from here?

Whenever possible we should choose multi-functional systems over singleuse systems, favoring projects that function ecologically and use natural systems as extensions and components of an infrastructure. For one thing, they are more economical in the long term. Multi-functional systems tend to require the acquisition of land, but those additional property costs can be off-set in the long-term municipal maintenance costs of concrete and steel systems. Moreover, lands bordering a green system command higher property values. We should encourage the development of this kind of infrastructure that serves economic growth at the lowest long-term municipal cost. We should favor projects that enrich and connect existing communities of plants and animals. Highway and pipeline corridors move people and oil, but they can also provide pathways for plants and animals on their cyclical migrations. Biologists believe that these pathways will become increasingly important as the climate band shifts, driving the movement of many species northward. Corridors connecting species-rich patches may become vital to preserving our existing bio-diversity. We should, therefore, promote projects that improve the “living” viability of the natural systems, projects that use native plant materials and provide protection against the invasion of foreign plant materials that undermine local plant and animal habitats. Native vegetation planted along the East Coast interstate system, for example, could have stalled the spread of the destructive kudzu vine that has used the highway corridor as an expansion route on its devastating northbound rampage to engulf and damage power lines and bridges, thereby increasing local maintenance costs. We should develop infrastructure projects that protect and replenish natural systems. Water quality is rapidly becoming the number one environmental issue for both the public and private sector. Just how much environmental health and economic recovery are connected is perhaps best illustrated by the struggling economies of Eastern Europe. A 1992 151

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Environmental Science and Technology article estimated that 70 percent of Czechoslovakia’s waters are heavily polluted; 30 percent cannot even support fish. Much of the country’s water is unusable for industrial consumption, not to mention damaging to plants and animals. Just as people cannot survive drinking water contaminated with mercury and other persistent contaminants, industry cannot thrive without larger quantities of clean water. Incentives should be given to infrastructure projects that clean their wastes as much as possible on site and recharge local water resources. Excellent models found abroad, and to a limited degree in the United States, make effective use of the natural systems that use hyper-accumulator plants to clean polluted water and soils. We must use every means to encourage infrastructure projects that aggressively recycle products and reclaim places. Newark, New Jersey Mayor Sharpe James instituted an aggressive recycling program that both cleans up the city and unites citizens in a common civic mission. Plastics are collected and recycled into new public benches for neighborhood parks and streets. The public works department in Phoenix shreds thousands of discarded tires, recycling them into a new road-surface material to replace asphalt. This recycled material has the added advantage of increasing traction and reducing solar heat gain on road surfaces. As we recycle our waste into new products, we should also reclaim the used sections of urban areas and the riches of their natural systems buried long ago by early metropolitan expansion. In Minnesota, the RomoseWashington Metro Watershed District is working with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the City of St. Paul, the University of Minnesota’s College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and residents of the Phalen neighborhood to revitalize this older, inner city neighborhood on the outskirts of downtown St. Paul. The strategy was: 1 To create a neighborhood commercial transit center and park to serve as a new focal point for this mid-density ethnic community. 2 To remove a deteriorating, crime-ridden 1960s shopping center and reclaim the pre-development wetland beneath the site. 3 To daylight piped and buried portions of Phalen Creek that run through the community and rebuild this ecological waterway system. Not only would the waterway provide recreational green space within the Phalen community, it would also enhance habitats for herons and waterfowl that use the area as a flyway. At the same time, this low-cost ecological water-management and treatment system would filter and clean water upstream, improving the quality of the water that ultimately flows into the Mississippi River. In our haste to built metropolitan landscapes, we have buried many streams, wetlands, woodlands, and other natural systems. The Phalen neigh152

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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 past development. Furthermore, we can reclaim the natural systems that will help us manage our waste while rejuvenating local economies, the social fabric, and the beauty of our neighborhoods. We believe that the role of infrastructure in President Clinton’s new compact is to create the systemic framework for each community’s mission: to nurture economic productivity, cultural expression, and social equity while preserving and replenishing natural resources. Infrastructures can become the vessel to carry forward the dreams of a new compact into physical reality, supporting a diversity of animals and beings across large, complex metropolitan regions. The collective wealth of our community’s infrastructure binds us together and provides a public landscape within which we, as individuals, find our identity and common ground between each other 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 Landscape. 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 Angeles.” In Modulus 17, David Gobel and Mary Mead (eds.). Charlottesville: University 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. 153

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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 produced by the Architectural League. Portions have been published in “Beautiful Infrastructure,” On the Ground, winter/spring 1995, and in Patrick Condon, ed., Sustainable Urban Landscapes: The Surrey Design Charrette (Vancouver, 1996). 154

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DANIEL SOLOMON (2007)

This essay is a stew that began to cook some time ago with a beautiful exhibition of women’s fashion at New York’s Metropolitan Museum entitled Chanel, curated, designed and sponsored by the current director of the House of Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld. This exhibition dealt powerfully with the question of modernity and the relationship of modernism to a long cultural legacy that predated it. It brought into focus for me the most perplexing questions about the movement called New Urbanism that I have been part of, about the stunning successes New Urbanism has had, and about its equally stunning failures. The set of ideas and practices that carry the banner of New Urbanism have a history much longer than the name. Similar ideas about the relationship of 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 the city came together long ago. In their earlier incarnations they were resisted and ultimately crushed by the collision of the same rigid orthodoxies— modernist and revivalist—that marginalize New Urbanism today and make it in the eyes of many the domain of maudlin saps—aesthetic and political reactionaries whose ideas about the city are discredited upon arrival because of the imagery in which they are clothed. In the decades since the 1920s, modernity and the isms it has spawned have taken many forms. In America, the term modernism in relation to architecture and town planning has a more specific and prescribed meaning than it does in other places and other disciplines. There was something radical in the canon of modernism as it was initially applied to American architecture and town planning that modernist aesthetics in other pursuits did not share. The person most clearly identified with this radicalism was Walter Gropius, as Director of the Weimar Bauhaus and later in his role as program director of Harvard’s School of Architecture beginning in 1937. In the nearly seventy years that modern architecture has been taught at Harvard, variations on its curriculum became the norm at schools of architecture, and ideas hatched at Harvard became an almost universally shared and rarely questioned set of received opinions among American architects. In that seventy years there have been many people of extraordinary and diverse abilities who have taught in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and their individual accomplishments are indisputable. For the purpose of this essay, however, I want to focus not on the many fine achievements of people on the Harvard faculty, but on an influence of the school that has been pernicious. I want to make the case that the way in which modern architecture is introduced at Harvard is one important source 155

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of the debilitating style wars that now swirl through the world of urbanism causing debilitating havoc. Gropius’ idea of education for modern architects represented a kind of revolution that shared its most basic idea with Mao Tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution or the revolution of the Taliban. The idea is that young people need to be protected from the corrupting influence of knowledge. Gropius did everything he could to insulate young architects from architectural history and from the traditional mimetic and representational skills of the Beaux Arts. Following his lead, American architectural education became a widespread cult of unlearning. Gropius tossed architectural history as it had traditionally been taught out of the professional curriculum, but at Harvard modernism needed some new theoretical grounding. To fill the bill, he launched his colleague, Sigfried Gideon, on the writing of two extraordinarily influential books, Space, Time and Architecture and Mechanization Takes Command. For my generation of architecture students, even 3000 miles from Harvard, Space, Time and Architecture occupied the position next to our bosoms that Mao’s Little Red Book did for the Red Guards. The thesis of Space, Time and Architecture goes something like this: the way people see and perceive things changes with the times. As evidence, Gideon invokes the standard art-historical view of the relationship between Renaissance humanism and the discovery of the laws of perspective. He then claims a similar relationship among a series of modern phenomena including the theory of relativity, cubism, steel frame construction and high speed transportation. The term space/time is his shorthand for a modern revolution in the perception of architecture and cities, equivalent to the discovery of perspective. In the sixty-nine years since the Gropius anschluss at Harvard, things have become more sophisticated without really changing. Architectural theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design is taught by Professor Michael 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 regard it as an ingenious work of propaganda as pseudo-history. Perhaps to insulate his students from this heretical view, Professor Hayes tells his fledglings how to read Gideon by providing in the syllabus a handy “Premise for Interpreting Gideon.” . . . modern architecture plays a significant role in an ongoing cognitive revolution—that extended process of intellectual transformation whereby a society whose life habits and perceptual apparatuses were formed by other, now anachronistic, modes of production are effectively reprogrammed for life in the new industrialized world.

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To paraphrase Professor Hayes’ paraphrase of Gideon in other and simpler words, he is saying that if people don’t like the mechanization and abstraction of our brand of modern architecture, don’t worry: it’s their fault. As a modern architect and an initiate into the true workings of historical process, you have an obligation not to listen to them. The infuriating smugness of this self-validating Gropius/Gideon pedagogy was bound over time to create merciless backlash. This is not smugness just as an unattractive personal habit, but smugness as a theory and a world view. Right after Gideon in the syllabus, now into the second week of graduate school, comes an introduction to the Frankfurt School for Social Research with special emphasis on Theodor Adorno and his Philosophy of Modern Music, published in its final form in 1949. If Gideon is the foundation for a system of ideas, Adorno is the keystone. The thrust of Adorno’s essay is to compare and contrast false modernity and true modernity, represented respectively by the music of Igor Stravinsky and that of Arnold Schoenberg. For Adorno, Stravinsky was the prisoner of historical sentiment, his music filled with primitivism, references to folk tunes, marches and classical structure. Schoenberg, on the other hand, was the true adventurer in the modern spirit since his twelve tone system is a pure abstraction, an invention of the mind incapable of reference to anything outside itself. What’s more, Schoenberg’s harsh dissonances are an appropriate art for the harsh, dissonant turmoil of modern life as opposed to 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 indulgent as “premature harmonies.” Most of the Marxist intellectuals of the Frankfurt School, like Karl Marx himself, were Jewish. Though they were assimilated and secular, they retained an element of Judaism in their thinking, and they freely appropriated the Jewish doctrine of the Messiah, giving it a new name—The Revolution. Until the revolution came, society would remain in a fundamental state of disorder. The function of art is to reify or give expression to this state of disorder and thereby raise social consciousness and hasten the revolution. Therefore all worthy art must have an element of negativism or dissonance 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 most viciously was American jazz, which he pronounced “yatz,” and associated with the German word “hatz,” a pejorative for the baying of a bloodhound. He wrote the long vituperative essay On Jazz in 1933, never having heard any jazz in live performance, but continued revising it and making it even nastier after he came to this country in 1940. In jazz, he saw American Negroes as complicit in their own oppression. He dismissed the great jazz of the 1950s as watered-down Delius and Debussy, but he found one thing 157

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positive (that is in Marxist terms—negative) in the lead instrument of the bebop of the 1950s—the saxophone. He observed that the saxophone is a metal horn played like a woodwind. It therefore has a kind of sexual ambiguity or Zwischengeschlechtlichkeit, and since this androgyny represents a critical challenge to the established sexual order of society, the saxophone is OK. Newly minted graduate students in architecture at Harvard are taken in their second week on this through-the-looking-glass journey into the topsyturvy world of Marxist aesthetic theory, where positive is negative, negative is positive and the redeeming quality of a saxophone is its androgyny. In fairness to Professor Hayes, his course goes on to present other contending points 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 like comparative religion as taught at Notre Dame, unlikely to win large numbers of converts to Islam or Buddhism. The institution has a point of view and Professor Hayes’ message to fledgling architects at Harvard, and to those unfortunate enough to be elsewhere, is clear: populist hostility to an abstract modernism is philistine ignorance to be ignored; references to vernacular building, the imperatives of place or classicism are inadmissible and dissonance not harmony is the order of the day. By the third week of school, the seeds of hostility to New Urbanism are well sown at Harvard. If Michael Hayes’ tune has a familiar ring to it, it is because you cannot listen to a Charlie Rose interview of a star architect without hearing echoes of it. These ideas are completely pervasive in architectural culture whether or not those who believe in them have any idea of their source. From the studiously unpretentious language of Frank Gehry to its opposite in the many big words of Peter Eisenman, what unites the purveyors of the blobs to those of the wiggles and the shards is a set of ideas that comes from Sigfried Gideon and Theodor Adorno out of Michael Hayes. The Hegelian view of history says that revolutions breed counterrevolutions of equal and opposite force. If this is true, it explains why after seventy years of the Gropius curriculum in schools of architecture, an institution like the Institute for Classical Architecture should suddenly appear on the scene and flourish with such remarkable vitality. There is no question that the I.C.A., many of its members, and the architecture department at Notre Dame are doing something important and desperately needed after the modern academy’s seventy year assault on architectural knowledge. Recovery of the knowledge that helped make the world civil for centuries is unquestionably a good thing. But the I.C.A. is tinted in a way—notice I say “tinted,” not “tainted” or “stained”—that sets it apart, I think a long way apart, from a strategy for contemporary urbanism. 158

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I.C.A. announces events all the time and the subject matter is usually something about a fabulous collection of Dresden porcelain or a tour of a 200 room mansion owned by Doris Duke or someone like her on a thousand acre estate in Santa Barbara or Newport. Last year, I found myself by fluke at 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 a high-rise, was, thanks to American building technology of the 1920s, the largest perpendicular Gothic interior I’ve ever seen, next to Westminster Abbey. 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 New Urbanism (C.N.U.) and elsewhere, but mostly it was a big crowd of surprisingly young strangers. I later learned that the youngest of the young were actually Notre Dame’s architecture students attending on assignment. The young women—whatever their talents, accomplishments and politics—were absolutely radiant with a fragrant, pre-Raphaelite innocence that I thought had been expunged from the world forever by Coco Chanel and her generation twenty years before I was born. Astonishingly for an architectural gathering, there was not an unstructured black jacket in sight. Except for the conspicuously frumpy presence of the C.N.U. Board, the hundreds of mostly young 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 to the English neo-classical architect Quinlan Terry. He accepted the award and said the following: We must build in the manner of our forefathers, in brick and lime masonry. 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 standing on the 12th floor of a high rise surrounded by the architectural treasures of Chicago Loop from William Lebaron Jenny and Louis Sullivan to Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion across the street, surely one of the great public spaces in America. That this skillful and intelligent architect, Quinlan Terry, neither saw nor acknowledged any contradiction was clearly a matter of choice. It is the same choice to resist assimilation into the larger culture for the sake of traditional values that the Shakers or the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn make. It is a choice that is perfectly OK for an architect, like a musician joining an early music consort, but not for an urbanist. Urbanism is engaged with the history of the city and the gears of history, like a good bicycle, have many speeds forward, but also like a bicycle, no reverse. Many people outside of New Urbanism think that we are all just like Quinlan Terry, trying to ride our bicycle backwards and like him, unwilling to engage with what is around us. What is around us are the forces of 159

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CCTV Building, Beijing, China. Rem Koolhaas. Rem Koolhaas, Content (Köln: Taschen, 2004).

technological change, of population pressure, of environmental degradation, of global warming, of hegemonic urban sprawl. The Driehaus Awards dinner was a gathering of a committed sub-culture, which is attractive to some 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 high virtue. We can thank Rem Koolhaas’ newest book Content for defining the very look of with it and for contextualizing the work of town planners and architects 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 terrifying way than almost anything I have ever seen. The single exception was the extraordinary program on Frontline on the scale of what can only be called slave labor in China under the ironic name of Communism. Rem understands and actually diagrams how China’s sweat shop economy has sucked the economic life out of Europe and the U.S. and he knows the enormous social consequences. Rem puts his dark insights about the world and his own work right on the cover of the book—Big Brother Skyscraper, Sweat Shop Economy. To me what is simply amazing is the gleefulness with which he casts himself in the role of Prince of Darkness, according to his own vision of hell. He records for our amusement some light-hearted banter with Prada fashionistas about the desperate poverty of Lagos, and he sneaks in some Larry Flynt style photographs of female genitalia. Naughty, naughty, I guess is the point. His design for the CCTV Building in Beijing is not only a dazzling symbol of oppression; it is the very instrument of oppression. CCTV’s control of information 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 New York and Chicago including the most vibrant neighborhoods were demolished in ten years and the population was forcibly relocated to sterile new suburbs through a massively corrupt system of expropriation. Imagine that occurring with the television, press and an internet police force forbidding any murmur of protest. Without any exaggeration, that is exactly what is happening in Shanghai and Beijing today and it is what Rem’s building celebrates. To achieve the symbolic and terrifying about-to-topple cantilever of the CCTV Building, Koolhaas enlisted ARUP Engineers. In a little essay he calls “Post-Modern Engineering,” he discusses how ARUP used their computational might to analyze the indeterminate redundancies and concentrations of loads on the exposed truss-work that holds up the monstrous cantilever and to derive the irregular patterns of the trusses. He wonders about what happened to the scientific rationalism that would have been revolted by the exercise and he asks wistfully, “Why don’t they just say NO?” 160

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Edificio Mirador, Madrid, Spain, designed by MVRDV with Blanca Lleo de Arquitectura. Terence Riley, On-site: New Architecture in Spain (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006).

The cadences of Winston Churchill during the fearful days of 1940 come to 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 steady employment as an agent of the dark side of globalization. Do not think for a minute that Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV is an aberrant exception in this regard. The social housing shown by the Museum of Modern Art in its 2006 exhibition entitled On-Site celebrated what curator Terence Riley considers the vitality of new architecture in Spain, including avant-gardist housing where the Spanish put their Algerians, Turks, Africans and Arabs: dwellings and play space for the next generation of train bombers. The social housing in On-Site is exactly the opposite of what we New Urbanists were able to accomplish through HUD’s HOPE VI program, where immigrant populations and our own poor were integrated into classic American neighborhoods. HOPE VI is where the aesthetically conservative strain of New Urbanism found a high social purpose. But New Urbanism finds itself in a loony situation. On one hand there is a powerful modernist establishment comprised of the best universities and museums throughout the world, the professional architectural press and most newspaper and magazine critics. For them town building and architecture are history-less and a-political subjects. Reference to anything prior to the modern period is culturally inadmissible and belief in social purpose is just not hip. There are of course exceptions to this—Yale as a school and architects from Lou Kahn to Rafael Moneo—but the exceptions are just that: exceptions to the juggernaut of modernist right-think. On the other hand, opposing the juggernaut is this now thriving neo-classical 161

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movement that does little to dispel the impression that it is willfully oblivious to the technical, demographic and political changes that distinguish our time from other times. We New Urbanists have our own agenda about the city which seems barely connected to this cultural debate, but we find ourselves in the cross-fire of an intolerant modernity on one hand and a revival of classical knowledge that has so far failed to separate itself from a longing for the riding-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 me to point the way around the cultural schism that threatens the great cause of urbanism and urban reconstruction. Let’s consider Coco Chanel. She is most often associated with a quintessential modernist object—the supremely beautiful, elegant and unchanging sixty-year-old design for the bottle of Chanel #5. At first glance 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 Fantasy. The Chanel #5 bottle rejects all that in favor of an abstraction, a bit of pseudo-science implying the formulation and testing of Chanel’s 1 through 4, which of course never existed, and also love of the beautiful form of the Helvetica #5. But Chanel was not selling perfume bottles: she was selling perfume. Perfume is all about sexuality, and smell—the most animal of the senses—packaged in a bottle. It is the abstraction of the bottle that makes the sensuality of the contents all the more vivid and meaningful. The bottle of Chanel #5 is, like her clothing and like her life, a splendid contradiction and a seamless synthesis of opposites. Chanel was not only the most original, gifted and prolific designer of her generation; she was a business genius on the scale of an Andrew Carnegie. She started in a foundling home, absolutely penniless, and she built an industrial empire, all of her own conception, the first and probably history’s most powerful woman C.E.O. But she never concealed or was in the least embarrassed by the fact

New dresses designed by Coco Chanel. 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 for her 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 could be considered different ideas. She wanted to dress a woman so that she could enter a room on equal terms with the army general, the bishop and the head of state, as confident and reassured by her dress as they. Her version of femininity was simultaneously egalitarian and aristocratic, simultaneously athletic and erotic. She dressed a woman to go the opening of the Paris Opera in such a way that you knew she was capable of climbing a tree. She believed in physical ease as the predicating condition for elegance. She referred to classical antiquity in clothing made of industrial mass-produced fabrics like jersey, and she absolutely mastered the traditional crafts of the milliner and the tailor. 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 the relationship of abstraction to life—are completely congruent with those of a friend and collaborator of hers, the great choreographer George Balanchine. It is not overstating the case to say that Balanchine united a classical tradition and modernism with more originality, more force and more enduring success than any other artist in any discipline. In this regard, his work, his contribution and his life story are one and the same. If one tries to draw some lessons from the synthesis he brought about, it is worth knowing how Balanchine became Balanchine, because his story is as rich with contradictions as Chanel’s. His career began at the age of ten when he was accepted into the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, part of the court of Tsar Nicholas II. In the Frenchified court of the Tsars, classical ballet, which evolved from fencing exercises in the court of Louis XIV, was preserved and perfected. Balanchine was raised at court, often appearing in the fabled Maryinsky Theater with its 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 trained classical dancer and the most supremely elegant of all 21-year-olds the Ballet Master of his world famous Ballets Russes. His first assignment was to collaborate with Igor Stravinsky and Henri Matisse, no less, on a reworking of the ballet Le Chant de Rossignol. Matisse did the sets, the costumes and the make-up and arranged red and white chrysanthemums in the hair of the principal ballerina, Alicia Markova. Coco Chanel hosted the cast party after the opening and Stravinsky played the piano at the party. 163

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The other Ballets Russes artists that young Balanchine was thrown in with included Picasso, Prokofiev, Tchelitchew, Jean Cocteau, Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya—an unbelievable list. He went from the court of the Tsar to Diaghilev’s court of modernism at its absolute pinnacle of excellence. Michael Hayes begins the education of architects with Adorno’s sour diatribe against Stravinsky, and it is revealing that Stravinsky found his natural collaborator, George Balanchine, in the most sensual of the arts— ballet. Just like the bottle of Chanel #5, the most characteristic and famous of the Stravinsky/Balanchine ballets strip away all narrative reference: no story telling and no sets, costumes that refer only to the dancer’s

Dance choreographed by Balanchine. Costas, Balanchine: Celebrating a Life of Dance. (Windsor, Connecticut: Tide Mark Publications, 2003.)

bodies. There is nothing on the stage but the life force of the music and the geometries he makes of the dancers themselves. And Balanchine’s dancers were better schooled in classical dance, more disciplined than any dance company had been before. Balanchine’s grand abstractions demanded more from the corps de ballet than had ever been asked of it before—more athleticism, more musicality, more speed. When his vision exceeded what even his own superbly trained corps could do, he would arrange his soloists in formation and use them like a chess master attacking with his bishops. Balanchine was a modernist who extended the tradition of classicism he inherited. He was also a modernist who was not a slave to modernity. He carried the whole history of ballet in his head and did all kinds of things with it—narrative story ballets, huge spectacle ballets, movies and Broadway musical comedy, which he helped revolutionize. Over their long careers, Stravinsky and Balanchine managed a trick that architects and town planners should be able to do and one that is strictly forbidden in the dictat of Harvard aesthetic theory. They were able to engage popular culture in its own terms, excel within it, and never compromise their own standards. When things got slow in 1941, Balanchine even took a job with Ringling Bros. choreographing elephants. He asked Stravinsky to collaborate with him, and Stravinsky had only one question, “Would the elephants be 164

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young?” Balanchine assured him that they would be young and beautiful and the collaboration proceeded. Chanel and Balanchine were such complete masters of their disciplines that they could draw upon its entire history as situations demanded. Neither was ever prevented from doing anything that interested them by an ideology or 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 were as cosmopolitan, as eclectic, as simultaneously modern and as embracing of history as Chanel and Balanchine? The fact is that modernity as a driving force in architecture and town planning predates the rigid prescriptions of Harvard modernism by half a century at least. During that long span of time there were classically trained architects in many places, fascinated by implications of new technologies and the problems and possibilities of the new industrial city. Cities and city dwellers suffered in many ways from the 1850s through the 1920s, but one thing they did not suffer from during those years was the systematic unlearning of their historic craft by architects and builders. That came later. There is a list of architects during this proto-modern period who were cosmopolitan eclectics in a way that seems appropriate as role models for contemporary urbanists. Of this list, the one who for me stands out as the most gifted and the most interesting is Otto Wagner, architect to Franz Joseph, the last Hapsburg emperor. He perhaps more than any other represented the contribution that architecture should make to urbanism and as teacher what architectural training should consist of, so that generations of architects 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 the Danube Canal, New Aspern Bridge, Regulation of the Stubenviertel. Otto Wagner, Sketches, Projects and Executed Buildings (London: Architectural Press, 1987).

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competition with Michelangelo, Palladio and Bernini, without copying them directly. But he considered it his mission as an architect and as a teacher to move from classicism to a modern Nutzstil, a classically based negation of revivalism that was directed at appropriate expression of the programs and building methods of the times. He was fascinated both by the spatial order of the traditional city and the new infrastructure of the industrial city. Otto Wagner, architect to the emperor, died of starvation and influenza in 1918, seven weeks before the armistice. The collapse of the AustroHungarian Empire brought about a completely new political and economic situation in Vienna, and it was Wagner’s pupils, the Wagnerschuler, who had exactly the right skills to adapt and to build magnificently in the new Marxist/Leninist Viennese Social Democracy that emerged in the ruins. Eva Blau’s splendid book The Architecture of Red Vienna tells this amazing story. After the war, the new socialist government, controlling only the historic city center and not its surrounding countryside, had an urgent need to house a dispossessed urban proletariat. And they had to be housed quickly and economically in the midst of the remaining glories of the baroque imperial city—but in a way that celebrated their status as the backbone of the new economy and the new political regime. Who better than the Wagnerschuler to bring about this synthesis of new circumstance and the historic city? To this day, the social housing of Red Vienna is one of the glories of the world and it represents a synthesis, never equaled, of classical architectural principles, urbanism and the modern spirit. The architecture of Red Vienna put in a brief appearance in the United States. The 1920s garden apartment movement in New York reached its apogee in a series of social housing projects in the Bronx, sponsored by garment workers’ unions for their members. The planning, programming and decorative language of these enduringly beautiful buildings are straight out of Red Vienna and even today, they are some of the most livable dwellings in the city. Abruptly, however, the garden apartment movement came to an end as the high modernist form of Euro-modernism seized the American stage in the early 1930s, and we all know the rest of that story. Simultaneously the architecture of Red Vienna itself came to an even more abrupt and symbolic end in 1934 with the routing of the socialist administration and the shelling of the most famous icon of Red Vienna, Karl Marx Hof, by right-wing militias called the Heimwehr. It is significant that that the Wagnerschuler ethos was eradicated by the same cultural forces that New Urbanism is battling today. In Europe it was wiped out by neo-classicism from the left in Russia, from the right in Germany and Austria, and by the adoption of conservative vernacular in the form of Heimatstil by the political right. In America the cultural wipe-out 166

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was at the hands of hegemonic modernism, emanating first from the new Museum of Modern Art and slightly later from Harvard. At the same time this cultural wipe-out was occurring with respect to architecture and the city, the very same attitude that the Wagnerschuler embodied was flourishing in other art forms and is still flourishing to this day in some of them. That attitude consists of a fascination with what is new and promising in the moment that one is living through and simultaneous reverence for the historical past of one’s discipline—simultaneous fidelity to the highest standards of excellence and an absence of dogma—a playful, creative eclecticism that allows one to do many things and perform in many situations. Chanel lives; Balanchine lives; cities will be better if we can live as well.

Karl Marx Hof, Vienna, Austria, designed by Karl Ehn. (Photos by Daniel Solomon.)

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THE TOWN OF SEASIDE NEW 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 of Seaside at the 74th Annual A.C.S.A. Meeting in 1986, followed by an appraisal by Andrés Duany twenty-five years after its design. DESIGN

The site and the program were perceived to approximate the size and components of a small town, permitting the turning away from the methods of contemporary real estate development toward those of traditional American urbanism. To this end, the retail center is conceived as a downtown commercial district, the conference facility doubles as town hall and a portion of the recreation budget is dispersed to create small civic amenities throughout the town. Civic character is further reinforced by reserving sites for public buildings such as a chapel, a primary schoolhouse, a fire station and a post office, to be shared by adjacent communities. The program is expanded to include a service station and a workshop district. A study of towns throughout the American South indicated that a community of genuine variety and authentic character could not be generated by a single architect. Building is, therefore, given over to a multitude of designers. The public buildings are to be freely designed by architects selected for their known sympathy with the regional vernacular. The private buildings will be commissioned by the individual citizen/buyers subject to the provisions of a Master Plan and Zoning Code. These documents are intended to generate an urban environment similar to that of a small southern town of the period prior to 1940. The Code has been tested several times in university design studios and has proven workable. It is envisioned that the town of Seaside will be substantially built out in ten to fifteen years, depending on economic conditions. In designing and administering the plan and Code, D.P.Z. abdicates direct responsibility for the design of individual buildings and acts as the municipal 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-A and fronts 2300 feet of beach to the south. PROGRAM

The given program calls for a new vacation resort of some 300 dwellings of different types, 100–200 units of lodging, retail and offices, a commercial center, a civic/conference facility and a recreational building. EXISTING CONDITIONS

The layout of Seaside responds to pre-existing natural and manmade conditions as follows:

• Two large gorges providing access to the beach determine the location of • • • • •

the central square and the easternmost street. The most wooded areas are preserved along the diagonal avenue and in open areas around the tennis club and city hall. High ground determines the location of the clubhouses and the small squares. A central square opens to the south, increasing the building frontage on the ocean. The existing grid of Seagrove to the east is received and extended to provide multiple access points and social continuity. The new street grid is left open to the north allowing access to the inland lake at some future time.

STREETS

The vehicular network structures the master plan. In addition to providing access to all parts of the town, it has the following characteristics:

• Geometric perfection at the center which disintegrates toward the edges

• •

as a result of circumstance, a formal organization common to most of the towns studied. A concentric layout which increases the number of buildings with an ocean view and allows a majority of the streets to terminate at the shore. The provision of on-street parking throughout, minimizing the need for parking 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 public buildings. In addition, an extensive system of footpaths through the blocks 169

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The public pedestrian areas consist of walks at both sides of every street, squares at important street intersections and larger squares related to public buildings. In addition, an extensive system of footpaths through the blocks makes walking more convenient than driving.

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makes walking more convenient than driving. These paths provide a secondary 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 the shoreline. PRIVATE LAND

The proportion and dimension of lots are specifically related to their intended building type. In order to provide a relatively neutral urban fabric and to facilitate marketing, many lots are standardized, but others do not avoid the idiosyncratic characteristics which generate unusual buildings that serve as landmarks. There is a gradual downsizing of residential lots toward the center of town in order to increase density. PUBLIC BUILDINGS

The major public buildings (town hall, tennis club, school and chapel) are located inland to activate those areas farthest from the shore. These buildings are bound to the central square by corresponding public spaces: the town hall is connected by a secondary square, the tennis club by a major avenue and the chapel by a market square. Pavilions at the beach termini of each north–south street belong to the residents of these streets. The southern portion of the central square will contain small public outbuildings responding 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 hypothetical, since most have not yet been designed. Public buildings are not subject 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 private buildings. PRIVATE BUILDINGS

The private buildings may be houses, apartments, shops, offices, lodging or workshops. Building forms will be generated by the provisions of the Code as interpreted by many designers. Building uses are not strictly controlled as in conventional codes, but loosely determined by a conjunction of specified building form and urban location. PUBLIC SPACES

The proportions of the squares, avenues, streets and alleys at Seaside are derived from exemplary types found in the town studies. There is little possibility of unsatisfactory spatial results because nothing is invented. The variety of types is controlled by a combination of right-of-way widths of the plan and the height assignments of the Code. The variety is intended to be sufficient for residents to be oriented without resource to street signs.

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This drawing approximates how Seaside would be completed if the building envelopes were all filled to the maximum.

ZONING CODE

The Seaside Code applies to all privately owned lots. It is a highly distilled document controlling only those aspects of building form which directly affect the public realm. The Code is graphic rather than written, so that the owner/designer may understand its provisions without professional assistance and not perceive it as a tiresome obstacle to building. There are eight building types. Three are for mixed use, three are principally residential and one is for workshops. The Code employs the conventional tools of zoning but with substantial variation. Principal among these 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 on the social utilization of the street.

• Outbuildings at the rear of lots are encouraged. These create a secondary

•

level of urbanism tied to the footpaths and tend to generate rental apartments dispersed within single family areas. This is intended to prevent homogeneity of age and income common to modern developments. The location of parking within the lots is specified with precision to prevent parking lots from causing discontinuities in the street frontage. 171

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• Minimum and maximum heights of roofs and porches are specified to

• •

control the spatial proportion of the public spaces and to determine the degree of formal variation in streets. Towers of small footprint (200 sq. ft.) are encouraged everywhere so that even the most landlocked house may reach for a view of the sea. Boundaries between zoning types occur at mid-block rather than more conventionally along streets. This allows streets and squares to be perceived as coherent spatial entities with similar building types on all sides.

The above is excerpted from the original published in the Proceedings of the 74th Annual 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 it would be. Seaside as built is very similar physically to the plan of twenty-five years ago—perhaps more than any of our plans since. The deviations that did occur, such as the drastic proliferation of the “temporary retail” shacks on the gulf front, are not at all bad. Indeed, they are possibly better than the 172

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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 which has emerged as a layout more akin to the lawn at the University of Virginia—it is neither better nor worse, just different. Generally, over time, as the house lots became more expensive, the building envelopes envisioned by the Code became more filled out. The early houses were smaller and articulated into pavilions; the later ones are boxier and in my opinion, conducive to better urbanism. Even the hard-to-implement parts of the plan: the live-work units, the public school, the chapel, have been achieved. Perhaps the most difficult of all, the Krier Tower, is today closer to reality than ever. Much of the outcome of today’s Seaside is due to the personality of the founders as surely as to any of the technical aspects of the plan and Code. Robert and Daryl Dans were true architectural connoisseurs and Seaside now has a series of brilliant architectural pieces that exceed the Code standards. The Rossi, Stern, Chatham, Gorlin, Mockbee, Machado-Silvetti, Hall, Berke, Massengale, Solomon and Merrill buildings (I am listing only the better known names—not just the better buildings) caused Seaside to become a kind of architectural Mecca, quite independent of the urbanism. This was not expected and it is not necessarily for the better. These may be the best buildings, but they have not necessarily led to the best urbanism. Despite the constraints of the Code, these buildings are almost always too idiosyncratic to be the background buildings that the town thrives on. Be that as it may, through their publication, they did make Seaside more visible, which raised the sales prices, which in turn permitted the better workmanship. Too bad for affordability, though. Way gone are the days of the house that I sold for less than fifty thousand dollars! Another unexpected improvement to the plan: Robert, and particularly Daryl, became great incubators of local commercial talent. Seaside has spawned scores of private businesses, some starting as humbly as a barbecue or a flea market table, now the backbone of the town center. It is a credit to the Seaside plan that it had the capacity to absorb them. Regarding capacity to grow which is essential to urbanism: we did envision that Seaside would expand to the north, and when the much bigger Watercolor came along, so influenced by Seaside that it is completely compatible, it was able to attach. So today, this little patch of provincial Florida has more first-rate architecture than anywhere else in Florida—not excluding older and larger cities. This, however, has not been Seaside’s only influence. Seaside’s inception intercepted the then-emerging development pattern of high rise coastal condominiums and row houses with the inland areas abandoned to undervalued second-rate uses and parking lots. The scars of that early disease are still visible nearby. What the Seaside model achieved is to extend the value previously confined to the waterfront in depth. This resulted in a more human and ecological pattern, and also great wealth: a wealth that has been 173

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distributed not just among Robert and his siblings but broadly among realtors, restaurateurs and most hearteningly, the contractors and their craftsmen. Robert and Daryl Davis’s fanaticism gradually raised the standard of craftsmanship, proving bit by bit, over the years, that people will pay for quality design and construction. The crews with which Seaside first started its buildings could hardly hammer a nail or hang sheet-rock straight—the usual. Twenty years later the construction crews, not only at Seaside but throughout the Panhandle, have become masters unsurpassed anywhere in the U.S. This excellence has created wealth for the working people, as they charge well for it. The very latest houses at Seaside are built like ships or cabinets. This workmanship has decanted to the subsequent towns of Rosemary 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 very important project. And important it became if influence is the measure. The influence has been helped along by a much-criticized part of Seaside: that it is “not a real town”—that it is a resort and that the houses are available for rental. Yet it is precisely as a result of the rental program that hundreds of thousands of people have been able to experience what it means to live in a compact, diverse and walkable community. Living in a place is crucial to understanding urbanism; because unlike architecture, urbanism cannot be properly assessed from photographs, not even from a short visit. It requires getting up in the morning and walking out to find the coffee and bread and paper and then having the independence all day long of family members with plenty to do, then shopping for dinner and staying up, in some cases very late, at the square.

The Type III buildings (live–work townhouses) in the center of Seaside. Photo courtesy of DPZ.

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Many suburban people (developers included) have taken the experience back home and implemented what they lived and learned. This was made easier because as a resort, Seaside attempts an ideal. After all, no one displaces themselves for vacation to live as one does daily. Resorts are compelled to be better, utopian even. We continue to design them because they are the closest that we urbanists have to experimental sites. The idealism of a resort can give clarity to a concept. Seaside with sequential residents has become a propaganda machine. A full-time community of everyday living cannot be quite as effective. The criticism that Seaside is a resort we understand, but on balance I approve of its destiny as a demonstration project. Least expected was the way that Seaside took over our lives. Robert and Daryl have lived in Seaside for two decades and defined the modern role of town founders, inducing the software of society and culture as well as the hardware of buildings and infrastructure that mere developers supply. They also proved that it is better business to do one such project for thirty years than three conventional ones for ten each. This has influenced the development industry to no end. As for the planners, the whirlwind of New Urbanism has taken over our lives as well. Without Seaside we may have become architects of a different sort. We like to remember the many designers that Seaside has touched. The process of sequential building design enabled by the Code has involved scores of young architects whose careers are better for it. For us as teachers this has been particularly satisfying.

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DEMOCRACY’S CHALLENGE CITY AND REGION IN DISEQUILIBRIUM

1 Johnson, K. “Take our Poor: Angry Hartford Tells Suburbs.” The New York Times, 1, 85. February 12, 1991. 2 Moran, M. Interview on National Public Radio, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Station. August 23, 1991.

3 Phillips, K. The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath. New York: Random House. 1990. 4 Reich, R. “Secession of the Successful.” New York Times Magazine. January 20, 1991.

5 Peterson, I. “Planned Communities are Multiplying.” The New York Times, Section 10: 1, 11. April 21, 1991.

6 Boles, D. “Reordering the Suburbs,” in Progressive Architecture, May 1989. 78–91. Kelbaugh, D. Editor. The Pedestrian Pocket Book. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 1989. Langdon, P. “A Good Place to Live,” in The Atlantic Monthly. March, 1988. 38–60.

We may have reached the limits of development guided by market responses to the ideals of a privatized society. Accumulating evidence suggests that the ownership of a single-family detached dwelling accessed by private automobiles and situated in self-governing communities located at a safe distance from the economic and social woes of the center city is no longer economically viable for increasing numbers of people. Recently, the City Manager of Hartford, Connecticut, proposed the dispersal of inner city public housing residents to surrounding suburban communities.1 The New Jersey Supreme Court ordered municipalities to provide a “fair share” of affordable housing in their region (the Mount Laurel decisions). The former Mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in filing for municipal bankruptcy protection, declared, “The system isn’t working.”2 The disequilibrium between central cities and their surrounding regions is reaching crisis proportions. It may be seen as the spatial dimension of an economic reorganization to a service economy accompanied by a decade of conservative administrations whose fiscal policies have widened the gap between rich and poor.3 While the wealthy have been able to insulate themselves from the distressed and tense urban centers—“the secession of the successful”4—the suburbs are not immune from the consequences of unplanned development. The impact of environmental destruction, pollution, congestion, and chaotically dispersed land use has raised the cost of doing 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 dissatisfaction with suburban sprawl.5 The Traditional Neighborhood Development advocated by architects Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andrés Duany and the Pedestrian Pocket concept developed by Peter Calthorpe have received careful attention from both popular and professional journals.6 While the present regional discontent may provide a window of opportunity for comprehensive planning efforts, any optimism must be guarded. The historical record suggests that only a commonly perceived national emergency can induce Americans to challenge their deep-rooted ideological antipathy to government intervention in urban and regional development. 176

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This paper traces the evolution of the contradictory pulls of ideology and circumstance on American town planning from the 1909 National Conference on City Planning, where the terms of debate were first framed, to two current developments in New York City—Roosevelt Island and Battery Park City. These two projects offer competing paradigms for future urban development and exemplify a century-long ideological struggle over the role of government in guiding metropolitan development. FRAMING THE DEBATE

By the time the first National Conference on City Planning was held in Washington, D.C. in 1909, the paradigmatic debates that would characterize the profession to the present day were already well formed. While the 43 Conference participants were united in their enthusiasm for the developing “science” of city planning, their views as to the goals and mechanisms for this new field were extremely diverse. Despite general agreement that the planning function ought to shift from private civic and commercial organizations to public commissions, there was considerable disagreement about what this public role ought to be. At issue were two sets of questions. The first asked whether the discipline of planning should focus on improving the physical appearance of cities or on improving the conditions of daily life for their inhabitants. Was the goal of 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 life were due primarily to the systemic failings of a political economy based on private investment or to the individual moral failings of the population. Those who subscribed to the latter view sought relief through building codes and zoning regulations to control the physical fabric of the city, and municipal reform to curb the political power of clubhouse machines.8 Those concerned with identifying and dealing with the under-lying systemic causes of congestion sought more drastic measures. Benjamin C. Marsh, Executive Secretary of the Committee on Congestion of Population, blamed congestion 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 the American city.” PLANNING IN TIME OF CRISIS INDUSTRIAL HOUSING FOR WAR WORKERS

Although even conservative housing reformers were convinced that some degree of government intervention in urban development was necessary, they believed this should go no further than modest regulation of market activity. Only a national emergency—the impact of inadequate housing 177

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7 N.C.C.P. (National Conference on City Planning]. Proceedings of the First National Conference on City Planning. Facsimile edition. Chicago, IL: American Society of Planning Officials. p. 77. 1909.

8 The profession of social work, which developed in parallel and overlapping step with the planning profession, had a similar split. Those who viewed the problems of the poor as moral failings advocated uplift and education. Those who viewed the problem as systemic advocated community organizing. 9 N.C.C.P. (National Conference on City Planning]. Proceedings of the First National Conference on City Planning. Facsimile edition. Chicago, IL: American Society of Planning Officials. p. 105. 1909.

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10 Testimony by leaders such as Homer L. Ferguson, president of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, turned the tide. The Newport News Daily Press of March 9, 1918 carried this account of his testimony before the Senate committee investigating shipyard conditions: In his stirring appearance before the committee, Mr. Ferguson described housing conditions in Newport News as insufferable and he called for immediate action by the Government . . . [He] testified to the alarming conditions at the shipyard where, because of inadequate housing, they were unable to employ enough men for a single shift, even though the yard could and should be operating day and night to turn out the ships so urgently needed. Finally, he warned that such conditions prevailed at all the shipbuilding centers of the nation—and for the same reason. 11 United States Housing Corporation. Report of the United States Housing Corporation. Vol. I edited by James Ford. p.22. 1920. 12 Ibid., p.1. 13 Ibid., p.7. 14 Ibid., p.44.

15 May, C. “Yorkship Village: A Development for the New York Shipbuilding Corporation, Camden, N.J.” Architectural Forum, June. 1918.

conditions on industrial production during World War I—allowed the progressives a brief opportunity to expand the acceptable boundaries of government control of development. Even under this duress it took a series of dramatic appeals by representatives of private industry—shipbuilders and munitions manufacturers—to impel the government into direct provision of housing.10 On June 13, 1918, the Secretary of Labor announced the war-time production measure, stating that “The Government will build, own, control and rent the houses until after the war” (emphasis added).11 Reflecting the prevailing sentiment against permanent government involvement, the enabling legislation gave explicit instructions that “such property shall be sold as soon after the conclusion 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 the construction program. The magnitude of the task was impressive: housing was needed for 292,649 workers in 71 different cities or districts.13 In assuming responsibility for this undertaking, the government had no long term vision for the future of these communities beyond recouping as much of its investment as possible after the war. The planners, on the other hand, under the leadership of Town Planning Division director F.L. Olmsted, Jr., saw the program not only as an emergency measure, but as a demonstration of the potential of comprehensive town planning. They envisioned the developments as “model communities in the sense that they are being studied and will inevitably be copied by the architects and builders of the future.”14 In the planning stages this discrepancy between the planners’ expansive goals and the government’s more restricted ones posed no problem. On the contrary, the government’s overriding concern with recouping their investment and salvaging materials after the armistice led to the decision to build permanent housing of good quality rather than quick temporary shelters. Since the appropriations did not come through until August 1918, only a small part of the construction program was implemented. After the armistice on November 11, 1918, only 22 of the initially projected 83 projects were carried through to completion, with 15 more built on a curtailed basis. The quality of these projects, however, did not escape notice. A contemporary review in Architectural Forum grasped the significance of this commitment of government funds to community development: “The opportunity for the individual to live in surroundings of decency and amenity, so often denied to the man without financial backing, becomes now a matter of national policy.”15 Communities such as Fairview (in Camden, New Jersey) and Hilton (in Newport News, Virginia) along with residential districts such as those in Bridgeport CT and New Brunswick NJ remain socially and economically viable neighborhoods, often in the face of grave deterioration in surrounding areas. 178

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THE DEPRESSION ERA GREENBELT TOWNS

Despite continuing opposition to government intervention in the housing market, the Depression afforded progressive town planners a second opportunity to implement their broader vision of balanced regional growth. This time the economic crisis was so severe—a fourth of the work force was unemployed in 1932—that they were able to go far beyond the scope of the World War I housing projects. Funded under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, the program was intended first and foremost to provide construction jobs for relief workers. Between 20,000 and 30,000 workers participated in the construction of the three new towns built under the program. Greenbelt, Maryland, alone employed over 13,000.16 As in the war worker housing effort, the planners involved in the greenbelt program were interested in pursuing a broad agenda. Guiding the operation was Resettlement Administration chief Rexford Guy Tugwell, whose intellectual affinity with the Garden City ideals of Ebenezer Howard included a belief in planning as a device to implement broader social and economic restructuring of society. Tugwell’s version of the Garden City did not propose fully independent cities but rather a network of suburbs located near major cities on which they depended for employment. Other features of Howard’s “social invention” survived intact: single ownership of land, controlled land values through government ownership and leasing, the establishment of the city as an independent legal and political entity, and the greenbelt itself. In the greenbelt towns, housing was seen as only one aspect of a broader problem. By building independent self-governing cities for the poor, the R.A. confronted the more basic problem of disenfranchisement. The original greenbelt program called for construction of 19 satellite towns close to major cities. As in the earlier case of industrial housing, conservative pressure imposed limits on the scope of development. Just three of the towns were actually built—Greenbelt, Maryland, Green Hills, Ohio (outside Cincinnati), and Greendale, Wisconsin (outside Milwaukee). The R.A. retained ownership until Congress ordered divestiture following World War II, with sale preference given to snug residents and veterans groups. The greenbelt towns are frequently cited as the high point of comprehensive planning in the United States.17 Ironically, although successful government-led effort failed to launch serious regional planning movement in the United States, the lessons were not lost on the British. The greenbelt program 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 the planning debate a moot issue. For the first time, home ownership appeared within reach of every working family. A suburban boom fueled by cheap oil, industrial jobs, and V.A. and F.H.A. mortgages transformed a nation of renters into a solid home-owning majority. By the mid-1960s, however, a 179

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16 Christensen, C. The American Garden City and the New Towns Movement. Ann Arbor, MI: U.M.I. Research Press. 1986.

17 Arnold, J. The New Deal in the Suburbs: A History of the Greenbelt Towns Program, 1935–1954. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. 1971. Christensen, C. The American Garden City and the New Towns Movement. Ann Arbor, MI: U.M.I. Research Press. 1986. Stein, C. Toward New Towns for America. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. 1951. 18 Hall, P. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. London: Basil Blackwell. pp. 164–165. 1988.

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19 H.U.D. (U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development). New Communities: Problems and Potentials. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of H.U.D., 23. 1976. 20 According to a 1976 study, H.U.D. was acquiring Flower Mound (near Dallas, Texas), Jonathan (Minneapolis, Minnesota), Newfields (Dayton, Ohio), Park Forest South (Chicago, Illinois), and Riverton (Rochester, New York). Development was continuing on Harbison (Columbia, South Carolina), Maumelle (Little Rock, Arkansas), Shenandoah (Atlanta, Georgia), and Soul City (Raleigh/ Durham, North Carolina). An environmental lawsuit enjoined further development at CedarRiverside (Minneapolis, Minnesota). Gananda (Rochester, New York) was being phased out as a conventional subdivision. St. Charles, Maryland (Washington, D.C.) was continuing development but was begun as a conventional subdivision in 1964 (H.U.D. 1976). 21 H.U.D. (U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development). New Communities: Problems and Potentials. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of H.U.D. p. 34, 1976.

combination of social, political, and environmental problems forced another look at the need for planning. Central cities were becoming enclaves of lower income minorities; suburbs were frustrated by the proliferation of jurisdictions; and there was growing concern for the environmental consequences of suburban sprawl. A legislative response to these concerns emerged in 1970 as Title VII of the Urban Growth and New Community Development Act. Part A of the legislation directed the President to prepare a national growth report to assist in formulating a national growth policy; part B expanded the program of loan guarantees and grant assistance for new communities, making this aid available to public as well as private developers. In 1970, President Richard 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 of new cities and the rebuilding of old ones.”19 On the surface it appeared that the Title VII program represented the culmination of a 60-year campaign for regional planning under government leadership. Here was a program to channel national growth explicitly based on the English new towns model. Yet by 1975 the program was a shambles and a moratorium was placed on Title VII contract approvals. H.U.D. had funded 13 separate projects with loan guarantees up to $50 million. Of the eight projects started under Title VII and at least partially occupied by December 1976, H.U.D. was obliged to acquire five. One was phased out as a conventional subdivision, another blocked by a lawsuit. Only the Woodlands, outside of Houston, Texas, was holding its own.20 H.U.D.’s own internal evaluation revealed that the program staff was thin on management, finance, construction, and marketing.21 As a result, H.U.D. relied on projections by the developers and their consultants with regard to regional growth rates, market share, and land valuations. Moreover, neither H.U.D. nor the Administration had formulated any national growth policy to guide the staff ’s work in selecting developers for Title VII new communities. Ironies abound in this story of a new initiative gone awry. As long as the government built new communities for purposes other than planning (e.g. emergency war worker housing, depression work relief) it employed the finest planning minds in the nation who did careful research before committing federal funds. When at last the government sponsored a planning program as such, it turned over effective control of the process to the developers themselves. In the end, despite the good intentions of the bill’s sponsors to encourage innovative and balanced development, Title VII was a pipeline of federal funds to private real estate companies whose motives were 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 impact was in the racial and economic integration of the federally funded new communities. Although not all projects embraced the concept with equal 180

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enthusiasm, the results, especially with respect to income mix, were significant.22 CONTEMPORARY PLANNING STRATEGIES: TWO MODELS

The Plan for New York City, published in 1969, described two new communities planned for Manhattan—Roosevelt Island and Battery Park City. The projects shared several important characteristics. Both involved innovative site assembly—the recycling of a derelict island in one case and the creation of landfill in the other. Both projects contained a mix of uses. The residential populations of both projects were described as a roughly even mix of low–middle- and upper-income residents.23 As built, however, the two projects could not be more different. While Roosevelt Island has held to the original intentions as a heterogeneous community, Battery Park City has become an exclusive upper-income enclave. This shift represents more than a dramatic retreat from the democratic premise of the initial proposal. Battery Park City is emblematic of the privatization of planning activity that attended the ideological shifts of the 1980s. The public authority abdicates control over land-use decisions in favor of deal-making and negotiation.24 The process is justified by the economic efficiency of the market-place. In the face of these same pressures, however, Roosevelt Island continues to pursue its original mandate. At stake are two competing views of urban life and social structure.

22 A survey which compared H.U.D. new towns with 13 non-federal communities found only 2,000 subsidized units out of 222,000 in the non-federal communities compared with 27 percent of all housing units in the Title VII projects. Moreover, the satisfaction of residents in subsidized housing in the new communities was found to be substantially higher than for residents in subsidized housing elsewhere (H.U.D. 1976, Appendix D). 23 C.P.C. (New York City Planning Commission). The Plan for New York City. New York: Dept. of City Planning. 1969.

24 Fainstein, S. “Promoting Economic Development: Urban Planning in the United States and Great Britain.” Journal of the American Planning Association. 57. 1: 22–33. 1991.

ROOSEVELT ISLAND

Occupying a narrow 147-acre strip of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, Roosevelt Island is a remarkable community in many respects. Many of these reside in the accomplishments of its physical plan. It is accessed by the only commercial mass transit aerial tramway in the country. Vehicular traffic has been substantially curtailed. It is the only large-scale residential project in the country with an underground garbage collection system. The island is barrier-free and provides a substantial number of units for the physically challenged. The landscaping includes 4l acres of parks and a 4½ mile pedestrian promenade at water’s edge. The provision of such recreational facilities and generous open space is not uncommon in upper-income suburbs or luxury condominiums. What is distinctive about Roosevelt Island is its ability to deliver on its original commitment to a “diverse community.” The General Development Plan written in 1969 established a precise unit break-down by income, with specific provision for the elderly and physically challenged: 30 percent lowincome; 25 percent moderate-income; 20 percent middle-income; and 25 percent market rate units.25 In addition to this income mix, Roosevelt Island has maintained an integrated racial composition, with a 23 percent minority population. Significantly, the median income for Black households on the 181

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25 A.K.R.F. [Allee, King, Rosen, & Fleming, Inc.]. Roosevelt Island Southtown: Final Environmental Impact Statement. New York: Roosevelt Island Operating Corp. 1990.

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26 Ibid., C-10

27 Russo. A. Planner, Roosevelt Island Operating Corp. Personal interview. 26 August. Stein, Clarence S. 1978. Toward New Towns for America. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. 1991.

island is higher than for White ones, suggesting that the island is a residence of choice for middle-income Blacks.26 In Northtown I, the first phase of development, completed in 1977, all 2,142 units received some form of public subsidy. The low-income units were dispersed throughout a large (1,000 units) apartment complex so that only management knows which tenants require the deeper subsidy. In 1984, however, when development resumed after an interruption caused by New York’s fiscal crisis and the Urban Development Corporation’s near bankruptcy, the flow of federal funds for housing subsidies virtually dried up. The developer for the second construction phase, Northtown II, was designated because they had access to enough Section 8 rent subsidy certificates to make 20 percent of the project affordable to low-income households. While this permitted the new development to maintain its mixed income character, conventional market wisdom concentrated all the subsidized units in a single, detached building, with four other new towers devoted to luxury rental units. For the first time, low-income households were segregated by place of residence, leading to some stereotyping of “the Section 8 kids.” In response to this experience, the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation is exploring ways to disperse the subsidized units throughout Southtown, the final phase of development.27 In the absence of federal funds, and with only modest assistance available from city and state sources, Southtown will depend on an internal cross-subsidy where low- and moderate-income units are subsidized by fees from developers of luxury apartments. Because the housing market is still mired in a deep recession, no contracts have been signed for Southtown. The present stalemate illustrates an inherent dilemma in linking the supply of “affordable” housing to the demand for luxury units. BATTERY PARK CITY

28 Deutsche, R. “Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City.” In Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture, edited by Diane Ghirardo. Seattle, WA: Bay Press. 1991. 29 C.P.C. (New York City Planning Commission). The Plan for New York City. New York: Dept. of City Planning. Vol. 4.26 1969.

Battery Park City is a mixed residential and commercial development on 92 acres of landfill in the Hudson River stretching north from Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan. The current development plan is actually the fifth proposal for the site, and the only one whose residential component is entirely based on market rate housing. Although earlier proposals for the site also emphasized luxury housing,28 by the time the Plan for New York City was published in 1969, the housing mix had become equal thirds of low– middle- and upper-income units.29 Battery Park City got off to a slow start. The landfill was not complete until 1977, and by then the city was mired in a recession. In 1979 Richard Kahan, the newly appointed head of the Battery Park City Authority (B.P.C.A.), hired architects/urban designers Alexander Cooper and Stanton Eckstut to produce a new master plan. To convince the N.Y. State legislature to continue its support, this plan had to reconfigure the development not only in its physical dimension but in its legal framework and financing 182

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strategy as well. The new legal approach was to have the N.Y.S. Urban Development Corporation condemn the site and convey the title to B.P.C.A. By transferring ownership to an independent public benefit agency this maneuver exempted the project from New York’s planning and zoning regulations, and from public scrutiny as well. The economic strategy was to attract private financing by eliminating all subsidized housing, offering tax abatements, and relocating the commercial buildings to the center of the project opposite the World Trade Center. Thus the much praised physical character of the Cooper/Ekstut site plan—the reintegration of the landfill into the Manhattan grid—was as much a rediscovery of New York’s history of incremental private development of small land parcels as it was a romantic invocation of its most livable neighborhoods. The physical aspects of the plan have received a great deal of critical acclaim. 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 the exterior spaces are indeed handsomely designed and inviting, the residential construction is less convincing in both physical and social terms. Despite the street and avenue organization of the Master Plan, Battery Park City lacks the heterogeneity of Manhattan’s culturally diverse neighborhoods like Chelsea or the Upper West Side. It has no side streets to speak of and lacks the row houses to leaven the scale of the large apartment buildings. The apartments themselves are relatively small, both in the number and size of rooms, leaving the exterior styling an empty gesture to New York’s grand old apartment buildings. Demographically, the development reflects the flat profile of the narrow stratum that benefited from the 1980s surge in the financial services sector: the new households are young, wealthy, and childless.32 There are few neighborhood services, and families with children had to organize to get a playground built. The social justification for all this private luxury in a publicly aided project is that Battery Park City spins off profits that the City uses to rehabilitate low-income housing in poor neighborhoods like the South Bronx and Harlem. Excess Battery Park City revenues are used to guarantee Housing New York bonds issued by the N.Y. State legislature. Proceeds from the first $210 million in bonds have already been applied to rehabilitate 1,850 units in the South Bronx and Harlem.33 The public/private partnership which generates funds for subsidies through market development reinforces uneven spatial development in the process. The mostly uncritical praise which Battery Park City has received for the excellence of its “public” spaces masks both the exclusion of the public from the decision-making process and the ways in which different groups are affected by the broader development process involved.

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30 Goldberger, P. “Public Space Gets a New Cachet in New York.” The New York Times. Section H, 35. May 22. 1988. 31 Gill, B. “The Skyline: Battery Park City.” The New Yorker. 20 August. 1990 Hiss, T. “At Land’s Edge, a Contentment of Light and Shape.” The New York Times. Section C, 1.18. October 19. 1990.

32 According to a 1988 tenant survey, 85 percent of the residents had incomes over $50,000 and 37 percent over $100.000. Less than 12 percent of the population was under 19 years old or over 65, and over 88 percent of the units contained only one or two people. 73 percent of the apartments are studio and one bedroom (B.P.C.A., 1988). Curiously, in two tenant surveys, the B.P.C.A. has not collected data on the racial composition of the residential population. 33 B.P.C.A. Annual Report. New York: B.P.C.A. 1988. Internal memorandum. April 6. 1987.

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CONCLUSION

The transfer of funds from Battery Park City to the South Bronx parallels the Regional Contribution Agreements (R.C.A.s) that compromise the New Jersey M.L. Laurel decision. The R.C.A.s permit municipalities to buy their way out of 50 percent of their obligation to provide their “fair share” of low- and moderate-income housing. The result benefits willing receiver cities like Newark, Camden, and New Brunswick, but in the process reinforces the very economic and racial spatial stratification they were meant to redress. Whether manifest in the bankruptcy of Bridgeport, Connecticut, or the explosion of pent-up racial rage in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, the spatial segregation of American society is an economic and social time bomb. The failure to develop a strong and systematic approach to town planning and hence orderly regional growth has left us with a pattern of regional development in which speculators erect scattered subdivisions for individuals who seek personal solutions to the crises of urban life by fleeing cities and segregating themselves in small, homogeneous enclaves. Although a consensus is emerging among planners and civic-minded members of the business community that more compact socially and economically mixed communities are a necessity, it is not clear that this consensus can produce a politically effective coalition. The willingness to concentrate on the aesthetic qualities of new developments regardless of their socio-economic composition dilutes the strength of this consensus. Projects such as Seaside, Florida, offer scenographic and tightly concentrated plans that exploit the social appeal of the town center. In the main, however, these new (or borrowed) town planning models do not address issues of equity. Their seductive appeal only fosters the illusion of solving problems by avoiding them. Only a public authority can assure a balanced resolution to the efficiency/ equity dilemma. Government has both the responsibility and the resources to take a long-range view of social and spatial development. Money spent after the fact to clear up the social and economic problems of sprawl and isolation does not add value to the products of America; it only slows the rate at which they deteriorate. Town planning history teaches that societies with a long-term perspective will be both more efficient and more equitable than those that choose to place ideology before experience.

This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 80th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1992. 184

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NEW URBANISM

ELLEN DUNHAM-JONES (2000)

New Urbanism’s unusual combination of neo-traditional styling and progressive attempts at social reform has made strange bedfellows out of its liberal and conservative critics. Bashed from the left as conservative nostalgia and bashed from the right as liberal social engineering, New Urbanism has an uncanny way of attracting uncommon enemies and advocates.1 Urbanism, “new” or otherwise, is far too complex to advance purely right- or left-wing agendas, and critiques of New Urbanism that attempt to dispose of it neatly on ideological grounds tend to be grossly oversimplified. New Urbanism has been able to attract a surprisingly diverse following precisely because it cannot be easily reduced to a single agenda, as its critics claim. 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, but for its radicalism; not for its capitulation to market forces, but for its critical defiance of them; not for its formulaic responses, but for its truly multi-disciplinary approach. I admire New Urbanism’s commitment to a political process of mobilizing and empowering communities to challenge the pattern, regulations and financing of seemingly out-of-control sprawl. Where many of my academic and architect colleagues see Luddite reactionaries resisting progress by indulging in nostalgic simulations of the past, I see committed reformers critical of the status quo debating and sharing multiple strategies and scales of alternative forms of development. In a post-industrial world dominated by the placelessness of digital media and global transactions, I see New Urbanism as a counter-project to postindustrialism. How do we determine if such a position is reactionary or revolutionary? Assuming continued advances in computer and telecommunication technologies, post-industrialism promises peace and harmony through global economic interrelationships and unlimited access to information. These, in turn, will presumably lead to abundant good equitably distributed, laborless leisure and self-determination. This view portrays the decentralized and dematerialized post-industrial world as a very progressive place.2 Architects like Frank Gehry and Bernard Tschumi make extensive use of digitally mediated design processes that expressively endorse the promise of a postindustrial future of unlimited possibilities. Similarly, Rem Koolhaas and 185

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1 For liberal critiques of New Urbanism, see the comments by Margaret Crawford, Detlef Mertins, Michael Hays and Michael Sorkin in the CD-ROM proceedings of Exploring (New) Urbanism, Proceedings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Department of Urban Planning and Design). From the political right, see for example the on-going defense of sprawl and critiques of New Urbanism in the libertarian journal Reason. Their recent articles are summarized in “Sprawl Brawl,” Reason Online (April 8, 1999).

2 Various writers and futurists have contributed to this rosy picture: Daniel Bell, Marshall McLuhan, Alvin Toffler, George Gilder, Thomas Friedman and William Mitchell, etc.

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3 Rem Koolhaas et al., S. M. L. XL. (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 971.

4 From 1980 to 1990, cities with strong downtown markets retained about 40 percent of office growth, while weaker downtown markets lost up to 85 percent of office growth to their suburbs. See William C. Wheaton, “Downtowns Versus Edge Cities: Spatial Competition for Jobs in the 1990s,” Working Paper 45 (Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. Center for Real Estate, 1993).

“Layers” from a photographic series titled “Welcome Home” exploring loneliness in new subdivisions around Atlanta, GA. (Photo by Lee Hughey.)

Peter Eisenman embrace the freedom represented by the speed, mobility and malleability of digital, nomadic, post-industrial culture. Koolhaas argues for a “lite urbanism” that ridicules traditional preoccupations with matter and substance.3 But post-industrialism has a dark side as well. The pace of innovation in digital technologies has been matched by an ever-widening income gap between rich and poor. As the economy has become more integrated globally, it has become increasingly decentralized locally. In U.S. metropolitan areas, 60 to 85 percent of real estate development during the past thirty years has occurred on suburban peripheries.4 The resulting landscape of decentralized, disconnected pockets of office parks, malls, strips, condo clusters, corporate campuses and gated communities clipped onto suburban arterials reflects the values and policies of mobile capital, the service economy, post-Fordist disposable consumerism and banking deregulation. This pattern, expanding at the periphery in ever lower densities, further exacerbates the spatial segregation of rich and poor, consumes open space, requires more and more driving and degrades air, water, land and habitat in the process. New Urbanists see the environmental and social impact of the postindustrial landscape as regressive. They have turned away from this future to promote diverse, compact, mixed-use, mixed-income, transit- and pedestrian-oriented communities. While their critique and concern for social and environmental goals may indeed be viewed as progressive (though hardly new), the prevalence of neo-traditional styling in New Urbanist projects that perpetrates the cultural dominance of traditional elites means they are generally viewed within architectural discourse as conservative. Can New Urbanism open itself more to the progressive aspects of postindustrialism? Can it recognize the positive impact of the global and the digital, and use these to induce more inclusive expressions of design, place and power? I will argue that New Urbanism’s continued development as a progressive force would benefit from a greater recognition of its role in the shift from industrial to post-industrial culture and development. Instead of providing a retreat from the post-industrial present, New Urbanism’s promise lies in creating stronger interchanges between physical neighborhoods and digital networks, in not simply countering post-industrialism but urbanizing it. NEW URBANISM VERSUS SPRAWL

During the 1970s and 1980s, while the American economy was hard at work producing sprawling beltway boomtowns and Edge Cities, architectural discourse focused on divergent theories and their associated styles while professional journals highlighted the individual buildings of star designers. New Urbanism emerged in the early 1990s as one of the few organized forums for an ongoing discussion of alternatives to conventional 186

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suburban development. Various approaches coalesced and diverged, from reconfiguring suburban patterns into new mixed-use towns to infilling underdeveloped locations in existing cities. Some proponents were motivated more by the environmental advantages of walkability and transit-oriented development. Others were more inspired by the social benefits of the renewed emphasis on well-designed public spaces. All recognized a common enemy in the regulations and development practices that perpetuated sprawl. The movement grew as it took on the rewriting of regulations and the partnering with various agencies and disciplinary groups including the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, Fannie Mae, the Urban Land Institute, the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the U.S. Green Building Council and the National Resources Defense Council. The involvement of diverse professionals focused increasing attention on the non-physical aspects of city design, such as community-building programs, affordable mortgage policies and financing structures. Initially recognized for its concern with greenfield new towns, New Urbanism has expanded its attention to urban and suburban infill, most notably through work on HOPE VI public housing projects.5 If sprawl is the post-industrial landscape of private investment, the insistent now, speed, disposability and the temporary contract, New Urbanism counters that by emphasizing that which is public, pre-existing and enduring. New Urbanism urges people to slow down, to get to know their neighbors and to become more connected with their environment. New Urbanists have proposed a now-familiar alternative pattern that recasts the isolated office parks, strip malls and subdivisions into mixed-use, walkable, transit-served districts and neighborhoods oriented around public town centers. Wide cul-de-sacs and wider arterials are replaced with gridded networks of narrow streets that calm and distribute the flow of traffic. Sidewalks, street trees and architectural codes governing the basic profile of the building front treat the space of the street as a figural public space or outdoor room. Front porches, or stoops (depending on the regional architectural history of a place), are intended to enable sociability among neighbors; the close mixing of lot sizes and building types is intended to encourage socioeconomic diversity. Densities from eight to forty dwelling units per acre are sought both as means of increasing social interaction, preserving unbuilt land and wildlife habitat, and supporting shops and transit service. This is more than an alternative template. New Urbanist developments seek to build on the existing identity of a place, rather than allowing it to be determined by ever-changing stores and short-term uses. Unique landscapes, whether streams, forests or wetlands, are preserved and made into identifying or recreational features. Regional building types, materials, landscape and planning strategies are called upon to further link the present to that which has endured in a place. Codes and covenants are intended to sustain 187

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5 Despite the inclusion of projects executed in a variety of styles, scales, densities and locations in books like Peter Katz’s The New Urbanism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), and The Charter of the New Urbanism, Michael Leccese and Kathleen McCormick eds. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999), the neotraditional small town has firmly established itself as the dominant model of New Urbanism in the eye of the public, the architectural press and many C.N.U. members.

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this character, emphasizing predictability instead of post-industrial flux and changeability. STUCK IN THE PAST OR MOVING INTO THE FUTURE?

Three views of an exurban highway interchange: at the present, as it will look with current development patterns, and how it could look if reoriented around its village center and rail station. (Source: New York Regional Plan Association, 1996.)

New Urbanism arose out of its founders’ reformist impulse to improve situations through design solutions. They reject the design autonomy sought by post-structuralist theorists and neo-avant-garde designers. Instead of critiquing culture, New Urbanists engage and redesign it. Moreover, they fervently believe that design is not autonomous but synergistic: Each individual 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 helped attract many designers to the movement, myself included. It has helped to empower designers and non-designers alike to refuse to accept sprawl’s logic of autonomous development as inevitable. Instead, through the power of design, new development becomes an opportunity for radical re-imagining. From Seaside to the New York Regional Plan Association’s aerial views of conventional versus reconfigured development patterns, the early New Urbanist designs were startling precisely because they so radically broke with conventional expectations. Even more revolutionary is the New Urbanists’ willingness to work on regulatory and procedural issues in order to empower their designs and fundamentally change the rules of the game. Based on their successes with mixed-income neighborhoods, the Department of Housing and Urban Development hired the New Urbanists to write the design guidelines for the HOPE VI public housing revitalization grants—a $5 billion program aimed at deconcentrating poverty. Similar partnerships with the Environmental Protection Agency expanded the Smart Growth Network while partnerships with the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the U.S. Green Building

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Council and the Natural Resources Defense Council have resulted in new street standards with greater attention to pedestrian safety and comfort, as well as the development of L.E.E.-N.D., a new system for ranking environmental benefits at the neighborhood scale. Model ordinances for Traditional Neighborhood Developments, form-based codes like the SmartCode, and comprehensive plans are inspiring policy changes across the country, most notably along the Mississippi Gulf Coast where New Urbanists were invited by the Governor to assist in planning the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. Often overshadowed by the architectural media’s attention to individual projects, this collective work by the Congress for the New Urbanism to reform the rules of development continues to effectively challenge the status quo. It could not have happened without the New Urbanists’ strong convictions about the need for change, the possibility of change and the viability of their alternative. Sadly, however, in fighting for change and winning over converts, New Urbanist principles have increasingly stiffened into rules. Types have become models.6 The elasticity and ingenuity of design is increasingly being sacrificed to the need for formulas, easy answers and a recognizable marketing image. There is an odd disconnect between what is exciting about the ambitious New Urbanist agenda and the places New Urbanists claim as successes. While the agenda looks forward to a world of vital neighborhoods and diverse communities, the places themselves seem increasingly frozen in a very singular image of the past; there seems to be little recognition of the value of ongoing change. Even where regional characteristics help particularize the architecture, there is a generic quality to designs that draw almost exclusively on white upper middle-class traditions, and the quiet gentility and formal civic behavior associated with them. As New Urbanism has become more successful, its designs have become more reactionary and less revolutionary. What happened to the spirit of invention and discovery that the changing of the regulations was meant to empower? Has New Urbanism become a part of the machine it set out to resist, simply another formula to replace the earlier one? New Urbanism is premised on the idea that designers armed with strong knowledge of good precedents can translate the movement’s simple principles into a masterplan and images from which to generate design codes in a relatively short time—during a seven- to ten-day charrette, for example. The expectation has been that the charrette introduces urban variety through the inclusion of many hands, and that the execution of the design by many builders over a period of time will introduce architectural variety. However, as New Urbanism moves into the mainstream, production builders and financing entities seek to undertake projects in ever larger increments. Developing in larger increments means more repetition of 189

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6 In his Dictionnaire of 1832, Quatremère de Quincy distinguished between the type, of which many permutations are possible, and the model, which is repeated precisely. The shift from interpretable design codes to pattern books, discussed later, exemplifies this change.

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7 There are notable exceptions. Hedgewood Properties is the developer and production builder for Vickery, a Greenfield T.N.D. in Cumming, GA, with almost no repetition of house designs and unique public spaces distinguished by their preserved trees. The result is a place with both a strong identity and surprising variety.

models, rather than development of typological variations.7 The bigger New Urbanism gets, the more it repeats itself. Seaside is an expensive resort hotel. It cannot be the poster child for New Urbanism. But, in fact, it got so many things so right. It is infused with a respect for tradition and feeling for place, but never allowed those lessons to squelch a love of design and innovation. Even though a non-coded common interest in Victorian architectural language settled into the place, it still speaks in varied voices. Akin to post-Fordist mass customization, each house riffs jazzily on familiar themes. There is a far greater balance between individual expression and a unified communal identity than in many later New Urbanist developments. Conversely, at projects like Celebration, the use of pattern books, intended to raise the quality of the work of production builders while keeping costs down, has resulted in far greater uniformity than at Seaside. Designers’ efforts to tweak, change, customize and improve the world no longer seem welcome. I worry that as New Urbanism becomes more focused on formulaic recreations of the past, it will lose its commitment to design and fall short of providing for the post-industrial future. New Urbanism needs to think more creatively about how to use new technologies to create a future that rises to its challenge of simultaneously addressing the larger scale of the region, where characteristics of the land and ecosystems might dictate broad development patterns, and the smaller scale of the neighborhood, in which varying degrees of variety and individual expression might be encouraged. GRASPING THE POST-INDUSTRIAL FUTURE

8 Some research indicates that the growth in telecommuting is expected to be greatest in people who telecommute three to four days a week and visit traditional offices on another day. These workers cannot really choose to live anywhere; they still must live within commuting distance of their workplace. New Urbanism’s stress on the availability of transit may be an especially strong attraction to this group of part-time commuters. See “Alternative Workplace Strategies,” Wharton Real Estate Review, 1:1 (Spring, 1999). William J. Mitchell predicts that the emerging wired generation will gravitate to precisely this kind of lively twenty-four-hour neighborhood. William J. Mitchell, E-topia (Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. Press, 1999).

Perhaps New Urbanism has written off the promise of a post-industrial future too quickly. Do the digital and the global have to work against placemaking and result in decentralized, economically segregated, consumerist sprawl? Certainly not, and this is where there remains room for design innovation. Many New Urbanist developments are heavily wired and are already attracting the digerati who can choose to live anywhere. New Urbanism offers people working all day at computer screens easy opportunities to take a break from technological interfaces. People-filled places and natural habitats are a short walk away, accessible without using a car. Many of the 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 telecommuting, computer software and digital networks might more radically reconfigure buildings, neighborhoods and regions. As sociable, local neighborhoods become overlaid with highly used global information networks they are likely to foster ever-more flexible, hybrid building types—such as new combinations of retail and 190

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services, entertainment and education facilities, and living and working. Like the now-ubiquitous wifi-coffee shop’s successful combination of hightech and high-touch, we may soon see more organic farms incorporated into business centers. This mixing and integrating of activities is consistent with New Urbanist principles and in many cases can be easily woven into traditional neighborhoods, but it requires new approaches to flexible building design, development financing and land-use regulation. Taking full advantage of the new technology and economy requires a willingness to further adapt neotraditional typologies, even to develop new ones. For example, New Urbanists have done a better job at integrating retail and residences than workplaces and residences. More thought could be given to converting office parks into mixed-use urban neighborhoods, using skinny floorplate buildings with incubator office space in neighborhood centers, and designing live–work units that allow for the running of a small business (with dual entries, accommodation of delivery services and variously sized office suites/workshops). And just as New Urbanists think about the benefits of the corner store, they could consider providing neighborhood-based telecommuting, delivery-coordination and business support centers. While analysis of regional vernacular building materials and typologies can go a long way toward helping New Urbanists design in relation to climate and place, New Urbanists would also do well to consider the newer digital tools that allow designs to be more specifically responsive to their particular places. Innovative uses of geographical information systems, computational fluid dynamics modeling and traffic modeling programs can be used to better understand the specific wind, sun, drainage and transportation patterns of places. Such digital information can be extremely useful in designing plans and green building designs that are more place-specific and environmentally responsible.9 Some New Urbanists are already finding innovative ways to use digital technology to empower local voices in the process of design and construction. Peter Calthorpe recently posted growth scenarios for Salt Lake City on the internet and got 17,000 citizens to vote their preferences. In recent decades, many sectors of the industrial economy have employed computation to better coordinate supply and demand and produce more consumer-responsive high-quality, automated, small-batch, varied product lines. Sophisticated market monitoring and analysis enabled this kind of “mass customization” to be linked to consumer preferences. Though these techniques have been used to develop niche markets where fashion serves to differentiate consumer identity and exacerbate class and economic differences, they might also be put to the service of New Urbanism. In a small step toward “mass customization” in housing construction, Armonics, an Indianapolis-based New Urbanist architecture firm, used 191

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Sales Center at New Town at St. Charles, MO, a new urbanist community designed by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (Photo by Steven Patterson.) 9 To help Los Angelenos establish neighborhood centers, Marc Futternan wrote a program called “Ped-GRiD” that layers information about pedestrian activities onto a G.I.S. database. Analyzing diverse data such as how many beds in a hospital, traffic counts and parks, Ped-GRiD can predict which locations will better support pedestrian activity and where community-building development should be directed. He hopes to make the technology available to individuals, who could then upload their own information to the database and conduct their own research as a form of teledemocracy. See Dan Damon, “Driven to Despair,” Guardian-Online (July 15, 1998).

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10 Since the original publication of this article, several New Urbanists have collaborated with modular and manufactured housing producers both as a means of reducing costs (such as the Katrina Cottage “starter home” designed by Marianne Cusato and sold as a kit-of-parts from Lowe’s Home Improvement Stores) and as a means of providing customizable variety within typological continuity.

digital software to expand and diversify the number of builders involved in a large housing project. They adapted “Expedition,” a program commonly used for construction management, to enable them to monitor numerous contracts (fifty-seven in all, ranging from $2,000 to $2.8 million) on a 200-unit HUD HOPE VI housing project. Many of the contractors were from the local area and consisted of one- or two-person teams. In addition to contributing a significant amount of variation in finishes and details to the completed homes, this process recirculated dollars in the community and provided opportunities for disadvantaged businesses.10 New Urbanism is not a one-size-fits-all model. It is a forum for sharing strategies about a variety of models that implement the principles of its charter. As such, the Congress of the New Urbanism is already a postindustrial information exchange. The challenge for New Urbanists is to continue 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 of post-industrialism. New Urbanism’s critique of the destructive and regressive aspects of post-industrialism and sprawl provides the movement with tremendous strength. New Urbanism’s privileging of local places, connecting to existing conditions, face-to-face communication, communal interaction and preservation of unmediated landscapes and natural habitats, resonates especially effectively at a time when these seem threatened by post-industrial forces. However, as a counter-project to post-industrialism’s doctrine of speed, mobility and malleability, New Urbanism should be wary of being overly committed to replicating the slow, the fixed and the enduring. The more perfect the recreation of the past, the more inflexible it becomes for dealing with the future, with diversity and with less perfect neighboring conditions. New Urbanism was initially proposed as a forum for promoting democratic tolerance for difference, not a tyrannical consensus. Instead of the absolute order and lockstep conformance of perfectly unified 1970s-vintage planned urban developments, New Urbanism was premised on a somewhat looser process of incorporating multiple voices into the system, with the intent of producing more variety—albeit within strict constraints at the interface between public and private space. In confronting the realities of working with production builders’, NIMBYs’, public agencies’ and consumers’ and bankers’ expectations of predictability, New Urbanism has lost much of that original flexibility, diversity and choice. New Urbanists would benefit from remembering that there is a virtue in the inclusion of the imperfect and the unfixed; a bit of peeling paint and the occasional purple house remind us that we are not slaves to consensus and conformity. Similarly, a fervent and creative embrace of post-industrial opportunities 192

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and tools may help New Urbanism avoid becoming a slave to consensus and conformity. Enriching the interface between neotraditional neighborhoods and the internet may provide the opportunities for New Urbanism to better connect 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 for republication. It has been updated with slight modifications. 193

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INTEGRATING URBANISMS NEW URBANISM Growing places between New Urbanism and Post-Urbanism CARL GIOMETTI (2006)

1 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1969).

2 Robert Fishman, Post Urbanism vs. Re-Urbanism: Peter Eisenman vs. Barbara Littenberg and Steven Peterson, Michigan Debates on Urbanism, Vol. III (Ann Arbor, MI: The Regents of the University of Michigan, 2005).

Thinking has its strategies and tactics too, much as other forms of action have. Merely to think about cities and get somewhere, one of the main things to know is what kind of problem cities pose, for all problems cannot be thought about in the same way. Which avenues of thinking are apt to be useful and to help yield the truth depends not on how we might prefer to think about a subject, but rather on the inherent nature of the subject itself. Jane Jacobs 1 The city is the culmination of the human condition, a manifestation of utopian ideas and practical policy. The ideas guiding the city down different “avenues of thinking” are as diverse as the people who reside in them. The city has the power to absorb and reflect whatever theory is being thrust upon it. 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 PostUrbanism describe current ideas of the existence of a city. This paper will outline a possible “next idea”; keeping some of the thoughts of each, while discarding those that no longer apply. The two schools of thought often appear at odds with each other; however, when treated as ingredients they actually make up a more complete idea of urbanism. The recent Michigan Debates on Urbanism created dialog among many seemingly disparate ideas of urbanisms. What always emerged, despite whatever disagreements the participants may have had, was recognition that there is no right answer to designing a city; we can only hope to ask the right questions.2 Negotiating a place between New Urbanism and Post-Urbanism may or may not lead to any new solutions, but it may raise better questions as to how we can form a more integrated urban theory. NEW URBANISM

3 Jane Jacobs, The Death And Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1969).

The most popular of the recent urban movements is New Urbanism. Its theoretical foundation relies upon creating lively neighborhoods that possess diverse styles of living. Constructed upon Jane Jacobs’s idea of “organized complexity” a city, neighborhood, or town is a complex organism consisting of interconnected parts.3 The New Urbanist theories concerning “community,” as both an idea and a physical object, have been mainstreamed into planning practice. 194

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The practitioners of New Urbanism have expanded beyond theory and many explicit design “manuals” exist on how to execute the ideals of the New Urbanist. These manuals have shaped a multitude of plans throughout the country. Unfortunately, New Urbanist developments are typically enormous, over-planned communities with little variance in architectural or economic style. Even Peter Calthorpe, a well-known proponent of New Urbanism, questions whether New Urbanism has become a style rather than a set of open-ended principles.4 Reasons for this may arise from the difficulty of executing a project of truly spontaneous diversity. Diversity is only achievable by differentiations in several urban qualities, particularly time. Certain roles, such as lower income housing and local retail, are difficult to fulfill in new construction.5 It has proved problematic to create truly mixed-use, mixed-income developments. These sorts of purposes will be 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 enormous scale (this business model is often referred to as the Wal-Mart model). As Modernism demonstrated, large urban renewal projects are inappropriate and in conflict with ideas of neighborhood and economic growth. Therefore, New Urbanism copes with projects that are just as architecturally sterile and economically unsustainable as its Modernist predecessors were. These projects attract labels of being “nostalgic” or “old-fashioned” and disappoint those, like Peter Calthorpe and other founders of the Congress for New Urbanism, who see their ideas gone awry. A healthy city is not nostalgic. It may contain elements that represent a previous period but imitation of the past produces stagnation and devolution. From a theoretical perspective, New Urbanists seem “too ready to return to the old city.” Critics point to those such as Leon Krier for an extreme case of the historical approach to urbanism. Although Krier is a fringe element, his positions are worth noting. While they may seem absurd under most circumstances, his schemes must serve as a warning to whole-heartedly accepting historical models of urbanism. This point is the most relevant criticism for New Urbanism. Historical models are useful as lessons for the future, not determinations of it. Moreover, no lesson has been more valuable than understanding the sensitivity needed when making changes to the urban fabric, as each building serves is own particular, and often unrecognizable, purpose; and regardless of whichever period of urbanism one aligns with, a good neighborhood is a terrible thing to destroy. POST-URBANISM

If there is to be a “new urbanism” it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of 195

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4 Robert Fishman, New Urbanism: Peter Calthorpe vs. Lars Lerup, Michigan Debates on Urbanism, Vol. II (Ann Arbor, MI: The Regents of the University of Michigan, 2005). 5 Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (New York: Random House, 1969).

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6 Rem Koolhaas, “What Ever Happened To Urbanism?” in Theories and Manifestos of Contemporary Architecture, Charles Jenks & Karl Kropf (Chichester, West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1997). 7 Jacques Derrida, “The Decentering Event in Social Thought” in Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, Charles Lemert (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). 8 Douglas Kelbaugh, Repairing the American Metropolis (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2002).

9 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1960).

uncertainty . . . Since it is out of control, the urban is about to become a major vector of the imagination. Rem Koolhaas 6 The center is not the center. Jacques Derrida 7 If New Urbanism is looking to a city’s past for guidance, Post-Urbanism is looking beyond the present for its direction. “Post-Urbanism” is a term coined by Douglas Kelbaugh to represent those who believe that urbanism is an idea of the past or will soon become of the past.8 Unlike the term “New Urbanism” which represents specific, agreed-upon ideals, Post-Urbanism refers to a group of people practicing design around a shared philosophical foundation. He aligns the writings of Rem Koolhaas, among others, to this classification. Adjectives shared among these philosophies are disconnectedness, placelessness, and the notion that there is no context. Cities are no longer centers but a “gray” area lacking edges or boundaries. Those who fit the classification of “Post-Urbanist,” beside Koolhaas, include names such as Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, and Daniel Libeskind; although most seek to refrain from any association as such. They earned the moniker of being “post-” or “anti-” urban by designing buildings that act to differentiate, a sculptural reaction against the urban fabric. Armed with the philosophies of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, their architecture exploits the loaded adjectives used repeatedly in postmodern discussion. A building is not bound by its function or its geography. There is no such thing as context, nor is there anything to be referred. This ideology is the zeitgeist mentality, the current spirit of the age. Buildings respond to technological achievements that allow people to become more connected, while removing the necessity for physical proximity. At first, it may seem difficult to discern how a design philosophy that preaches the destruction of contexts is necessary in an urban philosophy. Post-Urbanism is necessary for the creation of the unique, the departure from communal context. If New Urbanists’ developments resemble the “Wal-Mart model” of architecture, Post-Urbanists are the Gucci of architecture. Post-Urbanists are the trendsetters, the icons, and signature practitioners. Their rejection of context has given its architects incredible proficiency at creating places. Put another way, in their rejection of the ideological “centers” of architecture, they end up creating even stronger ones. Across the world, cities display the place-making effects of having a Post-Urbanist building. Bilbao, Chicago, and Los Angeles all have a Gehry building—an abstract, entirely unique piece of architecture that is used for its iconic value. These buildings are the points of reference that Kevin Lynch championed.9 The “post-urban” object, as it is described here, can be traced throughout time: it possesses permanence. It is a representation of an urban 196

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condition at a particular point in time.10 However, like its counterpart, PostUrbanism is not without its shortcomings as well. Columbus, Indiana has long been visited for its unique array of architecture. It boasts buildings by Eero Saarinen, Harry Weese, I.M. Pei and Richard Meier, among many others. Each building stands out as an extraordinary architectural achievement. However, despite the quantity and quality of the numerous designs, the town remains architecturally stagnant, but in a rather odd way. By constructing individual pieces that each demands its own attention, the city becomes a virtual gallery of architecture, something meant only to be experienced in a certain environment, a Disneyland of architecture. Absent is any architectural contrast in quality, where Saarinen’s church might emerge and stand gracefully among a real urban fabric and truly create a place. Instead, it is engaged in a battle with every other building for dominance over the area. This conflict is akin to placing two Eiffel Towers right next to each other. In this case, it is more like placing fifty together. The over abundance of defining elements diminishes their effectiveness to a null value. To use Robert Venturi’s language “. . . the exception has become the rule.” The context of Columbus is to have no context, the Post-Urbanist dream. The absence of an urban fabric prevents the city from developing community and architecture from gaining an identity.

10 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1982).

AN URBAN TYPOLOGY

To begin the formulation of a theoretical intermediary between these two, a language is useful to guide the dialog of the city and define roles within the urban whole. Aldo Rossi undertook the task of analytically dissecting a city and defining the role of each of its parts. He argued that the city is a collection of two principal types of architecture: dwellings and primary elements.11 The satellite picture of Paris (right) defines these two elements better than a textual definition. There is a collection of buildings and block layouts, which are all slightly similar to each other, generally describable as “ordinary.” Departures from this understood pattern are present, signified with architecture of a different scale, quality, or aesthetic. While it may seem problematic to rely on a structuralist dialect to describe the chaotic forces apparent in a city, Rossi’s system has some distinct advantages. Rossi articulated this condition: “In order to study the irrational it is necessary to take up a position as a rational observer. Otherwise, observation and eventually participation give way to disorder.”12 One of the strengths of Rossi’s idiom is that while dissecting different parts of a city into its components, the actual application of his typologies is an open-ended system. That is, the idea of dwellings and primary elements is more ephemeral than it is explicit. The syntactical structure, like a city 197

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Satellite image of Paris.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

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13 Lars Lerup, After the City (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 2000).

14 Ibid.

15 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1969).

itself, can evolve through time while still maintaining its pertinence and applicability. Dwellings are the present representation of a city, an item that is not unique but responds to the entirety of a superior structure. The dwelling builds what is to be the urban fabric. Lars Lerup employed a French word, meme, to describe the way dwellings are constructed. Meme is reproduction through imitation. He states, “Memes help affect our values. They do not exactly determine our values, but direct and constrain them.”13 It is this process by which the urban fabric is created and sustained. The values of the city are established by the vernacular and the dwellings arise out of the need to “summarize the city’s image.” The dwelling embodies the values of the culture that it houses. For example, the suburban dwelling exploits mobility and privacy, creating “American distance” between people.14 The dwelling is 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 its brownstones, Chicago its bungalows, San Francisco its cascading row houses. Rossi titles the second of the two principal city typologies as the primary element. The primary element is the artifact of a city, the “element(s) capable of accelerating the process of urbanization in a city.” It is a complete entity unto itself: it does not require an immediate aesthetic relation to its surroundings. In fact, primary elements are most often considered such because of their disassociation with previously established patterns. The idea of the primary element gaining its distinction by emerging from the dwelling demands a brief mention of the relational architecture. Often architecture is judged solely on its artistic achievement, its ability to dissent from the ordinary. After all, how often will a building achieve notoriety for its ability to “fit in”? This criterion limits the title of “good architecture” to that of primary elements, those buildings that depart from the context. However, the ability of a piece of architecture to satisfy its role within the urban form should be given equal, if not greater merit. Jane Jacobs first described the value of the “plain, old brick building” in terms of its socioeconomic function. It provides cheap rent, encouraging small businesses and the eventual development of an interconnected neighborhood. Old buildings are small business incubators and can be more valuable than any signature piece of architecture.15 The dwelling establishes the field from which the primary element will depart. A place cannot be unique without the ordinary. These plain buildings will never appear on the cover of architecture magazines, but a theory of urbanism that does not value the vernacular of an area is simply incomplete. Re-engaging the two presiding theories now creates a more complete picture of what is urban. New Urbanism describes the life of a dwelling, the common everyday interconnectedness that allows a city to function. The approach to understanding this condition is similar to that of Bernard 198

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Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects but brought to a contemporary context. Dwelling spaces are not artistic expressions; they respond to other universal ideas. The Dogon village Rudofsky studied is the result of social, economic, environmental, and a slew of other forces. The interpretation is the responsibility of the whole population. Perhaps this is a reason for New Urbanism’s widespread acceptance outside of the planning and architectural professions. It is responding to the commonly held ideals that shape the universal nature of our environment. Post-Urbanism is then sufficient to explain the primary element, the particular, artistic interpretation. It produces artifacts that will either question or celebrate the execution of the universal. This is the architect’s realm. The ability of a city to provide opportunities for the particular to emerge is incredibly important, especially when discussing the growth of a city. THE GROWTH OF A CITY’S ARCHITECTURE

The joint resolution between New Urbanism and Post-Urbanism is more than a theoretical compromise. The interplay between the two can test a city’s architectural life. The appearance of contextcreating and context-departing buildings tracks the rise and fall of an urban area. For an area to grow into a city it must have some original structure: in other words, it must have a collection of people. Upon the incorporation of a town or village, the existing structures become its dwelling. At this point the goal of the city must be to grow worthy of a primary element. While it exists in this “seedling” form, it draws architectural resources from outside areas. It does not possess the maturity to develop its own architecture. When a city begins to diversify its fabric, it earns a primary element. That is, when an aspect of its culture grows unique to that of a greater whole, a piece of architecture will be constructed to serve as an artifact, freezing that uniqueness in time.16 The evolutionary process of creating dwellings to earn new unique elements is perhaps the most explosive innovating force in the architecture of a city. However, this process is not without precedent. For some time, economists have understood this model as “import replacement.”17 For example, an area is developing an industry around the production of coasters. The local craft of making coasters is sought after worldwide. While the town is the center of the coaster-making world, it lacks industries to create drinks to place on the coasters, so must import them. Eventually, a perceptive businessman thinks that perhaps the people in this town would like to have their own glasses to place upon their world famous coasters. Therefore, he builds a shop making various glasses that work in conjunction with the coasters. His business becomes popular and the town no longer needs to import glasses to place on its coasters. It has 199

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16 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1982).

17 Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (New York: Random House, 1969).

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18 Carl Condit, Chicago, 1910– 1929: Building, Planning, and Urban Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

19 Carl Condit, Chicago, 1930–70: Building, Planning, and Urban Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

absorbed an import, diversified its economy, and is now searching for another import. The next import could be cup holders or perhaps paper towels to clean the unfortunate spill. If this process continues and compounds, as it does in growing cities, the town will be developing new industry after new industry, perhaps even over achieving its original businesses. This growth, however, did not occur until it produced something other than its beloved coaster. The ability of a city to import new types of architectural elements into its own model and then replace it with another import is a measurement of a city’s vibrancy. Every populated area will possess its own dwellings, 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 during some period of prosperity. Chicago during the late 1800s and early 1900s was departing from its bungalow context more rapidly that perhaps any other city at that time.18 London, Paris, Rome, and many others all had similar periods. All, at one point, were smaller, less diverse towns that grew because they were able to create unique primary elements and then rapidly build on the strength to construct another one. Because of their role as the symbol of a culture’s pervasiveness, the creation of primary elements is also a good indicator as to the health of a city. Returning to Chicago, in the early part of the 1900s, the Loop was the center of all economic activity in the American Midwest. The city grew at incredible rates, as evidenced by the rapid construction of primary elements. Architectural imports were absorbed and replaced quickly. The Tribune Building competition gathered ideas from throughout the architectural spectrum where they battled each other for primacy on Chicago’s turf. German architect Mies van der Rohe took his ideas of Modernism to the city, and created some of the best artifacts that remain of this period. As in most cities, the growth eventually slowed, and Chicago ceased to replace its architectural imports with new ones.19 Architects began to copy each other and created memes. That is, instead of new artifacts being created, the process stalled. From this point, the city began to attempt to build the vernacular support for new unique elements. Often excluded from these histories is the role of the dwelling, the neighborhood. During this same period, Chicago was increasing in population faster than any city previously had. The influx of people demanded the expansion of the dwelling space. Immigrants of all nations stitched 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 a direction correlation to the amount of meaningful opportunities to depart from it.

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FORMULATING STRATEGIES

Armed with the joint theories of New and Post-Urbanism, it is necessary to look how they may shape the future, not simply explain the past. Recently, few topics have received as much attention as suburbia. Cities have struggled for years to cope with the transition into becoming a region. At the time Rossi authored The Architecture of the City he set forth three scales with which to study a city. The levels were: 1 The scale of the street, including the built areas and empty spaces that surround it; 2 The scale of the district, consisting of a group of blocks with common characteristics; 3 The scale of the entire city, considered as a group of districts.20 In the present day, a fourth scale must be added:

20 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1982).

4 The scale of the region, an area made up of a city and its subordinate areas. By adding this new level, Rossi’s hierarchical system of describing an area still pertains. Certain suburbs are dwelling areas, the bedroom communities, each imitating the other with slight variation, the meme. Others, due to some unique circumstance, become centers. Whether it is a center of retail or entertainment or whatever functions it specializes in is irrelevant. The center-suburb is the primary element for the suburban region. The individual suburb can be analyzed using the same criteria. In addition to the various social and environmental arguments, suburban development has been criticized for its lack of place. It is an endless, undulating row of strip developments and detached single-family houses. Only recently, and mostly thanks to New Urbanism, have areas such as the suburban central business district (C.B.D.) or transit-oriented development (T.O.D.) come to exist. These developments enclose areas of density and diversity in a suburban setting, a “pedestrian pocket.”21 They begin to develop street life and other urban characteristics. These developments could perhaps represent the maturity of the suburb. The suburb creates an artifact by growing a portion of city life. Suburbs have always been characterized as a sort of thief to the city. Businesses relocate to suburban locations while people move outward in search of open space. Rather than labeling the suburb as detrimental to a city, it is more appropriate to view it as something that is benevolent to the urban area. Therefore, it is the ultimate achievement for a suburb to create its own center, sub-city life in a suburban setting.22 This idea changes the role of the architect in suburbia. Rather than attempting to change the patterns of life set forth by universal values, the 201

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21 Douglas Kelbaugh ed., The Pedestrian Pocket Book: A New Suburban Design Strategy (New York: 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 elements playing the role of the Post-Urbanist. Reworking Rossi’s words, a primary element is that which will accelerate the suburbanization of an area: that is, an element that recognizes its own local identity while paying homage to the greater whole. Through this acceptance, the suburb can reinforce the identity of the city and region. The relationship of architecture and city to the modern suburb is still in its infancy; perhaps maturation will bring greater understanding as to the opportunities that exist. The city and its relatives are constant interplays between the particular and the universal. It is a field for theories to battle at any scale, whether it is that of a park or that of a region. As Douglas Kelbaugh noted while he was moderating the Michigan Debates, the series gave birth to new types of “urbanism.” He attributed this to the complexity that is inherent when discussing a subject such as the city. Cities are guided by urbanisms with all varieties of suffixes and prefixes, each one bringing a different understanding to the organized complexity that is a city. The most valuable “next” idea will be the one that continues to meld different thoughts and observations into a more integrated urban theory.

23 Lebbeus Woods, “Manifesto”, in Theories and Manifestos of Contemporary Architecture, Charles Jenks & Karl Kropf (Chichester, West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1997).

I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky, I cannot know your name. Nor can you know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.23 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank all my friends from Miami University for many extended nights discussing the nature of architecture, cities, and life. I would also like to thank my family, especially Alison, for waiting two years for this paper.

This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 94th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2006. 202

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REM KOOLHAAS’S WRITING ON CITIES Poetic perception and gnomic fantasy

POST URBANISM

WILLIAM S. SAUNDERS (1997)

Rem Koolhaas, in his writing about cities, dares much, falters much, and achieves much. If he dared less, he would falter less and give less. His achievements—astute, unconventional, poetic perceptions of urban realities—at times 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 and unboxable. On the one hand a fiercely tough realist, despising nostalgia or any other wishful thinking, he is, on the other, a fantast, a surrealist, also fierce about his right to create ex nihilo, fierce in his conviction that a world constructed to satisfy human desire can and should supersede the natural world that common sense calls real. Koolhaas the poetic realist has more to offer us, in his writing, than Koolhaas the fantasist; this latter Koolhaas can, in fact, display some of the megalomania that Koolhaas sees in Le Corbusier and believes is endemic to most highbrow architecture. Koolhaas the poet of perception and Koolhaas the pseudopoet of fantasies mingle throughout his writing from Delirious New York to S,M,L,XL.1 The sharper, more perceptive, and instructive Koolhaas (the focus of the last part of this essay), like a journalist (as he once was), focuses on the concrete (this place, this history) and not the abstract or categorical (Bigness, Urbanism). However, he is a poetic journalist in that he realizes his material with feeling and intuition, giving us dreams that ring true. Koolhaas is at his unreductive best in the essays “Globalization,” “Field Trip,” 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 specific experiences and observations, rather than in essays like “Bigness” and “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?” which make absolute, monolithic, and ultimately simplistic claims (even on behalf of complexity). Koolhaas’s poetic/gnomic perception of cities can be seen to follow a line of representations including, in the English language, William Blake’s “dark, Satanic Mills,” Charles Dickens’s London, and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. It is a mistake to approach this kind of writing demanding the kind of careful historical accuracy that one would expect of conventional or academic historical writing. Disputing the details would be pedantic, for Koolhaas, like these other writers, wants to register the larger underlying truths and is willing to take poetic license with history, as long as those larger perceptions are on the mark and being effectively served.2 203

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“Luna Park at Night, Coney Island, N.Y.” Koolhaas has failed to demonstrate convincingly hints of the sublime in the mere extravagance of this fantasy world. (Courtesy of the Monacelli Press, from Delirious New York, p. 40.)

1 Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994; originally published by Oxford University Press, 1978). Rem Koolhaas et al., S,M,L,XL, (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995).

2 In a conversation with George Baird published in Summer 1996 GSD News, Koolhaas remarks that it would be pedantic to include footnotes in much of his writing because it is more like dreams than history.

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3 S,M,L,XL, 206.

4 Ibid., 871.

5 Ibid., 199.

All this does not mean, however, that poetic writing cannot or should not be measured for any kind of truthfulness—that, following Roland Barthes or Jacques Derrida or Jean Baudrillard, the vitality and interest of the vision or 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 its responsibility to realities beyond the writer’s psyche, even though the best measure of this quality might be not “factuality” but rather the presence or absence of the author’s self-deception, his ability to distinguish, among his own 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 automatically profound. Koolhaas overreads and romanticizes many of the urban phenomena that he at the same time so sharply and originally perceives: Coney Island, skyscrapers, Manhattan(ism), congestion, Radio City Music Hall, the Berlin Wall, 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 opposite extreme and becomes a gullible, bedazzled idealizer of the American and associated phenomena: blankness, the ordinary, the unself-conscious, the self-indulgent, the ugly, the crude, the banal. In “The Terrifying Beauty of the Twentieth Century,” he calls edge-city conditions “ridiculously beautiful” 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 understand becoming jaded with postmodernist architecture and with the burden of European tradition to the point of angry revolt, this last response has pushed revolt into unreason. As an iconoclast of pretensions, a despiser of moralism (from his sense of what is more truly moral), and a Nietzschean who prefers vital evil to conformist goodness, Koolhaas can be devastating but salubrious. Who else has such a biting sense of how architects can fool themselves into feeling heroic and powerful? Who does not long feel an acute nostalgia for types who could, no more than 15 years ago, condemn (or was it liberate, after all?) whole areas of alleged urban desperation, change entire destinies, speculate seriously on the future with diagrams of untenable absurdity, leave entire auditoriums panting over doodles left on the blackboard, manipulate politicians with their savage statistics—bow ties the only external sign of their madness? 5

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Who else resists knee-jerk negativism about figures like John Portman and can therefore see complexity where others see only stereotypes to scorn? But it is in the name of this worldly realism that his romanticization, even sentimentalization, of the banal is justified, and the achievements, however localized, of recent “highbrow” architecture and urban design (for instance that of Rafael Moneo and the city of Barcelona) are neglected. In Delirious New York, Koolhaas’s basic romanticization is of fantasy itself. Built form that plays out fantasies of wished-for states of mind or lifestyles is glorified for its putative freedom, and in the process, the deprivation of more reliable fulfillment than that self-indulgent fantasy can provide is overlooked. In this way, Koolhaas participates in a key weakness of poststructuralist thinking: Without a belief in the knowability of otherness, desire becomes onanistic, and inner life lacks imagination’s grasping for fulfilling engagement with the nonself. This confusion of freedom with caprice (the Italian capriccio perhaps conveys the sense of footloose fantasy better), this linked assumption that a predetermined (designed) environment is a limitation, not an enablement or a vitalization, has skewed and cramped Koolhaas’s entire intellectual career. “Architecture is monstrous in the way each choice leads to the reduction of possibility. It implies a regime of either/or decisions often claustrophobic, even for the architect.”6 Quite the opposite might be true: each good architectural choice leads to the exhilarating sense that the next choice has a measure of necessity to it, as the architectural work suppresses the architect’s mere capriciousness: the work frees the architect from his or her determined, habitual, and merely private self. This reflects a very different Nietzschean idea—Amor fati—you are free when you love what fate provides you. “Private meanings . . . insulated against the corrosion of reality”7 have romantic appeal for Koolhaas. He describes Theodore Starrett’s 1911 proposal for a one-hundred-floor building: “each compartment is equipped to pursue its private existential journey: the building has become a laboratory, the ultimate vehicle of emotional and intellectual adventure.”8 The equation of adventure with private journeys is symptomatic. Coney Island, like other amusement parks, appears in some historical and novelistic accounts (like Maxim Gorky’s) not only as an amusing, dazzling fantasyland of “harmless” escape, but also as a place of delusions exploiting, for handsome profits, the stupidity, base desire, and gullibility of the lower and middle classes. But Coney Island looks to Koolhaas like a great liberation from the shackles of Western rationalism, a “revolution,”9 and an expression of “genius.”10 Instead of appearing as humanly grotesque and cruel as it must have been, Coney Island’s Midget City becomes an abstraction to Koolhaas, a springboard for philosophizing: “ ‘a miniature Midget 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 205

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6 Ibid., 344. A colleague has suggested that claustrophobia might be evident in much of Koolhaas’s thinking.

7 Delirious New York, 104.

8 Ibid., 91.

9 Ibid., 76. 10 Ibid., 70.

11 Ibid., 49.

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12 Ibid., 39.

13 Ibid., 67.

14 Ibid., 20. 15 Ibid., 174.

16 S,M,L,XL, 205.

interpretation, “invites descent into the regions of collective unconscious.”12 When Koolhaas refers to “the arguments respectable culture will mobilize to denigrate its probable replacement: the potentially sublime is criticized for being cheap and unreal,”13 he has failed to demonstrate convincingly that there are hints of the sublime in the extravagance of this fantasy world. (The sublime, I would argue, entails an extraordinary degree of felt contact with suprapsychic otherness.) What he has done is demonstrate the enchanting escapism of these ingenious inventions. Writing about Manhattan and the creation of skyscrapers in Delirious New York, Koolhaas continues to press on his material a highly unified vision 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, John Portman, the governors of Singapore—Koolhaas is captivated by the Promethean desire to remake reality and supersede nature. Manhattan’s grid, as “a conceptual speculation,” “claims the superiority of mental construction over reality . . . the subjugation, if not obliteration, of nature is its true ambition.”14 “Manhattanism is the only program where the efficiency intersects with the sublime.”15 The reality is surely more mundane: the grid was chosen for its simplicity and efficiency; the early skyscrapers were motivated, in their program, their multiplication of floorplates, and—most important here—their more extravagant skins, by business interests. Architecturally, Manhattan put an exciting, even exhilarating, flourish on the making of money; the Great Gatsby flair served mammon; ostentation dominated more than Nietzschean vitalism. Koolhaas, from Delirious New York to S,M,L,XL, has the notion that multiple fluid programmatic uses, compacted into large areas, create a condition of maximum potential for desirable life. However, this notion, like his concept of freedom, is based on a questionable assumption: that proximity by itself creates significant interaction—that some kind of precious vitality is automatically obtained when working, shopping, leisure, and residing occur in propinquity. The just as likely (if not more likely) scenario is that, in any conditions of vast scale and great congestion, people experience a lifeinhibiting, demoralizing anonymity and isolation; they mill around each other unseeingly. He writes of the edge-city condition around La Défense that it “mysteriously works, or, at least, is full of people”16—there’s a big difference between the two. A particularly flagrant romanticization/existentialization of bigness in Delirious reads, “The Monolith spares the outside world the agonies of the continuous changes raging inside it” (p. 101, emphasis added). There is little reason to believe that Manhattan skyscrapers ever were significantly mixed-use, that office pods for the humanly dead transactions of the great gray corporate world were not, as is obvious in the World Trade Center, these buildings’ overwhelming activities. Rockefeller Center a richer 206

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environment? Certainly. The Downtown Athletic Club, with its fluid building sections and mixed programs, scene of “eating oysters with boxing gloves, 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 romantic fantasy is evident in repeated stylistic tricks. Single sentences form whole paragraphs to suggest their great weight of meaning: “Coney Island is a fetal Manhattan.”18 The pulp-fiction device for conveying immediacy and “drama”—the “historical present” verb tense: “Hood meets secretly with him at midnight”—appears frequently. Most surprisingly, the hokeyness of mystical/magical thinking, the most extreme form of unrealism, also appears: “The Carnarsie Indians, the original inhabitants of the peninsula, have named it Narrioch—‘Place without Shadows’—an early recognition that it is to be a stage for certain unnatural phenomena.”19 And, finally, we get forced, sloppy generalizations: “The sphere appears throughout Western architectural history, generally coinciding with revolutionary moments.”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, proclaiming the death of architecture, falling in too easily with the forces of hyperdevelopment (capitalism at its most rapacious), making absolutistic statements like “Bigness is ultimate architecture”(p. 495) and “Bigness is the last bastion of architecture”(p. 516). The essay displays the “ParanoidCritical Method” that Koolhaas accuses Le Corbusier of using: “The reality of the external world is used for illustration and proof . . . to serve the reality of our mind.”21 In his ideas about Bigness, Generic Cities, and globalization, Koolhaas commits the logical fallacy of presenting part of the truth as the whole, presenting certain conditions—such as those in new Chinese cities— as the conditions. Whereas it is possible to understand why certain aspects of architecture as traditionally understood—attention to detail, craftsmanship, and relatively small spatial and formal gestures—might become irrelevant or impotent at huge scales, it is another thing to assume that no architectural refinements or subtleties are possible at that scale (consider Rockefeller Center), to neglect that interiors of even the largest buildings still could contain refined architectural detail, and to avoid considering that vast quantities of building will be done at small scales for the foreseeable future. Koolhaas believes that the blandness, blankness, and “neutrality” of huge architecture is liberating because it is programmatically indeterminate, whereas it can easily be seen as oppressively dulling and depersonalizing. He would like to think that the characterlessness of huge buildings dialectically “exacerbates specificity.”22 Perhaps his most prominent epigram is, “Where there is nothing, everything is possible. Where there is architecture, nothing (else) is possible.”23 Again, this is an unfortunate confusion of freedom with 207

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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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24 Sanford Kwinter, ed., Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with Students (Houston: Rice University School of Architecture; New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 40–41.

25 Koolhaas shares, without qualification, the diagnosis of the essayists in Variations on a Theme Park, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) and cultural theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord, that authenticity is increasingly elusive in an environment of more and more simulacra. But Koolhaas retains more hope than these thinkers in the possibility of honestly expressing, in built form, the conditions of modernity, however blank the architectural results might be. 26 Richard Ingersoll, “Bidness,” ANY 10: 5. 27 S,M,L,XL, 514.

28 Ibid., 208.

caprice. Koolhaas says of generic edge-city towers that “the least these things represent is an enormous freedom: freedom from formal coherence, freedom from having to simulate a community, freedom from behavioral patterns.”24 Freedom as freedom from, not freedom for; freedom as arbitrariness, action without engagement. Strong and distinctive architecture could be defined as that which arouses and challenges us to meet it with an equal inner strength. The best buildings do not dominate us; they enliven us. But can any of us, turning our thoughts to examples of what Koolhaas thinks of as huge, blank, and therefore less restricting architecture, imagine any such structure or complex—Empire State Plaza in Albany, the World Trade Center in New York, edge-city office complexes—as anything but enervating, with little spontaneous human interest or content? In addition, it is important to ask whether, in fact, Bigness does and will dominate new “urban substance” except in extreme situations like those in China, where the population explosion forces the rapid creation of new cities (conditions, admittedly, that are expected to become more common in the developing world). In the developed world, there has been a significant popular reaction against large buildings; many developers want to create smaller, more intimate scales in their attempts to meet market demand. However nostalgic and fake, New Urbanist development, as espoused by Andrés Duany and others, and endless suburban “colonial” tracts are what American consumers predominantly prefer to any vibrantly congested megastructure.25 Finally, it is worth seconding Richard Ingersoll’s point26 that Bigness means surrender to “bidness” (Texan for “business”) more than, as Koolhaas says, “surrender to technologies; to engineers, contractors, manufacturers; to politics; to others . . . a realignment with neutrality.”27 Big bland structures communicate not “neutrality,” but indifference to anything but making money. Before I turn to Koolhaas’s enormous contributions to an understanding of new urban conditions, “Bigness” brings me to one last aspect of Koolhaas’s writing: the general absence of people except as abstractions, as atoms in a spectacle of larger, impersonal forces. Koolhaas’s view of people is as if from a great height, so that they appear as ants, flowing in masses, engaged in generic activities—shopping, working, recreating, and residing—mobs at Coney Island, crowds moving on escalators and ramps. (Koolhaas is moonstruck by circulation in itself.) When he confesses the “primitive fact of simply liking asphalt, traffic, neon, crowds, tension, the architecture of others, even,”28 the impersonal dominates. Those individuals that do appear in his writing—for example, Portman, Hood, and Ferriss—are dramatized, mythologized, and made larger than life. Seldom is there a sense of the daily experiences of ordinary people or the consciousness of individuals—the only real locus, one might argue, of life—the kind of sense one gets in Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 208

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When Koolhaas describes the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Singapore shantytown inhabitants into high-rise apartments, there is only a generalized sense of the violence of this act and of people’s apparent adaptation to this extreme change. He speaks with exhilaration elsewhere of “chickens on the fortieth floor” of housing near Hong Kong, without seeming to consider the nasty implications of this for health and happiness.29 A Sartrean nausea with the human and certainly the humanistic appears in many of Koolhaas’s essays. He associates humanism with the soft, sentimental, and deluded. The Nietzsche in him wants something much more fierce, even at some cost. This side of Koolhaas likes and wants to play with the heartless Big Boys: the developers, the mad Corbusier who would flatten all to create endless sterile Villes Radieuses, John Portman trying to make Atlanta a monument to his self-proclaimed genius, the governors of Singapore wiping out hundreds of thousands of poor people’s dwellings. Koolhaas is drawn to their daring, extremism, and power. This Koolhaas loves the clean impersonality of machines and sees in the Rockettes’ line dance “an exhilarating surrender of individuality to automatism.”30 He presents the impersonal and anonymous as comforting, a retreat from social stress: “Bigness . . . offers degrees of serenity. . . . Bigness is impersonal: the architect is no longer condemned to stardom.”31 This Koolhaas includes in the same book a picture of a hand (his, probably) imperiously peeling away blocks 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 similar attempts. This Koolhaas is fascinated by pornography, the subjugation of women in male fantasies. And this Koolhaas is Faustian, Promethean, eager to create alternatives to nature, to be God’s rival. “Sick unto death” with intellectual and moral conventionality and selfrighteousness, this Koolhaas might be sick also with that side of himself that is morally fastidious, overly sensitive, highly cultured, an inheritor of the Dutch refinement represented by the Vermeer picture of a woman playing a harpsicord that is placed, for ironic contrast, among images of his antigenteel, antibourgeois Villa Dall’Ava in Paris.34 This Koolhaas, like the Marquis de Sade, Jean Genet, and Henry Miller, is drawn with excitement to the realm beyond morality, quickened by the horrifying, dramatizing it as his diction on the erasing of old Singapore—“a convulsion of uprooting”35 (emphasis added)—makes evident. In S,M,L,XL, this Koolhaas includes pictures, from Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s film Un Chien Andalou, of a woman’s eyeball being sliced36 and seems sympathetic to Georges Bataille’s ideas of the “ ‘sacred’ animal world based on disorder, cruelty, excess”37 to which he refers just before he proclaims, “The [Berlin] wall suggested that architecture’s beauty was directly proportional to its horror.”38 This Koolhaas is fascinated by what he loathes: he spends many hours interviewing people in Atlanta architectural firms whose practices appall him. 209

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“Asian City of Tomorrow,” Singapore Planning and Urban Research (S.P.U.R.) Group. Koolhaas’s ideal of the culture of congestion. (S.P.U.R., Reprinted in S,M,L,XL, p.1056. Courtesy of the Monacelli Press.) 29 Rem Koolhaas, “Understanding the New Urban Condition: The Project 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 of hands holding models in S,M,L,XL are quite similar to iconic images of Le Corbusier’s hands doing the same. Koolhaas also imperiously appropriates quotations as if they were part of his own writing, with no identification of writers or sources except in footnotes, and he italicizes others’ words without saying “my italics.” 33 Ibid., 1102. 34 Ibid., 142. 35 Ibid., 1037.

36 Ibid., 233, 235. 37 Ibid., 232.

38 Ibid., 226.

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39 Ibid., 70.

40 Delirious New York, 70.

41 S,M,L,XL, 668.

42 Cynics will read this as a rationalization for wanting to chase the big bucks of developers.

Koolhaas’s possible need to break from an enervating Dutch refinement might 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,XL dictionary quotes Jodie Foster: “My dream in life is to wear sweats and go to a mall.”39) This part of Koolhaas shares attitudes with Robert Venturi and 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 enterprises that intervene drastically in the cultural and political landscape of Europe, we wondered whether—paradoxically by playing with the real fire of Bigness, even in Europe—it could be again possible to become innocent about architecture, to use architecture to articulate the new, to imagine—no longer paralyzed by knowledge, experience, correctness—the end of the Potemkin world.”41 This confession of a momentary wish to be free of responsibility, to be swept away by larger forces, contains an underlying sadness at the impossibility of being spontaneous, childlike, ignorant, American.42 This brings us to the need to see the other sides of Koolhaas: the European, the refined, the highbrow, the man revolted by crudity, cruelty, and power. He is—and this explains his lasting interest—a man of many selves. Koolhaas participates to some extent in a mode of contemporary historical/cultural thinking that seems to predominate in recent “cultural studies” of cities—writing of unrelenting negativism and cynicism, one that stares down and exposes the worst in the harshest possible light, that sees corruption, greed, and callousness as pervasive in the recent development of cities. These writers include Mike Davis on Los Angeles (City of Quartz, 1990), David Harvey on Baltimore and Thatcher’s London (in Architectural Practices in the Nineties, 1996), and Neil Smith and Christine Boyer on New York (in Michael Sorkin’s Variations on a Theme Park, 1992). On the surface, the tone of this writing is cool and factual, but the conditions being presented are quite disturbing. There are heavy black ironies in just “stating the 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 underbelly of misleading appearances, no matter how unpleasant the experience. (Its weaknesses are two: it has no lightness—it lugubriously neglects whole realms of positive experience, such as the harmless pleasure one can take in Disneyland; and it offers no hope, no constructive, realistic resistances or alternatives.) Koolhaas shares this determination; he presents historical narratives (such as the story of John Portman building in Atlanta) that are neutral on the surface and caustic just beneath. But unlike these writers, Koolhaas’s responses are often multiple, including awareness of whatever 210

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might be impressive, heroic, and creative in what is also grotesque (like Singapore’s tabula rasa). He espouses “lite urbanism”43 and is, as a writer, often playful and humorous;44 self-important seriousness is what he thinks we should have learned, from the heroic modernists, to avoid. And Koolhaas is not merely cynically detached; he dares to hope that one can participate meaningfully, if modestly, in the forces of contemporary urban development. For that very reason, he is attacked by the bleaker urbanists for being opportunistic or naive: How can one expect to “inflect”—to use Sanford 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 is simply the way things are.” Since Koolhaas more often embraces “both/ and” than chooses “either/or,” single perspective responses to his ideas are off the mark; simple approval or disapproval of his “positions” will usually neglect that there are conflicting sides to his thinking. Yet there can be slipperiness in this complexity, a defensive maneuvering to stand on no one spot for very long, a compulsion to be “free” even if that forces selfcontradiction. To string out some of his many contradictions: Koolhaas wants to be (or is) both American and European, practical and theoretical, lowbrow and highbrow, yielding and controlling, meek and powerful, innocent and worldly, personal and impersonal, individualistic and anonymous, hedonistically or rebelliously amoral and puritanically moral.46 “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (Emerson). Koolhaas, speaking of the Generic City, writes, “Strangely, nobody has thought that cumulatively the endless contradictions of these interpretations prove the richness of the Generic City”47—or of Koolhaas’s perceptions. “Sometimes it is important to find out what the city is—instead of what it 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 below that many, if not most, of his perceptions of new urban conditions and productions are exceptionally clear and convincing: one has that “I knew that was true, but never could put it into words” feeling. His attitude is more one of fascination than of evaluation. Koolhaas’s “poem,” “Learning Japanese”49—a series of detailed anecdotes and sociological observations from his first trip to Japan, boldly uncensored—illustrates how Koolhaas, when he focuses, as poets usually do, on immediate experience, writes more vividly and allows the violation of (or indifference to) any totalizing polemical ideas. Similarly, “The Generic City” is a playfully messy soup of astute observations presented in an unpredictable diversity of tones. Koolhaas’s primary motivation seems to be provocation and the subversion of conventional perceptions. Although he hardly mentions any specific places—as a social scientist interested in proof would—we know full well what he is talking 211

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43 S,M,L,XL, 971. 44 See especially the exuberant sarcasm of sections 9 and 11 of “The Generic City” in S,M,L,XL.

45 Sanford Kwinter, “The Building, the Book, and the New Pastoralism,” ANY 9:22. It is worth noting that Koolhaas has said, “We have been careful to approach . . . new alignments with powerful forces in moral terms. . . . We are involved in operations that we think deserve support . . . We have no projects in China, because so far I haven’t discovered a single project I would like to be involved in personally.” Nancy Levinson, “The Future City: A Conversation with Rem Koolhaas,” Graphis 304 (July– August 1996): 75.

46 George Baird has set forth his own set of four “paradoxes” in Koolhaas’s work. See “Rem Koolhaas in Conversation with George Baird,” GSD News (Summer 1996): 49. 47 S,M,L,XL, 1256. 48 Ibid., 832.

49 Ibid., 88–110.

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50 Ibid., 1248.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid., 1250–51.

about and when he is on or off the mark. He is mainly on. The nature of the overwhelming similarities of cities worldwide is his focus. His hard-nosed (or nose-thumbing) main point is that these similarities express current authentic articulations of life and that any individual identities of cities— derived from clichés and artificial resuscitation of their histories—are relatively inauthentic. The reality is not now the historical identity but the packaging and selling of that identity: “Paris can only become more Parisian—it is already on its way to becoming hyper-Paris, a polished caricature.”50 More “authentic” urban activities now occur at Paris’s periphery. He begins with the argument that I have criticized above: “The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.”51 The alternative that Koolhaas does not consider—that strong identities can and should provoke strong responses and that the lack of identity provokes mere caprice—leads him into celebrating the Generic City as, in principle, the stage for freedom. However, by the third page of the essay, Koolhaas has begun forgetting this principle and describing the Generic City for what it is, not only refreshingly authentic, but also hideously dead. “It is a place of weak and distended sensations, few and far between emotions. . . . The Generic City is sedated. . . . The serenity of the Generic City is achieved by evacuation of the public realm. . . . Its main attraction is its anomie.”52 This helps us realize that for Koolhaas, the city of efficiency, dedicated only to business, is nothing like his Manhattan of the teens, twenties, and thirties or like Fumihiko Maki’s metabolist city of the sixties, places of fertile chaos, maximum interaction, and existential intensity. The remainder of the essay, aside from a few moments of melodramatic exaggeration, is witty, sharp, and often original diagnosis. Consider these observations: (1) The Generic City (I will abbreviate it as G.C.) is unified by “controlled neatness, a moralistic assertion of good intentions” (p. 1253). Surely we are familiar with the demoralizing “Stay off!” hygiene of litter-free and over manicured lawns surrounding corporate towers. (2) (Bad) public art is prevalent in the G.C. as a feeble attempt to revive streets. (3) “Decks, bridges, tunnels, and motorways—a huge proliferation of the paraphernalia of connection—[are] frequently draped with ferns and flowers as if to ward off original sin” (p. 1254). Planting and landscaping are the G.C.’s pathetic attempt to “beautify” by returning the natural/real to the city—with the laughable effect of making nature seem fake. (4) Each G.C. has a quarter called “Lipservice,” which turns the city’s history into a consumer commodity—an observation that pervades Variations on a Theme Park as well, but without Koolhaas’s biting humor: “History returns not as farce here, but as service: costumed merchants (funny hats, bare midriffs, veils) voluntarily enact the conditions (slavery, tyranny, disease, poverty, 212

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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 . . . Here tourists congregate in droves around a cluster of stalls” (p. 1257). (6) Hotels and airports are becoming cities unto themselves, now providing places for business and leisure activities, as well as shopping. (It’s a sign of flexibility that 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 construction techniques 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 ever more effective adhesives and sealants that turn each building into a mixture of straitjacket and oxygen tent . . . a triumph of glue over the integrity of materials” (p. 1261). (8) Atria—big empty spaces—are used as substitutes for impressive architectural substance. This list of sharp observations could continue for another page. They have their inherent revelatory value, but they also help dispel the common critique of Koolhaas that he yields to contemporary urban conditions uncritically. The key distinction, of course, is between accepting as real and accepting as desirable. It is Koolhaas’s driven, often solitary pursuit of an awareness of what is newly real in cities and his insistence on opposing our need not to see these realities that leads to the mistaken sense that he likes all of what he sees. Nothing could prove this as well as the final paragraph of “Generic Cities,” in which Koolhaas imagines the production of the G.C. as the playing in reverse of a Hollywood Bible story movie—from a wild, teeming, diverse, chaotic bazaar to that scene evacuated, barren, and lifeless. For Koolhaas, the city as it should be is the first; as it is, painfully, the second. In a public conversation with George Baird, Koolhaas tried to clarify this key issue: “Alignment doesn’t mean, for me, that we take an uncritical position toward the phenomena that interest us. It’s possible to want to respond to a tendency that seems triumphant, without necessarily being euphoric about it. In our work, we try to combine criticism of a phenomenon with an ability to work within and parallel to it.”53 Reasonable people certainly can and do disagree with Koolhaas about how helpless design professionals are to influence the dominant modes of development and about how significant exceptions to those modes are, but it is also possible to see reason in Koolhaas’s assertion that unless you accept most of the terms the world presents you, you cannot hope to have any effects at all. “Atlanta,” presented as a talk in 1987 and revised in 1994, seems to be the seed of the 1994 “Generic Cities” essay; Atlanta is a prime example of a Generic City. In the halls of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), discussions of this essay center on whether Koolhaas likes or dislikes Atlanta: some are unsure, others sure but with opposite conclusions. The reality, I think, is that the terms like and dislike are not pertinent in this case; 213

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53 “Rem Koolhaas in Conversation with George Baird,” GSD News (Summer 1996): 50.

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Koolhaas is, rather, intensely interested in Atlanta, feels mainly wonder about it, and whatever evaluations he has change subtly from sentence to sentence. Certainly, there is plenty of sarcasm: “Atlanta has culture, or at least it has a Richard Meier museum” (p. 835). “In a book on John Portman by John Portman, John Portman writes, ‘I consider architecture frozen music’ ” (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 realization that Koolhaas loves his cities congested and chaotic like Piranesi’s Rome we bring in largely from outside this essay’s context. Again, astute observations proliferate: “[Atlanta’s] strongest contextual givens are vegetal and infrastructural: forests and roads. Atlanta is not a city; it is a landscape” (p. 835). “Atlanta has nature, both original and improved—a sparkling, perfect nature where no leaf is ever out of place. Its artificiality sometimes makes it hard to tell whether you are outside or inside: somehow, you’re always in nature” (p. 836). “The vegetal is replacing the urban: a panorama of seamless artificiality, so organized, lush, welcoming, that it sometimes seems like another interior, a fluid collective domain, glimpsed through tinted glass, venetian blinds, and the other distancing devices of the alienated architecture—almost accessible, like a seductive fairy tale” (p. 855). Koolhaas’s sensibility here surely deserves 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 undertone of stewing emotions: hatred, amusement, chagrin, horror, disgust, and so on. Other cutting observations: Portman’s reinvention of the atrium is “a container of artificiality that allows its occupants to avoid daylight forever—a hermetic interior, sealed against the real” (p. 841); designers of the new downtown towers don’t care about the towers being a complementary group—they want them to compete; postmodern architecture, dominant because it can be made quickly and cheaply, makes inspiration an outdated concept. Perhaps the most interesting and complex of Koolhaas’s responses in “Atlanta” is to the new breed of architects he encountered on a tour of Atlanta firms. These are the architects of postmodernism, a new form of professionalism, of architectural education, not one that creates knowledge or culture, but a technical training that creates a new unquestioning, 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. In Atlanta, architects have aligned themselves with the uncontrollable, have become its official agents, instruments of the unpredictable: from imposing to yielding in one generation. Working on the emergence of new urban 214

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conditions, they have discovered a vast new realm of potential and freedom to go rigorously with the flow, architecture/urbanism as a form of letting 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 touch of envy? One must here articulate and critique Koolhaas’s “position” carefully. Yes, there is some envy and ironic admiration for architects who have the chance to create huge swatches of urban substance. Yes, these architects are the “realists” who have no illusions about where “the flow” is and the possibilities of resisting it. Yet when one looks back at Koolhaas’s description of the work they are doing, it is unequivocally negative: “The model was a complete inversion of metropolis as we know it—not the systematic assembly of a critical mass but its systematic dismantlement, a seemingly absurd dispersion of concentration. Alarmingly, it suggested that the elements that had once made the city would now cease to work if they got too close together [congested]” (p. 848). Then when Koolhaas refers to their “vast new realm of potential and freedom” (that misguiding word again)—unquestionably, the market and the developers, not the architects, are calling the shots—his realism turns mushy. (A truer statement of his belief appears in “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?”: “The only legitimate relationship that architects can have with the subject of chaos is to take their rightful place in the army of those devoted to resist it, and fail.”54 He is multivocal. Not content with convincing us that new urban conditions exist, Koolhaas, despiser of nostalgia, wants us to be excited by their potential, to engage us. So he sometimes romanticizes: “Each site in Atlanta is exposed to a theoretical carpet bombardment of ‘centers,’ possibilities hovering somewhere, waiting to be activated by a mysterious process—only vaguely related to money” (p. 852), but the not-so-mysterious show runs for the maximization of profits—what else? Of Portman’s renderings for a new exurb: “Is this the reappearance of the sublime? . . . A post-cataclysmic new beginning that elaborates revolutionary forms in liberated relationships, justified, finally, by no other reason than their appeal to our senses?” (p. 856). Koolhaas’s inclusion of question marks here connotes his awareness that his speculations have turned footloose. We have seen this melodramatic streak in Koolhaas’s other writing, and it is not absent from even his best essays.55 Koolhaas’s Singapore essay, one of his most recent and connected to a multiyear project (started in 1996) of studying urban conditions in Asia with Harvard GSD students, might be his finest. Like Delirious New York, it is a richly informative and detailed historical narrative. But unlike Delirious, it contains very little pseudopoetic inflation. It expresses a poised 215

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54 S,M,L,XL, 969. 55 See also, in “Atlanta,” his forced comparison of Portman’s atria with panopticons: “Everyone becomes everyone else’s guard—architectural equivalent of Sartre’s No Exit, ‘Hell is other people’ ” (S,M,L,XL, 841). No, if anything, the atrium spectacle is a kick even to traveling salesmen, at least more so than its alternative.

“Razed plane (in Singapore) as the basis for a genuinely new beginning.” “Heroic . . . Promethean . . . courageous . . . merciless” scraping of old urban fabric. (Courtesy of the Monacelli Press, from S,M,L,XL, p.1030.)

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“[T]he process of erasure could be spread over time in a surreptitious way—an invisible reality. We could gradually scrape . . .” Mission Grand Axe, La Défense, Paris, France, Competition, 1991. Daring, power, “harshness,” and “insanity” and in one design plan. (Photograph by Hans Werlemann from S,M,L,XL, pp. 1108–9. Courtesy of the Monacelli Press.) 56 S,M,L,XL, 1013.

and balanced set of attitudes, primarily a resistance to positive or negative judgments for the sake of preserving, in focus, the simple being of its subjects. To preserve the being of Singapore, however, is for Koolhaas a polemical act, an assertion against the western intellectual’s knee-jerk scorn for its ways: “Our refusal to read Singapore on its own terms is frivolous: our most sophisticated reflections on the contemporary condition of the city are completely disconnected from the operational.”56 The essay is not free of judgments about Singapore, but Koolhaas makes a constant effort to make sure they are not blinkering. Needless to say, the most salient fact about Singapore since 1960 is its radical urban renewal: its near total destruction of the old and its rapid modernization. This “delirious transformation” excites Koolhaas as “heroic,” “Promethean,” “courageous.” The power and unstoppable drive of the government seem intoxicating. But its cruelty also makes it appalling. Koolhaas sees both. The bureaucrats of Singapore achieved something monumental: “saving” the population from living in filth, disease, and poverty. The price paid was loss of certain freedoms. But Koolhaas is careful to keep open the possibility that the people might have willingly gone along with their losses: “It is difficult to identify what precisely is unfree, how and 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 “the Asian factor”—the relative lack of the western insistence on individual autonomy, the ability to put the good of the group first—that makes comparisons with urban renewal in the United States invalid. Singapore raises questions for Koolhaas that are being raised more and more urgently by political theorists writing on the United States: “whether democracy promotes or erodes social stability; whether free speech is worth the cultural trash it also produces” (p. 1017). Although lacking a sense of individual lives, Koolhaas has an uncompromised sense of the violence that must have been done to nearly 270,000 families between 1965 and 1988: “The leap from the Chinese shophouse— typology that packs store, factory, family living quarters together in a single block around a courtyard—to Singapore’s high-rise containers is . . . merciless . . . because the new inhabitants, cut off from connective networks of family relationships, tradition, habits, are abruptly forced into another civilization” (p. 1021). Koolhaas’s vision might never be more clear and balanced than here: “The entire operation ambiguously combines the fulfillment of some basic human needs with the systematic erosion of others— tradition, fixity, continuity—a perpetuum mobile where what is given is taken away in a convulsion of uprooting, a state of permanent disorientation” (pp. 1035, 1037). “Tradition, fixity, continuity”—there is no sarcasm about these words this time. When Koolhaas writes of a leftover remnant of old Singapore, he does so with respect for its “authentic subversiveness . . . 216

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against the overwhelming quantity of hygienic newness around it. . . . It seems ‘tropical’ in the sense of dirty, lazy, corrupt, drugged—absolutely other” (p. 1039). There can be no doubt toward which end of the continuum from hygiene to dirtiness the romanticizer of Coney Island prefers. He bemoans the city’s having “adopted only the mechanistic, rationalistic program and developed it to an unprecedented perfection . . . by shedding modernism’s artistic, irrational, uncontrollable, subversive ambitions— revolution without agony” (p. 1041). Koolhaas is an existentialist. He values authenticity and the gritty mess of spontaneous life even as he sees those values becoming more and more inevitably out of reach. When Koolhaas writes, in the Singapore essay, about the ideas and work of Fumihiko Maki and the other Japanese metabolists in the sixties, he finally 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 the exploding population) but without sacrificing spontaneity, community, and heterogeneity—all that “the culture of congestion” meant in Delirious New York. There is no criticism or ambiguity in the paragraphs on Maki’s Koolhaas-like ideas.57 And when Koolhaas looks at some of Singapore’s large-scale mixed-use projects built after its housing need had been addressed, he sees actual built form that approximates to his realistic ideal of “a modern-movement Chinatown” (p. 1067), built in a now authentic way and fostering maximum urban vitality. Beauty, form, detail, durability—all these are outdated and irrelevant in this program-driven, everin-revision architecture. I doubt if one could find a passage in Koolhaas of such unmitigated approbation as this: In the late sixties, Singapore architects . . . crystallized, defined, and built ambitious examples of vast modern socles teeming with the most traditional forms of Asian street life, extensively connected by multiple linkages, fed by modern infrastructures and sometimes Babel-like multilevel car parks, penetrated by proto-atriums, supporting mixed-use towers: they are containers of urban multiplicity, heroic captures and intensifications of urban life in architecture, rare demonstrations of the kind of performance that could and should be the norm in architecture but rarely is, giving an alarming degree of plausibility to the myths of the multilevel city and the megastructure that “we,” in infinitely more affluent circumstances, 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’s experiences of Maki’s book and these projects were prime influences in his intellectual career. The questions provoked by his sarcasm about “we” who have rejected these models remain unanswered: Do “circumstances” 217

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57 There is also, in the words of Maki that Koolhaas quotes, a level of abstraction that matches Koolhaas’s in “Bigness,” a vision of the city as “a dynamic field of interrelated forces,” “ ‘a pattern of events’ more than . . . a composition of objects,” in which people are seen from a regrettable distance, “pumping through like life blood” (ibid., 1044, 1049).

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58 Koolhaas’s characterization is yet more harsh in a talk he gave at Harvard in the spring of 1993: “Singapore was . . . a petri dish of Chinese Stalinist modernism followed by Chinese postmodernism.” Rem Koolhaas, “Architecture and Globalization,” GSD News (Winter–Spring 1994): 48.

elsewhere allow this sort of project to work? (And does this sort of project really work? Has that been carefully studied?) No sooner has Koolhaas suggested that Singapore has provided ideal models for urban megastructures than he draws back, determinedly realistic, to see once again what is lost in the larger context of these isolated gains. “The resistance of these assembled buildings to forming a recognizable ensemble creates, Asian or not, a condition where the exterior—the classic domain of the urban—appears residual, leftover, overcharged with commercial effluence from hermetic interiors, hyper-densities of trivial commandments, public art, the reconstructed tropicality of landscaping” (p. 1075). Koolhaas supports designing interiors as if they were exterior public realms, but he is unwilling to shut his eyes to what the outside then becomes.58 But more; eyes opened wider: Singapore reveals a cruel contradiction: huge increases in matter, the overall effect increasingly unreal . . . doomed to remain a Potemkin metropolis. That is not a local problem. We can make things, but not necessarily make them real. Singapore represents the point where the volume of the new overwhelms the volume of the old, has become too big to be animated by it, has not yet developed its own vitality. Mathematically, the third millennium will be an experiment in this form of 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? A waffling? No, I think it is, rather, Koolhaas as poet of perception winning the struggle with his other selves. Creation ex nihilo, the putative freedom of the tabula rasa, a constantly misleading idea during Koolhaas’s career, is now seen to end as well as start with emptiness. Places fabricated out of whole cloth to support some predetermined pattern of activity seem unreal. Much that is uncontrolled must enter in, organically, or the creation has no otherness, is forced and phony. Now that the delirium of “building-out” is over, Singapore is trying to remake its image as place of fun and leisure, adding beaches to its shoreline, making its landscape “stand for” “the tropical,” adding Chinese ornamentation to its high rises. In such imposed identities, Koolhaas now finds no identity at all: “Singapore is a city without qualities” (p. 1077). The capricious Barthesian sign isn’t enough; Chinatown and the megaprojects must somehow be integrated. So what would it mean for “us” to “wake up from our 30-year sleep of self-hatred”? It would mean, above all, being able to think as Koolhaas has done in this essay—rigorously looking to find the world as it newly is, perceiving it freshly, without wishful illusions. It would mean learning to make do with what is or what is about to be, such as the creation of 218

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“countless” Chinese cities based on the model of Singapore. And in making do, Koolhaas would like to think that one might enable some degree of making real, or else he would have given up making architecture and doing urban planning. In a talk he gave at Harvard in the fall of 1995, he said, “We are increasingly confronted with utterly irrational problems, problems that we no longer have the luxury of refusing . . . We should be able, when given the impossibly difficult problem of designing in two weeks a city for three million people, to respond with vigor and skill.”59 He is very skeptical, but not hopeless, that architects and urbanists can avoid making Potemkin villages.

This essay was originally published in the Journal of Architectural Education Vol. 51 No. 1 (September 1997). 219

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59 Koolhaas, “Understanding the New Urban Condition,” 13.

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“BIGNESS” IN CONTEXT POST URBANISM Some regressive tendencies in Rem Koolhaas’ urban theory JORGE OTERO-PAILOS (2000)

1 “The irony is that the obsession with history and specificity has become an obstacle in the recognition of these new realities.” Rem Koolhaas, as quoted in Alejandro Zaera Polo, “The Day After: A Conversation With Rem Koolhaas,” in El Croquis, n. 79 (1996), p. 19. 2 “To disentangle the resulting landscape requires the combined interpretative ability and 19thcentury classificatory stamina of Champollion, Schliemann, Darwin, and Freud.” See Rem Koolhaas, “The Terrifying Beauty of the Twentieth Century,” in Rem Koolhaas et al., S,M,L,XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), p. 206.

Rem Koolhaas’ views on urbanism have been taken up as a “renewed commitment to the American city.” Bill Lacy, executive director and juror of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which Koolhaas received in 2000, lauded the architect during the award ceremony for his ability to “continually blur the line between urban design and architecture.” “Bigness,” the most popular of his theories, states that beyond a certain scale buildings can be considered autonomous urban sectors, independent of the context in which they sit. Although Koolhaas situates Bigness formally and historically as an extension of the American City Parks tradition, a more careful comparison of the two reveals that Bigness ignores the democratic components of its alleged precursor. Koolhaas speaks of urban planning as a thing of the past. Since buildings have a life span of about twenty years, to think of urban planning in terms of formal relationships articulated architecturally in space is obsolete. Context is also seen as a thing of the past. To insist on the right of certain buildings to exist, to insist on the relevance of context, is to apply outdated conceptual structures that increase the rift between the discipline of urbanism and the real forces shaping the present. Moreover, old theories of urbanism, insofar as they are the wrong tools for looking at the present, are considered repressive veils keeping us from an authentic experience of the real. History, context, and specificity are all seen as concealing reality.1 In calling for a fresh look at the real, Koolhaas appeals to models of nineteenth century objectivity.2 The reality, he claims, is that what we call cities today are really 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 develop new taxonomies and models that will help us understand and operate in the contemporary metropolis. However, Koolhaas does not provide a systematic and comprehensive theory of urbanism, nor does he explicitly describe the research methodology that led him to the conclusions he draws from Bigness. This factor accounts in part for his failure to influence the urban planning profession. It also makes it difficult to synthesize his views into a simple summary. His reflections are purposefully impressionistic and fragmentary. Even though he alludes to the forces he considers central to urban transformation, he does not deal with them in any significant depth. For example, the familiar factors of exploding demographics and of the late-capitalist economy are 220

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deployed but without any scientific evidence to map the specific channels of interaction between these factors and urban tissue. Koolhaas argues that these developments challenge the disciplines of architecture and urbanism and point towards a new kind of synthetic practice guided by the general theory of Bigness. THE CITY AS ISLAND: RESURRECTING A DEFUNCT MODEL

In modern times our understanding of urbanism was probably first articulated by Ildefonso Cerda, who in 1867 coined the now common word “Urbanización” (urbanization). Cerda argued that the extension of infrastructural services associated with city living (such as sewage, gas lighting, and the telegraph) to the country gave rise to new bureaucracies and professionals whose competencies extended well beyond urban centers. Cerda’s process of “urbanización” accounted for the increasing physical, social, and political homogenization of the rural and the urban.3 Since his school days, Koolhaas has been fascinated by the loss of the classical “closed” city to the more open urban form of the contemporary metropolis. In a rather short but telling essay entitled “Imagining Nothingness” Koolhaas credits his teacher O.M. Ungers for describing the possibility of resurrecting the traditional city within the larger metropolis. Ungers’ realization that most European historic centers “float” in larger metropolitan contexts, gave Koolhaas the insight that: In such a model of urban solid and metropolitan void, the desire for stability and the need for instability are no longer incompatible. They can be pursued as two separate enterprises with invisible connections. Through the parallel actions of reconstruction and destruction, such a city becomes an archipelago of architectural islands floating in a postarchitectural landscape of erasure where what once was a city is now a highly charged nothingness. 4

4 Rem Koolhaas, “Imagining Nothingness,” in S,M,L,XL, p. 201.

Koolhaas uses the traditional Nolli plan analysis of urban tissue as solid and void, figure and ground, to describe the metropolis. His description is more figurative and projective than objective and researched. It is a conclusion more than an observation. The fact that he would allow himself to consider the great expanse of metropolitan fabric as a void in spite of its vibrant reality and presence denotes, to say the least, a value judgment. Elsewhere, he would make this estimation more explicit: “If you look at our project for Melun-Sénart, there were explicit judgments of contemporary architecture: it is mostly ‘merde’ [shit].” 5 But he does not simply mean that this architecture looks bad. For him, it is bad. It is a form of institutional and semantic oppression. The coercive aspect of architecture is something he feels is constitutive of its mission. 221

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3 See Ildefonso Cerda’s Teoría General de la Urbanización (Madrid, 1867), Vol. 1, parte 1, Introducción, p. 1.

5 Alejandro Zaera Polo, “Finding Freedoms: Conversations with Rem Koolhaas,” in El Croquis, n. 53 (1992), p. 24.

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6 Rem Koolhaas, “Field Trip: A (A) Memoir (First and Last . . .),” in S,M,L,XL, p. 226.

In 1993 Koolhaas describes his 1971 visit to the Berlin Wall as the experience that was to make him a “serious student.” He senses “an enormous reservoir of resentment against architecture, with the new evidence of its inadequacies—of its cruel and exhausted performance— accumulating daily; looking at the wall as architecture, it was inevitable to transpose the despair, hatred, frustration it inspired to the field of architecture.”6 Sixteen years later, his competition entry for a city at Melun-Sénart, France, reconciles the two ideas that marked his student days: his contempt for architecture and his fascination with the closed town. A field of what is described as “nothingness” eliminates the sprawling metropolis and contains a series of neatly encapsulated urban islands. But in reality this “void” is a complex system of parks where, as shown in his explanatory sketches, city dwellers are presented as exercising or toiling the land. Nature returns as the mythic edge of urbanity, and as its cure. THE SICK CITY

Islands of urbanity are contained by a series of parks. Rendering of Rem Koolhaas’ competition entry for MelunSénart (1987). From Jaques Lucan, Rem Koolhaas: OMA (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), p. 15.

Koolhaas’ formal sanitizing of the city with parks, or “voids” as he calls them, is a strategy with roots in the nineteenth century. By the mid eighteen hundreds, city bureaucracies in Europe and America, responding to alarming health reports, and to the devastation of cholera and diphtheria pandemics, studied options for improving conditions. In the United States, the idea of the urban park slowly surfaced as a way to accommodate the need to insert new infrastructure, to store clean water, to provide increased light and air circulation, and to furnish citizens with spaces for recreation. The most famous example in the United States is Manhattan’s Central Park. Frederick Law Olmsted, famed landscape architect, superintendent of the park since September 11, 1857, and main strategist of the place Koolhaas now calls a “void,” won the 1858 competition to design the park with the help of his partner, the English architect Calbert Vaux. In their eyes Central Park was to be much more than just a work of engineering to hold fresh water in the Croton Reservoirs. The park was to be a Republican Institution where the classes would mingle as a single collective in the spirit of democratic fraternity. It was to be a pleasure ground where citizens could find an escape from the pressures of cramped living. The ideas behind Central Park were accented by the moralistic overtones of the American transcendentalists who believed in a metaphysical need for individual communion with nature, as a way of salvaging personal autonomy from the social conformity spawned by the nascent commercialism of American culture. For the Transcendentalists, nature was the last bastion of resistance to the city’s ferment. Olmsted and Vaux endeavored to construct not just a fragment of the country inside the city, but an entire visual and formal system that would 222

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serve as counter balance to the existing urban form. They turned vistas inward, and masked the edges of the city with plantings, in an attempt to create an autonomous environment. Olmsted and Vaux believed that by relating the non-urban to the urban they were improving the whole. They rejected more utopian arguments about the city in favor of processes that would transform the existing one. Nature, though formally autonomous from the more urban parts of the city, could nonetheless complement and ameliorate it. What was once separated was here brought together within an entirely new kind of urban form.7 THE VOID

Olmsted’s parks interest Koolhaas because they resist the stability of the formal language making up the traditional city. In the parks’ formal indeterminacy, he finds an example of liberation from the formal coerciveness of architecture, “a kind of erasure from all the oppression, in which architecture plays an important role.”8 In Koolhaas’ hands, however, the notion of form in flux is misread and radicalized as 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 architectural capital is usually at its minimum, the cycles of the economy produce fast changes in the formal make-up of entire districts. The constant metamorphosis of form in time is understood by Koolhaas as the sprawl’s complete lack of formal presence. Through a questionable leap of logic, Koolhaas sets up a simple relation of equivalences between all entities that are voids. The sprawl is equal to, and can therefore be turned into, a park, or an infrastructure. Koolhaas’ treatment of sprawl as a “void” is not entirely innocent. His sleight of hand is revealed when he describes his own projects as “voids” that resist formal stability, and thus grants himself the license to replace the existing urban fabric with his designs. He caters to the highbrow rejection of sprawl as valueless and meaningless, and complies with conservative public opinion by acting as its willing executioner. He cleanses the metropolis of the “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 an endorsement of urban purges, as well as his belief that the void and the traditional city depend on each other for survival. He writes: “This is La Défense, the office-city that nobody really likes but that has one undeniable virtue . . . Its presence has saved Paris; each ‘eyesore’ realized there has prevented an invasion of the center.” Although he singles out some “good” structures like the university or the future T.G.V. station, “everything else is plankton—the typical accumulation of undeniably inferior buildings built 223

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An open boundary between the urban and the non-urban: Manhattan’s Central Park circa 1970. From F.L. Olmsted, Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park, ed. F.L. Olmsted Jr. and Theodora Kimball (Cambridge, MA, and London: The M.I.T. Press, 1973), opposite p. 200.

7 David Schuyler provides a convincing argument that what resulted from Olmsted and Vaux’s work was really an entirely new urban form that is typically American. It integrates nature and urbanity over large expanses of territory, and re-organizes city life in accordance. See David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 8 Rem Koolhaas, Conversations With Students (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), p. 63.

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9 Rem Koolhaas, “Tabula Rasa Revisited: Mission Grand Axe, La Défense, Paris, France, 1991,” in S,M,L,XL, pp. 1090–6.

10 Rem Koolhaas, “Bigness,” in S,M,L,XL, p. 510.

between the fifties and the nineties that forms the index of 20th-century architecture.”9 The sprawl is not replaced with nature, but with a ready made, idealized Bigness structure, or infrastructure. In essence, he paves the newly bulldozed site with a version of the Manhattan grid. Today, we are no longer dealing with the same problems that faced the nineteenth century. Cholera and diphtheria are not killing large sections of urban populations. What exactly are the diseases harbored by today’s metropolis? What does Bigness really solve? Some of Koolhaas’ descriptions of the city’s ailments have changed over the course of his career. His early condemnation of the dull complacency of bourgeois urban life has given way to a more abstracted discourse about freedom that has been emptied of inflammatory rhetoric. What remains strong, however, is his dissatisfaction with a loosely defined loss of reality in subjective experience, and a similarly ambiguous dissolution of social unity. Koolhaas runs through the canonical list of reasons popularly understood to be the cause of these conditions: rising world population, higher dependency on communications technologies, the impact of late capitalist forms of production and consumption on social structures, and the “sabotaging” of the classical city by modernization. His objective is to produce an architecture that will resist the alienation of life experience and the demise of collectivity. In defense of Bigness he states: in a landscape of disarray, disassembly, dissociation, disclamation, the attraction of Bigness is its potential to reconstruct the Whole, resurrect the Real, reinvent the collective, reclaim maximum possibility. 10 By placing the possibility of authentic and wholesome life strictly inside of Bigness, and thinking of the city not as a whole, but as a series of mutually exclusive “good” and “bad” parts, Koolhaas breaks with a major aspect of the City Parks movement. Bigness replaces the whole with a new totality which is fundamentally independent of its outside. This insistence on projecting the model of the decontextualized fragment onto the existing blinds Koolhaas from discovering any new realities of the modern metropolis, and its forces of formation. To move beyond the rhetoric of the canon, one must engage in comprehensive research. Specifically, one must not confuse designing, and instrumentalized observation, with disinterested attempts to describe the complex temporal and material substance of the real and of its contexts. It is not possible to accept the view that metropolitan life is “bad” in the absence of convincing evidence. It is still more dangerous to accept proposals based on 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 Bigness that limits the right to live only to those willing to be equalized into sameness. Bigness is a broad metaphysical view about history and about 224

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how society works, which is derived from vulgar Marxism, and which depicts society as a bad system that must be overthrown by attacking the language, values, culture, history, and ideology of bourgeois culture. It is interesting that today this rhetoric drives the homogenizing commercialism that Bigness appeals to. It plays on the erroneous diagnosis of reality as doomed, and on the nonsensical promise of liberation along the single path of Bigness. It is still valuable to remember that through research Olmsted and Vaux had rebuffed the prevailing assumptions regarding city growth as inversely related to quality of life. They investigated a number of complex planning issues from transportation, to expansion, to infrastructure, and to housing costs. By analyzing the evolution of street plans from medieval towns to contemporary metropolises they came to embrace the accelerated enlargement of cities. Olmsted and Vaux explained that growth should not be feared because the growth of nineteenth century metropolises induced major advances in urban conditions. The expansion of cities had precipitated public health reforms and the delivery of urban services which were previously unavailable, and which greatly diminished epidemic diseases. The abandonment of compact buildings in favor of more open, light, and air filled arrangements had indeed made cities larger, but it had also contributed to making them more salubrious. Unfortunately these historical conclusions, along with equally relevant contemporary studies, are stamped out by Bigness’ one-dimensional view of reality. ONE WORLD

Bigness is the ideal singularity. It is Stephen Hawking’s model of the universe, bounded but without edges. It is a seamless interiority. Koolhaas finds in Bigness a guarantee for uniqueness because, like the walled city, it is chaotic but at the same time establishes a boundary which contains that very chaos. For Koolhaas, each large scaled architectural project “acquires the pretension and sometimes the reality of a completely enveloping reality, and an absolute autonomy.”11 To the degree that these mega-projects separate us from the world “out there,” they also liberate us from it. They are worldsin-themselves. Thus, Koolhaas proposes Bigness as an index of possible new freedoms, 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 stable identity, and of traditional community, and serves Koolhaas as a tool to battle the forces of dispersal that he feels are eroding today’s society.12 In relation to his proposal for a library for the University at Jussieu, Paris, he states: I find that one of the most pregnant and provocative elements of the library program in Paris was to re-formulate the idea of a “communal 225

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11 Alejandro Zaera Polo, “Finding Freedoms: Conversations with Rem Koolhaas,” p. 20. 12 Bigness must be read in the context of the many critiques of the contemporary metropolis circulating inside the Architectural Association in the late sixties when Koolhaas was a student there. Bigness plays on the idea of the building as a city that, according to Peter Cook (an A.A. professor, and member of Archigram), had crystallized by the mid 1960s into numerous theories and built projects. Cook argues that the concept captivated theorists because of its clarity and homogeneity, and because it combined the compact character of the much treasured Italian town with the heroism of the Unité d’Habitation. The concept came with a whole supporting stratum of ideas: the development of the multilevel environment, and the study of the building as container for random development. Bigness also addresses the sixties debate, especially central in British urbanism, about how to insert the new into the old. There were those at the A.A. who argued for improving the existing through the careful insertion of new elements. Alison and Peter Smithson were researching how to introduce new large structures into cities without disrupting existing use patterns of association. On a smaller scale, Michael Webb’s experiments with mobile inflatable systems for individual habitation were attempts to resolve the deficiencies of the city through punctual insertion of new elements at the level of the user. See Peter Cook, Experimental Architecture (New York: Universe Books, 1970), p. 97.

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13 Rem Koolhaas, as quoted in Alejandro Zaera Polo, “Finding Freedoms,” p. 17. 14 Rem Koolhaas, “Bigness,” in S,M,L,XL, p. 502. 15 Koolhaas quoting Frederic Jameson to define “Bazaar” is particularly telling in this regard: “The Blade Runner syndrome is the interfusion of crowds of people among a high-technological bazaar with its multitudinous modal points—all of this sealed into an inside without an outside, which thereby intensifies the formerly urban to the point of becoming, or being analogous to, the unmappable system of late capitalism itself. The abstract system and its interrelations are now the outside, the former dome, the former city, beyond which no subject position is available so that it cannot be inspected as a thing in its own right, although it is a totality.” Koolhaas’ understanding of Bigness in terms of capitalism denotes his desire to design a totality so perfectly autonomous that it erases its own boundaries. See S,M,L,XL, p. 16, and Alejandro Zaera Polo, “Finding Freedoms,” p. 21. 16 “Through their scale and variety, the effect of the inhabited planes becomes almost that of a street; this boulevard generates a system of supra-programmatic ‘urban’ elements in the interior: plazas, parks, monumental staircases, cafés, shops. [. . .] Also, the life span of the structure and that of the crust of the

Bigness closes itself off from the urban and seeks to replace it: Rem Koolhaas’ photomontage of “Exodus” (1971). From Rem Koolhaas et al., S,M,L,XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), p. 8.

facility”, an “entity” in the midst of a complete collapse of the public realm,—and certainly of its classical appearance. Against the obvious homogenization of electronic media, against the erasure of the necessity of place, against the triumph of fragmentation . . . 13 But Bigness is a place that floats above reality. It is an alternative world: a complete enveloping virtuality where the horizon of the real is a man-made bubble. It is a “void” that has clear boundaries but is internally unstable. It determines autonomous worlds that can pose as the Real and feign totality. Bigness is, to quote Koolhaas, “the final, most radical break: Bigness is no longer a part of any urban tissue. It exists, at most, it coexists. Its subtext is fuck context.”14 Once inside, the outside (as with the shopping mall) becomes not only irrelevant but also inaccessible.15 Koolhaas reasons a world where nature has expired. It can no longer operate as the mythic locus of Spirit. Inside his library project for Jussieu he envisions a network of boulevards creating a “new public realm,” a more “concentrated” city where visitors drift along a hyper-urbanized environment.16 Architecture is the only ship capable of containing humanity and of saving it from the technological 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’ projects are not for everyone. They are not the porous Republican Institution of Olmsted. They have walls, they have gates, and they are owned by selective constituencies. Koolhaas is always deliberately vague about precisely what kind of community he envisions inhabiting Bigness.

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INVASION OF THE CITY SNATCHERS

“Bigness no longer needs the city;” proclaims Koolhaas, “it represents the city; it preempts the city; or better still, it is the city.”17 Read in the light of the American city this break liquidates the progressive, democratic function of the non-urban. What gave the parks of the nineteenth century their revolutionary power, that is, the power to contest and to transform the conventions of authority operative through the traditional city, was that they stood in for that which was beyond human control and design, i.e. nature. The paradox of course is that the parks were manicured environments. They can and should be read as highly constructed ambiences. Yet we cannot overlook that they are alive, and that this brings them close to effacing their own artificiality. They have a life of their own. At the very least Olmsted’s parks speak a formal language that is completely antithetical to the architecture of the city. In this sense, the parks keep open the possibility of a different life and social reality. They are not simply compensatory environments. Bigness, on the other hand, folds the city back onto the city, thus foreclosing on one important possibility of imagining resistance to the establishment. We are in effect faced with a complete internalization of metropolitan life behind a new kind of city wall. Instead of non-urban pockets in an urban 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 successful conclusion. He challenges the existing by calling it “nothingness,” but instead of really taking a fresh new look at it, instead of investigating the rich potential of sprawl as the source for a new kind of urbanity,18 he replaces it with an idealized view of the city and its indeterminacy. Bigness internalizes urbanity and demotes the contemporary metropolis to “un-city.” This attitude towards the city has been a constant in Koolhaas’ work from the start, and not the result of some prolonged study of the city. His 1972 thesis project at the Architectural Association entitled “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture,”19 depicts London as a sick city, “a behavioral sink.” The problem of the city is really the problem of the subject’s apathy. Urbanism meets psychology. Borrowing heavily from Superstudio’s “Continuous Monument” project (1969), Koolhaas designs a linear megastructure in which the subject is forced into action and denied his or 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. Individuals are forced into group experience. Koolhaas’ new city stands inside a double wall meant to “enclose and protect this zone to retain its integrity and to prevent any contamination of its surface by the cancerous organism that threatens to engulf it.” Outside stand the menacing forces of power politics, the bourgeois home, and the Protestant work ethic. The new city offers 227

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‘settlements’ are not necessarily the same; the path and the public domain are analogous to the permanence of the city, the infill of the libraries to that of individual architectures. In this structure, program can change continuously, without affecting architectural character.” Rem Koolhaas, S,M,L,XL, pp. 1326–9.

White urban islands float in a sea of black “nothingness”: Figure/Ground diagram of Rem Koolhaas’ competition entry for Melun-Sénart (1987). From S,M,L,XL, pp. 982–3. 17 Rem Koolhaas, “Bigness,” in S,M,L,XL, p. 515. 18 Other architects around the globe are proposing new methods to visualize the existing, to map even non-visual elements, in order to make their projects arise from a fresh discovery of the site, and a deep understanding of the forces that shape it. The work of UN Studio in Holland uses parameter-based computer technologies to visualize the correspondences between the various elements of the site and the program to be inserted. Then they generate a situation-specific organizational structure out of their research. Shayne O’Neill in the United States is less dependent on technology and more resistant to giving the program priority from the start. His projects draw on mappings of the site from various disciplines (from geology to air traffic) in order to produce a composite picture of the forces of formation of the site from which a site-specific response to a program may be modeled. See Patrick Schumacher, “UN Studio: Arnhem Central,” in AA Files (Spring), n. 38, 23–36.

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19 See Rem Koolhaas, “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture,” in S,M,L,XL, pp. 2–21.

Londoners “collective facilities that fully accommodate individual desires.” For those “strong enough to love it,” the city makes individuals “ecstatic in the freedom of their architectural confines.” The building is not just a “social-condenser,” as Central Park is for Olmsted. It is the early promise of infinite confinement that Bigness would deliver twenty years later. Resistance is futile. STATUS QUO

Koolhaas’ claim that he is resurrecting the Real and the Whole is false. In his model the particular stands in for the universal. His Bigness is an attempt to 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 proposes a “germ-free” world that is not contaminated by the same social ills of the world outside. Koolhaas’ urban theory plays the game of naïve socialism, but fails to account for socialism’s failure. The refusal to address history and context leads Bigness down the double path of a bureaucracy of authenticity doomed to self-destruction, and of a pure mirror of the world it replaces. Bigness confuses its myopic understanding of sprawl with a license to ignore the real. Just as the nineteenth century urban park acquired moralistic proportions through the writings of the transcendentalists and the combined efforts of planners and landscape architects, Bigness is polished with the wax of virtue by Koolhaas. Where morality was once measured against nature, 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. The freedom that Koolhaas values most in both Bigness and capitalism is the freedom to exclude. As such it can claim to effect connections to all that is outside, because, once you are in, there is no outside, only the semblance of exteriority in a perfect interiority. His Bigness is a representation of urbanity that lays claim to reality in the name of consumer culture. By appealing to the old rhetoric of the new, Koolhaas liquidates its very possibility.

Bigness as infinite confinement. The outside becomes inaccessible: photomontage of Rem Koolhaas’ “Exodus” (1971). From S,M,L,XL, pp. 8–9.

A preliminary version of this article was originally published in the Proceedings of the 88th 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 republished in Italian in Il Progretto, v. 4, n. 7 (April 2000). 228

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HABRAKEN AND KOOLHAAS Two Dutchmen flying over Bijlmermeer

POST URBANISM

JUNE P. WILLIAMSON (2000)

The Bijlmer offers boredom on a heroic scale. In its monotony, harshness, and even brutality, it is, ironically, refreshing. Rem Koolhaas 1 How can we design large projects without necessarily imposing uniformity and rigidity where variety and adaptability over time are desired? How can the big project nevertheless do justice to the small scale? N. J. Habraken 2

1 Rem Koolhaas, “Las Vegas of the Welfare State,” in Rem Koolhaas et al., S, M, L, XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), 871.

2 N. John Habraken, “The Control of Complexity,” Places 4:2 (1987): 3.

This paper examines the differing, though related, attitudes toward scale exhibited by N. John Habraken and Rem Koolhaas, as exemplified by their reactions to the residential district of Bijlmermeer in South Amsterdam. Habraken has consistently advocated for the creation and preservation of fine-grained urban tissue in the built environment. He has observed and described the increasing coarseness of grain that characterizes twentiethcentury urban projects, particularly mass housing, using figure-ground plans of Amsterdam as a telling example of the transformation. In his 1998 book The Structure of the Ordinary, the synthesis of many years of observation and reflection, Habraken carefully outlines his arguments about structuring scale—point by point, grain by grain. Conversely, Habraken’s countryman Koolhaas argues polemically that the Extra Large is a contemporary reality to be welcomed, not bemoaned. O.M.A.’s 1986–87 project for Bijlmermeer illustrates this position. A LATTER-DAY VILLE RADIEUSE

An aerial vantage point is required to comprehend the scale and spatial organization of the Bijlmermeer district in the southern sector of Amsterdam. One may also characterize as “top down” the planning process that led to the design and construction of the district. The extension, on a large reclaimed sector of land to the southeast of the central city, was begun in 1966 by the Amsterdam Department of Urban Development and continued into the 1980s. The intention was to ease overcrowding in the central city and other low-income areas by providing housing for up to 120,000 lowincome residents. The project was a revision of the final phase of expansion envisioned in the 1930s General Extension Plan for Amsterdam from the 1930s, based on the ideas and projects of H.P. Berlage.3

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3 D.A. Pinder, “Urban Expansion and the Bijlmermeer Project in Amsterdam,” Housing and Planning Review 28:1 (1972): 17–20.

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Aerial photographs of the Bijlmermeer extension of the 1960s and 1970s. (AVIODROME Aerial Photography, Leylstad, NL.)

4 Hugh McClintock and Michael Fox, “The Bijlmermeer development and the expansion of Amsterdam,” Royal Town Planning Institute Journal 57:7 (1971): 313–316.

The planners carefully aligned their vision with the program of the 1933 C.I.A.M. Athens Charter. The very large project, consisting of 4,420 acres of virgin land, provided an opportunity to comprehensively realize the forms and concepts of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. This “retrospective” adherence to ideas of the 1920s and 1930s is curious. When examining the overall plan and development strategy at Bijlmermeer is it clear that the Ville Radieuse provided a very direct model. The majority of the housing is concentrated in flats in medium-rise eleven-story linear buildings placed far apart on open land, maximizing access to natural light and air. Conventional streets are eliminated. Automobile traffic is concentrated on elevated high-speed motorways with direct exits to collective parking garages. Three new metro lines were also planned. Industrial and recreation uses are kept distinctly separated from residential areas. The housing projections anticipated inhabitant densities higher than in other newly built sectors of Amsterdam.4 In accordance with Le Corbusier’s vision, the open land was intended to be freely accessible landscaped parkland, to provide a sense of human scale, crossed by pathways for pedestrians and cyclists. The corridors of the long block buildings were intended to serve as “streets in the air” where residents might interact socially, removed from the congestion and grime of nineteenthcentury corridor roads. The fixed nature of the plan does not reflect later calls within C.I.A.M. to address open-endedness and capacities for growth and change.

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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 deviation in the scheme from the orthogonal orthodoxy of modernism. As Koolhaas notes, the hexagonal shapes extend down in scale to the jungle gyms in the children’s playground.5 Only at the periphery of the masterplanned area may low-rise buildings be found that do not conform to this monotonous formal theme. The backlash was immediate. The generation of Dutch architects with the most influence in the late 1960s and early 1970s were protagonists and followers of Team X (organizers of the last C.I.A.M. in Dubrovnik, 1956), such as Aldo van Eyck and his follower Herman Hertzberger; they were highly vocal critics. In its realized form, the Bijlmermeer provides few of the advantages suggested by the C.I.A.M. program. The open space is barren, asphalted, and littered with errant automobiles; the concrete walls of the corridor-streets are covered with graffiti; and the poor immigrant inhabitants are isolated from, rather than directly connected into, the center city life of Amsterdam.

5 Koolhaas et al., S, M, L, XL, 866, 876.

HABRAKEN’S FLY-OVER

The critique of modernist planning by Team X was the context for N. John Habraken’s intellectual coming of age. His first book, Supports, was published in 1962 (English edition in 1972). It is a reactionary polemic against industrialized mass housing (which he abbreviates as M.H.) as a solution to the postwar European “housing problem.” The essence of his argument is that M.H. eliminates the user/inhabitant from the process of designing housing. The essay was published without illustrations or specific examples. Instead, the problem is described in terms of the conditions and values that provide the context for M.H. solutions against which a possible alternative is juxtaposed. This alternative, called “support dwelling,” would provide inhabitants with the opportunity for involvement in determining the form and configuration of their dwelling units, within a predetermined infrastructure. In contrast to the seductively illustrated manifestos of modernism and other utopias, Habraken provides only a hypothesis. Habraken’s rhetoric is measured and calm. His focus is on careful descriptions of ideas supporting a seemingly modest and eminently sensible proposal: the “conclusion must be that the return of consultation and involvement on the part of the users, in the most literal sense, must be accepted.”6 Rather than incitement to revolution, the reader is provided 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 found his ideas naïve and over-generalized.7 Others were mobilized to concrete action. 231

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6 Habraken, Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 3. 7 Robert Gutman, “Simple-Minded Utopianism and Autocratic Nonsense,” Landscape Architecture 63:2 (1973): 166–169.

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8 Habraken, J.T. Boekholt, A.P. Thijssen and P.J.M. Dinjens, Variations: The Systematic Design of Supports (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Laboratory of Architecture and Planning, 1976), 126–135.

9 Habraken, “The Limits of Professionalism,” AA Quarterly 8:1 (1976): 52–59; Habraken, Transformations of the Site (Awater Press, 1988), plate xi; Habraken, The Structure of the Ordinary (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1998), 324.

10 Habraken, Transformations of the Site, 182.

11 Habraken, “The Limits of Professionalism,” 57. 12 Habraken, The Structure of the Ordinary, 7.

In 1964, the S.A.R. (Foundation for Architectural Research) was organized in Eindhoven, Holland to explore the architectural potential of industrialized support dwelling. Habraken was the organization’s director until 1975. One of the first design applications of the resulting formal ideas of support and infill structures was at Bijlmermeer. The low-rise Bijlmer support system was developed in 1970 in conjunction with K. Rijnboutt, an architect 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 control the extent of variation possible in determining the layout of individual units.8 Habraken extended the argument in Supports to a more general argument against professionalism and towards an appreciation for the territorial complexity of vernacular and self-built urban areas, which he called tissues. He characterizes urban tissues in terms of graining. Finer-grained urban environments are usually territorially more complex. Habraken repeatedly uses aerial photographs or figure-ground plans of the Bijlmer compared to seventeenth-century central Amsterdam as a leitmotif in his criticism of the coarsening of the urban grain.9 He writes, “within areas of the same size we see hundreds of independent physical units in the first and only a few in the latter. . . . The capacity for transformations in the site is of course directly related to the number of configurations that can change independently.” And, “density simply cannot be the rationale behind the arrangement. The same density can usually be reached with three or four story buildings along residential streets. The undeniable difference of highrise projects compared to the lowrise solution is the dramatic shift towards full public control of outside space.”10 In other words, the natural desire of those in control (i.e. professionals) to consolidate the amount of territory over which they may exert their control has gone unchecked. But he also admits, “it is . . . much less simple to develop a close and fine-grained territory than an open coarse-grained territory with the same housing density.”11 Explicit in Habraken’s argument is the ever-present propensity for change.12 His set of values assumes the desirability of variety in the urban environment. His theories propose methods and strategies for maximizing the opportunities for individuals to exert control over the physical form of various portions of the built environment. Implicit is a broad acceptance of differing visual and form-making approaches as long as the apparatus of centralized control is dismantled. Therefore, Habraken does not directly critique Bijlmermeer; instead, he addresses the centralized bureaucratic structure of the organizations that planned and designed it. His critique extends a life-rope to the moribund, suggesting that fine-grained interventions over time might transform the site.

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KOOLHAAS’S FLY-OVER

The principle of defining zones as a tool for designing adaptable schemes as developed by the S.A.R. group is a significant precedent for the design strategies later reinterpreted by Rem Koolhaas.13 The notion of dissecting a building (or a landscape, or an urban area) into zones to be considered independently rather than as an integrated whole held enormous appeal both as a tool for analysis and as a methodology for design. Zoning as an analysis tool was explored in the discussion of the Downtown Athletic Club in Koolhaas’s 1978 book Delirious New York. The rhetoric of zoning in this guise, however, is completely different from the charts and diagrams of the S.A.R.; Koolhaas delights in sexual innuendo and the playful use of language, his text awash in irony and simulacra. “In an abstract choreography, the building’s athletes shuttle up and down between its 38 “plots”—in a sequence as random as only an elevator man can make it—each equipped with techno-psychic apparatus for the men’s own redesign.”14 The principles of zoning used as the basis for a design methodology are apparent in the competition design for Parc de la Villette and other O.M.A. projects from the early 1980s. This was also the primary design strategy utilized in O.M.A.’s project at Bijlmermeer. As already noted, before it was even completed the Bijlmer district of Amsterdam had become an embarrassment to the city. Proposals were floated to tear the slab buildings 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 1976 essay entitled “Las Vegas of the Welfare State” Koolhaas had characterized the Bijlmer as a socialist spectacle, embodying the extreme result of the themes of “equality, puritanism, physical and mental health, a New Age.”15 In its excesses he identified a retroactive polemic against the “postmodernist, anti-C.I.A.M. principles” of van Eyck, Hertzberger and other Team X influenced architects in Holland whom he accused of a “fetishistic concern with the ineffable and the qualitative” that equaled C.I.A.M.’s concern with the objective and the quantifiable.16 The Bijlmer offered “boredom on a heroic scale,” and Koolhaas found this refreshing, just as Venturi and Scott Brown delighted in the signs and symbols of Las Vegas. When teaching at the Architectural Association in London in 1978 he and his partners used the Bijlmer as a site for a studio requiring students to propose large building interventions.17 In their alternate plan, Koolhaas and O.M.A. proposed to learn from the Bijlmer, rather than reject it. In the 1976 essay Koolhaas had accused the major Dutch architects of the time as having turned to an architecture of “social remedy” and described their output, such as Hertzberger’s De Drei Hoven (Old People’s Home) and van Eyck’s Orphanage, as a “soft-core gulag for the vulnerable.”18 In contrast, O.M.A. proposed that the district 233

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13 Bernard Leupen, Christoph Grafe, Nicola Kornig, Marc Lampe and Peter de Zeeuw, Design and Analysis (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1997), 64–65.

14 Koolhaas, Delirious New York (1978; New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994), 157.

15 Koolhaas et al., S, M, L, XL, 863.

16 Ibid., 867.

17 Catalog of work at the Architectural Association, London during the 1978–79 school year.

18 Koolhaas et al., S, M, L, XL, 867.

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View of the minarets of a mosque at Bijlmermeer, built to serve the immigrant Muslim population, with apartment slab block beyond. (Photograph by Anneli Bengtsson and Rob Kanbier, 2000.)

needed increased urbanization, not removal and replacement. Interestingly this strategy, if not its motivation, aligns with the goals of Habraken. They proposed to infill the site by adding new, overlapped zones of programming across the barren, open space, underutilized no-man’s land. First would be added street-like bands of parking rather than centralized garages, followed by the introduction of an international marketplace/ boulevard in the empty space below the elevated metro tracks. The green space would contract into intensely landscaped bands, meandering paths would become direct, and a process of “typological bombardment” would introduce new uses interspersed between the housing slabs to provide new focus and identity to each hexagonal courtyard within the project. But the project was not implemented, nor was the Bijlmer demolished. COLLISION COURSE

19 Ibid., 886.

20 “The Growing Monument,” Werk, Bauen + Wohnen 6 (1999): 42–45. See also “Dal Suriname a Bijlmermeer,” Space and Society 67 (1994): 70–71.

Koolhaas’s story of his involvement with the Bijlmer ends with the disastrous El Al freight plane crash of 1992. “Then one day a jumbo jet fell from the air and made a start with the destruction. The other side had won.”19 The airplane crashed dramatically into one of the housing slabs, causing the loss of 250 lives, and renewing focus on the plight of the majority immigrant population (from Surinam) who live there and on the attempts by Dutch culture to come to terms with multiple ethnicities. Inquiries into the crash and memorials for the victims continue. One notable recent project at the site is a memorial garden by Descombes Architects with Architectuurstudio Herman Hertzberger.20 The ideas of Habraken and Koolhaas collide over the issue of control in the design and planning process. The issue of control, regardless of political ideology, was at the center of Habraken’s critique of mass housing. 234

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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 essential difference 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 demonstrating the morphological differences between the public housing products of capitalism and those of Marxism as long as the process in both cases is not the process of the fine-grained division of power.”21 Conversely, Koolhaas encourages the simulation of variety, rather than its actuality, through the vehicle of the spectacle. He is too cynical to accept Habraken’s line; he writes, “Whatever variety exists is obviously a simulated variety that attempts to reproduce synthetically an Umwelt free from all the controls that are responsible for its very formation.”22

21 Habraken, “The Limits of Professionalism,” 57.

22 Koolhaas et al., S, M, L, XL, 871.

SUBSEQUENT TRAJECTORIES

Since 1986, Koolhaas has increasingly embraced the ideology and ethics of late capitalism. He has announced, “The city is no longer.”23 It seems that it is now his desire to build fast, build big, build NOW, for yesterday and tomorrow are of no concern if one has access to control today. Added to his advocacy of large-scale projects with centralized control is the recognition that current building practices do not guarantee a life span for a building of more than thirty years, especially in Asia. He suggests that larger spatial sizes are accompanied by shorter temporal intervals. Entire areas will be wiped out and rebuilt—as required by the forces of capital—rather than accrued piecemeal over time. Habraken, meanwhile, has doggedly continued applied research into ideas growing out of the initial premises of Supports. He has retained his optimism about the power of careful description and the potential for designers of the built environment to learn through recognizing the processes that “structure the ordinary.” He writes: The pedestrian realm moves into the shopping mall, the office tower, the institutional complex or residential apartment complex. Atria, escalators, and corridors begin to articulate hierarchy in an exclusively pedestrian three-dimensional net form. . . . Intensive relations between form and use, familiar to us from the historic pedestrian fabric, may be reinterpreted in the large building, the result may ultimately create richer hierarchy within city form. 24 He has continued to pursue variable housing methodologies that utilize the potentials of industrialized mass production. He is involved with the “Open Building” group, which has piloted projects in Japan and Holland with the cooperation of industrial manufacturers. The focus has shifted to improved infrastructure systems that may be easily separated from the main building 235

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23 Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” S, M, L, XL, 1264.

24 Habraken, The Structure of the Ordinary, 121.

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25 Habraken, “The Open Building Approach: Examples and Principles” (paper delivered at the Housing Seminar, Taipei, R.O.C., 1994).

support structure and selectively replaced or reconfigured. One promising example is the Matura infill system, which includes a matrix tile layer above the floor holding water, heating, and sewage piping (pressurized to run horizontally), coupled with a baseboard for electrical conduit.25 These very small elements have the capacity to radically alter how large housing projects 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 to Dr. Ron Lewcock at the Georgia Institute of Technology, my academic home when this essay was composed.

This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 88th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2000.

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HETEROTOPIAS AND URBAN DESIGN POST URBANISM

DAVID GRAHAME SHANE (2000)

WHAT IS URBAN DESIGN?

Urban Design is a strange and imprecise mixture of architecture and city planning whose practitioners envision and construct small fragments of cities, without being able to control the larger city or every architectural intervention. It is interdisciplinary by nature and necessarily looks at the geography, sociology, economy and politics of an entire city as the setting for the design operation. It examines the culture of the city and the designer tries to act in response to this perceived larger cultural environment. The response may take many forms, but Urban Designers draw on architecture for their design skills and projective abilities. Architecture is the constructional base from which they work as they engage the city at a variety of scales and in a variety of modes. It is the argument of this paper that Urban Design creates fragments or enclaves in the city. These enclaves work as heterotopias, functioning to differentiate one area from another. Urban Design controls this differentiation and refines it further. This differentiation can be based on historical, ethnic or marketing strategies adopted by a variety of stakeholders in the Post-modern city. This paper then gives a theoretical foundation for migrations in meaning of enclaves within a semiological system based on urban morphologies (Type A for old city enclaves, Type B for the mall). These meaning systems are linked to Foucault’s theory of heterotopias. Foucault’s theories on “Disciplinary” heterotopias are well known, based on his studies of madness, hospitals, prisons, etc. This paper argues that his category of “Illusory” heterotopias, which has received less attention, is important when new media shape our perception of the city and its differences in an age of accelerated communications. HETEROTOPIAS AND THE ENCLAVE SYSTEM

One of the premises of this paper is that enclaves and armatures act as heterotopias in relation to their surrounding city. The creators of the armature and enclaves want to differentiate their work from its surroundings, to make it attractive, new, successful. While effective formulas may be repeated, the developers and designers have to refine and adapt for every new project. Enclaves are differentiated from the rest of the city as new pockets of growth or old areas equipped with a new image. These fragments operate within a larger, bi-polar, system of urban semiology. Each development unit combines with its neighbors to form a disjunctive urban ecology with planned and unplanned relationships. 237

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Figure 1. Enclave and Image/ Armature Diagram. (Drawn by D.G. Shane.)

Figure 2. London Enclave: Covent Garden Festival Mall, 1998. (Author photo.)

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 our urban 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 normal everyday experience of private, domestic living arrangements, with its fortuitous mixtures and messes that defy categorization. This meant that heterotopic enclaves were like mirror reflections of their society, both recognizably the same yet at the same time distorted with their codes reversed in the mirror space. In contrast to these private, domestic areas, the armatures 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 forms the nexus within which its creators imagine the purity of the enclave. This sign system is the background against which the urban public consumes the enclave as the latest attraction. The 300-year history of Covent Garden illustrates that this sign system shifts as the “floating signifier” changes its position over time. Thus what was once an efficient, single minded and pure enclave can be incorporated into the messy body of the city (Figure 2). Also, as the Covent Garden history illustrates, the same enclave under different circumstances can re-emerge as a heterotopic pocket of development, not once but twice (fruit market in the 19th century, the festival mall in the 20th century). In this shifting situation enclave spaces may lose and regain their critical edge, their mirror function. In a similar fashion, early malls are now being recycled as low budget, community facilities, containing social service centers, police stations, health clinics, jails, colleges and chapels. Architects are also cutting these early malls up and converting them into Type A village centers, without a residential component. The semiological urban system of armatures and enclaves reflects the larger social and economic life of the city. It is not hard to read Post-modern American, European or Asian cities, as a system formed by a series of enclaves of specific typologies or pathologies. Enclaves in this system act as heterotopias, spaces of high efficiency and great specialization, which temporarily serve as pinnacles of profit, social control, fashion or decay. Their interaction has created the dynamic inter-relationships that power the history of the city. Just to consider residential enclaves, clearly inhabitants of 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 Los Angeles (Type B). There are also enclaves of upper middle class two income, managerial households in both Type A and Type B morphologies, with urban neighborhood associations (Type A) and suburban residents’ associations (Type B) protecting their interests and family values. Another type of 238

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enclave accommodates the working class, blue collar workers and lower middle class administrators, living in tenements in the old city (Type A) or in small lot, semi-detached, inner city or suburban neighborhoods of row houses, bungalows and tract homes (Type B). Finally there is the fourth category of enclaves, those of great poverty and abandonment. Here building demolitions and fires have eroded the Type A street structure. In the Type B inner ring suburb, a similar pattern of demolition and arson has reduced once prosperous suburbs to open fields and isolated buildings, as in Detroit. Each of these systems of enclaves has its own set of codes, which defines its position relative to the others. Together these are woven into the fabric of the city as residential enclaves, interacting with commercial, industrial, mixed use and transportation systems. Each enclave is defined in the system by its own specialty, which reflects its individuality against all the others. A double code is at work. One code defines the interior relationships of the fragment and sets up its internal consistency. Another code controls the exterior relationships, based on the reflective, mirror function. This second code entails a knowledge of the neighbors and their qualities, which stretches widely across the system. At the same time, as mentioned earlier, a curious paradox remains. Both codes retain a memory trace of their opposite. Covent Garden contained an object building at its core, while the isolated object building of the suburban mall contained within it the memory trace of the main street of the city. This complex and contradictory condition is typical of heterotopias in eras of rapid change. Michel Foucault wrote that heterotopias were “A single real place made up of several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible.” The surprising combinations gave an innovative edge to their operations and rationalized emerging new orders, free from the interference of the rest of society in islands of efficiency and comparative order. For Foucault heterotopias were specialized enclaves in which specific knowledge 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” discipline for those unfortunates who did not conform to the codes decreed by the rational 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 never developed in such an extensive survey as the “Disciplinary.” These secondary, “Illusory” heterotopias, were much more fluid and unstable in their internal order. Here the “compensatory” disciplinary system was reversed and chaos reigned. Values could change in a second, codes could be flipped and the world turned upside down in an instant. Foucault’s model for this world was the “Theater of the Absurd” of Artaud or Ionescu, in which all 239

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Figure 3. Las Vegas Enclave: The Venetian Casino, 1999. (Author Photo.)

social conventions were questioned beyond the existential minimum. Foucault cited the theater, cinemas, casinos, bordellos and the stock market as belonging to this Illusory category (Figure 3). Other scholars have extended this category to shopping arcades and malls—places of consumption. The semiological dimension, with its “floating signifier,” was paradoxically 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 heterotopia to a Modernist machine interacting with trade and empires, work and leisure, implied but did not articulate the fundamental connection between capitalism and heterotopias. Between metropolis and colony, between European and colonized, an enormous, reflexive gap existed. Such differentiation drives desire and the consumption/production cycle in the capitalist dynamic, also fueling the Post-modern enclave and armature creation around highly differentiated images. In this portrait of heterotopias as specialized enclaves their dual aspect has emerged. Enclaves and armatures operate as dual hybrids within this system or network of flows. They have both a regulatory side and an illusory image making side. On the one hand there is the legal department, which is concerned with rules and regulations, enforcement, inspections, the disciplining and punishment of offenders. On the other hand there is the designer and marketing arm which is concerned with the image of the city, the desire and manufacturing illusion. While Foucault scarcely considered this latter aspect, it has become increasingly important in the market driven and highly mediated environment of the Post-modern city. Differentiation is crucial to survival in this environment and the capacity of “Illusory” heterotopias for marketing places, aiding in place production and advertising images has made these enclaves especially important to scholars of the Post-modern city. HETEROTOPIAS AND THE “MACHINE CITY”

The fragmentary system of Urban Design has only emerged as a distinct discipline in the last 50 years in western and industrialized nations. Modernist city planning presumed a synoptic overview, that everything could be planned and designed by a central state, agency or intelligence (Patrick Geddes’ Watchtower). A long history of city making was lost in the Modernists’ drive for progress and their abrupt break with history. Manfredo Tafuri pointed out that after the Depression of the 1930s state planning was the rule in Marxist, Fascist and Democratic countries (Roosevelt, T.V.A. etc). It was presumed that the city was transparent and the centralized organ of government could control everything, like the central jailer in Bentham’s Panopticon (Foucault). All functions would be carefully segregated in mono-functional zones for maximum efficiency. 240

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Communication and transport systems connected these enclaves and privileged the center. A brief review of the utopian projects of Le Corbusier, Mies or Hilbesheimer reveals their preference for the center, segregated functions, Total Design, aerial perspectives, panoptic views etc. Robert Moses, with his gigantic model of New York City, belonged to this tradition. The New Urbanists also look back longingly to such dreams of tightly planned and controlled environments. Ebenezer Howard provided the crucial diagram for the Modernist city in his book on The Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1904) (Figure 4). The city was seen as a polycentric city-region, with satellite new towns set in a ring around the “mother city,” surrounded by Green Belts. Howard foresaw the demise of the center city and the rise of a system of self-sufficient new towns around the periphery. The planned and unplanned decentralization of the Post-War years gave a peculiar twist to the Modernists’ utopias, one that broke the dream of total control and the privileged center. A polycentric, urban dispersal was prompted by many concerns, varying from fear (as a defense against atomic attack after Hiroshima) to the political (the desire to create a large, stable, property owning middle class). The unintended consequence 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 transportation systems (such as the automobile and T.V.). To the inhabitant traveling at speed, the city became a system of more or less dense urban fragments. These urban enclaves were dispersed throughout the landscape around the highways, railways, airports etc. With the breakdown of Modernist total design and planning methodologies (with their non-physical/statistical orientations), Urban Design emerged as a mixture of urban planning and architecture. The new discipline broke down the Modernist city, bringing aesthetic controls to the large urban fragments and investment packages created by the dominant system of finance, planning and functional segregation. As the city dispersed into the city-region, new urban centers were required and the center also had to reequipped for an altered regional role. Urban Design coordinated the internal aesthetics of these urban enclaves. Kevin Lynch in Good City Form described this system of urban production as the “City-Machine,” in a diagram which showed how each part is self-contained, linked by channels of communication, can be easily replaced and has no sense of the whole (Figure 5). These enclaves, whether planned or free-market, all contained strong urban armatures (linear sequences/narratives) to counteract Modernist notions of free flowing, universal, non-specific space. They had clearly defined perimeters and a sense of enclosure and were clearly differentiated from their surroundings, neighbors or competitors. These enclaves might contain housing, commercial uses, industrial uses, recreational uses etc., segregated from all others. 241

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Figure 4. Ebenezer Howard: Garden City Diagram. (Drawn by D.G. Shane.)

Figure 5. Kevin Lynch: City as a machine Diagram. (Drawn by D.G. Shane.)

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Figure 6. Edge City: Modified Model Diagram. (Drawn by D.G. Shane.)

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 these peripheral cities, ranged along a spine or armature of a highway, taking advantage of the high-speed automobile travel to restructure urban functions within a regional landscape. In this city, mobility, access and travel time replace close pedestrian proximity and public transportation in the center 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 dependent on the media, allowing our perceptions of the city-region, its inhabitants and locales, to be easily manipulated by those with a clear agenda or large financial backing. Mall owners have responded with a variety of themed environments to attract customers. Thus the image of the city in the Postmodern city takes on a meaning never intended by Lynch, but easily understood by Marshall McLuhan. In this situation Urban Design takes on a mediated dimension that is rarely considered in discussing the newly founded discipline. THE TRIUMPH OF THE HETEROTOPIA: THE LIMITS OF URBAN DESIGN

Urban Design emerged, in part, in reaction to the Modernist City Machine model to manage the aesthetics of the resulting fragments. This implied an increase in the scale of operations of the architect, but also, paradoxically, a diminution of the power of the planner. Instead of a whole city, now only the enclave or the single armature might be controlled. Also abandoned was the Modernist idea that architecture might help create or even enforce the creation of a better “New Man”. Post-modern Urban Designers gave up the utopian aspirations of their predecessors and accepted that they were only a part of a larger social situation that was fundamentally beyond their control. They aligned themselves largely with the corporate forces of the market place, real estate interests, service and media interests, which were reshaping the city. The moral imperatives that had inspired the Modernists were exchanged for the commercial and marketing imperatives that inspired their new clients. Along with this shift in allegiance amongst Post-modern Urban Designers went an abandonment of the Modernist claim that architecture could create a “New Man” or entirely new city. Thus architecture and Urban Design take their place amongst a number of disciplines which might be said to construct the city setting, whether in the center or at the edge. Good architecture or Urban Design alone cannot make a city successful or safe; many other disciplines and people are involved. The larger social and economic setting is obviously very important along with a host of other factors beyond 242

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the designer’s control. Contemporary Urban Design has become a risky and shifting business with many complex actors, agents and forces participating in 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 Architecture, 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 the Other” 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 Entertainment Industry” in Fainstein, S. (Editor), The Tourist City, New Haven: Yale University Press, 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 and Oxford: 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.

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III URBAN SOCIETY

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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 and last section of the book. Society is shaped by the character and interaction of human institutions, customs, laws, and policies, as well as technology and natural circumstances such as geography and climate. It is the social and cultural condensate of evolving civilization—complex, dynamic, and unwieldy. Society is not simple to analyze or explain, much less to design or control. The sum of countless vectors of different magnitude pushing in different directions, it is constantly shifting its center of gravity and trajectory, often in ways and with consequences that are not easily or immediately apparent. Nonetheless, there are some more obvious changes that seem too widespread and inexorable to be ignored by the design fields. This third and final section of the book focuses on the more salient and consequential trends and issues, with an emphasis on how they impinge on the design and planning of the built environment. Societal changes seem to be both cyclic/recurring and structural/transformative. The former have to do with matters of fashion and style. These shorter-term trends are on designers’ radar, but considered too ephemeral and superficial to write or even talk about. Stylistic considerations are important but unacknowledged, especially in fields and mediums that are meant to be long lasting—like architecture and urban planning. On the other hand, there is a great deal of academic and professional discourse on longer-term change. Like the dozen or so essays in this section, design theory tends to focus on the deeper and more lasting societal changes and their impact on architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and planning. If urbanism and society are inextricably entangled, what societal changes are of most interest and concern to those concerned with the built environment? And what issues, dialectics, and antinomies preoccupy and shape practices and policies? The public realm, globalism and local identity, and technology—the three foci in this section of the book—are of paramount relevance. And they are interconnected in transparent and opaque ways to each other and to the other two sections of the book, urban process and urban form. The contemporary public realm is rich if not fraught with pithy contradictions and polarities. There are potent questions about public and private space—what is public and collective and shared, and what is private and idiosyncratic? What belongs in the public and private sectors? What is everyday public space and what is civic public space? What surveillance and intrusion rights does government have? The public realm also touches on 247

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issues of social class, of authenticity, and identity. Whose reality and whose identity, 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 democratically balance these competing interests and resolve these questions. But no subject 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 first place. On the other hand, people are uneasy about, if not threatened by, the breathless rate of change in their lives, and have a growing appetite for the stability of tradition and grounded place. It is a chronic and perhaps unavoidable clash between modernist, universal space and postmodernist neotraditional place, made all the more acute by forces of globalization and technology. As noted in the Preface, society is fast becoming both global and urban, with 90 percent of the estimated 3 billion increase in world population expected to live in urbanized areas (often in mega-agglomerations that are unlike cities as we presently know them). The remarkable acceleration in the urbanization of society is both promising and challenging. In addition to providing social benefits and amenities, cities are inherently more energyefficient and environmentally sustainable than low-density development. The post-petroleum megalopolis—very big, very diverse, very rich, and very poor—will need to develop infrastructure, transportation systems, and buildings that can survive and flourish with less plentiful, more expensive energy, as well as rising sea levels and more severe weather events. Cities will also have to negotiate and learn to live with the globalization of finance, production, and distribution, as well as all the attendant economic and social recalibrations and dislocations. The growth of free-trade zones and extra-jurisdictional spaces to circumvent national laws and exploit cheap labor begs difficult ethical questions about political and corporate behavior, as well as physical design and planning. So too do contested borders and cross-border activities, both legal and illegal. Natural disasters, poverty, disease, social upheavals, geo-political tension, terrorism, and war will continue to ravage society, as they always have and no doubt always will. To this long list of perennial problems must be added the dilemma of the carbon-based world economy and the resultant juggernaut of climate change. This section ends with four essays on technological issues. Technology is so pervasive and commonplace in today’s society that we tend to either take it for granted or miss the forest for the trees. It is easy to forget that choosing 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 these writings. Like the ones on the public realm and globalism, these final essays delve into and try to untangle the contradictions and conundrums of techno248

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science and techno-culture, to use Frampton’s terminology. Empowered and exhilarated, but also controlled by the logic of mechanical and digital devices, we are chronically torn by the merits and demerits of technology. The ubiquity of electronic communication and the pervasiveness of computing have fundamentally altered our lifestyles and environments, not to mention transformed the public realm. The tension between the embedded/ ambient and the public/monumental in urban design is both exacerbated and relaxed by new science and technology. For instance, networks, whether digital or vehicular, strongly shape society and, in turn, the built environment. This third section in particular and the book in general are rife with dialectical dilemmas and difficult choices: technology vs. nature, modern vs. 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 new dualities, dichotomies, and polarities—inevitably part of any complex, selfregulating system, including the book’s triad of urban process, urban form, and urban society. The challenge is to untether these problems from dogma and myth, and to attempt to resolve them, whether obliquely or frontally. They will forever require adjustment and correction, which can be temporary and provisional, or recurring and incremental, or transformative and cataclysmic. This collection of essays begins to sort out some of these challenges, to identify promising opportunities, and to posit some answers, as well as to ask important new questions.

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MICHAEL SORKIN (2007)

As part of his recently released plan for “New York 2030,” Mayor Michael Blooomberg is actively promoting a scheme for congestion pricing in the busiest parts of Manhattan. Modeled on programs in Singapore, London, and Stockholm, the system is intended to curb vehicular traffic (and to raise money for public transportation) by imposing charges ($8 for cars and $21 for trucks) to enter the borough below 96th Street. The proposal has the support of virtually every bien-pensant urbanist in town, although it has met some resistance, particularly from the outer boroughs and suburbs where car dependence is highest and public transport thinnest. And there are many who suggest that the burden of the charges will fall disproportionately on the poor. I certainly support radical measures to reduce traffic in Manhattan and congestion pricing has a good track record in the cities that have tried it. But there is something disquieting about the system. The arguments that it will be a trivial burden to the man in the Mercedes and a serious one to the busboys in the battered banger have real merit. But what really chills me is the means by which the system will be run. As in London, routes into the city are to be guarded by cameras that will photograph all incoming cars and record their license numbers, information that will be used to generate billing. And the system will presumably be capable of other levels of photographic observation and is sure to be linked to other networks and databases administered by our anxious state. Earlier this month, the front page of the New York Times carried a story headlined “Police Plan a Web of Surveillance for Downtown—Like London Ring of Steel—A Call for 3,000 Cameras—New York Seeking More Antiterror Aid.” These cameras would join close to 5,000 private and public security cameras already in operation in lower Manhattan. Technologically speaking, the plan is identical to the apparatus for congestion pricing, both for its reliance on cameras and license plate scanners (and its potential to incorporate face recognition software and other suspicious algorithms) and for the massive, largely unregulated, database it will compile. While the police disingenuously offer that a CCTV camera on the street is simply equivalent to an additional cop on the beat, civil libertarians suggest that there is an important difference between simply being observed in a public place and having information about your movement, activities, and whereabouts recorded, stored, and shared. The authoritarian risks of such systems are thrown into particular relief by their congeniality to more unabashed authoritarian regimes. The Chinese government is in the process of installing more than 20,000 CCTV cameras 250

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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 are to work in tandem with new ID cards for all residents. These cards will have embedded chips (again with software from China Public Security) that are to contain staggering amounts of information, including work, credit, and reproductive histories, religious and ethnic data, medical insurance status, transit payments, landlord phone numbers, police records, and room for lots more. And, the Shenzhen police already have the capacity to track the location of all cell phones in use in the city. Clearly, such invasive systems threaten any reasonable idea of a right to privacy. This transformation is fundamental. Cities—and the organization of space in general—are key media by which we sort out the boundaries between public and private and the public side of the equation is increasingly squeezed. The dramatic acceleration of surveillance post-9/11 is one marker of the contraction and police agencies, public and private, are enjoying virtual carte blanche to intrude both in the traditional public realm—the streets 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 diminish political and civil liberties.” The profusion of data-mining, phone taps, bio-metric screening, DNA testing, and other intrusive technologies is a political and cultural development of truly frightening implications, an erosion of our most basic freedoms, including what Henri Lefebvre has famously called “the right to the city.” The supportive incorporation of “terror” as part of the standard repertoire of architectural and planning due diligence—like fire or seismic protection—is astonishingly sinister and far exceeds any simple utilitarian account. As a profession, we are far too compliant in advancing this threatening regime. The contraction of the public realm, however, extends beyond these Orwellian developments. Public space is produced from the private: in democracy, the commons is always a compact about what is to be shared, what reserved, about where we choose to interact with the other. There’s been a lot of criticism from certain academic quarters about traditional notions of public space, about over-identifying the idea with streets, squares, parks, and other historic settings for the face to face. This critique is predicated on the idea both that these spaces fail to acknowledge the existence of multiple publics and that a purely spatial definition of public space is inadequate in the internet (or any other) age. While the idea of a one-size-fits-all public arena surely risks its own oppressions, spaces of free access are foundational to civil liberty and winnowing them, whether for nominally progressive or for out and out reactionary reasons, is very risky. Public space that excludes the civic—supporting only private forms of exchange—puts our democracy under radical threat. Consider Starbucks. The problem with Starbucks isn’t the instance but the aggregate. I’ve just returned from several weeks in the suburbs and 251

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Starbucks was a lifeline. Not simply the only source of decent coffee for miles, it was also an oasis of conviviality with its comfortable chairs, free newspapers, and relaxed vibe. The Starbucks we frequented was part of a big shopping center, sandwiched with a couple of other smallish shops between a monster supermarket and a gigantic Lowe’s box. Not that we had no choices: another local supermarket had a kind of satellite Starbucks right inside the store, along with a pharmacy, a bank, and various category stretching elements of the supermarket itself: bakery, liquor store, deli, hardware, florist, etc. Being there, I felt a little like Nikita Khrushchev on tour, visibly staggered by the sheer scale of the operation and of the choices on offer in American capital’s most perfectly staged spectacle of consumption. The problem with the suburbs (and increasingly the city) lies in both the homogeneity of their formats and the frequent elusiveness of a genuinely public 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 lot or supermarket aisle. The difficulty is not the lovely houses and gardens, nor the qualities of neighborliness they can produce, but an interstitial tissue that is only negotiable by car. This is a toll even more severe than the downside of congestion pricing—financially, in the alienating effects of hours spent sealed up alone, and for those people it excludes. Over years of visiting elderly parents in the suburbs, I have watched their possibilities contract in a system in which a carton of milk or a visit to a friend requires an increasingly perilous drive on the highway. It’s Sunday in New York and I’ve just returned from a walk to buy a coffee . . . at Starbucks. There’s one a block away and, as I’ve mentioned, the coffee 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 cameras on the single block between here and there. There are fifteen visible to me. Fifteen. This paranoid voyeurism by the authorities surely contracts our relationship to the spaces over which we—whatever “public” we happen to belong to—exercise proprietorship and in which we feel comfortable and “at home.” The line between the friendly cop on the corner and Big Brother is not obscure. I’d love to get some traffic out of the neighborhood but those cameras may be too high a price to pay. Such are the ambiguities of unfreedom that the exclusion of cars on the one hand and their indispensability on the other can be servants of the same agendas of monitoring and control while at the same time their use (or non-use) remains emblematic of the freedom at the core of what makes both cities and suburbs desirable to their denizens. Technology is a human artifact and its role in culture is neither autonomous nor neutral. I have no doubt that we are at a watershed not simply in terms of the way in which we deploy technologies of surveillance, mobility, and control, but in the fact that the character of the public realm is under 252

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enormous threat from both too much government intervention (by the getgovernment-off-our-backs creeps in power) and the concession of too much of the public realm to private interest. A shopping mall is not the same as a street and a security camera on every corner is not a pal.

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COMMUNITAS AND THE AMERICAN PUBLIC REALM SPIRO KOSTOF (1987)

If I begin with Boston Common, it is because it is all there. For over three hundred years it has remained an open space, there in the heart of a thriving city, 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 Bell rings them home to their respective habitations.” Early in the next century, trees were planted on the Tremont Street side; the walkway they framed was called The Mall. Buildings surrounded the Common. There were churches with their graveyards, shops, elegant houses along Beacon Hill. The Massachusetts State Houses at on an eminence on this Beacon Hill side, with an imposing set of stairs descending toward the Common. Monuments cropped up, to honor publicly what Boston thought worth honoring. At the far side, toward Arlington Street, on land reclaimed from the mud of the Back Bay in the mid-nineteenth century, a lovely Public Garden was installed—small, formal, manicured. And so the place continued, more or less free of encroachments, a common ground for pleasure and civic use, where all could come and go as they pleased and encounters were easy and unrehearsed. This is the public face of America. Every town, however small, designs into its fabric a stage of this sort. Beyond self, beyond family and neighborhood, there exists a public realm which holds our pride as a people. We want 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—a community with a shared record of accomplishment. I want to talk to you about the public realm—and I have nothing new to say about it. This is not a research paper, nor even a carefully reasoned argument. 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 first European towns planted on this continent. The street was the commonest public place of all. It was, with few exceptions, a straight line. And it was without artifice, and ill-defined by abutting structures. Still, the street was a stage of activity and chance encounters from the beginning. This public life 254

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was especially lively in administrative capitals like Williamsburg and Annapolis, and in port or river towns with their shops, the crowds that arrived on boats, the bustle of the wharves. But there were also intentional public open spaces. In the middle of their gridded pueblos, the Spanish invariably left a large plaza, longer than it was wide and surrounded by porticoes where goods were sold. The administrative palace and other public buildings fronted the plaza, and so very often did the main church. But there was nothing in the middle: that was for the people, for their fiestas and the customary evening stroll or corso, a time of socializing, flirting, showing off. French towns were on rivers, and the town square, which doubled as a parade ground here too, looked out on the waterfront. The buildings that defined the square included a barracks and a hospital. In New Orleans, the square, miraculously, lives still—a charmed, evocative public place, full of shade and smell. Americans, that side of them that derives from the English at least, were never very comfortable with an empty public place. They liked it filled with something, preferably some sort of public building that would provide a good excuse for wanting to be there, so you wouldn’t be presumed to be loitering or wasting time. Take the New England common. The open space had a useful purpose at first. In the early morning, when the men walked from their houses to the fields at the edge of town, they led their cattle to the “close” in this open area of town. A herdsman would then lead the town cattle out of here to graze in the common pastures, and lead them back at dusk for the returning men to take them home. The real reason for the common was the meeting house, religious center and town hall in one. When the allocation of land was first made in a new town, a large plot was set aside for this most important building of community life. Once the meeting house was set up, and the graveyard fenced in with a neat stone wall, other buildings gathered around—the nooning house, where in the winter months the parishioners could find some shelter and heat during the breaks in the long, cold services of Sabbath; the tavern, which also served as temporary courthouse and stage stop; a blacksmith shop. There might be a magazine for the storage of powder, horse sheds for the 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 furnishings: the hay scale, the bulletin board, the well, the whipping post. To turn this stern Puritan civic center into the town green we now admire, the monopoly of the Congregational church on town life had first to be broken. In New Haven we have the classic early case of this transformation. After the 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 255

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The town common in Petersham, Massachusetts. (Photo by Kit Krankel McCullough.)

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The courthouse square in Lockhart, Texas. (Photo by Kit Krankel McCullough.)

churches down the middle where the old meeting house had stood unchallenged, one of them Episcopalian. Planned spaces were also allotted to the Methodists and Baptists at the two corners. Behind the three churches rose the new state house, in temple form, replacing an older building that was now found to spoil the symmetry. On the northwest side, Yale’s Brick Row faced 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 the most celebrated public squares in America. By then, in the 1830s and 1840s, in the new railroad towns of the Midwest and the South, the New England green had found its counterpart in the courthouse square. This was the central feature of towns that served as county 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 green oasis was a statement of survival and permanence. The townfolk spoke of it proudly as the “park” or the “grove.” The jail and a fireproof clerk’s office might be at the corners of the square. For the rest, it was small, local retail businesses, a hotel, a restaurant or coffee shop where the businessmen ate their lunches. Board roofs projecting from the fronts of these establishments furnished shade, and plank seats between the roof supports made it easy to spend time there. The farmers came in regularly from the surrounding countryside on legal and tax matters. In the courthouse were kept land grants and commercial debt-bonds. On the grounds there was room for the weekly market and the country fair, and for electioneering. Here statue-soldiers on pedestals betokened 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, where collective civic actions like markets and parades took place, and where the prevalent values and beliefs of the community were made manifest. The institutional building—the courthouse or the public library or the town hall—dominated. The space was well bounded and its scale intimate; it took its shape from the street pattern. It had many uses, some of them unplanned. But the urban square was political territory. Within its confines, people knew their place, and found strength in their local tradition. The space held them, gave them identity. It is where they learned to live together. Now the urban park, coming in around the same time, the midnineteenth 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, was an invented, romantic landscape, with no relation whatever to the street pattern. The sense was of a pleasure ground, a place of quiet and passive enjoyment. 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. At the same time, the park would provide a neutral setting where the poor and the rich could come together as equals. 256

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So ran the rhetoric. But this outward look of innocent escapism and fraternal equality in fact couched a much more serious purpose. It had to do with the imposition of moral order where it was thought most wanting, among the urban poor. The creators and administrators of parks were gentlemen idealists. They viewed the park, from the very start, as an uplifting device, a means to improve the social behavior of the citizenry, which really came to making sure that the working classes, the immigrant labor of the Yankee-owned businesses, behaved like their betters, the cultured upper crust.1 This is how Frederick Law Olmsted thought of the park. What he really intended to do with his parks was to wean the working classes away from their ethnic neighborhoods, away from the adventures of city streets, and to make proper Americans out of them. Olmsted was uncompromising on the issue of built structures. Within his parks, there were to be no monuments, no decorations. The urban square was the proper place for such “townlike things,” as Charles Eliot put it. It was, to my mind, the first major attack, all the more serious because so polite and well-couched, on our true public places, and this polite attack found 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 right of any church member; you did not have to pay to get a lot. The tombs had headstones with symbolic carvings, often reused by others, and instructive inscriptions to remind us of the virtues of the deceased and the fearsomeness of death. These unlandscaped, fully visible churchyards in the center of town were a kind of collective monument that stressed the oneness of the living and the dead. By 1800, the need for larger and more sanitary burial grounds led to planned cemeteries, the first of them introduced in New Haven by James Hillhouse in 1796, laid out in a regular grid. When this idea of the formal lay-out takes over, the cemetery becomes a specialized, isolated place, removed from the urban scheme. You have to pay to be buried now. Death here is no longer something to be dreaded; it was very much as if you were being reunited with your loved ones and with God, so that private and not collective commemoration becomes the ruling order and cemeteries become showplaces for fancy family monuments. In the 1830s death got an alternate setting—the romantically conceived garden they call the rural cemetery, more for the living than for the dead, with serpentine carriage avenues and gravel footpaths and statues of patriotic figures. Mount Auburn, in Cambridge, was the first, in 1835. And then 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 in effect what happened was that death was neutralized and prettified, much as 257

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1 For this discussion of the urban park, two current sources are indispensable: R. Rosenzweig, “Middle-Class Parks and WorkingClass Play,” Radical History Review 21, Fall 1979, pp. 31–46; and R. Starr, “The Motive Behind Olmsted’s Park,” Public Interest 74, Winter 1984, pp. 66–76. In general, see G. Cranz, The Politics of Park Design (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1982).

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Commonwealth Avenue, Boston. (Photo by Kit Krankel McCullough.)

the urban tensions of those vital cities of the nineteenth century were neutralized and prettified in urban parks. It was an early manifestation of that nineteenth-century tendency for family, church and community to drift apart, the tendency to remove public business from the stages of daily life, to drain the public realm of tension and spontaneous ferment, and to homogenize it. In this slow process of the dominant classes to diminish us as public persons, cemeteries, urban parks, and a third element, the suburb, had a very specific role to play. It has always seemed strange to me that architectural historians would link the form of rural cemeteries, urban parks, and picturesque suburbs, and refuse to see the more serious agenda that brings them together. All three are attempts to diffuse communality, which derived precisely from the social interaction of the diverse and the unequal, and to create, instead, lethargic environments which induce social harmony and outward tranquility by distancing themselves from potential conflict, from rival claims of allegiance, from reminders of misfortune and pain. Suburbs, of course, were exclusive communities that harbored a special way of life. There you could associate with neighbors of your own kind. A suburban street, the legacy of Andrew Jackson Downing, is to the urban street what the park is to the urban square. That suburban street is a reaction in part to the phenomenon of row houses, the very symbol of urban congestion and promiscuity. This urban convention had overtaken our early streets that were so ill-defined, as I suggested, and, by the early nineteenth century, had created channels, very well-defined channels, the row houses built against each other in series enclosing street corridors and so intensifying the public aspect of the street. Front and side yards are gone. The houses are brought together close to the edge of the lots and between them and the street channel, an intermediate space is created, a great invention of the nineteenth century, the sidewalk, a pedestrian island that increased the possibility of chance encounters 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 contribution to modern urbanism in the nineteenth century, Main Street—usually two or three blocks long, wider than the rest of the streets, and in small towns, open to the farm land at either end. The business premises were on the ground floor, and tall false fronts advertised the owner’s intention to go up a second storey when he could. When they existed, these upper storeys would be taken up by professional people like lawyers and physicians, and by groups as meeting rooms. The exterior sides would be used for advertising. So Main Street was a place where farmers could come in for supplies and luxuries; the barbershop would be there, the local newspaper, livery stables, the 258

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saloon. This is where the 4th of July parade would be held, and this is later where the young people would cruise on weekends and kill time in the drug store and in the movie theater. In fact, as we all know, Main Street was much more than a street. It was a state of mind, a set of values. It represented the simple, insular life of wholesome, honest folk unconcerned about the fashions of Paris or the Boer War—the setting of Andy Hardy movies, where decency and common sense always ruled. But it was also, as small town writers like Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood 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, not at all the sanitary look and uniform nice Victorian frontages that you see in Disneyland’s version of Main Street. At any rate, Downing’s suburb was envisaged as a relief from that arrangement, those compacts, those tensions of Main Street and row streets. The Gothic cottage that he sells us in his books was a private place, a Christian place, a church for the family. Here Downing said, “The social sympathies take shelter securely under the shadowy eaves, as if striving to shut out whatever of bitterness and strife may be found in the open highways of the world.” Precisely. Don’t bother me; I don’t want to know what’s going on out there. The house has a nice open lawn, which replaces the pre-row house memory of the fenced-in, producing front yard, front garden, and creates a continuous unfenced environment down the street, stressing the sense of a community, cut of one cloth—no social tensions, no problems. Everyone makes the same income. Everyone has the same number of children. Things are 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 away from the city and thus shun contact with that melting-pot population of immigrants. Behind this polite, outwardly welcoming, self-same public aspect, the family turned in upon itself and began staging its own rituals of communion and leisure. The park had a harder time doing its leveling work. Very early it became a battleground of two contending social factions. On one side, the cultured, cosmopolitan elite of Olmsted’s peers who saw the park as a pristine work of art, a soothing middle landscape between raw nature and the unseemly entanglement of cities. On the other hand, the ward politicians, to whom parks were vacant land that could be filled with job-producing structures. And there were the related conflicts of use. To the reformers, the park was where the classes could rub shoulders. It was the ideal place for cultural enlightenment and, in time, rejecting Olmsted’s purism on the subject, educational institutions like museums and conservatories, aquariums, zoos, and so on, ensconced themselves within its bounds. But the working classes were 259

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Main Street, Lockhart, Texas. (Photo by Kit Krankel McCullough.)

Downing-style cottage, Pittsburgh. (Photo by Kit 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 places to act as fields of interaction and to change character in the process of mediating social behavior. The working classes insisted on, sometimes violently, and got their own playgrounds, which may not seem like much to us, but which were different—and that is the point—from the refined pleasure 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 longer vacations, earlier retirement—all of this was creating, as you know, what became known as “leisure time” and it was best if it could be filled in an orderly way now, society felt. Now came a sudden profusion of municipal beaches, stadiums, tennis courts, picnic areas, and public playgrounds. But Olmsted won too. During his long career, he managed to give substance to 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 constellation of parks linked together into an integrated system. The connectors would be green boulevards and parkways. The boulevards and parkways would now use stately public buildings as focal points. The scale, in fact, of our public buildings had steadily escalated after the Civil War. By the end of the century, a spectacular monumentality had seized our cities. It made pre-war courthouses, state capitols, and colleges look almost residential by comparison. Something had changed. Our vision of ourselves was not what it had been. Size was not all. We now also joyously embraced public art. There were sheathings of lavish materials, stained-glass windows, painted friezes, and showy furnishings. American artists trained at Dusseldorf, at Munich, at the Hague, at the École des Beaux-Arts, came back armed with sophisticated techniques and a style that stressed historical pageantry and the rhetoric of allegory. These they now put to work in their public programs of art, in friezes and personifications. They peopled our public places with monumental sculpture, mounted on impressive architectural frames finely proportioned to the landscape of the city, and fixed with studied care in entrances to parks, in public squares, as markers of avenues and landscaped vistas. Now this new worldliness at the end of the nineteenth century, which aimed to put us on a par with Europe, to make us atone for our ugly Main Street, came at a price. The rich harvest of allusion in our new public art left the average viewer far behind, unable to absorb the erudite references that kindled the artist’s work. And a similar distancing, I think, began to take place between our daily rituals and their aggrandizement through architecture. Reading, shopping, traveling, were now being ensconced in luxurious settings, far grander than the functions themselves called for. 260

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The Boston Public Library on Copley Square was called “a palace for the people” by the trustees, and so, indeed, it was. The enjoyment of art, once a domestic pleasure of wealthy Americans and their friends, was also elevated to a public spectacle; the great private collections were open to the people by bequest and grant, and most were housed in monumental buildings. Cities raised their own civic monuments to art in the manner of the great European palace museums. This new tendency to design and build for show as much for utility did not stop with government and culture. Metropolitan railroad stations now sat ponderously in the modestly scaled townscape. At the same time three- or four-storey office buildings grew into spectacular towers. And finally, shopping areas became palaces of consumption called “department stores”—Macy’s, Marshall Fields, Wanamakers, Jordan Marsh; between 1880 and 1910, these became the true centers of the downtowns. The change brought about by this imperial monumentality was twopronged. First, railroad stations, department stores, office towers, set up a colossal public scale that overwhelmed the once-dominant scale of churches and government buildings. Traditionally, it was steeples and domes that punctuated American cities. Church steeples had always been omnipresent—whole forests of them in the big cities. But faith compromised something of its public force when the temples of commerce began to overwhelm the landscape of God. Domes, too, that once rose over government buildings alone, were now pre-empted, by the end of the nineteenth century, in libraries and countless buildings—or rather, the same monumental dress covered 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 City Beautiful planners, now created a kind of uniformly monumental townscape, from the business district out to the upper-class residential avenues, and so it became very difficult to assign symbolic priorities among individual institutions. There was now total disdain for the classic plotting device of American cities, the grid, in the new City Beautiful plans whose radial avenues now began to cut through fine-grained neighborhoods in the name of slum clearance—a kind of premonition of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s. The second aspect of this new public domain was that it was really not public, not in the traditional sense. Once our collective activity had centered upon, and been represented by, a genuinely “public” pattern: the market, the wharf, places of assembly, courthouses, town halls—these were paid for by us and in a fundamental way they belonged to us. This was not true of banks and skyscrapers and department stores, or even railroad stations. They were monuments to private interests and we basked in their splendor through the courtesy of companies that courted our business, but obviously could never speak for us collectively as a civic society. The more our public 261

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2 The best general statement of these disjunctions, to my mind, is still R. Sennett’s The Uses of Disorder (Knopf, 1970).

architecture celebrated the private sector, the weaker grew our sense of being a distinct and whole community. At any rate, we had long refused to behave as a public, that is to say, a body of people with a clear political and social identity, except in small towns. Through the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, a broad coalition of reformers, educators, politicians, worked hard to mold us into a homogeneous society, but we tended to fragment. Ethnicity pulled us apart; sex, class, special interests pulled us apart. So what civil and political cohesion we could not attain, we directed into consumption and recreation. So, in a sense, we deserved these new private-public monuments, because we had become a buying public, a traveling public, a playing public. True public places like streets and squares declined in favor of department stores, stadiums, beaches, and later on, shopping centers. True public places declined because we chose, very consciously, to separate human life into isolated functions and assign to each one its own physical setting. We sequestered the family inside the house and moved the house away from the work place. We forced a split in our environment between the intensely built-up downtown and the unaccented spread of the residential suburb. In the suburb, the family turned itself into a microcosm of society. In the downtown, life ebbed after the work hours, leaving public places to the homeless, the restless, and the rough.2 From 1920 on, as we all know only too well, another unexpected phenomenon 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. The point is obvious. Piecemeal adjustments had now to be made to accommodate this new machine. These included very simple devices that had very longterm consequences: the widening of streets, for one thing, at the expense of sidewalks. In New York, in 1912, the average width of the sidewalk was 15 feet; by 1925 it was 13 feet; by 1960 it was 11 feet. The width of the roadway and community spirit seem to be inversely related. The merchants understood that. They resisted the widening of streets because they knew that after a certain point you couldn’t get people to relate from one sidewalk 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 its motivating force. The next thing was that curbs were gone. What was ours once, the sidewalk, this great invention of the nineteenth century, might as well not have been. Then the squares and streets became parking lots. But I think, more importantly, in trying to control the machine and traffic, we introduced fears into our daily lives. Traffic hazards were nothing new, but never before had we vehicles hurtling by at 30, 35 miles per hour—an elevated street car would go nine miles an hour at most—and so we became, of course, sick with fear of public places. 262

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And again, to state the obvious, public transportation began its slow but certain decline. The more we used cars, the less we used those vehicles that tended to bring us together in the days when we had no alternative. We went down from 17 billion rides in public transportation in 1929 to 13 billion in 1940, and it continued that way. And then, of course, little by little, the worst fate of all: highways coming into town. First the boulevards that were meant to be for slow, gentle rides when Olmsted and his peers set them down became, because of their God-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 big buildings and modest-scaled ones, of starchy commercial blocks and promiscuous neighborhoods, what little remained of all this that the car hadn’t done away with, would come under attack after World War II. The steady flight into the suburbs had long condemned the older center city to decay. Now came urban renewal. Its premise was that the deteriorating fabric must be razed, the rot removed, and in its place, modern buildings must be put up that would look nice and would bring in moneyed clients to revitalize the downtown. 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 slums and blighted areas. The amended version of 1954 recognized the practical value 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, centercity parcels by the exercise of eminent domain. Typically, the land would be completely cleared of structures before it was turned over to a local redevelopment agency. Urban renewal was supposed to free cities “that were enslaved to the 20 to 25 foot lot.” It was meant to enlarge the street system, of course, at the expense of the pedestrian, and run highways into the center-city shopping areas. In effect, the urban expressways made it even easier to leave the city, and the Act gave license to the often-indiscriminate destruction of old neighborhoods with their own public spaces marked with the character of their age and use, and the installment of apartment towers and commercial buildings lapped by vast open spaces where the thick of things 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, no use for the slow accretion of buildings through time, the intimacies of the waterfront street, or a lightly enclosed urban square. The earlier generations of tall buildings saw no conflict between themselves and the traditional public spaces of streets and plazas. Even the more flashy, historicist brood usually had a neutral space-defining facade up 263

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Lakeshore Drive Apartments, Chicago, by Mies van der Rohe, 1949–1951. (Photo by Douglas Kelbaugh.)

to a certain level before they gave way to the fanciful in their strange crowns. But the modernist dogma, that the skyscraper be a free-standing object, as articulated by Le Corbusier in the 1920s—“It is a wonderful instrument of concentration to be placed in the midst of vast open spaces,” as he put it—this dogma was now fully subscribed to. As shiny towers stayed clear of one another, space flowed around and even under them, but rarely came to rest 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, corporate clients would make room for a public plaza on their lots, in the shadows of their gleaming towers, but life rarely found a perch in these sleek unsheltered wastes, transfixed by sleek, uncommunicative monuments of abstract art. The turning point in this slow slide away from a truly public realm was the 1960s. It was the decade of our discontent. Our cities went into convulsions. Rallies and demonstrations became endemic. Crowds now roused by some common worry poured into the streets and open spaces of America. Public life turned political, and so public places were reinvested with civic purpose. In the general anxiety of self-examination, the policy of urban renewal began to raise doubts. Was the gutting of our cities really for the good of the people? Were the benefits of corporate towers and their immaculate plazas really so clear cut? This ferment, of course, strengthened the hand of preservationists who were struggling to make their point. The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 included the following, for us, absolutely extraordinary language. “Congress finds and declares that the historical and cultural foundations of the nation should be preserved as a living part of our community life and development, in order to give a sense of orientation to the American people.” The National Register of Historic Places now was expanded to include buildings and districts of local as well as national significance, and H.U.D.’s block grants helped revive old neighborhoods. The inner city witnessed a gradual return of the middle classes from the suburbs. Old row houses were gentrified, cafes and restaurants opened in once-derelict urban stretches, and at night strollers could be seen along piers and restored Main Streets. The old town squares livened up. It seemed that America might be going public once again. To take advantage of this gregarious mood, as business always does, our developers cooked up new schemes for the downtown. They looked at the suburban shopping mall, which was a terrific success, and they tried to replicate it in the city. But the sealed, isolated nature of these malls, with their shop fronts turning inward to face the courts, does not suit the casual interaction characteristic of downtown street activity. The mall is covered and air conditioned; it is not part of a larger downtown. We should, of 264

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course, fruitfully compare it to the old galleria, like those of Milan or Naples, which you did not have to make a special trip to get to and which are wide open to the city—not only by being literally wide open, but also by bringing street architecture straight into the arcade, and so rejecting any discrimination between an outside cityscape and an interior architecture of the arcade itself. Something of that same inhibition that can’t make malls work as true public places is also evident in corporate buildings of the 1970s that internalize the underused open air plazas of the previous decade by giving us atria. You have to make the decision to brave the smartly polished revolving doors, the metallic lobbies with their uniformed guards, before you can experience the atrium of IBM, Ford, or Trump Tower. These inner courts are often exciting places: cage-like, lighted dramatically, and staged with intimate corners and interdependent levels that encourage people-watching. But there is something too controlled, even too secure, about them. They are, in the end, not our spaces. We are guests who come in from the street and are expected to behave. And, indeed, there is also a legal issue sharply focusing this distinction, and that has to do with the exercise of First Amendment rights. These places are ultimately private places and the Supreme Court had to deal two or three times with the issue of whether we can pass out leaflets and make speeches there. In 1968, the Supreme Court voted, in the case of Logan Valley Shopping Center of Altoona, Pennsylvania, that the shopping center was “the functional equivalent of a sidewalk” and therefore no distinction could be made between it and public places like streets, parks, and so on in so far as the exercise of First Amendment rights was concerned (picketing, leaflet distribution, etc.) But in 1971, the Burger Court reversed this, in the case of the Lloyd Shopping Center in Portland, Oregon, and then in 1980, the Supreme Court looked at it one more time and said that freedom of speech on private property can be protected through state law. And indeed, California and several other states immediately began to put into law the identification of shopping malls, university campuses and corporate parks as new public places in the American metropolis, with all the legal rights pertaining thereunto. But even with all legal assurance that we can behave in malls and atria as public persons, the safe retreat of them, the glimmer of high technology, the cleanliness we are offered, fail to inspire, in the end, that spontaneous and always unpredictable—indeed, threatening—mingling that goes on in the open air pockets of real public quality. Such places are usually in the heart of things. They need not be very fancy at all; a street corner will do. They’re well-connected to the street system. There is in them a working relationship between boundary buildings and open space. There is a constant coming and going of people with different errands and diversions in mind, a constant shifting of the human landscape, a mixture of indolence and scurrying industry. 265

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Harbor Place, Baltimore. (Photo courtesy 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 Urban Malls (U.S.G.P.O., 1977); and Brambilla and Longo, For Pedestrians Only (Whitney Library, 1977).

Lately we thought we had refound the knack of creating this kind of magic out of whole cloth. We appropriate a big urban scrap that has lain neglected or defunct, fill it with shops and eating places, and let indoor activity spill over casually to the outside. The master of this wizardry is, of course, James Wilson Rouse. The inner city to Rouse, however, is “a warm and human place with diversity of choice full of festival and delight.” In other words, the emphasis is on fun, on the apolitical and the uncontroversial, and he has a proven way of bringing this about. He creates what he calls festival marketplaces, in crowded centers that want to combine commerce, leisure, and showmanship without stressing any of the problems which public life ultimately must have constantly on exhibit. Sometimes he begins with what is there—as with Faneuil Hall. Sometimes the old is removed altogether, remembered fondly and judiciously, as in Harbor Place, Baltimore, not long ago a decaying waterfront which gets two waterside pavilions that hark back to the low, long wharf buildings of the site, open on both sides, toward the city and toward the water, where the three-masted frigate Constellation, commissioned by the young nation in 1797, is permanently moored. These transparent walls allow people to see through the buildings, pour in and out without inhibition. And on an innocent, mindless level, it works. There is the sea to look out on, that ancient waterfront scene of waves and boats and birds. There is the open sequence of shops and restaurants on a generous ledge above the quay. 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 a handful of tenants. Some businesses it invents. This occupancy is almost literally, then, designed in terms of sight and smell. Institutional businesses are avoided; nasty businesses are avoided. Fresh fish is avoided—it smells too much. There are no department stores, and only a small number of chain store outlets. Shopping mall fare, like indoor fountains, plastic plants, and muzak are forbidden. There are strict rules about the conduct and look of each business premise, the use of materials. So the spontaneity is totally deceptive. For some, at least, urban centers like Faneuil Hall Market, Harbor Place, and New York’s Roused-up South Street Seaport are celebrations of the trendy superficiality of our time. They speak, as Donlyn Lyndon put it of Faneuil Hall, “of the transformation of our society, of crafts, of franchise, of aspiring good taste, and of our absorption with our own superfluous pleasures.”3 That leaves the pedestrian mall, which started with Kalamazoo—“Mall City, USA”—in 1959.4 The model is the suburban mall and Disneyland, and like them the pedestrian mall is artificial and sanitized. The design issue is simple. You eliminate curbs. You stress street furniture, lighting, landscaping. You can have children’s play areas, benches, etc. You can cover 266

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the mall and air condition it, like Rochester’s Midtown Plaza. You can make water the main feature, as in Victor Gruen’s Fresno Mall (Fulton Street) where there are fountains, ponds, running rivulets, trellises, shade trees. But as Edgardo Contini said about it, “To view the pedestrian environment as a glorified botanical garden is a cowardly way out.” Fresno also has a slowspeed 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 as a shopper will walk. At least Fresno was comprehensive, based on a central area plan adopted in 1960. It viewed the pedestrian mall as an instrument of action. Most others are launched with much fanfare but without a long-range program for downtown improvement. Malls, as Roberto Brambilla puts it, “are not urban idylls created in an artist’s eye, but practical solutions to some urgent urban problem.” This is why we must separate malling from rehabilitated main streets, where traffic is not necessarily banished at all. Great examples are Magazine Street in New Orleans, Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, famous because of the Venturis’ project with its controversial reflector trees. Venturi, who had some time ago told us that the main street was almost all right, never quite got around to telling us what we had to 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 entertainment avenue, and so incidentally avoiding the competition from the nearby fancy shopping street at Nicollet Mall. But in fact, both Hennepin and Nicollet are suffering from the skywalk system of Minneapolis—yet another example of the slow privatization of public space. Like atria, malls, and corporate plazas, this system too is privately funded, privately owned. It is intimidating. You always end up in a store at either end, with somebody saying “May I help you?” And of course the system tends to create, as we all know, an inbuilt segregation, with the black people down at street level and the white folk in the skywalks. Malls and the like are attempts to revive the commercial spirit of the city, and turn its interactive tensions into a festival. Equally bloodless is the attempt to bring back the communal character of residential streets, as at Berkeley, by reducing or eliminating traffic on the model of Holland’s woonerven. Is any of this for real? Is it possible to tame the automobile without curtailing severely the very advantages that gave it its fantastic success? Why hasn’t it worked? Because, as stated plainly and resignedly in 1983 by the author of the Buchanan Report of 1963, which first stressed the need to correlate the numbers of cars with the quality of life in the cites, “people are prepared to trade off their environment in return for motorized accessibility.” In the past, streets and public places were stages where social classes and 267

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5 In Cities (Rizzoli, 1982), p. 57.

social uses mixed, stages of solemn ceremony and improvised spectacle, of people-watching, of recreation. In their changing architecture, their slow shifts and adjustments, they were also time channels—the safeguard of those continuities of culture and place that made us users of the public realm vastly and substantially older than our age and infinitely wiser than our 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 “people can live together in proximity and interdependence,” as Gerald Allen put it.5 The public realm was all those things not because of the container, but because of what we were all willing to put inside. I don’t see much point in reviving the container now, as long as we are not ready to reinvest it with true urban vigor, and, yes, urbanity. As long as we would rather keep our own counsel, avoid social tension, schedule encounters with our friends, and travel on our own in climate-controlled and music-injected glossy metal boxes, the resurrected public realm will be a place we like to visit every so often but not inhabit, a fun place and a museum—but also the burial place for our hopes to exorcise poverty and prejudice by confronting them daily; the burial place of unrehearsed excitement, of the cumulative knowledge of human ways and the residual benefits of a public life. We seem ready to take our losses. In the 1980s, it is my conviction, the momentum to recreate a genuine public realm has been lost. Some see a fundamental change of society in the works, and there is much evidence to prove them right. At the turn of the twentieth century we culminated a great revolution that shifted us from a nation of farms to a nation of factories and moved us from country to city. Now we have started as momentous a revolution, it would seem, from factory to service and information, and from city back to country. I am, of course, talking about megacenters—the landscape of postindustrial America, of the new information economy—those gigantic pseudo-cities where hundreds of thousands work and live without any need of or love for the traditional city. I am talking of Tech Center in Denver, Ben Carpenter’s Las Colinas and the Golden Triangle in Dallas, Cumberland and Galleria Malls north of Atlanta, the Galleria in Houston, the Princeton Forrestal Center on the Route 1 Corridor, and in my own Bay Area, Velvet Turtle at Pleasanton and Bishop Ranch in San Ramon. The developer of Velvet Turtle is quoted as saying, “We can offer a self-contained city, and that’s a hell of a selling point.” These instantaneous cities of the countryside have little to do with those dormitory communities that resulted from an earlier and long-lasting abandonment of the old downtown. After the residential component removed itself, and the factories and industrial establishments followed suit, the heart of the metropolis was still held together, at least in the day268

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time, by offices, banks, and administrative buildings symbolically holding the city down in the manner of the old guild hall, the Rathaus, the palazzo di podesta. Now they too are beginning to leave. The work pool needed by the information economy is already out there in the suburbs—upscale, white, professional. So you take the plant out to them. You give them shopping malls and parks, movie theaters, restaurants, conference centers, and luxury “townhouses” or apartments. But you do not confuse the alternate city environment with schools or churches, with poor people or ethnic concentrations; 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 the miniaturized City Beautiful boulevards in Houston megacenters when the real thing, South Main Street, is crumbling unappreciated and used only as an urban expressway; like scraps of San Antonio at Las Colinas with pseudo-Venetian teakwood water taxis and Spanish house fronts that conceal 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 the metropolis of its only remaining mystique, that downtown cluster of towers that is supposed to hold corporate might, political muscle, the managing world of entertainment and design. At best, in our multicenter “global” city with its network of telecommunications, we might grudgingly recognize the old urban core as one of these centers—for those who care to be there. Let us recall that some 70 percent of all Americans now live in suburbs and rural areas and only 30 percent in cities. It is entirely possible, if the trend holds, that the institution of megacenters will erode the much-celebrated renaissance of the downtown, and lead to yet another major exodus, leaving these old worn-out artifacts to the poor who cannot escape them, and the incorrigible romantics who would rather run their rat-race down corridor-streets and live in Victorian houses yanked from the jaws of bulldozers. It is entirely possible, and profoundly sad. In 1947, Percival and Paul Goodman justifiably announced the first death of the public realm. They wrote in Communitas: A city is made by the social congregation of people, for business and pleasure and economy . . . A person is a citizen in the street. A city street is not . . . a machine for traffic to pass through but a square for people to remain within. They invoked Sitte, his city esthetic of enclosure, intimacy, interaction— Camillo Sitte whose 1889 book, not at all coincidentally, had just been translated for the first time into English. “It is possible,” the Goodmans conclude, “that this urban beauty is a thing of the past . . . If this is so, it is a grievous and irreparable loss . . . If it is 269

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so, our city crowds are doomed to be lonely crowds, bored crowds, humanly uncultured crowds.” We made an effort to reverse the trend. I think we lapsed. I think we lapsed because that beauty is by now a thing of the past, beyond resuscitation. It may also be that the Goodmans were right—that the consequence of that loss is as they announced—that we have become lonely, bored, and uncultured in a fundamental sense. If so, we no longer recognize it, or we no longer 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 by Design (Oxford University Press, 1987), and it is in part based on its contents. Most of the latter half, however, is not included in the book. The reader will find a full bibliography on the issues discussed here in America by Design. The few notes appended to this paper account for quotations and other obvious debts.

This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 75th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1987. The original illustrations have been lost. The photographs included here were selected by the editors. 270

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THE PUBLIC REALM

MARGARET CRAWFORD (1995)

This article, in response to architectural “narrative of loss” lamenting the disappearance of public space, argues that urban residents are constantly remaking public space and redefining the public sphere through their lived experience. Following Nancy Fraser, this article questions the insistence on a unified public and private space that characterizes the bourgeois public sphere and proposes contestation, competing “counter-publics,” and the blurring of private and public as equally significant aspects of the public sphere. In Los Angeles, the struggles of two “counter-publics,” street vendors and the homeless, over use of the streets and public places reveal the emergence 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 are dominated by a narrative of loss. From the political philosopher Jurgen Habermas’s description of a public sphere overwhelmed by consumerism, the media, and the intrusion of the state into private life, to Richard Sennett’s lament for the “fall of public man,” to urban critics Michael Sorkin’s and Mike Davis’s announcements of “the end of public space” and the “destruction of any truly democratic urban spaces,” claims that once vital sites of democracy have all but disappeared are widespread.1 These narratives of loss contrast the current debasement of the public sphere with golden ages and golden sites: the Greek agora, the coffeehouses of early modern Paris and London, the New England town square, where, allegedly, cohesive public discourse once thrived. This narrative inevitably climaxes in what these critics see as our current crisis of collective life which places the very identities and institutions of citizenship and democracy in peril. I argue that this perceived loss is primarily perceptual, derived from extremely narrow and normative definitions of both public and space. In fact the meanings of concepts such as public, space, democracy, and citizenship are continually being redefined in practice through lived experience. By eliminating the insistence on unity, the desire for fixed categories of time and space, and the rigid concepts of public and private that underlie these narratives of loss, we can begin to recognize a multiplicity of simultaneous public interactions that are restructuring urban space, producing new forms of insurgent citizenship, and revealing new political arenas for democratic action. 271

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1 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1989); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1974); and Michael Sorkin, “Introduction,” and Mike Davis, “Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space,” in Michael Sorkin, ed. Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992).

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2 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 3 Ibid., pp. 4–6.

4 David Wharton, “A Walk on the Mild Side,” Los Angeles Times, Valley Edition, May 27, 1994: 10; Norman Klein, “A Glittery Bit of Urban Make-believe,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1993: B17; Leon Whiteson, “Dream Street,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 31, 1993: K1; and Charles Jencks, Heteropolis (London: Academy Editions, 1993) pp. 46–51.

In her important article, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” Nancy Fraser identifies some significant theoretical and political limitations contained in the argument about these disappearances of the public sphere.2 While acknowledging the importance of Habermas’s influential concept of the public sphere as an arena of discursive relations conceptually independent of both state and the economy,3 she questions many of its underlying assumptions. Habermas’s account of “the liberal mode of the bourgeois public sphere” links its emergence in early modern Europe with the development of nation-states in which democracy was realized through universal rights and electoral politics. This version of the history of the public sphere emphasizes unity and equality as ideal conditions. The public sphere is depicted as a “space of democracy” that all citizens have the right to inhabit and where all the public discourse takes place. Here social and economic inequalities are temporarily 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 ideal of Athenian democracy and the agora, this model is structured around significant exclusions. In Athens, access was theoretically open to all citizens, but in practice this excluded the majority of the population— women and slaves—who were not “citizens.” Similarly, the modern bourgeois public sphere began by excluding women and workers. Women’s rights were presumed to be private and therefore part of the domestic sphere, and workers’ concerns were presumed to be economic and thus excluded as self-interested. Moreover, the requirements for rational deliberation and a rhetoric of disinterest privileged middle-class and masculine modes of public speech and behavior by defining them as universal norms.4 Recent revisionist history has contradicted this account, demonstrating that non liberal, non bourgeois publics also emerged, producing competing definitions and spheres of public activity in a multiplicity of public arenas. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, for example, middle-class women organized themselves into a variety of exclusively female voluntary organizations that undertook philanthropic and reform activities based on private ideals of domesticity and motherhood. Less privileged women found access to public life through work and public roles that addressed both domestic and economic issues. Working-class men also founded their own public organizations, often structured around workplace or ethnic identities, such as the unions, lodges, and political organizations. If we broaden 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 competing interests and violent demands as much as by reasoned debate. Demonstrations, strikes, and riots, as well as struggles over issues such as 272

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temperance or suffrage, propose alternative public spheres, arenas where multiple publics with inevitably competing concerns struggle and where conflict takes many forms. In the bourgeois public sphere, public citizenship is primarily defined in relation to the state, addressing issues and concerns dealt with through political debate and electoral politics framed within clear categories of discourse. This assumes a liberal notion of citizenship based on abstract universal liberties, with democracy guaranteed by the electoral and juridical institutions of the state. Fraser instead argues that democracy itself is a complex and contested idea that can assume a multiplicity of meanings and forms. These often violate the strict lines between public and private on which the liberal bourgeois concept of the public sphere insists. In contrast, counterpublics of women, immigrants, and workers have historically not only defended established civil rights, but also demanded new rights based on differentiated roles originating in the domestic or economic spheres. These constantly changing demands continually redraw the boundaries between public and private. Two current efforts to re-define public and private behavior demonstrate both the intensity and the complexity of these struggles. On one side, feminists are attempting to transform domestic violence from a matter of strictly private or domestic concern, dealt with within the family or through specialized institutions of family law or social work, into a matter of public concern and legal control. On the other side, the religious right is attempting to transform abortion from a private decision about one’s own body into a public act regulated by civil law. While pursuing conventional remediation through legal or legislative means and attempting, through public debate, to mobilize public opinion, both groups also adopt less conventional methods that further blur the line between public and private. Feminist activists have attempted to create an alternative domestic sphere to the family by creating shelters and other communal living arrangements for battered women. Antiabortion demonstrators have abandoned rational discourse in favor of direct action and civil disobedience. RETHINKING PUBLIC SPACE

How can Fraser’s ideas of multiple publics, contestation, and the redefinition of public and private be extended and applied to the physical realm of public space without losing their connection with larger issues of democracy and citizenship? First of all, they suggest that no single physical space can represent a completely inclusive “space of democracy.” Like Habermas’s idealized bourgeois public sphere, the physical spaces often idealized by architects—the agora, the forum, the piazza, or the town square—were similarly constituted by exclusion. Thus, instead of a single “public” occupying an exemplary public space, the multiple and 273

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Pershing Square, Los Angeles. Designed by Ricardo Legorreta.

5 Frank Clifford, “Rich–Poor Gulf Widens in State,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 1992: A1; “The Path to Fury,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 1992: T1–10; and Mike Davis, “In L.A., Burning All Illusions,” The Nation, June 1, 1992: 743.

counterpublics that Fraser identifies necessarily produce multiple sites of public expression, creating and using spaces that are partial and selective, responsive to limited segments of the population and to a limited number of the multiple public roles individuals play in urban society. Rather than being fixed in time and space, these public spaces are constantly changing, as users reorganize and reinterpret physical space. Unlike normative 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 and urban space can be restructured from the bottom up as well as from the top down. The narrative of lost public space presents Los Angeles as particularly compelling evidence for the disappearance of public life. Most critics agree that the city’s low density development and wide-spread dependence on the automobile have eliminated street life and public interaction. The city’s traditional public spaces support the argument that public space and public life in the city are either commodified, bankrupt, or nonexistent. For example, over the last thirty years, Pershing Square, historically the central focus of the downtown business district, has lost any public meaning. Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta’s recent redesign, featuring brightly colored walkways, plazas, and seating areas above underground parking and a subway station, has failed to reinstate its public function. Although still physically recognizable as a traditional public square, it is usually unoccupied, except for a few hours at lunch time, and its emptiness visibly demonstrates the city’s impoverished public life. In contrast, the sidewalks of Citywalk are always jammed with people. Operated by M.C.A. and Universal Studios, this complex of movie theaters, shops, and restaurants was designed as a simulation of a public street, a collage of Los Angeles’s most attractive urban elements supervised by mall designer Jon Jerde. Citywalk’s popular appeal, however, owes as much to its crime-free image as to its architectural spectacle. The management of this privately owned space has the right to exclude anyone it deems undesirable, in addition to those groups of the public already discouraged by its suburban location, six dollar parking fee, and heavily policed spaces. To many architectural and urban critics, Citywalk’s success demonstrates the total absorption of public life by private enterprise.5 However, Fraser’s redefined public sphere allows us to identify other sites of public expression that propose an alternative conception of public space. The civil unrest of April 1992, for example, can be interpreted as a spontaneous and undefined moment of public expression, an explosion of multiple and competing demands (some highly specific, others barely articulated) on the streets and sidewalks of Los Angeles. These events unleashed a complex outpouring of public concerns, involving a number of 274

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different ethnic and social groups. African-Americans, many of whom called the uprising the “justice riots,” attacked the inadequacy of urban politics to redress the juridical inequality demonstrated by the Rodney King and Latasha Harlins verdicts. To many, this constituted a denial of fundamental rights of citizenship. Liberal concepts of universally defined civil rights failed to address the visible racism of the police department and the court system, allowing them to avoid public responsibility to more specifically defined ethnic 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 deindustrialization. This was expressed through highly selective patterns of looting and burning that largely spared residences while attacking commercial property; 74 percent of damaged buildings were retail stores and restaurants. Despite public perception, the riots were multicultural. Thirty-four percent of those arrested were black, 51 percent were Hispanic, mostly recent immigrants. Also economically marginalized and exploited, they protested their economic exclusion and political and social disenfranchisement. The riot also pitted immigrants against one another. Korean-owned stores were the focus of much of the burning and looting, serving as targets for pent-up frustration about the lack of economic self-determination in low-income neighborhoods. Briefly, streets, sidewalks, parking lots, swap meets, and mini-malls became sites of protest and rage: new zones of public expression. The violent dissatisfaction revealed by the unrest makes it imperative to look more closely at the lived experience of different groups in the riot areas and to acknowledge their use of everyday space as a site of public discourse. Looking around the city, we can discover innumerable places where new social and economic practices re-appropriate and restructure urban space. Arenas for struggle over the meaning of social participation, these new public spaces are continually in flux, producing constantly changing meanings. Streets, sidewalks, vacant lots, parks, and other places of the city, reclaimed by immigrant groups, the poor, and the homeless, have become sites where public debates about the meaning of democracy, the nature of economic participation, and the public assertion of identity are acted out on a daily basis. Without claiming that they represent a totality of public space, in their manifold forms these public activities collectively construct and reveal an alternative logic of public life. STREET VENDORS

No longer deserted, Los Angeles’s streets, sidewalks, and vacant lots are increasingly populated by street vendors. Existing on the margins of the formal economy, their informal commerce supplements income, rather than constituting an occupation, or else supports only the most marginal of existences. Although all types of street vendors openly occupy space all 275

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6 Robert Lopez, “Vendors Protest against LAPD,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 2, 1994: B3.

over the city, street vending remains illegal. Current discussions about centralizing vendors in designated locations acknowledge the existing reality of widespread vending but attempt to restrict one of the main advantages of vending: its flexibility to respond to changes in activity and demand. Street vending constitutes a complex and diverse economy of microcommerce, recycling, and household production. The innumerable variety of vendors publicly articulates the multiple social and economic narratives of urban life in Los Angeles. In the process of pursuing their trade, vendors blur established understandings of public and private in complex and paradoxical ways. Dramas of immigration are played out daily on the streets of Los Angeles, increasingly exposing to the consciousness of the city stories both heroic and horrifying. For example, the ubiquitous orange vendors, working on street dividers all over the city, are almost always undocumented immigrants. Working for the “coyotes” who brought them across the border, they sell the fruit the coyotes supply to pay off the cost of their illegal crossing. Along streets in the Zona Centroamericana, other immigrants use vending as a means of economic mobility. For many self-employed vendors, their vending carts provide an alternative to sweatshop labor and may eventually lead to a stall at a swap meet or even a small store. Lined up along sidewalks, wearing aprons, female vendors extend 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 many immigrant vendors, many of whom are undocumented, therefore doubly illegal. The organization of Vendadores Ambulates represents the interests of more than eight hundred vendors to the city government. Other vendors recently demonstrated against police harassment, chanting, “Somos vendedores, no criminales” (We are vendors, not criminals).6 Defending their livelihood, vendors are becoming a political as well as an economic presence in the city. In other parts of the city, vending takes different forms. In Baldwin Hills, a middle-class African-American neighborhood, a parking lot between a gas station and a supermarket has become a scene of intense, if fluctuating, social and commercial activity. On most days, a van parks in the lot, offering car detailing services. The operators, two local men who are now retired, set out chairs, providing a social magnet for neighborhood men who pass by. On weekends, a portable barbecue is set up nearby, selling “home-cooked” ribs and links. On holidays and weekends, a group of middle-aged women joins them, setting up tables to sell homemade crafts and gifts. Mostly grandmothers who work at home, their products represent both hobbies and an income supplement. Replicating the domestic order of the surrounding neighborhoods and expanding the private roles of grandparents into the public realm, their local activities provide a focus for the 276

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Clothes for sale, street-side garage sale, Hollywood.

community that is also accessible to anyone driving by. Simultaneously local and public, the activities in this parking lot strengthen the neighborhood while they visibly represent its culture to outsiders. THE HOMELESS

No group challenges the limits of the concept of public more than the homeless. Even the designated social category of homelessness can be seen as a method of removing a group of people from the larger collectivity of the public 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 domestic and economic life. Occupying parks, streets, sidewalks, and the lawns of public buildings, they claim the space necessary for their own personal and economic survival. This forces them to live at least part of their private lives on the street and in other public places. It is often impossible for them to secure domestic privileges that are taken for granted, such as bedrooms, closets, and private bathrooms. Their private use of public space tests democracy’s promise of universal access in a very literal fashion. For the homeless, streets and sidewalks also function as important economic spaces. Although most homeless people work, they do not earn enough money to afford shelter. Instead, public spaces become their primary venue for seeking work and acquiring money. Waiting for day-labor jobs, posting bills, recycling cans and bottles, or collecting and reselling refuse or castoffs, homeless men and women claim their rights to be economic actors.7 Using cardboard signs to explain their circumstances, they assert their identities as unique individuals in need of 277

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7 For an excellent overview of homelessness in Los Angeles, see Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear, Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1993).

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Mother’s Day on La Brea Avenue, Baldwin Heights, Los Angeles.

8 Nancy Hill-Holzman, “Brother, Keep Your Dime,” Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1992: J1; Nancy HillHolzman, “A Lightning Rod for Anger over Homeless,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 10, 1991: J1; and Jeff Kramer, “City Wants to Shut Palisades Park at Night,” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1993: B1. 9 Rosalyn Deutsche, “Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy,” Social Text 33 (Fall 1992): 37–39. 10 James Holston, “Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship,” Planning Theory 13 (Summer 1995): 30–50.

a job or money. Even panhandling can be understood as an economic transaction, encouraging individuals to evaluate requests for a certain amount of money or a specific need on the basis of their own judgment or financial situation.8,9,10 Yet even these minimal social and economic rights are under attack. If Pershing Square, with its hard surfaces and intense security, was explicitly designed to repel the homeless, far more intense struggles over public space are taking place in Santa Monica. Intent on criminalizing the daily activities of the homeless, the city council is incrementally redefining the nature of public space while gradually expelling the homeless from the city. After a ban on sleeping in public parks proved unenforceable, the city closed all parks from midnight to 6 a.m. Even in daytime, the presence of homeless people in city parks has become a point of tension, with some parents demanding that homeless people be evicted from parks with playgrounds and sports facilities. Other antihomeless measures include eliminating food programs in city parks and preventing the expansion of social service agencies. Local merchants are also attempting to eradicate panhandling; they have initiated a campaign to urge pedestrians not to give money directly to panhandlers but instead to put donations into a bronze dolphin, to be distributed to approved social service agencies. For these people, the definition of a “public” place has become a space without homeless people. Homelessness is perhaps the ultimate determination of citizenship. Defined as undesirables, the homeless are not just evicted from public parks, they are stripped of “the right to have rights.” In Santa Monica, the right to public space has become conditional, based on official residence, appearance, or adherence to a set of values that defines “proper” use. 278

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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 citizenship accompany the processes of change that are transforming societies locally and worldwide. In cities such as Los Angeles, migration, industrial restructuring, and other economic changes increase social reterritorialization. When they appear in the city, residents with new histories, cultures, and demands inevitably disrupt the normative categories of social life and urban space. In the course of expressing the specific needs of everyday life, they dramatize the large-scale public issues of economic change and migration. Their urban experiences, the focus of their struggle to redefine the conditions of belonging to society, reshape cities like Los Angeles. As new and more complex kinds of ethnic diversity come to dominate the city, these multiple experiences increasingly define a new basis for understanding citizenship. The homeless and the street vendors, demanding access to public space, are just two of many social groups articulating new demands. The demands of the urban poor for “rights to the city” and of women and ethnic and racial minorities to “rights to difference” constitute new kinds of rights, based on the needs of lived experience outside of the normative and institutional definitions of the state and its legal codes. These rights emerge from the social dramas acted out in the new collective and personal spaces of the city; they concern people largely excluded from the resources of the state; and they are based on social demands that are not constitutionally defined but that people increasingly perceive as entitlements of citizenship. Expanding the definition of urban political activity to include these new social bases can produce new forms of self-rule, which in turn can lead to new social movements that challenge existing formulations of democracy. Holston warns that, while the city is an arena for the self-creation of these new citizens, it is also a war zone. The dominant classes have met the advances of these new citizens with new strategies of segregation, privatization, and fortification. The war zone includes gang-devastated neighborhoods, corporate fortresses, and suburban enclaves. Just as the local and the urban appear as crucial sites for articulating new social identities, they also engender exclusion and violent reaction. The public sites where such struggles occur serve as evidence of an emerging order, not yet fully comprehensible. Here differences between the domestic and the economic, the private and the public, are blurring. Change, multiplicity, and contestation, rather than constituting the failure of public space, may in fact define its very nature. The emergence of these new public spaces and activities in Los Angeles, shaped by lived experience more than built space, raises complex political questions about the meaning of economic participation and citizenship in our cities. By recognizing these struggles as the germ of an 279

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alternative development of democracy, we can begin to frame a new discourse of public space—one no longer preoccupied with loss, but filled with possibilities.

This essay was originally published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 49, No. 1 (September 1995). 280

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ACTION SPACE THE PUBLIC REALM

RICHARD SCHERR (1996)

Over the last two decades there has occurred a transformation in the design of urban public space, marking a radical shift from its historical roots. The characteristics of the phenomenon are represented by a series of challenging new parks and plazas, the most important of which have resulted from urban development programs carried out in Barcelona, Paris, and New York.1 These plazas diverge significantly from traditional public spaces, and constitute examples of what can be termed a type of “action space,” which can be defined by its polarization from earlier spatial models: • If the perception of historic space is dependent on defined limits distinguishing clearly delineated voids, action space can have irregular limits determined by circumstance; its order is perceived through the nature of contained human activity. • If the formal order of historic space is based on singular, geometrically derived shapes conceived as indivisible wholes, action space can be conceived as fragments, or zones whose order is achieved through the sequencing of experience, rather than formal composition. • If historic space tends to be permanent, and developed in conjunction with the design of surrounding buildings, action space is conceived independently from the design of its peripheral edge, and changes incrementally over time. • If historic space tends to be neutral and passive, allowing the user to initiate activities or experiences with minimal constraints, action space tends to be highly directive and programmed, utilizing props that specify particular patterns of use and cognition. • If historic space establishes a collective, public setting which is both a product and generator of social agreement, action space is also public, but is engaged on an individual, private basis, resulting in varied possibilities for behavior and personal cognition. It is suggested that the development of this new type of space should be seen as more than simply another formal trend. More fundamentally, it is based on the realization of a continuing misfit between contemporary culture, with its evolving tendencies towards displacement, privatization, 281

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1 The inspiration for this article largely comes out of exposure to Barcelona’s program of urban spaces and public art, which has resulted in over 200 new parks and 50 site specific works since 1980, establishing the city as a unique laboratory for the evolution of urban open space.

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Camino Sitte, Votive Church Plaza, Vienna.

2 Alan Balfour, Rockefeller Center: Architecture as Theater (McGrawHill, New York, 1978), pp. 7–24.

3 George R. Collins, Christiane C. Collins, Camillo Sitte: The Birth of Modern City Planning (Rizzoli, New York, 1986), pp. 126–127.

motion, and simultaneous frames of reference, and the making of urban spaces whose formal criteria continued to be based on static, rigidly framed, “drawing room” settings more in keeping with cultural and esthetic sensibilities of earlier historic periods. Recent interventions in the modern city that are based in programmed events, performance, and the introduction of large-scale, site specific sculpture suggest another type of space, the qualities of which are based more on the active, directed experience of the user rather than the self-referential, formal qualities of the space itself. Action space is an expression of 21st century culture, the culture of personal control, 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 the greatest urban designs of our age, the central mall and plaza of New York’s Rockefeller Center, designed in 1931. The aspirations and symbolism of the project were of the new age of communications, a new world order, generating a defining statement of the modern metropolis. Yet appearing more than two decades after Cubism, the plan is straight-jacketed within a most conservative, 19th century Beaux-Arts order—a centralized, axial space functioning as little more than a viewing stage to the then R.C.A. Building and spatial relief from the overall project density, representing a product of market conditions and opportunity rather than a vision of modern culture.2 One of the reasons that historic spatial models continued to be persuasive well into the modern period was the publication in 1889 of Camillo Sitte’s City Planning According to Artistic Principles. In this treatise, the art of designing space is based on succinct, formal principles that were deduced from a reexamination of the historic city, described by step-by-step formula and diagrams that were easily adapted to other contexts. After the proliferation of Modernist urban experiments of the 1920s and 1930s based on 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 publication of the 1945 English edition, influencing the work of Cullen Davis and the British Townscape movement, and later, Colin Rowe and other collaborators in the development of “Contextualism.”3 The principles derived from this work continued to play a role in the redevelopment of the city well into the 1980s, as evidenced in the design of public spaces such as Pioneer Square in Seattle, Rector Place in Battery Park City, much of the work of Leon and Robert Krier, and other manifestations of the “PostModern” city. The more recent manifestations of action space constitute a corrective rupture with the precepts of 19th century space; their sources have less to do with the history of urban space, and more with the influences of cultural and aesthetic shifts that have evolved throughout the 20th century. Two sources 282

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in particular have received little critical attention: One can be traced to the realization of the so-called “spectacle,” or programmed event, as a generator of modern space; the other is derived from the influences of the development of 20th century art, mostly centered within a series of investigations which were part of the Minimal and Performance Art movements of the 1960s and 1970s. THE URBAN SPECTACLE

The nature of the spectacle, the planned public display and programming of urban space as a field of human activity, depends less on the physical attributes of the defined setting, and more on the activity within the setting to create a specific sense of place. In fact, it can be argued that some of the greatest urban designs in this century were not permanent spaces within fixed physical boundaries, but rather, have been staged, temporary events of unparalleled focus and intensity. While there exist many examples throughout the 20th century, one of the most memorable took place in Nuremberg, Germany, only several years after the completion of the Beaux-Arts plan for Rockefeller Center. In 1936, Albert Speer designed a “cathedral of light” to contain the Nuremberg Party Rally, part of a week-long series of speeches, exercise drills, marches, and parades to promote policies of anti-bolshevism and National Socialist unity. On the evening of the fifth day, 1,200 floodlights are focused on the main stage of the Zeppelinfeld; with 70,000 spectators in the stands, 200,000 participants holding 25,000 flags march into the stadium in darkness. Only at the moment that Hitler’s car enters the stadium, 130 antiaircraft searchlights spaced at intervals of 40 feet around the stadium are turned on, sending vertical shafts of lights 6–8 kilometers into the sky, finally merging together into an overall glow. Sometimes, as described by Speer, “a cloud moved through this wreath of lights, bringing an element of surrealistic surprise to the mirage.” The stadium is transformed into an otherworldly space of potentially infinite limits, totally unlike any other ever conceived in history, used to promulgate a political and cultural agenda beyond 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. The 1968 student uprisings in Paris, the civil rights marches in the Mall in Washington, D.C., the 1970 anti-war demonstrations on the New Haven Green, and elsewhere, vary in political agenda, but share similar characteristics. While sometimes circumstantially contained within spatial boundaries, the action and movement continually shifts; participants flow between interior and exterior spaces, and are absorbed into the landscape and 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 500,000 283

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Albert Speer, Nuremberg Rally, 1936.

4 Ernst Eichhorn et al., Kulissen der Gewalt: Das Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg (Heinrich Hugendubel Verlag, Munich, 1992); also: Albert Speer, 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; the performance and event depended less on the assigned performers and more on the directed, shared presence of the audience, a community of a half million private desires, blurring the distinction between the observers and the observed. The walled limits of space have all but disappeared, and contribute little to the experience—the notion of place has been achieved purely by a program of activity, a city whose only fabric is human presence. 20TH CENTURY ART

5 Perhaps the seminal statement of the basic characteristics of Minimal Art comes from the writings of Robert Morris, one of the movement’s most prominent sculptors. See: Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Art Forum (4, no. 6, February, 1966 and 5, no. 2, October, 1966). 6 Roald Nasgaard, Structures for Behaviour (Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario, 1978), p. 14. 7 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1968), p. 131.

The other sources for the new urban space come out of the development of art and film during the 20th century. The invention of Cubism and montage techniques in filmmaking fundamentally shifted traditional notions of perspectival space, fixed points of reference, and bounded, singular forms into dissociated fragments layered, or collaged within an open field, shifting points of reference, and multiple events articulated within an interrupted, non-linear flow of time. If traditional urban space is dependent on being perceived as a clearly conceived focal center through a tightly bounded gestalt, defined by surrounding buildings, modern space suggests a shift towards a non-centralized, peripheral vision, generating a form of “marginal” space, more ambiguously interactive with surrounding conditions. What mainly sets the stage for the radically shifted role and form of recent public space comes out of the art investigations of the 1960s and 1970s. During this period of intense activity along a number of fronts, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Performance Art, and Earth Art all tended to break down traditional relationships between the art work and the observer, either by removing work from the gallery setting and inserting it into the outside world, or focusing not so much on the object itself but on the perceived space between the work and the observer.5 For instance, in a work such as Richard Serra’s “Shift” of 1970–72, six concrete planes are vertically positioned in a field related to the slope, in which each plane establishes a horizontal datum within a fluctuating topography; the viewer has to traverse over the whole field from one plane to another to perceive the overall work. In this work and many others from the period, “the character of sculpture has been modified from concentration in a discrete thing to expansion across a behavioral space in which the symbiotic relationship of sculpture and viewer becomes the real object of experience.”6 The selfimportance of the object has been supplanted by the experience of the object—“you just have to experience it . . . the experience alone is what matters.”7 In other cases, artists programmed activities, or events in external settings, that would define the cognitive experience of the observer. Some of the 284

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Vito Acconci, “Following Piece” 1969–71. (Photo by permission of Vito Acconci.)

seminal works of this period are the “Peopled Space” experiments from 1969–71 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, any location; following him wherever he goes, however long or far he travels (the activity ends when he enters a private place—his home, office, etc.).

8 Acconci has been creating since the late 1980s large-scaled interior and exterior interventions in cities that perform as art, and function for human occupation. See: Vito Acconci, Jean-Claude Massera, Lilian Pfaff, Christophe Wavelet, Vito Hannibal Acconci Studio (Barcelona: Actar Editorial), 2005.

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 someone to cling to. Adjunctive relationship—I add myself to another person—I let my control be taken away—I’m dependent on the other person—I need him, he doesn’t need me—subjective relationship. A way to get around, get into the middle of things (I’m distributed over a dimensional domain)—out in space—out of time (my time and space are taken up into a large system.)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 the space. The perception of space only acquires significance through its cognitive occupation—the space exists as long as the work goes on; when it’s over, the space collapses into abstract locations, insignificant and devoid of meaning. The activity takes on a different nature from theater, say, or the collective spectacles described above, whereby action is performed within uniform, agreed upon systems, or rules of behavior. For Acconci, the interaction between activities and participants is distinctly private—the action is unpredictable, unrehearsed, and played out on an individual basis, within 285

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9 Vito Acconci, “Following Piece,” Avalanche (Fall, 1972), p. 31.

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Richard Serra, “Tilted Arc,” 1981, Federal Plaza, New York. (Photo by the author.)

10 Robert Storr, “ ‘Tilted Arc’: Enemy of the People?” Art in America (73, September, 1985), p. 92.

11 “Tilted Arc Hearing,” Art Forum (23, Summer, 1985), p. 98. These restrictions were clearly felt by the users of Federal Plaza, and ultimately became the instigator of the public’s outcry for its removal. For documents from the public hearings and court proceedings, see: Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk, The Destruction of Tilted Arc (M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990).

a private world of desires, fears, and unlimited possibilities, specifically aligned to the cultural sensibilities and freedoms of the 20th century. The power of art to radically, if not subversively, change the nature of urban space was exemplified by Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” project installed in Federal Plaza, lower Manhattan, in 1981. The plaza was an undistinguished, poorly scaled space with little meaning or role other than serving as a decorative setting for the even less distinguished adjacent Federal Building. Once the sculpture was installed, the space was radically transformed in terms of the sculpture setting new terms of engagement, forcing a response on the part of anyone coming within contact. The issue was not that a work of art as “object” was placed in the space that could either be interpreted, or remain distant from public consciousness. Serra allowed the public no choice, inserting a curved wall (not an object), 120 feet long and 12 feet high, that divided the space, limited how one could traverse the space, determined what one could see and not see, and needed human occupation and context to become activated, conceiving “a way to dislocate or alter the decorative function of the plaza and actively bring people into the sculpture’s context.”10 Or, as later interpreted by Rosalind Krauss: The kind of vector “Tilted Arc” explores is that of vision. More specifically, what it means for vision to be invested with a purpose . . . For the spectator of “Tilted Arc”, this sculpture is constantly mapping a kind of 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 participant’s options; as a form of resistance, it demanded that we interact on its terms, and not ours; our choices, the freedom to move, or see within an unlimited, non-directional field, were compromised. It is this demand for the viewer to be directed within a prescribed, limited set of possibilities, 286

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rather than be placed in a position to freely act on one’s own terms, which presents a paradigmatic shift in the formation of urban space. PUBLIC URBAN SPACE

The differences between historic public space and the nature of action space are made graphic when comparing two parks within Battery Park City, Manhattan, both of which were designed almost concurrently (in the early 1980s), and built within a quarter mile of one another. One park, Rector Place, was modeled after Gramercy Park, an “English square” concept surrounded by built edges that define a regular trapezoidal solid, densely landscaped, and formally organized along a longitudinal axis extended from the Hudson River. The space serves to provide an open relief from the dense surrounding development, a natural oasis in contrast to built structures, establishing a setting that enhances the view to adjacent buildings, or conversely, is to be viewed from apartments above. Nothing much goes on in the space itself—the obligatory benches, flowered gardens, and open lawn; pleasant, but hardly stimulating. The South Cove, designed through a collaboration of an architect (Stanton Eckstut), landscape architect (Susan Child), and artist (Mary Miss), is another matter entirely. The park sits in the South Residential District parallel to the river, and is only minimally defined by a built edge. All of the action takes place within, with every part designating a particular pattern of use, or cognition. One is directed to move along straight paths, curving paths, an arched bridge, proceed up steps to a platform overlook, or even continue around a broken jetty-like extension into the river, which dead-ends, and then forces you to retrace your steps. Every detail of the project seems to have been designed to force a response, initiate a bodily action, or expose an additional layer of content. We are exposed to traces of the waterfront’s history, isolated piers, and the jetty’s disintegrated form to suggest the typical pier forms along Manhattan that are gradually decaying; an observation structure that recalls the crown of 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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12 These and other insights relative to painting, film, and perception are discussed in Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1968). A further development of Benjamin’s work, and the implications of program relative to space, can be found in “Spaces and Events,” from Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994). 13 Garry Apgar, “Public Art and the Remaking of Barcelona,” Art in America (Vol. 79, February, 1991).

park has been removed, exposing the structure below, so that one can understand that the whole affair is really an artificial construction built over water. The varied components deny any notion of compositional unity. Each component establishes an independent “quotation” that is perceptually assembled in a linear sequence; together these scenes are each given 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 into the realm of staged “event.” One enters into a form of private theater, interacting with a series of props and loaded images, linearly connected on a path allowing little chance to veer off the intended sequence, or turn one’s attention away. This is a radically different scene from the historic garden, with its sublime landscape and open fields that inspire reflection, relaxation, individuality, and free associations into unlimited, unpredicted possibilities. Here, we must act, learn, acknowledge, and move on within a highly specified context, until the information is absorbed, the action completed, and the event is over. If the perception of the historic garden can be said to be analogous to painting, which invites the spectator to contemplation, action space can be compared to film, whose controlled passage of continuous events interrupts free association and reflection. The participant is held captive, completely “distracted” by spatial circumstance, removing all critical distance between viewer and perceived space.12 Many of the new spaces planned in Barcelona over the last decade can be characterized as action spaces, with similar characteristics to those defined above. Most of them incorporate public art, in one form or the other, which provides possibilities of directing a physical response to its presence (as in “Tilted Arc”), or establishes the conceptual framework, or theme, around which the park is designed. In other cases, action is determined by particular sequences and landscaped forms, and the theme is derived from a dialogue between new design forms versus traces of the context which are left to co-exist and interact with the new interventions.13

Parc du Clot, Barcelona. (Photo by the author.)

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The Parc du Clot, designed by Dani Freixes and Vicente Miranda in 1988, is a particularly strong example of the latter. As in many of the recent Barcelona parks, the space was not conceived in the context of new surrounding development, but was carved out of an existing context. Its overall form is irregular, relationships to the buildings are circumstantial, if they exist at all, and while the space is somewhat contained by surrounding building walls, it doesn’t seem to be particularly well defined, or proportioned. But it hardly matters—as in the case of South Cove, it’s what’s inside that counts. The lack of traditional formal resolution actually lets the park be more integrated into the context and be absorbed by the neighborhood. The park was originally the site of a series of large brick factories, most of which have been removed, while some wall fragments remain as a reminder of the past. These ruins now provide unique settings for activities, and in one case, are transformed into a kind of aqueduct along one edge, which sends an extended curtain stream of water into an adjacent pool. This wall is then cut by a new bridge, which crosses the park diagonally, leading to another bridge crossing a sunken paved play area. Both bridges direct the routing of residents through the park, connecting various activities, and allowing observation of the events below. All parts of this space are charged, programmed for action, in terms of literal physical movement as well as cognitive awareness of its history and transformation. The essence of Parc du Clot is the perception of space through directed action, in which all the props—the paths, gardens, industrial remnants, bridges, etc. are orchestrated to put the viewer into a precisely staged series of perceptions. The act of design is not so much the arrangement of forms as an autonomous construct, but the design of the experience itself, which is sponsored, or activated by the setting. The goal is the limitation of certain possibilities, and the direction, or programming, of others. All of the remaining choices lead to individual action, the inducement to move, participate, interact, and respond—one must only go along and experience the possibilities—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 and meaning in art. The experience is a form of theater, or performance, with the audience reduced to the scale of an individual, placed “within a situation that 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, it has been waiting for him.”14 This critical shift in perception, whether of sculpture, from an independent form within its own gallery setting to form completely depended on the shared space of the viewer, or of one’s everyday interaction with the environment at large, has now become a central condition that shapes our relationship to public space. 289

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14 Michael Fried, op. cit., p. 140.

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15 Bernard Tschumi’s widely discussed La Villette park in northern Paris is clearly one of the primary models for the concept of action space; an excellent description can be found in: Bernard Tschumi, Cingramme Folie: Le Parc De La Villette (Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton, 1987). 16 The influence of earlier garden typologies and city form has been documented extensively; one of the most convincing explorations remains the work found in: Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1978), pp. 175–177.

The success of the new urban space is measured not so much from the quality of its design as a physical artifact or independent setting, but the quality of programmed event, the richness and satisfaction of the induced action, and the perceptual response of the participant. The recent urban plazas and parks in Barcelona, New York, Paris,15 and elsewhere are the result of shifting paradigms in art and culture throughout the 20th century, and mark a decisive break with earlier models which have proved to be most resistant to change and transformation. Most importantly, just as earlier landscape forms and spaces inspired parallel models of city form more charged and richly defined than anything the existing city has to offer,16 possibly the characteristics of these new urban spaces can lead to 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 Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1996. 290

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THE INSCRIPTION OF “PUBLIC” AND “CIVIC” REALMS IN THE CONTEMPORARY CITY

THE PUBLIC REALM

MICHAEL E. GAMBLE (2003)

The city used to be something that you get for free. It’s been a public space, and it enables the citizens to assemble in a kind of collective sense, but basically through the process, effects of the market economy and through the withdrawal of the public sector and the kind of complimentary invasion of the private sector, which is expressed through shopping, the nature of the city has changed from something that is fundamentally free, to something that you have to pay for, so that even in educational establishments, even in religious establishments and certainly in cultural establishments there is always this kind of commercial presence . . . Rem Koolhaas in an interview with Ray Suarez, PBS commentator In our day it seems to me that civic spirit is inseparable from the exercise of 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 unified public. I realize that the “decline” of public space was essentially classspecific nostalgia for a place that never existed on the terms so imagined, especially by middle income suburbanites. I cannot mourn the loss of something that has hardly ever existed in parts of Atlanta. I do believe that we need public spaces that are free from private influence, market force and policies based on control and consumption. The terms public and civic should in fact be in quotation marks, denaturalized, because of the changes in meaning wrought by so much interpretation. The definition of public space is indeed a site of debate.1 As the contemporary city grows and designers, policy makers, developers and special interest groups seek ways to allay the gap between suburban life and urbanity, automobiles and pedestrians, ambiguous public space and the public realm, sustained debate on the term public is essential. In what ways can public life manifest itself in an increasingly privatized world? Is public life now limited to residual, ambiguous spaces? How are the boundaries between public and private inscribed? Public space is literally required in order for democratic society to exist by the Bill of Rights and Amendments to the Constitution, being the realm of organized political action, the place 291

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1 I was fortunate enough in graduate school to participate in Rosalyn Deutsche’s course on Public Space and am indebted to her for insight and debate related to the subject. The term public remains bracketed throughout this discussion.

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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.

of free speech and freedom of assembly, tolerance, self-presentation, self-preservation and public dialogue. Some would say that today the defense of public space is a radical project. The question is where is it and how is it made manifest in suburbia, urban retrofits and new public/private partnerships? Is the public realm now relegated to the temporary2 status described by Margaret Crawford in Everyday Urbanism? The Generic City, Shopping Mall Urbanism, Simulated Urbanism, the Private Public are all recent themes associated with the increased privatization of American public space. In Atlanta, most parks and outdoor spaces are now privately maintained and monitored. New developments in Atlanta such as Lindbergh City Center, Perimeter Town Center and Atlantic Station are developer-driven, privately maintained, consumer havens with little or no civic or public infrastructure. Similarly, in Atlanta’s newest park, Centennial Olympic, the private body that maintains the space prohibits some forms of public gathering and the expression of political opinion. The trend has even reached many of Atlanta’s sidewalks, which are now privately maintained and monitored through video surveillance and security. Why is the continued cultivation of the public realm important? Public space today is understood as a place in which a range of different individuals who don’t necessarily know each other can interact. Pure public space should be democratic and responsive, accessible to all groups, and a locus of public action, but because so many public spaces are now part of larger public/private partnerships and not essentially democratic, this definition, as we will see, can be problematic. To Hannah Arendt, “Action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost anytime and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.”3 The space of appearance, a subject that is now widely understood as the essence of Arendt’s position on political representation, is “. . . for us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves, 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 the highest possibility of human existence, to have no private place of one’s own meant to be no longer human. Public life, by her definition, was essential in the formation of private identity. For Arendt, society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance, and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public. The space of appearance is the world itself, “. . . as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it.”5 While Arendt’s definition of the public was representative of a hierarchical political system, and was not essentially social, she 292

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articulates a clear vision of the significance of public space to society. Like Aristotle’s, Arendt’s urban epistemology evolves from the fact that without a visible public realm, we lose our private place in it. What happens when everything becomes privately held? Like Arendt’s definition, the search for “public” space has traditionally focused on an idyllic place, made possible by the elimination of conflict. In her book Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Rosalyn Deutsche contends that conflict is a prerequisite for the existence and growth of public space, and states that public space is possible only when society accepts that the social field doesn’t have an essential identity, but is structured by multiple relationships. Focused on public art discourse and working with Claude Lefort’s thesis6 stating that democratic power comes from the people and is located in the social, Deutsche further defines public space as the place where the meaning and unity of the social is negotiated. Eliminating conflict obscures the basis of democracy, making public space artificial. Individual and group identities are formed in public space and only become meaningful through sustained debate. Without a singular identity, the social has no unity and power; in essence, it belongs to no one. The existence of democracy is based in the fact that the social is an open, incomplete entity. This misconception of public space rises through the definition of democracy. With no central core of power, the social order has no basis. In essence, the privatization of the public realm is an attack on society. The security of a public/private division shelters the subject from public space. The recognition of public space as the locus of conflict and the struggle for representation is an attempt to prevent the conversion of the public sphere into a private possession, something that is often attempted in the name of democracy. Margaret Crawford, drawing from the writings of Lefebvre, de Certeau and more recently Nancy Fraser, proposes an alternate reading of public space to that of Arendt’s, and extends Habermas’ concept related to “communicative action” and “dialogues” beyond systems of equal power. By introducing, through Fraser, “counter publics” and “subaltern counterpublics,” Crawford dismisses the public as a single entity and defines a public sphere “based on contestation, rather than unity, and created through competing interests and violent demands as much as by reasoned debate.” Crawford seeks locales, both public and private, for the development of new social and spatial practices where new meanings are continuously being created because new users keep reinterpreting and reorganizing the place over and over again. Unexpected and unplanned use of these places enables the specificity of the liminal urban terrain to become visible: “. . . instead of a single, ‘public’ occupying and exemplary public space, the multiple and counter-publics that Fraser identifies necessarily produce multiple sites of public expression, creating and using spaces that are partial and selective, responsive to limited segments of the 293

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6 Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society. See specifically the chapter on Politics and Human Rights.

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7 Crawford, Everyday Urbanism. Many thanks to Ana Maria Leon and her work in my Public Space seminar on parking lots. Her commitment to close readings of selected texts was very beneficial to this research.

8 Deutsche, Evictions, p. 326.

population and to a limited number of the multiple public roles individuals play in urban society.” According to Crawford, “when we recognize these struggles as the germ of an alternative development of democracy, we can begin to frame a new discourse of public space—one no longer preoccupied with loss, but filled with possibilities.” In her evolving definition of democracy, we discover a complex and contested idea that can assume a multiplicity of meanings and forms. The boundaries between public and private become blurred and “violate the strict lines between public and private on which the liberal bourgeois concept of the public sphere insists.”7 Arendt’s theory is formed from an idealized public space; Crawford’s theories of public space are grounded in the radical ethnicity and suburban sprawl of Los Angeles; Deutsche’s in the contested, compressed spaces of Manhattan. Significant and parallel is a concern with the definition a public and private. Deutsche argues that private identity should be formed in the public sphere, because the social (or “phantom public”) has no essential identity. While Arendt considers the social as an anomaly caused by the confusion of public and private, Crawford and Deutsche argue that it is this very condition that must be accepted and enhanced. While Arendt refers to the rising phenomenon of the social, in which private activities are allowed to take place in public spaces, Deutsche and Crawford encourage it, arguing that private individual identity should be formed in public spaces. Against any notion of collectivity or “oneness,” Deutsch and Crawford warn us against the dangers of a society distracted by the “benign fantasy of social completion”8 which negates plurality and conflict through the construction of an image of social space on authoritarian ground. Democracy is all that supports the construction of public space—enigmatic, grounded in the struggle for representation of all individuals and based on multiple publics. Whether implicit or explicit, many new developments, be they New Urbanist or other, problematize the role of public and civic space by either sanctioning private definitions of the public realm, or by failing to describe the role of civic and institutional structures on democratic terms. What is the nature of public and civic space in the contemporary city? Privatization makes 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 and market instabilities proliferate. In many cases, debates about the representation of diverse publics are suppressed. Unfortunately today, many private and public development agencies see the tenets of New Urbanism only as a brand or a commodity. On the heels of many successful projects like Seaside and the Kentlands, New Urbanist practice is seen now more for its capacity to produce profit than to create the types of spaces outlined by the Charter and desired by the Congress. “How do we know it’s New Urbanism?” is a recent addition to the Congress of New Urbanism’s 294

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website. Good Urbanism and its progeny New Urbanism both place high value on civic identity, community and representation in the public realm. But in the contemporary city is there simply no space for civic and public space in the developer’s pro forma? Is shopping the ultimate expression of public life? Where does branding end and public life begin? In America there are well over five and a half billion square feet of retail space. Is, as Koolhaas contends, the marketplace the final arbitrator and regulator of life? It’s an exciting time for many American cities, as blighted areas are revitalized and new developments realized. Doug Kelbaugh asks, “As citizens, are we too seduced by private pleasures and personal conceits to cultivate a rich, coherent, and democratic public realm? In our quest for a new civitas, which New Urbanism can help sponsor, are we prepared, like great cultures before us, for the balance and discipline required?”9 What and where is the public? Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp observe that the lack of authenticity and a limited form of control don’t have to obstruct the experience of public domain. “The existing need for the consumption of events in a protected space won’t necessarily obstruct the experience of public domain. The design of public domain is just a matter of designing the crossings between the different landscapes, and of the provocation of voluntary manifestations of diversity.”10 As Americans stroll forth from franchise cafés and bookstores in search of more varied public space, it is important 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 sufficient quantities 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 to our current needs, rather than relying on misconceptions of earlier examples.11 However, experience in relation to social form is what’s at stake here, and as I see it, the new social forms under construction in Atlanta are inadequate. “I shop therefore I am” should not be our only mantra. The construction of identity in public is only possible when places in which each of us can appear as democratic citizens are willfully conceived and implemented. 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. 295

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9 Kelbaugh, “Three Urbanisms.”

10 Hajer and Reijndorp, In Search of New Public Domain: Analysis and Strategy.

11 Smithsimon, “People in the Streets.”

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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 and 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 Everyday Public Space” available at

This essay is excerpted from the original published in the Proceedings of the 91st Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2003. 296

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DUPLICITY

As global powers juggle multiple sovereignties and allegiances, their behavior is, by necessity, discrepant. Manipulating both domestic and international sovereignty, nation states are more vigorously partnering with non-state forces and deciding together how to release, shelter and launder their 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 states they occupy (N.A.F.T.A., G.A.T.T.). We emphasize patriotism and citizenship while looking for cheap labor and unfilled quotas in the global market. The stances of any one nation are therefore often duplicitous or discrepant reflections of divided loyalties between national and international concerns or citizens and shareholders. Observers, researchers and theorists, some of whom are included in this anthology, continue to report the failure of political orthodoxies to assess contemporary global powers. They reject universals or world system theories as they reject binary oppositions of national/non-national, citizen/non-citizen, global/local. Whether one refers to 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 to match the necessity of multiple ethical platforms.1 The contention that the nation state is weakening in the face of burgeoning transnational forces is nowhere near sneaky enough. It is much more likely that the multiple realms of influence are kept in play to lubricate the obfuscation so important to the maintenance of power. Crucial then might be a working knowledge of the logics of duplicity. Some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are written not in the language of law and diplomacy but rather in the language of architecture and urbanism. Having often escaped the bounds of parliamentary politics, this extrastatecraft resides in the unofficial currents of cultural and market persuasion. Beyond the well-rehearsed techniques of national sovereignty (war, citizenship, suffrage and diplomacy) are events that may not have an orthodox political pedigree, but nevertheless create a shift in sentiment, a cessation of violence or a turn in economic fortunes. Indeed, the notion that there is a proper forthright realm of political negotiation usually acts as the perfect camouflage for a rich medium of subterfuge, hoax and hyperbole that finally rules the world.

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1 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); <www.petersloterdijk.net>; Marc Auge, An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). We might now consider locality to reflect not primordialism, but rather the complex mixtures and tinctures of global forces on the ground in any location or in any very particular organization that may, in fact, not rely on location.

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2 Michael Engman, Osamu Onoder and Enrico Pinali, “Export Processing Zones: Past and Future Development,” O.E.C.D. Trade Policy Working Paper No. 53, May 22, 2007; 3 Xiangming Chen, “The Evolution of Free Economic Zones and the Recent Development of CrossNational Growth Zones,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 19, no. 4 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), 593–621.

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 the corporation’s legal duty to banish any obstacle to profit, and the zone is the spatial organ of this externalizing—a mechanism of political quarantine designed for corporate protection. The earliest historical urges to incorporate express this desire for freedom and exclusivity. In 1934, the United States established Foreign Trade Zone status for port and warehousing areas related to trade. As the zone merged with manufacturing, Export Processing Zones appeared in the late 1950s and 1960s. China’s Special Economic Zones (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 grown exponentially, from a few hundred in the 1980s to between three and four thousand operating in 130 countries in 2006.2 Special zones handle over a third of the world’s trade. Some zones accumulate a few hectares; some grow 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 headquarters or offshore facility. More and more programs and spatial products thrive in legal lacunae and political quarantine, enjoying the insulation and lubrication of tax exemptions, foreign ownership of property, streamlined customs and deregulation of labor or environmental regulations. Indeed, the zone as corporate enclave is a primary aggregate unit of many new forms of the contemporary global city, offering a “clean slate,” “one-stop” entry into the economy of a foreign country. Most banish the negotiations that are usually associated with the contingencies of urbanism—negotiations such as those concerning labor, human rights or environment. Many of the new legal hybrids of zone, oscillating between visibility and invisibility, identity and anonymity, have neither been mapped nor analyzed for their disposition—their patency, exclusivity, aggression, resilience or violence. The zone launders identities. Countries just entering the marketplace may use the new zone economy, while also rejecting its incompatibility with state rhetoric 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 as cash cows for the state but also remain separate and vilified as a capitalist economy. China’s S.E.Z.s are the world’s model of this phenomenon. Their early experiment with four S.E.Z.s to quarantine the capitalist market has exploded to produce scores of different zones of various types all across the country. Cross-national growth zones in the South China Sea move products between zones in different jurisdictions to take advantage of different quotas and levels of regulation. In Eastern Europe the zone allows other 298

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European corporations to take advantage of less expensive labor from entering EU countries. Similarly, AllianceTexas, north of Fort Worth, a classic corporate city as office park and distripark, renames and redistributes many of the products produced in Mexico under N.A.F.T.A. agreements so that they can be calibrated to the desired profitability in a U.S. context. The orgmen who tend the self-referential organizations of the free zone are proud of the fluid, robust, information-rich environments they have created. Their automated warehouses and information Landschafts slowly and obsessively sort and stack enormous amounts of information: yet only information that is compatible to a common platform qualifies for inclusion. Indeed, an enormous intelligence is deployed to reset or eliminate any errant or extrinsic information. While remaining intact, the hermetic organization develops shrewd auxiliary tactics and strategies to fortify its stupidity and defend against contradiction. Regimes of power at once diversify their sources and contacts while consolidating and closing ranks, extending and tightening their territory. They grow while deleting information. This information paradox—wherein an enormous amount of information is required 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 expression of the zone’s evolution beyond being merely a location for warehousing and transshipment. The zone has become a new primordial civilization and a warm pool for the latest cocktail of spatial products (e.g. offices, factories, warehouses, calling centers, software production facilities etc.) that move around the world. Many countries in South Asia, China and Africa used Export Processing Zones as a means of announcing their entry into a global market as independent post-colonial contractors of outsourcing and offshoring. For example, with Ebene Cybercity, Mauritius has merged E.P.Z. development with I.T. campus development thanks to help from the developers of HITEC City in Hyderabad. Dubai has rehearsed the “park” or zone with almost every imaginable program beginning with Dubai Internet City in 2000, the first I.T. campus as free trade zone. Calling each new

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Below left: Alliance Texas, Forth Worth, Texas. Below right: Dubai Internet City.

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Cyber Gateway, Hyderabad, India.

4

Kish Island, Iran.

enclave “city,” it has either planned or built Dubai Health Care City, Dubai Maritime City, Dubai Silicon Oasis, Dubai Knowledge Village, Dubai Techno Park, Dubai Media City, Dubai Outsourcing Zone, Dubai Humanitarian City, Dubai Industrial City and Dubai Textile City. The zone has become a resort. Able to materialize and dematerialize with the caprice of petrodollars and offshore holdings, the new corporate enclaves also need to get away and relax. Operating in a frictionless realm of exemption and merging with other urban formats, the zone also naturally merges with the resort and theme park, even assuming an ethereal aura of fantasy. 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 sometimes refer to themselves as I.T. resorts offering lush vegetation and a mixture of small scale vernacular buildings and mirror-tiled office buildings. Even more extreme are those zones that merge with the offshore island retreats. Jeju, for instance, is a quintessential island retreat that has housed, as have many islands, all of those programs or illicit activities that do not fit into the logics of the continent. Transforming itself from penal colony and strategic military position to citing Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong as models, the island of Jeju, for instance, has transformed itself into a “free economic city.”4 On the island of Kish off the coast of Iran, Kish Free Zone similarly attracts business to an island notorious for its relaxed religious standards. Here, there is not only a loosening of headscarves and a greater opportunity for socializing between men and women, but the standard set of exemptions to which the corporation has grown accustomed. Nearby fantasy hotels like the Dariush Grand Hotel recreate the grandeur of Persian palaces with peristyle halls, gigantic cast stone sphinxes and ornate bas reliefs depicting ancient scenes. The zone is a double. Now major cities and national capitals are engineering their own world city Doppelgangers—their own non-national territory within which to legitimize non-state transactions. The world capital and national capital can shadow each other, alternately exhibiting a regional cultural ethos and a global ambition. Companies like CIDCO and SKIL can now be hired, as they were in Navi Mumbai, to deliver an infrastructural legal environment like those in Shenzhen and Pudong. City-states like Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai, that assume the ethos of free zones for their entire territory, have become world city models for newly minted cities with not only commercial areas but a full complement of programs. King Abdullah Economic City, a production of the U.A.E.s’ Emaar developers on the Red Sea near Jeddah, offers cultural, educational, business and residential programs merged with a resort. Fly-throughs with swelling traditional music render the city as a shimmering golden man-made island filled with multiples of traditional Islamic palace buildings and programmed with leisure space. While corporate headquarters in national capitals and 300

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financial capitals portray a glamorous business-like atmosphere, here the zone projects the image of a kingdom of unencumbered wealth. New Songdo City, an expansion of the Incheon free trade territories near Seoul, is a complete international city on the Dubai or Singapore model designed by K.P.F., an American architecture firm. Here, aspiring to the cosmopolitan urbanity 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” are often accompanied by tinny fanfares of low production values, the New Songdo City video messages are accompanied by new age tunes or heroic strains in the John Williams style—the spectacular theme music of the nonstate capital. The zone is the parliament for the de facto global governance of private corporations. Enjoying quasi-diplomatic immunities, corporations function in an elite parastate capacity, providing to nations the support and expertise for transportation and communication infrastructure or relationships with the I.M.F. and the World Bank. Networks of construction companies and infrastructure specialists like Bouyges, Bin Laden, Mitsubishi, Kawasaki or Siemens deliver technologies for high speed rail, automated transit and skyscraper engineering. To the ports around which so many free trade zones, Export Processing Zones and Special Economic Zones crystallize, conglomerates such as P.S.A., P.&O., Hutchison Port Holdings or E.C.T., like modern counterparts of British or Dutch East India company franchises, deliver transshipment and warehousing technologies. Technology parks around the world grow their own satellite and cable networks with their own headquarters or embassies at the interstices of the network; whole families of corporations stick together in the same legal habitat recreated anywhere in the world and separated by a plane trip or a satellite bounce. Real estate operators like Emaar provide the spatial environments and amenities that corporate “families” recognize as home. The zone prefers non-state violence to military conflict that might be bad for business. The gulf widens between the extremes of the Dubai development model and the slums of Lagos or Kinshasa. Yet the zone is a formation within which poverty can be strictly maintained without the chaos of informal economies. The offshore sweatshops in Saipan or the maquiladoras on the thickened border between the United States and Mexico organize a form of labor exploitation that is stable and within the law. The corporate city not only provides a double to the national and financial capital: it has its own double in these offshore enclaves. More discrete and less visible, these backstage formations are not given the “city” designation. In Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, the Alsunut Development Company Ltd. is building Almogran, which includes 1660 acres of skyscrapers and residential properties. The new corporate city only underlines the extreme discrepancies between oil wealth and the exploitation of oil 301

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resources in the mostly non-Arab southern Sudan. Indeed, the overt, even hyperbolic, expressions of oil money are among the chief tools for instigating war and violence in the south. The zone tutors impure ethical struggles. Duplicity is the prevailing logic and organizational disposition of this space. The logics of righteousness and the insistence on orthodox political sentiment evaporate in these environments. Most urgent for architecture, then, may be not the consolidation of a singular position but rather the acquisition of an expanded, agile repertoire. Curiosity and ingenuity nourish a position wherein one is too smart to be right. Some backstage knowledge of the bagatelle in exchange, the players in the game and the cards being dealt returns more information about the tools and techniques of extrastatecraft. The zone is an especially discrepant territory within which to rehearse a new species of spatio-political activism.

Portions of this essay were adapted from an article prepared for the Rotterdam Biennale, 2007, Visionary Power catalog (NAI, 2007). 302

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DIS-ASSEMBLING THE URBAN The variable interactions of spatial form and content SASKIA SASSEN (2007)

This short essay examines the tensions between the shapes of a built environment and the underlying dynamics feeding it. Because some of the sharpest tensions can be found in economic spaces, I focus especially on these. To make it concrete and allow the reader to visualize some of the conceptual points, I regularly invoke the models of the so-called Chicago School and the Los Angeles School, as they represent familiar contrasting understandings. The L.A. model’s core proposition is that the L.A. region is the urban form of today’s new (post-modern) economy while the Chicago model reflects that of an older (modern) economy, with the centrality of agglomeration as its organizing dynamic. I distinguish between spatial outcomes that may result from similar novel dynamics even when they look very different, and spatial outcomes that may result from different dynamics even when they look the same. In its most extreme instances, the variability of spatial forms given similar underlying dynamics makes legible the diverse constraints shaping the spatializing of similar dynamics across different cities and urban regions, on the one hand; and, on the other, the homogenized state-of-the-art built environment of major cities, no matter how original the architecture, obscures drastically different 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 emphasis is on the extent to which their articulation is partly shaped by a range of intermediate variables. That is to say, diverse spatial outcomes may result from area-specific constraints on the scaling and spatializing of the 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 potentially raising the divergence between two urbanized areas as a function of path-dependence rather than the underlying dynamics getting spatialized. Once a distinct spatial form is produced, even though conceivably stemming from a similar underlying dynamic, it will have its own effects on outcomes. This is perhaps best exemplified by the contrasting logics for real estate profitability evident in the original development of 303

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Hilary Koob-Sassen, The Paraculture Nr. 6 (London, T1+2 Gallery).

both Chicago and L.A. An emphasis on intermediate variables questions the easy opposition of Chicago vs. L.A. as models of urbanism representing respectively an old and the future phase in the evolution of urban form. A critical but easily overlooked variable when comparing formats such as the L.A. and Chicago models is the fact that complex trans-local processes comprise diverse geographic moments, notably agglomeration and dispersal. We need to know where a particular area fits in such multi-sited processes. Just describing the spatial organization of an area does not allow us to get at such deeper economic dynamics. Areas with complex spatial organizations such as those represented by the L.A. or the Chicago model, are likely to contain both moments of agglomeration and dispersal, including for the same firm. And they may contain predominantly one of those moments in a firm’s or a sector’s spatial organization of its activities, for instance, dispersal in the L.A. region and agglomeration in Chicago. Translocal chains of operations are increasingly common for many firms and for whole economic sectors. The evidence shows that globalized firms and sectors contain both agglomeration and dispersal moments in their spatial organization. Dispersal might be at a regional, national and global level, and agglomerations might vary sharply in content and in the specifics of the corresponding spatial form—for instance, Chicago’s 304

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financial center and L.A.’s Hollywood or Northern California’s Silicon Valley. A focus on the presence of such translocal chains of operations helps us situate the specifics of a city, a metro area, or an L.A.-type region in a far broader systemic condition, one that might include points both of sharp agglomeration and of sharp dispersal. In my own research I found that the most globalized and innovative firms were characterized by the fact that agglomeration is itself a function of dispersal. That is to say, the more globalized and thus geographically dispersed a firm’s operations, the more likely the presence of agglomeration economies in particular moments (the production of top-level headquarter functions) of that firm’s chain of operations. It became one of my core theses in specifying the global city model. For the purposes of this essay, it underlines the fact of a single dynamic with diverse spatializations, i.e. both agglomeration and dispersal, for a firm or a sector. This is critical given the proposition in the L.A. model that spatial dispersal is the new, post-modern urban form that captures novel economic (and other) dynamics; in contrast Chicago style agglomeration is then represented as belonging to an older economic phase—the modern city. One way of specifying some of this empirically is to establish whether agglomeration economies, especially as a function of dispersal, matter for understanding the spatial organization of the L.A. region. I would add that we need the same type of analysis for Chicago, both the city and the larger metro region, because the Chicago model is predicated on an older notion of agglomeration, one shaped by the weight of core inputs and by transport costs. The L.A. model as per Dear (2002) posits that agglomeration economies have ceased to be a locational determinant in the new economy and hence 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 extents from Dear’s.) To organize the argument one might posit that the underlying new economic dynamic is the same in significant and indeed in growing segments of each region even as spatial form diverges. This would then engage the thesis that the L.A. model represents the spatializing of a new dynamic that makes itself legible in the L.A. landscape, and thus that the geographic dispersal at the heart of the L.A. model captures a whole new economic phase that is reshaping urban form. I counterpose the hypothesis that the more an urban region is being shaped by the new economic dynamics, the more spatial organization will involve agglomeration economies precisely as a function of geographic dispersal of economic activities under conditions of systemic integration no matter the scale—regional, national or global. This is a type of agglomeration economy I found in my research on global cities, but it can also be applied to national or regional scales. Let me elaborate briefly on the hypothesis, alluded to earlier, that I derived from this 305

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finding—to wit, that the greater the capabilities for geographic dispersal a firm can evince, the more it can benefit from agglomeration economies for the increasingly complex management of a globally dispersed set of operations (see Sassen 2001: New Preface for a brief explanation of the nine hypotheses that specify the global city model). The complexity of the functions that need to be produced, the uncertainty of the markets such firms are involved in, and the growing importance of speed in all these transactions, is a mix of conditions that constitutes a new logic for agglomeration; it is not the logic posited in older models, where weight and distance are seen to shape agglomeration outcomes. The mix of firms, talents and expertise in a broad range of specialized fields, makes a certain type of dense environment function as a strategic knowledge economy wherein the whole is more than the sum of (even its finest) parts. This is a crucial asset for highly globalized sectors. In my current research I have added yet another variable to explain the importance of such agglomerations to the most advanced sectors. It is the fact that organizational complexity allows firms to maximize the benefits they can derive from the new digital technologies, thereby further underlining the importance of agglomeration to the new economy. Further, the capabilities for global operation, coordination and control contained in the new information technologies and in the power of transnational corporations need to be produced, serviced, “debugged” through specialized cultural work, and ultimately also designed and invented. The fact of having to “produce” these capabilities adds what is often a neglected dimension in discussions about how the new technologies neutralize distance and place, as made emblematic in the L.A. model. A second key dynamic that articulates dispersal and agglomeration is that the more headquarters actually buy some of their corporate functions from the specialized services sector rather than producing them in house, the greater their locational options become. Among these options is moving out of global cities, and more generically, out of agglomerations. This is an option precisely because of the existence of a spatially concentrated network of specialized producer services sector that can increasingly handle some of the most complex global operations of firms and markets. It is precisely this specialized capability to handle the global operations of firms and markets that marks the global city production function, not simply the number of corporate headquarters of the biggest firms in the world, as is often suggested. A third key dynamic is that the more large corporate clients buy components of their top-level headquarter functions from the specialized corporate services sector, the higher the benefits this sector can derive 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, and of absorbing the growing uncertainty and risks facing their corporate clients as these go global. In the L.A. region we find elements of this in Hollywood 306

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for the global entertainment industry and the L.A./Long Beach harbor economy, and perhaps now also in the corporate office complex of Orange County and even in downtown L.A. These are intense agglomerations that are very much part of the new economic phase, particularly its most advanced sectors. This contests the key proposition of the L.A. model on urban form and the new economy. Interpreting what is novel about the L.A. region would then entail analytic rescalings that allow us to capture the possibility that some of L.A.’s multipolarity is actually better understood as reflecting the presence of agglomeration economies. The available evidence, and there is plenty of it, indicates that key factors shaping the spatial organization of leading firms are operative in 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 say that it is perhaps to some extent a question of coding. What is coded as multipolarity in the L.A. region gets coded as “relocation to the metropolitan area or beyond” in Chicago and New York. At the same time, dense concentrations of the most innovative and globalized sectors subject 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 similarities in underlying dynamics. Rescaling the Chicago area to incorporate the metro area, and the L.A. region to include sub-regional microagglomerations, gets us only so far in analytically neutralizing the diverse histories and contents of each region. But it is essential work for specifying whether the new dynamics reshaping the urban condition necessarily spatialize according to the L.A. model—dispersal and multipolarity. 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 of the economic urban landscape misses a critical point. It misses, or obscures, the fact of the diversity of economic trajectories through which cities and regions become globalized, even when the final visual outcomes may look similar. Out of this surface analysis, based on homogenized landscapes, comes a second possibly spurious inference, that similar visual landscapes are a function of convergence. Both propositions—that similar spatial forms are indicators of both similar economic dynamics and of convergence—may indeed capture various situations. But key conditions are not, and, in fact, they are rendered invisible by such notions. Hence we cannot assume that such inferences from the visual order always hold. This then also problematizes the proposition that the L.A. model represents the new urban spatial 307

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1 For some initial elements see Greene et al. 2006. 2 Lloyd 2005.

3 Sassen 2006a. Chapters 1 and 5.

form arising out of what are today’s new dynamics, including prominently economic dynamics. What led me to question the prevailing homogenization and convergence theses was the research comparing Chicago and New York. It is common to see Chicago as a latecomer to global city status because of its agro-industrial past. Why did it happen so late—almost fifteen years later than in New York and London? It is easy to assume that Chicago had to overcome its agroindustrial past which put it at a disadvantage compared to old trading and financial centers such as New York and London. But I found that its past was not a disadvantage. It was one key source of its competitive advantage. The knowledge economy, developed to handle the needs of its agro-industrial regional economy, gave Chicago a key component of its current specialized advantage in the global economy. While this is most visible and familiar in the fact of its preeminence as a futures market built on pork bellies, it also underlies other highly specialized components of its global city functions. The complexity, scale and international character of its agro-industrial complex required highly specialized financial, accounting and legal expertise, quite different from the expertise required to handle the sectors New York specialized in—service exports, finance on trade, and finance on finance.1 Other sectors are, clearly, also critical to the advanced service economy of today’s Chicago;2 some of these have developed as a result of this particular core knowledge economy, e.g. the expansion of professional firms and households, high end components of the hotel and restaurant sector, and of the cultural sector. The specialized economic histories of major cities and urban regions matter in today’s global economy because there is a globally networked division of functions. This fact is easily obscured by the common emphasis on inter-city competition and by the standardization (no matter how good the architecture) of built environments. Because financial, legal and accounting experts in Chicago had to address in good part the needs of the agro-industrial complex, the city today has a specialized advantage in producing certain types of financial, legal and accounting instruments. But for this specialized advantage to materialize entails repositioning that past knowledge in a different set of economic circuits. It entails, then, disembedding that expertise from an agro-industrial economy and re-embedding it in a “knowledge” economy—that is to say, an economy where expertise can increasingly be commodified, function as a key input, and thereby constitute a new type of intermediate economy. Having a past as a major agro-industrial complex makes that switch more difficult than a past as a trading and financial center. This then also explains partly Chicago’s “lateness” in bringing that switch about. But that switch is not simply a matter of overcoming that past. It requires a new organizing logic that can revalue the capabilities developed in an earlier era.3 It took making to execute the switch. 308

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Recovering this specialized advantage linked to a city’s specific economic history also brings to the fore a key argument by Peter Taylor about cities that derive their significance from their location in global networks rather than only their position in a hierarchy. To recover this particular specialized advantage, one akin to a positional good, we need empirical research about the intersections of regional locations and functional activities.4 It also points to the fact that “the” global network comprises multiple, often specialized networks. I have found this to be the case with financial markets: once we disaggregate the global capital market into its multiple specialized financial markets, it becomes clear that there are several specific networks of cities in play. A city like Chicago dominates some of these financial circuits but is a fairly minor player in others. This opens up a whole research agenda that takes us beyond city rankings. The aim is to recover the more complex city networks that are a strategic infrastructure for the global operations of markets and firms, and on which a variety of other types of actors and networks can build, such as global civil society actors, alternative cultural circuits, transnational migration networks, and so on, even as these also build their own distinct city networks.5 Through its particular type of past, Chicago illuminates aspects of global city formation that are far less legible in cities such as New York and London, which did have very large manufacturing components but were nonetheless dominated by predominantly trading and banking economies. Chicago’s history points to the mistake of assuming that the characteristics of 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 of global cities today with heavy manufacturing origins, many once important manufacturing cities have not made the switch into a knowledge economy based on that older industrial past. Along with Chicago, São Paulo and Shanghai are perhaps among today’s major global cities with particularly strong histories in heavy manufacturing. But most once important manufacturing cities, notably Detroit and the English manufacturing cities, have not undergone the type of switch we see in Chicago, São Paulo and Shanghai. This points to the importance of thresholds in the scale and diversity of a city’s manufacturing past to secure the components of knowledge production I identify in Chicago’s case—specialized servicing capabilities that could be dislodged from the organizational logic of heavy manufacturing and relodged in the organizational logic of today’s so-called knowledge economy. The economic trajectory and switching illustrated by the case of Chicago contests the thesis of homogenization on two levels. One concerns what it takes to become part of leading sectors. It is not simply a question of dropping that past and converging/homogenizing on the headquarters– services–cultural sector axis. Critical is executing the switch described earlier—whatever might be the specifics of an area’s past. The other 309

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4 Taylor 2004.

5 Sassen 2006b. Chapters 5 and 6.

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6 Sassen 2006a. Chapter 7.

concerns the meaning of homogenized landscapes. It becomes critical to establish the particular specialized sectors that might inhabit that homogenized landscape. This qualifies the convergence thesis. There is a kind of convergence at an abstract systemic level, but at the concrete, material interface of the urban, the actual content of the specialized services that inhabit that built environment can vary sharply. From here, then, my proposition is that critical components of the homogenized/convergent urban landscape, frequently presented as today’s quintessential urban visual order, are actually more akin to an infrastructure for the advanced sectors. The critical question becomes what inhabits that “infrastructure.” Looking similar does not necessarily entail similar contents, circuits, moments of a process. This illustrates the thesis that different dynamics can run through similar institutional and spatial forms, and vice versa. The substantive character of convergence in the global city model is not 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 specialized functions 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 between people and technical domains that is one of the features of some of the most developed economic sectors, even when these are the most demanding of talent. One does not preclude the other.6 CONCLUSION: REASSEMBLING URBAN FRAGMENTS INTO NEW FORMATS

Introducing the possibility that a given format—whether the Chicago model or the L.A. model—might be one moment of a multi-sited process, brings to the fore the question of the boundary. Rescaling can make legible respectively Chicago’s regional dimension and L.A.’s sub-regional microagglomerations. Thus although Chicago thinks itself a city, critical components of its economy inhabit a larger metropolitan geographic terrain and constitute what have been designated as L.A. type spatialities. And while L.A. thinks itself a vast region, critical components of its economy correspond to Chicago type spatialities marked by concentration. Finally, if our concern is to capture the translocal processes within which both Chicago and L.A. are partial geographic moments, closure whether at a city or regional scale becomes problematic, in turn making the distinction city versus region somewhat less meaningful. Turning to the second issue addressed in this essay, the specific contents of the global located in Chicago may diverge considerably from those of L.A. The actual economic content of each downtown Chicago, Hollywood and downtown L.A. varies sharply and each is located on very different sets of global circuits. Yet all three have a spatial form marked 310

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by agglomeration. All three are also marked by dispersal of many of their operations. The interactions between their agglomeration and their dispersal moments can encompass one or all of three scalings— regional, national and global. Closed formats such as those represented in the L.A. and Chicago models need more analytic elaboration in order to incorporate some aspects of these types of scalar interactions and spatial forms. A refinement on such scalar and formal interactions concerns the built environment of a region or city. One step here is to distinguish between the formal aspects of today’s built environments for new economy sectors and the actual economic activities they contain. Here I find the emphasis in the literature and general commentary on homogenization of the built environment of globalized places misleading. We need to specify with far greater detail what they contain. Similar looking landscapes may contain very different types of operations and very different moments of a firm’s multi-sited processes. This means that the specialized economic history of an area can be critical to the development of its specialized advantage in the global economy (or state of the art national economy). Overlooked in most of the literature is the fact that the specialized differences among cities within national economies and across borders assume renewed value in today’s advanced economic sectors. Under these conditions, convergence and homogenization of the built environment become an envelope, a standard applied to potentially very different economic contents. I recode these homogenized built environments—the hyperspace of global 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 of specific economic functions. This indeterminacy makes them more akin to an 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 of American Geographers. Lloyd, R. 2005. NeoBohemia: Art and Commerce in the Post-Industrial City. New York: Routledge. Sassen, S. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. 2nd Edition. Princeton, 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. 311

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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 of California Press. Taylor, P. J. 2004. World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis. London: Routledge.

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TROPICAL LEWIS MUMFORD The first critical regionalist urban planner LIANE LEFAIVRE AND ALEXANDER TZONIS (2001)

Lewis Mumford is not generally thought of as a tropicalist. Nor is he usually considered an urban planner. Yet the one time he departed from his role as a historian, theoretician and critic and put his ideas into practice by entering into urban planning practice was in the tropics, to be precise, Hawaii. He had been invited to Honolulu in 1938 by the City’s Park Board, under the directorship of Lester McCoy, to survey the need for recreational sites.1 He had attended an education conference at the University of Hawaii and was invited by the Honolulu Park Board to conduct a survey on parks and playgrounds. The report is based on a four-week study of the parks and playgrounds 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-page text’s publication was delayed until 1945. One may say that it stands not only as the first master plan for a tropical city planned along the lines of a garden city; it is the first master plan for any city planned along the lines of critical regionalism. Initially meant to address park planning only, the report rapidly grew into a comprehensive planning memorandum also dealing with problems of air pollution and congestion, slum clearance, land use and municipal administration. Mumford defended an all-inclusive rather than piecemeal approach by arguing in manner, typical of a regionalist, that “no structure can stand alone; no function exists by itself.” His overriding concern, however, was sustainability—again typical of a regionalist. His aim was to ensure that Hawaii “conserve(d) resources that are already in existence”2 because it had “now reached a point where some of her natural advantages are not

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1 Lewis Mumford, “Report on Honolulu” in City Development: Studies in Disintegration and Renewal (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1945).

2 Lewis Mumford, Whither Honolulu, p. 2.

Lewis Mumford, Pencil drawing of Diamond Head.

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3 Lewis Mumford, The South in Architecture (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1941).

4 Frank Lloyd Wright, “Mumford Lectures,” Saturday Review, undated, Mumford Archive, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

5 Richard Neutra, The Architecture of Social Concern (São Paolo, Todtmann, 1948).

6 Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Critical Regionalism: Architecture in an Age of Globalization (Munich, Prestel, 2004). 7 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1938), p. 353.

merely in danger of being neglected, they have already been spoilt” and that “more disastrous results may follow unless steps are taken at once to conserve Honolulu’s peculiar assets.”3 Although Mumford was a New Yorker, it was when writing about Southernness that his regionalism was at his most passionate, inspired and practical. After the memorandum on Hawaii, he wrote The South in Architecture (1941), a patriotic address to Southern soldiers at a military academy in Virginia about to leave for the front in Europe. Frank Lloyd Wright, apparently an isolationist, wrote in his review of the book that its purpose was to “throw the lives of American boys at Hitler.”4 The short but dense book extended for the first time his regionalist approach, until then focused on historical and theoretical issues, to a hands-on one. One of the cultural paradoxes of globalization is that outsiders sometimes express better than local people the character of a particular region. The South in Architecture contains two such examples: that of Thomas Jefferson, a Northerner settled in the South, and Richardson, the Southerner who more than any other shaped the particular character of architecture in the Northeastern U.S. Both books were written during the first effort of the Roosevelt administration in the U.S. to counter the traditional indifference of the North to the South, when the regional plan by the Tennessee Valley Authority was set up to modernize the then impoverished southern states. At the same time, the Roosevelt administration was also sending experts to Puerto Rico. Richard Neutra was hired by the federal government to consult on the development of impoverished, slum infested Puerto Rico, eventually leading to the publication of his book called The Architecture of Social Concern, with designs for new public buildings such as schools and hospitals.5 Lester McCoy’s call to Mumford to help plan Honolulu is also part of this trend. The conditions in Honolulu at the time were dire. Here is what Mumford wrote about them: “The slums themselves are among the filthiest and the most degraded in the world: that they are not even viler, when the physical conditions of life are considered, is a tribute to the personalities of their inhabitants. The overcrowding of the land in the central areas imposes upon a park program a burden that park planning by itself cannot retrieve. Such an acute maldistribution of population may be beyond the physical powers of a park commission effectually to correct.” As we have written elsewhere, Mumford never pulled together in a comprehensive way the various regionalist fragments to be found in his different writings.6 To situate the Honolulu study within Mumford’s life’s work, 1938 was the same year he published his first major book, Technics and Civilization,7 his evolutionary study of modernization from the early Renaissance to the present, ending with a defense of what he termed a new “biotechnic” order, based on what we would today call sustainability and social justice, which he saw as the necessary replacement for the current 314

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“neotechnic” one, based on an environmentally wasteful and socially oppressive industrial one. That purely theoretical book, as well as being a major historical study, was the most systematic formulation of his personal credo and the theoretical foundation of everything he wrote afterwards.8 When looked at as a whole, as we have also argued elsewhere, it is equally clear that there is a thread running through Mumford’s writings and that this thread interweaves four strands, each one constituting a critical rethinking of traditional regionalism.9 Given this, one could say that Whither Honolulu is his clearest statement about a new kind of urban planning, and that The South in Architecture, written three years later, is his clearest statement about what a new kind of architecture might be. The first tenet of traditional regionalism that Mumford overturned in both these writings is that regionalism necessarily entails a return to authenticity. As far as architecture is concerned, although he did advocate the preservation of actual historical buildings built in the “vernacular brick tradition” of the South because it “deserves to be regarded with a far more appreciative eye that people usually apply to it,” he balked at the idea of mimicking 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 our own country’s history were ultimately part of the whole structure of their life. There is no method of mechanically reproducing these forms or bringing these back to life. It is a piece of rank materialism to attempt to duplicate some earlier form, because of its delight for the eye, without realizing how empty a form is without the life it once supported. There is no such thing as a modern colonial house any more than there is such a thing as a modern Tudor House.”10 This attitude, equating the historicist with kitsch, is still novel and surprising today. There are current books announcing the impossibility of recapturing regional authenticity in contemporary architectural design, indicating the issue is still alive today.11 Such an announcement would have been all the more shocking in 1941. This hardly deterred Mumford. In fact, in his strongest worded statement, he declared that “if one seeks to reproduce such a building in our own day, every mark on it will betray the fact that it is fake, and the harder the architect works to conceal that fact, the more patent the fact will be . . . The great lesson of history—and this applies to all the arts—is that the past cannot be recaptured except in spirit. We cannot live another 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 understand it, so that we may face the opportunities of our own day and deal with them in an equally creative spirit.”13 With Mumford’s rejection of architectural historicism as the equivalent of a masked ball was his reaction to local materials or local building crafts when 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 315

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8 See Lefaivre and Tzonis, “Lewis Mumford’s Regionalism,” Design Book Review, 19, Winter 1991.

9 Ibid., pp. 20, 25.

10 Mumford, The South in Architecture, p. 14.

11 Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998).

12 Mumford, The South in Architecture, p. 13.

13 Ibid., p. 18.

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14 Ibid., p. 30.

15 Ibid., p. 13.

16 Ibid., p. 27.

17 Ibid., p. 32.

18 Ibid., p. 77.

copying some simple form of construction that our ancestors used, for want of anything better a century or two ago.”14 In fact, he was for the total abandonment of precedents of any kind if they were not adapted to the evolving needs of the region: “People often talk about regional characters as if they were the same thing as the aboriginal characters: the regional is identified with the rough, the primitive, the purely local. That is a serious mistake. Since the adaptation of a culture to a particular environment is a long complicated process, a full blown regional character is the last to emerge. We are only beginning to know enough about ourselves and about our 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 brittleness damaged the ornaments of the building. On the other hand, he praised Richardson for adapting local architecture to new industrial building techniques and materials. In general he preferred the more modern, innovative Richardson, 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 in Whither Honolulu. Indeed, here too he balks at the idea of preservation for the sake of preservation, arguing on the contrary that Honolulu had much to learn from the social housing projects or Siedlungen of Frankfurt and suggesting inner city slum clearance in these terms.16 The Return to Nature was a second keystone of traditional regionalism that Mumford consistently tried to adapt to mid-twentieth century urban, industrial, economic, social and political realities. He rejected the equation of regionalism with the cult of the genius loci and picturesqueness, that is as the purely aesthetic or spiritual enjoyment of landscape for its own sake.17 For him “regional” meant “something besides a place for the personal touch, for the cherished accident,” although it must be stressed that he did love the land in these terms too. This is only natural. His roots stretched back to Rousseau’s love of the natural life as he mentioned several times. He wrote that “there was a romantic movement from its beginning in Rousseau, an element of energy and vitality that could not be denied: the belief in nature, as a resource of the human spirit.” It was in a—so to say—tropical Rousseauiste spirit that he saw Honolulu as a “great park” made up of “tropical foliage with the pepper red of the Poinciana, the brilliant yellow of the golden shower, the feathery greens of the palms, the dark tones of the banyan trees”18 and proposed that the city tap the local population of Chinese and Japanese inhabitants to create Japanese and Chinese gardens. It is in this spirit that he suggests opening the city up to the view of the mountains by widening and planning the major thoroughfare, Bishop Street, the provision of a parking area and the wiping away of the collection of miscellaneous buildings marring the view. And it is equally in this spirit that he proposed nude bathing for Hawaiian beaches, 316

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something he and his own family regularly practiced on Long Island, but which in the late thirties was perceived as the height of prurience and raised derision in the local press. One article quoted Lester McCoy’s opponent, Superintendent of Public Works Louis S. Cain, as facetiously referring to Mumford’s “two novel suggestions—beaches for bare bathers and spooning alleys.”19 But for Mumford, the attachment to nature was not just a matter of pastoral nostalgia, bucolic sentimentality or hedonistic hippiedom. He had a deep commitment to redefining the meaning of the landscape in order to deal with new realities. “Regional forms,” he wrote, are those which “most closely meet the actual conditions of life and which fully succeed in making a people feel at home in their environment: they do not merely utilize the soil but reflect the current conditions of the culture of a region.”20 In this, he was a disciple not only of Rousseau but of the regional planning philosophy of Patrick Geddes who had abandoned the Garden City Movement as a way of designing leafy residential suburban areas, preferring a more robust search for policy-guiding economic and social planning based on decentralized neighborhoods. As an indication of Geddes’s influence, Mumford’s “Report on Honolulu” appeared along with other essays by Mumford in a book entitled City Development, a direct reference to Geddes who had published a book under the same title a quarter century earlier in 1904, City Development, a Study of Parks, Gardens and Public Institutes.21 Among the aims of biotechnic regionalism expounded in Technics and Civilization had been the restoration of the balance between man and nature, the conservation and restoration of soils, and of the forest cover to provide shelter for wildlife.22 For Honolulu, this meant an extension of both the garden city idea and regional planning idea: Mumford suggested the provision of the old Garden City “greenbelt,” or park girdle. Honolulu was partly surrounded by mountains. As “the spurs of the mountains that lead into the city form natural open areas that can only be developed for urban building at an extravagant cost,” he proposed that “where these areas have not been sacrificed to the subdivider, they should be retained and connected together as a greenbelt.” The greenbelt could be “as little as a hundred feet wide, which could give as much coherence to a modern neighborhood as the ancient wall used to for medieval cities.”23 Greenbelts had been first proposed as a means of limiting the size of garden cities. This is the purpose Mumford put them to on the scale of the city of Honolulu in order to act as a brake on sprawl. “Planning for indefinite expansion is now wasteful and obsolete. The city of the future will have a better sense of its natural limits. It will attempt to make the most of what it has, rather than to evade its actual difficulties and its actual deterioration by encouraging its population to move out to the outskirts and permit the interiors to become more completely blighted.24 This brings us to what distinguishes Mumford from Geddes. What 317

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Lewis Mumford, Pencil drawing of palm fronds.

19 “Mumford Book on City Parks Rapped by Cain,” Honolulu Star Bulletin, December29, 1938. 20 Mumford, The South in Architecture, p. 30. 21 Mumford, City Development. 22 Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 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 automobile traffic because they had simply not been a problem in his day. In Mumford’s, however, sprawl and its potential for ecological and social disaster was just beginning to dawn. His conception of what a greenbelt should be took that new reality of vehicular traffic into consideration. He saw greenbelts as what he called the locus for what he termed “arterial parkways,” parks with highways running through them. In order both to limit car traffic in the inner city and establish a strong link to both the sea and the mountains, therefore, Mumford called not only for the provision of broad boulevards in the city center leading to the water and two east–west parkways, one Mauka and one Makai, but also for two “arterial parkways” in the greenbelt, linking the opposite sides of the city, called Ewa and Diamond Head. If Geddes could not have imagined sprawl this was not the case for Mumford. “Reckless expansion,” which he called one of the “great weaknesses in Honolulu’s development,” was something he put down to the abandonment by local government of the city center. This abandonment had caused “the spotty and erratic nature of their growth.” In turn this meant that “large tracts of land near the middle of the city have long been held out of use” preventing “the orderly and systematic development of the city, section by section,” necessitating “a premature building up and exploitation of the land in the remoter suburban areas.” Mumford put his finger on the economic consequences of sprawl. In his chapter called “Can Cities Hold their Population?” he railed against “the tendency on the part of many people to escape from the more congested and sordid internal sections of the city to outlying urban developments where at least a little sunlight, fresh air, and free play can be secured for their children.” If these trends continue, he goes on, “the cities that now exist will

A sketch on top of a map of Honolulu by Lewis Mumford indicating the greenbelt he wished to place between Honolulu and the mountain range above it.

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be emptied out in their central areas, leaving a mass of rotting or dilapidated structures and a vast burden in capital investments whose returns are annually becoming smaller and shakier to the point of eventual tax delinquency and forfeiture.” As with “cities throughout America” that had “been decaying in their old centers, and over-extending themselves in ragged fragments, often tax-delinquent or otherwise approaching private and public industry at the edges,” so with Honolulu. Here “in many cases, the areas zoned for business and industry are five to fifteen times the amount that any city would normally have used.” This, in Mumford’s assessment, has been accompanied by the “extremely costly development of the hillside sites of the city, long before, in the ordinary course of things, they should have been made available.” In tracts of St. Louis Heights, for example, land has been opened up to middle-class home owners “who could ill afford the excessive site preparation and utility costs that such a development calls for: and the city has 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 water supply that “by itself limits this expansion”; to overcome it by drawing upon distant supplies would create water shortage. Having argued to contain sprawl outside the city limits through a greenbelt and rationalize the flow of traffic through parkways in the center of the greenbelts, he then went onto the other side of the coin: how to manage the resulting inner city density. “The question, I submit, can be successfully answered only if it is recognized that the older cities must be made into sound biological environments.” For Honolulu, this translated into his criticism of the restriction of the present parks to mere “recreation zones”25 He called “for the systematic improvement of housing, the prevention of overcrowding, the establishment of healthy standards of density, the creation 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 the advantages that the suburb usually has at the beginning of its existence— before the suburb itself becomes a prey to speculative disorder and congestion.”26 Among his urban planning ideas, he borrowed the idea of ribbon parks from Radburn and “Frankfurt housing projects before 1932” (that is before 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 because it was the natural site for elementary schools and made it possible for a child to walk to school. Another way he proposed that parks be more integrated in urban life was as a potential cooling mechanism capable of “renewing the air, tempering the heat of the sun, reducing glare and strain, providing visual delight for play and relaxation and supplying one of the most sanative of all modes of work—the care of plants themselves.”28 He noted that the trade 319

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25 Ibid., p. 95.

26 Ibid., p. 111.

27 Ibid., p. 128.

28 Ibid., pp. 89–90.

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29 Ibid., p. 88.

30 Carl Abbott, “Oregon came around to Mumford’s ideas but 40 years late,” The Oregonian Forum, February 1, 1979.

31 Mumford, City Development, p. 111.

winds that swept over the city from the northeast formed “an admirable air-cooling apparatus that a community could boast.” The purpose was to “command the fullest possible exposure to sunlight, in a climate like Honolulu’s, with its open-air life, the main degree of ventilation.” This, he specified, “does not merely mean open houses: it means an open and oriented type of planning, of which Honolulu as yet can show but few good examples.”29 Like a true regional planner, he not only placed urban planning under regional planning but also called for the setting up of a centralized planning commission in order to set limits and control laissez faire development. He argued that “to take care of the possible increase of population involves not city planning but regional planning for the islands at large. No city, no matter how drastic the pressure of population, can afford to grow in the haphazard and wasteful fashion that prevailed in the past.” And like a true Rooseveltian, he favored a measure of government intervention in arguing that a regional planning authority should be set up. Against what he called the “congestion-for-profit” or the “spear to everywhere” 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 of industry—he called for “a strong executive agency that would reinforce its legislative mandate without bending to local prejudices.”30 “Ultimately,” he argued, “every well administered municipality, in order to save itself from bankruptcy and hopeless arrears, must offset the tendency toward reckless suburban growth by taking substantial measures towards its own renovation. Not merely must the municipality discourage such uneconomic growth by resisting premature subdivision, by withholding assent from ill-advised express highways, bridges, or tunnels that open up cheap land outside the municipality’s area of control: what is much more important is that it will seek to make the city itself permanently attractive as a human home by slum clearance, large-scale housing, neighborhood planning and park development.”31 On the other hand, for all his ecological concerns, he was also for the use of the most advanced technology of the day in the service of economic modernization. This is the third element of his regionalism that was patently at odds with traditional regionalists. The relation between open planning, air circulation, and efficiency is worth extra emphasis here. In a well organized factory, like that of the Hawaiian Pineapple company, the principal working units are designed so as to permit the free circulation of the air. Numerous physiological investigations, beginning with Winslow’s classic experiments, have shown that the lowering of the temperature is not so important as the direct air cooling of the body. Mechanical air conditioning may be a useful auxiliary 320

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to nature under special conditions; but for the mass of the population, and for most circumstances of living, the more natural modes of air conditioning that would be available to everyone in the city through adequate planning must retain major importance.32 As is evident, he was for the air conditioner. Although scientific research has shown that the lowering of temperature was not so important as direct air in cooling the body, still Mumford allowed that “mechanical air conditioning might be a useful auxiliary to nature under special conditions.”33 Such conditions included the work place, preceding Singapore’s founding premier, Li Kuan Yew, who declared the air conditioner the best invention of the twentieth century. But in most circumstances of living, natural modes of air conditioning through ventilation was the best.34 Thirty years before Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design of the First Machine Age (1960), in Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934) we have a celebration of technical inventions such as the modern steamship. He had great admiration for Buckminster Fuller’s streamlined Dymaxion car, the Union Pacific train, the Soviet “rail zeppelin sphero-train,” Brooklyn Bridge and the Galerie des Machines in Paris. Finally, he admired Neutra’s image of the modern city put forth in his largely forgotten Rush City Reformed scheme published in his early Wie Baut Amerika,35 where the emphasis was placed on movement, with ubiquitous freeways, local and express elevated train systems, railroads and airports all interlinked.36 An interesting feature was landing strips for helicopters at the railroad station and on the roofs of elevated stations. Mumford wrote in 1949 that Neutra’s “kind of thinking should now be resumed and perhaps public competitions should be held to enlist the imagination of the younger generation of architects and planners. . . .37 Surely the most radical departure associated with Mumford’s regionalism was his definition of “community.” First, as an heir to Whitman and the Transcendentalists, he could not abide the traditional regionalists’ equation of community as monocultural, based on tribal or national affiliations, blood ties and attachment to the soil. Mumford espoused the view that community could be something multicultural.38 Second, he was a follower of the philosopher Martin Buber, the first philosopher in Germany to propose an alternative to the Blood and Soil theory of community that had dominated German thought since the theme of Gemeinshaft versus Gesellshaft had been introduced by Simmel. Mumford’s The South in Architecture makes the point forcefully. Here his definition of regionalism is consciously opposed to Heidegger’s. His “Report on Honolulu” is where he applied this view hands-on. He described a city as a multicultural city, made up of original Polynesians, Japanese, Chinese and various Haole groups (western) who made it a “significant experiment in the hybridization of cultures which perhaps will mark the future development of human society; it is a miniature experimental station.”39 321

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32 Mumford, City Development, p. 94.

33 Ibid., p. 95.

34 See Philip Bay, “Three Tropical Design Paradigms,” in Tzonis, Lefaivre and Bruno Stagno (eds.) Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalization in the Age of Globalization, London, Wiley, 2001), p. 259.

35 Richard Neutra, Wie Baut Amerika (Stuttgart, Hoffmann, 1927). 36 Ibid., p. 30.

37 Lewis Mumford, The New Yorker, January 8, 1949, p. 60.

38 See F.O Matthiessen, American Renaissance (London, Oxford University Press, 1941) and David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance. The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988).

39 Mumford “Report on Honolulu,” p. 50.

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40 Mumford, The South in Architecture, p. 50.

41 Ibid., p. 5.

Finally, Mumford saw no opposition between what he called the local and 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 and globalism. Again, it is in The South in Architecture that he introduced the notion in these terms: “The philosophical problem of the general and the particular has its counterpart in architecture; and during the last century that problem has shaped itself more and more into the question of what weight should be given to the universal imprint of the machine and the local imprint of the region and the community.”40 This was another way of saying that every regional culture necessarily has a 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 or time or both together. It would be useful if we formed the habit of never using the word regional without mentally adding to it the idea of universal—remembering the constant contact and interchange between a local scene and the wide world that lies beyond it. To make the best use of local resources, we must often seek help from people or ideas or technical methods that originate elsewhere . . . As with a human being, every culture must both be itself and transcend itself: it must make the most of its limitations and must pass beyond them; it must be open to fresh experience and yet it must maintain its integrity. In no other art is that process more sharply focused than in architecture.41 The originality of this last proposition cannot be overestimated. For the first time a regionalist steered a middle course between the particular and the universal, taking the view that there was nothing mutually exclusive between one region and another, or between one region and the globe, that there was the possibility of mutually beneficial negotiating to be carried out within a wider, in principle collaborative so to speak, scheme of things. This marked a major swing away from the centuries-old pattern of regionalist thinking based on either an adversarial stance or on resistance to one based on dialogue and negotiation, what one might call “in betweening,” to use Buber’s term. Was Mumford’s urban plan for Honolulu a good one? In terms of its broad integration of elements of planning, including not only landscape but air pollution and congestion, slum clearance, land use and municipal administration, the answer, we believe, is yes. One may ask if parkways were a good solution to sprawl, or rather good enough. The fact is all transportation in Mumford’s plan was car-dependent and he made no provision for a public transit system. Even in 1938, at a time when the car was not nearly as dominant as it is today, the blindness 322

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to this issue is serious and the failure to address the issue is a definite shortcoming. Besides this shortcoming, how did the plan fare? The unfortunate fact is: not well. In fact it has been completely ignored. Mumford’s main Democrat supporter, Lester McCoy, died in 1941. This left him defenseless in the face of the attacks by the Republican Louis S. Cain, the territorial superintendent of public works who was soon to become the mayor of Honolulu, who called Mumford’s plans “mumblings” that “fumbled the facts.”42 The result, as appraised by urban designer A. A. Smyser, writing in a local newspaper in 1965, was a disaster. “Cruise along the ugly, tree-less arterial to town from Honolulu International Airport. Or curse your luck at 4:30 pm traffic jam almost everywhere, or look at crowded, overhead wire strewn ugly streets all over town,” he wrote. “Mumford’s parkway running from the shore from Honolulu harbor out to Koko Head, with its wide traffic lanes and trees shaded and beautified by it would have changed this.”43 He went on to decry the lack of Mumford’s Makai and Mauka parkways to solve traffic congestion and complained about the plans, much opposed by Mumford, for the “highly dubious Pali Tunnel which would further 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 more manageable.” In order to establish a strong link to both the sea and the mountains, Mumford proposed broad boulevards leading to the water and two east–west parkways. Instead Honolulu opted for the H-1 expressway— a ruthless gash across the landscape—and Nimitz and Kalanianiole highways which scarcely take advantage of their closeness to the water. Mumford felt that the two parkways would clearly link the Ewa and Diamond Head sites of the city. Today travel to or from the Ewa side is still thwarted by a maze of inconclusive streets such as Vineyard, School, Dillingham. Seventy years have passed since Mumford put forth a working model for a critical regionalist urban planning model. Though ignored for so long— with its shortcomings as well as its remarkable inclusiveness, involving issues 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 Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2002. This text is a much expanded version of a section of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Critical Regionalism: Architecture in an Age of Globalization, Munich: Prestel, 2004 and Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization with Bruno Stagno, London: Wiley 2001. The authors wish to thank the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Pennsylvania for permission to reproduce all the material related to Mumford’s Honolulu plan here. 323

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42 “Mumford Book on City Parks Rapped by Cain,” Honolulu Star Bulletin, December 29, 1938.

43 A.A. Smyser, “Mumford Revisited,” Honolulu Star Bulletin, May 15, 1965. p. A-9. 44 David Smollar, “Old advice valid, but . . .” The Sunday StarBulletin & Advertiser, Honolulu, May 11, 1975. 45 Gerald Hodge, “Lewis Mumford’s Unfinished Vision of Honolulu,” in Honolulu, December 1980, pp. 90–93.

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1 Ingrid Whitehead, “Patricia Gay: Working Hard for Preservation in the Big Easy,” Architectural Record, August 2002, 256.

Port of New Orleans. (Image by Grant L. Robertson.)

MICHAEL A. McCLURE AND URSULA EMERY McCLURE (2003)

The present economy, culture, and built environment of the United States rely on efficiency and speed. The primary gauge of the commodity of time is its acceleration. The spaces we construct reflect that pace; strip malls, drive-thru windows, parking lots, and freeways. Speed spaces such as these have become the public spaces of America. As the pace of the American lifestyle increases, so does the need for temporary escapes into the opposite. People save money and accrue vacation time for the momentary opportunity to travel and experience a languid cultural landscape. In the tourism industry of Southern Louisiana, like other areas of cultural and infrastructural uniqueness, the built environment is essential to this escape. “It’s buildings that give cities their identity, especially in New Orleans.”1 The area finds itself in a contemporary contradiction of preserving and promoting its “languid spaces” of tourism within an atmosphere of convenient and immediate speed. One of the greatest commodities of the lower Mississippi river valley, from Natchez to New Orleans, is its built environment and the perceived cultural meaning that this environment holds for those who live outside of it. Retaining and providing access to an idea of “languid space” is one of South Louisiana’s major economic products, ranked the sixth largest tourist economy in the United States. (It employs over 87,000 workers and generates 5.2 billion dollars per annum). Retained and re-used architecture of the area creates “languid space” and it is evident at many scales. The most apparent scale is that of New Orleans and its buildings. It is a city known primarily as a tourist destination of languid escapism, even though it contains the United States’ third largest port. It is the access point to four of the eleven largest U.S. ports (in foreign commerce tonnage) and they handle more than 457 million tons of U.S. waterborne commerce a year, including nearly half of all American grain exports. In its scale, style, and planning, one witnesses a direct contrast to the normative commodity of convenience and capitalism found throughout most of the United States. Immediately adjacent to New Orleans’ urban scale slowness, one finds “languid space” at a smaller scale along the Scenic Byways. The Mississippi river, the small towns, and the singular spaces of plantations frame these routes and contribute to the region’s spatial slowness. North to Natchez, these remaining restored places stand as symbols of a slower time and of languid human interaction without the distractions of modern speed. For this paper, we define Southern Louisiana’s “languid spaces” by their differences from what is seen as the American norm. If the efficiencies 324

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in communication, convenience, and accelerated obsolescence define normative American space, then the opposite, the inefficiencies, define unique “languid space.” Inefficiencies in communication are mostly spatial and historic: porches, porticos, and plazas. These tangible places encourage inefficient human interaction (chatting, lounging, and strolling). Inefficiencies in spatial convenience decrease acceleration: pedestrian districts, meandering byways, and tree-lined, residential thoroughfares. They encourage and sometimes force one to stop and observe. Delayed obsolescence has value in a “languid space.” We measure the value of these spaces by the difference from what is progressive. Thus, the older, less conformable and least similar spaces increase in value and define a “languid space.” Through advertising, historic example, movies, books, and television commercials, the idea of “languid space” also increases in value and has become as important as the space itself. People are drawn to the area through promises like this byline of something other: “The small roads that traverse the countryside from Natchez to New Orleans offer access to small town America . . . charming towns and villages which still celebrate a style of life that has become increasingly elusive for many of us.”2 Southern Louisiana very efficiently and progressively caters to, exaggerates, and protects both the idea and the reality of its greatest commodity: “languid space” as an alternative to the normative. With little economic motive to modernize from the end of the civil war to the mid-twentieth century, there was no need to demolish the built fabric. For example, as of March 2000, 30 percent of Louisiana’s residential structures pre-date 1950. This built spatial slowness coexists in the midst of a highly evolved port/factory economy and tourism remains the primary perceived commodity of the area. This leads to the contemporary contradiction Southern Louisiana relies on: maintaining its obsolescence in order to remain viable as the alternative. Tourists flock to experience a “languid space.” They do so, however, within such short periods of time and with such vigor, they usually only experience an idea of space, a flattened visual reference (the postcard experience). The main goal seems to be a proof-of-attendance or the postcard, t-shirt, and coffee mug that serve as a memory of attendance at this unique space. Rarely will they experience the inefficiencies and slow value 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 within space become important. “Imageability,” or the quality of a physical environment that gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in the mind, is essential to understanding the value a built environment has on the escapist “languid space.” Because of this significance in understanding and nomenclature, we will now briefly examine three examples of Lynch’s elements of imageability in relation to the “languid spaces” of tourism of Southern Louisiana: paths, and urban and rural districts/landmarks. For the 325

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2 James Fox-Smith, “Country Roads Area Map,” Country Roads Magazine (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/compression between the artifacts of a “languid space” and the contemporary efficient condition of speed space. PATHS: URBAN AND RURAL

Two of the most identifiable paths of the area are the urban St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, and the rural River Road. The “languid space” of St. Charles Avenue is composed of the inefficient and obsolescent overlay of uses 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 linear public 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. The cultural meaning has also remained consistent, but a critical balance has changed. Now, the visitors, who have always come to St. Charles to view the elaborate homes of the social elite under a canopy of live oaks, view it as an artifact in a museum. The experience is singular and linear. The real urban value is not a concern. The visitor measures the avenue’s value as a forty-five minute surface tour for one dollar, not a well-established thriving urban thoroughfare.

3 Tony Dunbar, City of Beads (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), 7.

St. Charles Avenue. (Image by emerymcclure architecture.)

There was a grand feel of luxury about the streetcar. Not only was it constructed of much better material, mahogany seats, stout leather straps, solid hunks of steel, than any form of public transportation put together in the past 50 years, and not only did you pass block after block of mansions oozing romance and old prosperity, but also the ride was slow as summer.3 Another identifiable path, the River Road, is a rural “languid space” that has changed more dramatically from its initial condition. What was originally an efficient, modern connector of economic centers to the river, ports, and cities, Interstate 10 and several high clearance bridges over the river

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have replaced. The River Road’s value as a “languid space” comes now from its obsolescence. One must drive slowly through the tight curves, caught in the fixed space between the Mississippi River Levy on one side and chemical plants and sugar cane fields on the other. Only at occasional moments does one come across a small town or remaining plantation home. The River Road may still physically link the modern chemical plants and serve as access for the vital upkeep of the levy; its meaning as a “languid space” now occurs in segments because of the alternate routes that have replaced it. Its main use is the idea or image, not as a vital contemporary space. One can now very efficiently exit the freeway, drive a short distance along the river at an inefficient pace, tour a plantation, drive through a small town, 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 what have now become, through historical use and the international advertising of a highly developed tourism industry, the ubiquitous “languid spaces” of escape. The French Quarter in New Orleans, specifically Bourbon Street and Jackson Square, is simultaneously an actual example of “languid space” and an intense commodification of the idea or image. The commodity is reliant on an actual built space, but the commodity has become primary. The outside perception of these spaces holds their value. Bourbon Street has remained constant in its space, use, and cultural meaning. It is still a dense space of multiple levels of social interaction. Its use is still a place for celebration and release dependent on support spaces. Historically those support spaces were the port, city homes of country farmers, and transient housing of the city. Now those support spaces are exponentially larger, more efficient, and convenient. The New Orleans Convention Center brings in 1.5 million people annually. The volume and intensity of Bourbon Street has also grown exponentially so that the idea of the “Bourbon Street Experience” is paramount to those who occupy the space. The idea of a night on 327

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Cane Field/Factory on the River Road. (Image by emerymcclure architecture.)

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Above: T-Shirt Shack on Bourbon. (Image by emerymcclure architecture.) Above right: Jackson Square. (Image by emerymcclure architecture.)

Bourbon Street has surpassed the actual experience. Both the idea and the experience, however, rely on the physical space that has been preserved and re-adapted for the new reality. The proof-of-attendance shops (T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) have become a primary program, now rivaling the bars and strip joints of the streets in leased square footage. On the other hand, the tourism industry and contemporary speed space have changed the use and cultural meaning of Jackson Square. Any plaza is a rare space in the United States in both its physical form and contemporary vitality 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 as a civic meeting place, the spatial town bulletin. On the weekends, it acted as a market and social promenade. Now that these spaces are no longer required to inform and celebrate information exchange on a daily basis, the plaza’s use and cultural meaning have been transformed. The contemporary reality of use and meaning is still exchange, but the exchange has changed. Experiential value is no longer essential or valuable for society, politics, and commerce. Instead, like Bourbon Street, the postcard view is primary and the exchange is a proof of attendance. One now goes to the plaza to view a street performer, take a photograph, and then move on. Like all of the “languid spaces” of Southern Louisiana, the idea has become primary, the experience secondary. Very few locals, if any, does one find in Jackson Square. The primary change in the physical space of the plaza is a telling addition to the classic plaza formed by the Law of the Indies. What was once an open side on the square to the river is now a tourist information exchange and snapshot platform. Access to “river walk,” trolley tours, and boats to 328

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the aquarium and zoo now dominate the riverside of the plaza. Jackson Square is a prime example of the value of a “languid space” in today’s society. It still exemplifies the spatial inefficiencies of a plaza and demonstrates the tangible contradictions required for a “languid space” of tourism. DISTRICTS/LANDMARKS: RURAL

The same contradictions in the conditions of adaptive re-use and adaptive re-meaning can be seen in the rural “languid spaces” of tourism. Plantation sites along the river road may have experienced the greatest change in their use, meaning, and space. “Their self-sufficiency seems strange today, when distance is so easily bridged; but in those days the houses were remote indeed. Some of them stood a day’s long journey from the nearest town.”4 Originally centers of economic and cultural exchange, they acted as the rural versions of Jackson Square. Now House Museums, the remaining grand homes and few support buildings provide an extremely limited vantage into the spatial and cultural space of a working rural factory and social center. Their value still relies on their spatial characteristics. The plantations’ remote and infrequent locations along the Mississippi continue to accurately provide an experience of a slower, non-connected, self-reliant space as a comparative escape from the norm. The hierarchies of spaces, formal to informal and public to private, also provide an example not seen in today’s non-hierarchical architecture of instant total access and convenience. They are artifacts of the formal public façade whose vestiges remain in the public access faces of strip malls and box stores. These porches, however, are spatial, not merely a flat sign located on the street façade, much like plazas are spatial artifacts whose vestiges can still be seen in food courts and parking lots. The porches provide the public threshold to the ground floor, which consists of the social gathering spaces: ballrooms, parlors, and grand dining rooms. These over-scaled interior rooms coupled with the deep, occupied façades are unique. They give the spaces value in the escapist, tourism economy. To continue the illusion we are expected to ignore the contemporary extended landscape, for history has removed the vast, exterior support spaces of fields, docks, barns, and slaves’ and workers’ quarters. Chemical factories, large corporate fields, and suburban developments now occupy the once essential, extended landscape spaces of plantations. Like the entire remaining valuable “languid spaces” of Louisiana, the plantation houses survived originally through inattention and lack of better economic alternatives. Now they exist as an asset because of their low availability to the 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 continue to operate in much the same inefficient and isolated manner that they 329

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4 Lyle Saxon, Old Louisiana (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1998), 147.

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Bocage Plantation. (Image by emerymcclure architecture.)

5 James Fox-Smith, “Country Roads Area Map.”

originated. The towns along the river between New Orleans and Natchez were originally local centers for the plantation culture outside of the three larger cities. The free plantation workforce lived in these towns and a commercial center formed to serve the immediate area. Now, the workers are employed mostly at the chemical factories (the contemporary plantation crop), but the towns serve the same function. The towns abut the river levy with low-density residential blocks adjacent to denser commercial streets with shaded sidewalks and they still mostly serve the local population. They have not been incorporated yet into the tourist economy through the overlay of efficiency and convenience. The exceptions are few. One is the recent opening of high-end Cajun/Creole restaurants with bed and breakfasts. Most notable is Lafitte’s Landing, operated by one of Southern Louisiana’s most famous gourmet chefs, John Folse. This restaurant’s prices and cuisine are well above the scale that the small community population should support. Again, “access to small town America”5 in conjunction with the lure of “authentic” or high-end cuisine lures visitors to the place with the promise of the opposite of what they experience in their daily environment. To further substantiate that Southern Louisiana’s built environment is not just a time capsule of artifacts from a slower time, but a complex overlap and collision of the speedy and slow, one must only look to the new hybrid building of the area, Harrah’s Casino in downtown New Orleans. This archetype of spatial escapism, replication, and efficiently captured audience is familiar and can be seen at its purest in Las Vegas. A compression of languid and speed space can be seen in Las Vegas and any other tourist area that originated for those who journey for pleasure. The difference in areas such as Southern Louisiana is the existence and re-established meaning of the original artifacts. True, Harrah’s Casino is a modern American casino. Its program and spaces perform in the same complex manner as the newest and most contemporary Las Vegas casino. Harrah’s in New Orleans is 330

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unique because of its adjacency to the original artifact. One can find spatial replicas 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. One could visit the Vegas Venice and never have seen the original. This is not possible in New Orleans. One experiences Harrah’s flattened imitation of the French Quarter within the view of the spatial original. Couple this with the contemporary condition of the French Quarter, itself a contemporary flattened 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 the College of Art and Design at Louisiana State University, concluded his lecture regarding New Orleans by drawing comparisons between modern day New Orleans and turn of the century Venice, Italy. He asked the question whether or not New Orleans had given up its role as a vital progressive urban environment, or if, like Venice, it had become an artifact frozen in time, valued only as a past thing. Many similarities exist between the two cities regarding the value of architecture, urbanism, and space within its economic viability as something other. However, New Orleans and Southern Louisiana differ from other historic tourism centers like Venice, Italy. That difference exists in the vast compression and complexities of space, economy, time, culture, and tourism. The overlays of inefficiencies and efficiencies and of inconvenience and convenience seem to demand a unique hybrid building like Harrah’s Casino. It is a tourism space that replicates a re-used and re-interpreted original only blocks away. It is a contemporary architecture that relies on imitation. This same notion of compression allows the chemical plants to hold the same economic positions within their rural landscapes that their neighboring Plantation Homes once did, seemingly without conflict. The homes exist now as museums of what was once an efficient culture, but now is outdated. Southern Louisiana has kept its architectural detritus. It is not in a zone or area separated from modernity. This detritus is its own unique progressiveness, reliant on ideas of regression. The two co-exist simultaneously. It is not a simplified and sanitized version of entertainment (Disneyland) or a regressive capsule of the past (Williamsburg, Virginia), or a vibrant contemporary cultural and economic center (New York, Chicago). It is partly all of these, and not really any of them. Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other. To know oneself is to know one’s region. It is also to know the world, 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 331

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6 Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: The Noonday Press, 1997), 34.

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7 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), 10.

practice relevant architecture in Southern Louisiana. Southern Louisiana presents a unique microcosm of the conditions found in the contemporary global environment. Its “languid space” is a speed space that capitalizes on the idea and the experience of the regressive. Its built environment consists simultaneously of adaptive re-use, preservation, contemporary industry, and replication. It is landlocked by the Mississippi river, the Gulf, the Atchafalaya Basin, Lake Pontchartrain, and the numerous swamps, rivers, and bayous. The compression and overlay of these infinite influences and their lack of clear hierarchy epitomizes the contemporary “culture of congestion.” 7 If we are to contribute to the built environment and cultural identity of Southern Louisiana (or anywhere), it is necessary we understand the constant influences of everything and nothing at all. To understand oneself and environment is dependent on these influences vying for relevance. The process is fluid, dynamic, and non-hierarchical. In a time when hierarchies are fluid, should not the practices and pedagogies that attempt to translate 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 of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2003 (prior to Hurricane Katrina). 332

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TECHNOLOGY

KENNETH FRAMPTON (2001)

The consequences of techno-cultural processes are not inevitable, as if decreed by the blind gods of a mechanical fate. Like the Freudian unconscious, the realm of techno-culture is at once over-determined and constantly in process; it is coded, but its codes are continually subject to mutation and rewriting. In this realm, nothing is inherently stable, secure, guaranteed. Such a realm is precisely the realm of politics, where futures are imagined, contested and brought into being. If there is to be a techno-cultural politics that does not simply try to control the processes of techno-culture, it must imagine human beings as participants in the techno-cultural unconscious—riding its waves, attempting to navigate its currents, but also by their actions, initiating unsettling new movements within it, generating new relations and processes, whose consequences often cannot be foreseen. Such a politics would itself be a complex, generative process in which fixed values and power relations would be unsecured, in which connection and interconnection with others would be “essential,” in which hybridity and partiality would be valued over purity and wholeness. R.L.Rutsky High Techné, 1999 1 Thus, after the development of the transport networks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the network of networks, the Internet, comes the imminent establishment of real networks of transmission of the vision of the world, the audiovisual information superhighways of those on-line cameras which will contribute, in the twenty-first century, to developing the panoptical (and permanent) tele-surveillance of planetary sites and activities, which will very probably end in the implementation of networks of virtual reality. This is a cyberoptics which will leave intact neither the old aesthetics that was a product of European modernity, nor the ethics of the Western democracies. I am referring to that “representative democracy,” which tomorrow will be subject to the pressure of the acceleration of historical reality, with the incalculable risk that the “commerce of the visible” will bring about what no totalitarian regime has managed to create through ideology: unanimous support. Paul Virilio The Information Bomb, 2000 2 333

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1 R.L. Rutsky, High Techné (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) pp. 157–158

2 Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (London and New York: Verso, 2000), pp. 121–122.

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3 Guy Debord, in Commentary on the Society of Spectacle (London: Verso, 1988), p. 38, writes: “It is indeed unfortunate that human society should encounter such burning problems just when it has become materially impossible to make heard the least objection to the language of commodity; just when power—quite rightly because it is shielded by the spectacle from any response to its piecemeal and delirious decisions and justifications—believes that it no longer needs to think; and indeed can no longer think. It is sometimes said that science today is subservient to the imperatives of profit, but that is nothing new. What is new is the way the economy has now come to declare open war on humanity, attacking not only our possibilities for living, but our chances of survival. It is here that science— renouncing the opposition to slavery that formed a significant part of its own history—has chosen to put itself at the service of spectacular domination. . . . “What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is reconstructed as quickly as possible, to resemble the false. . . . “Feuerbach’s judgment on the fact that his time preferred ‘the sign of the thing to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality,’ has been thoroughly vindicated by the century of spectacle, and in several spheres where the nineteenth century preferred to keep its distance from what was already its fundamental nature: industrial capitalism. Thus it

The ascendancy of technoscience and the rise of the mediatic bring into question the capacity of democracy to survive our ever accelerating rate of technological change, along with the collapse of history into the immediacy of an ever more fungible present. This unstable field of continually fluctuating data and mediatic images, identified by some as the technological sublime, lends itself to the domination of the spectacular, as had already been foreseen by the situationists some forty years ago. Under these conditions, as Guy Debord predicted, power not only loses its ability to think but also concludes that it no longer has to think.3 Thus the situation arises in which space previously accorded to thought becomes subsumed by cybernetic calculation. Nevertheless, as the urban economist Saskia Sassen reminds us, the material world still has to be made, and building culture remains exceptionally subject to this rubric whether we like it or not. Thus, while the rate of 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-seamless kaleidoscopic flow of digital and telematic images that continually pass like luminous phantoms across the surface of our screens, we may posit the ponderously wet aggregate of in situ concrete, where a tolerance of even a centimeter is hard to maintain. Despite the precision of high-tech architecture, ideally assembled dry from machine-tooled parts, building as an overall process tends not to be high-tech, particularly when we compare it to the latest advances in microcircuitry, smart weaponry, and genetic engineering. Building, by its very nature, is involved with the more basic, less dynamic, aspects of existence and hence is more intimately connected to the slower metabolic rhythms of the biosphere. We may note in this regard that we still distinguish in the environment between the mobile and immobile, paralleling the distinction in French between meubles (furniture) and immeubles (apartments). However, like many other design disciplines, architectural practice has been transformed by cybernetic procedures, although this does not mean that computer-aided design (CAD) will have an impact comparable to that experienced by building culture between 1870 and 1920, when the perfection of steel and concrete frame construction, combined with the introduction of the elevator and other electromechanical services, totally transformed the physical nature of builtform. That CAD has had and will continue to have a major impact on the design process does not imply that builtform must directly reflect or even mimic the constantly transforming morphology of the telematic world. Clearly, digital drafting along with cybernetic production will continue to facilitate the generation of forms “hitherto unimaginable,” to borrow Konrad Wachsmann’s memorable phrase, but this is not sufficient justification, in itself, for architecture 334

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to pursue the allure of spectacular form for its own sake or to strive for a technocratic legitimacy based on its computer generation of exotic form. Thus we need not only to assimilate the computer but also to guard against its abuses, above all, perhaps, the exploitation of cybernetic perspectival projection as a seductive substitute for all other modes of representation. The current tendency to transform the traditional architectural atelier into a “paperless” studio is surely just as reductive in its implications as the erstwhile beaux-arts insistence on the rendered drawing, as opposed to other forms of three-dimensional representation, such as axonometrics, models, etc., into the architectural design process until the mid-twentieth century. Admittedly, the digital is a supremely effective tool at many levels in the design and realization of builtform, from the use of laser cutters in the fabrication of models to the cybernetically regulated production of reiterative large-scale components such as we find in the varying tubular steel frames that make up the torus volume of the terminal building in Kansai Airport, Japan. However, in the generation of form, one needs to continually pass through multiple modes of representation at all stages of the project, from prototype to production drawing. That is to say, one needs to verify the work in different ways throughout the design process, passing from hand drawing, to model making, to digital projection, and vice versa. Ironically enough, far from being paperless, the paperless studio has already contributed as much as the word processor and the fax machine to our exponential, never ending consumption of paper. TRANSIT

The inescapable interaction between technology and culture may be further revealed by noting the different environmental conditions that have been engendered by automotive versus locomotive modes of transportation and distribution. Such a comparison may appear to be rather academic given the current dominance of the automobile throughout the world, but it is nonetheless instructive to observe that the two successive infrastructures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have had very different consequences in environmental terms. It is unlikely, for example, that the rain forest would ever have been subject to devastation had it not been for the mass ownership of the automobile and the concomitant building of autoroutes, and a similar causality surely obtains with regard to the continual suburbanization of the earth’s surface. The United States loses some 50 acres of virgin-cumagricultural land per day to suburbanization, while at the same diurnal rate, the world loses an area of the rain forest the size of Manhattan, together with some 100 species of flora and fauna. This apocalyptic state of affairs can barely be justified opportunistically in terms of gratifying some popular consumerist desire, for nothing surely is more artificial in our admass 335

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was that the bourgeoisie had widely disseminated the rigorous mentality of the museum, the original object, precise historical criticism, the authentic document. Today, however, the tendency to replace the real with the artificial is ubiquitous. In this regard it is fortuitous that traffic pollution has necessitated the replacement of the Marly Horses in the Place de La Concorde, or the Roman Statues in the doorway of Saint-Trophime in Arles, by plastic replicas. Everything will be more beautiful than before, for the tourist’s cameras.”

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4 The term motopian was coined by Geoffrey Jellicoe in his book Motopia: A Study of the Evolution of Urban Landscape (New York: Praeger, 1961).

manipulation of taste. As the environmental engineer Guy Battle recently remarked, appropriate development should meet the needs of the present “without compromising the capacity of future generations to meet their own needs.” The “motopian” chain reaction initiated after 1945 by powerful oil and automotive interests, aided and abetted by the governmental subvention of the freeway system, is too well known to require reiteration here, but people are perhaps still insufficiently aware of how the mass ownership of the automobile and the proliferation of the suburb were the two symbiotic agents that brought about the demise of the American provincial town.4 The freeway opened up hitherto inaccessible agricultural land to suburban subdivision, which in its turn gave rise to the shopping center and the mall. These new outlets effectively vitiated the main street shopping frontage of the average small town, along with the railroad station that had been its lifeblood. Furthermore, the automobile remains a major source of pollution contributing to our excessive production of carbon dioxide, not to mention the fact that we are enclosing with acoustical barriers every freeway of consequence that passes through any suburb of standing. Where the automobile has had the effect of emphasizing the sovereignty of the individual to the exclusion of the collectivity of the railroad, highspeed rail transit has been able to coexist with the car in such a way as to emerge at the end of the twentieth century as the optimum vehicle for transport over intermediate distances. I am alluding to high-speed rail as this has been 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 environment, the locomotive provides a more restrictive mode of distribution, and where the former favors decentralization, the latter still focuses on the city. That this split in technological application also implies a parallel differentiation in sociopolitical terms is partially confirmed by the prominent role played by the European Community in subsidizing intercontinental, high-speed rail travel. The E.C. policy in this regard has been to maintain through state subsidy and taxation the existence of different complementary means of transport, with the result that today the T.G.V. is more advantageous for intercity, short-haul travel than comparable journeys by plane over similar distances. One year from now, it will be possible to travel from the center of Nîmes to the center of Paris in two and a half hours. Given the ever increasing delays at so-called hubs due to aircraft congestion at both the intra- and intercontinental levels, not to mention the perennially clogged autoroutes leading to and from the airport, high-speed rail begins to emerge as the more efficient mode for distances up to 500 miles. This is independent of its side benefits—its tendency to reinforce civic memory, and to minimize environmental pollution. 336

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This infrastructural interplay between technology and culture seems to have ramifications at a more immediate, experiential level as when we compare, say, the means of airport access obtaining today in London and Zurich. Not only has London been slower than Zurich to provide a direct rail link to the city center, but even now this link is inadequately coordinated with the main line and intracity systems. Zurich, on the other hand, has a rail link that is fully integrated with the federal rail system. One may further note that the Swiss authorities developed an ingenious luggage cart for use on escalators and travelators with absolute safety throughout the terminal and its corresponding rail connections. May we conclude that such innovation and investment depend upon “cantonal” culture, since clearly it is addressed to the convenience and comfort of the ordinary citizen? One cannot help noting how different this is from the paucity of passenger convenience provided in large airport hubs throughout the United States, where passengers invariably have to walk long distances without the aid of travelators and where luggage has to be hand-carried up and down escalators or stairs. Here we already touch on policies favoring the amortization of public investment as opposed to assuming the durability of the fabric. Is it equally symptomatic of direct democracy that Zurich is one of the few cities in the world where the electric tram is still in use, as a mode of nonpolluting transit, where the rhythm of stopping and starting is symbiotically related to the walking speed? Thus, we see how the tram, along with various forms of light rail, may still assert itself as an ecologically valid system of urban transit.5 The edict that each successive technological innovation must ipso facto eliminate its predecessor does not always apply, either in civil engineering or in building culture, and in this regard we may note that we are still using essentially the same system of reinforced concrete construction that we used over a century ago. LAND SETTLEMENT

As the Danish planner Bent Flyvbjerg has remarked, there is a disjunction between power and reason that is rarely, if ever, discussed in the institutions of government and higher learning. As he puts it in his book Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice (1991), power is imbued with a reason that it is unaware of, whereas reason is unfortunately not equipped with a comparable power.6 This explains why in the conflict between reason and power, power is invariably the stronger. What is of concern to power is not reason but rationalization as a means for arriving at a consensus in favor of certain vested interests. Under the late modern conditions of distorted communication, the rational argument all too often fails to prevail, since its recommendations come to be represented as being either economically infeasible or as popularly unacceptable.7 It is not that we lack appropriate models for addressing the seemingly intractable problems of 337

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5 See Brian Richards, Transport in Cities (London: Architecture, Design and Technology Press, 1990), p. 115. Richards writes of light rail: “This is a development of the conventional tram, to a much improved design. In the past trams were often removed, in favor of buses, on the grounds that they conflicted with vehicular traffic. Today that position has been reversed. The first important planning initiative for light rail occurred in 1961 in Bremen, through the work of Dr. Dorfler, the city traffic engineer.” 6 Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 236. On this concluding page of the study Flyvbjerg writes: “At times direct power struggle over specific issues works best; on other occasions changing the ground rules for such struggle is necessary, which is where constitutional and institutional reform come in; and sometimes writing genealogies and case histories like the Aalborg study, that is, laying open the relationships between rationality and power will help to achieve the desired results.”

7 Jurgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, Jeremy J. Shapiro, trans. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 62–67.

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8 Efforts to check suburban sprawl in the burgeoning megalopolis surrounding the urban core of Atlanta have been categorically opposed by private interest. See David Firestone, “Suburban Comfort, Thwarting Plans to Limit Growth,” in New York Times, Nov. 21, 1999. “In July, the commission dropped the plan.” Elsewhere Firestone notes that in Atlanta, the county pastoral, “long time landowners . . . fought the plan bitterly because it meant they might not be able to sell to developers.”

9 Melvin Webber, Explorations into Urban Structure (Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press, 1964), pp. 79–153.

our time. It is rather that we lack the conviction or even perhaps the political means of convincing society of the necessity of adopting certain measures, particularly where these affect market forces and the rights of private property.8 In a recent inquiry commissioned by the British government with the intention of evolving an appropriate national planning policy for the twenty-first century, a committee of experts comprising engineers, architects, and urbanists, strongly recommended that there should be no more construction on “green-field” sites, that is to say, on virgin or agricultural land that has not been built on before. It is rumored that this finding was rejected by the current socialist administration on the grounds that “middle England would not stand for it”; a rumor which, if true, exemplifies only too directly the constraints imposed by populist consensus in our admass democracy. It is a sobering thought that the less open bourgeois democracies of the nineteenth century were more effective in managing the expansion of the metropolis than contemporary megalopolitan governments have been in managing the environment. This difference in political mandate perhaps partially explains how the wholesale commodification of our urbanized regions has taken place without too much public investment, save for the provision of an auto-infrastructure that was considered to be essential to land speculation and the expansion of consumerism. Two alternative models may be seen as exemplary alternative land settlement strategies that were posited in the second half of the twentieth century. The first of these was the abandoned plan for the town of Hook in Hampshire, designed for the London County Council in the late 1950s and published in 1961 as The Planning of a New Town, while the second was set forth as a low-rise, high-density paradigm in Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander’s Community and Privacy of 1963. Where the first was a relatively dense yet flexible form of settlement conceived as an appropriate response to the constraints and opportunities of the welfare state, the second was a more generic alternative of motopian sprawl. Both models were equally rational and pragmatic and although the realization of either would possibly have entailed “the power of eminent domain,” neither was categorically anticapitalist, nor incompatible in any way with the mass ownership of the automobile. However, both were predicated on economizing in infrastructural costs, land use, and fuel and hence were dedicated to limiting the consumption of nonrenewable natural resources. That the lowrise, low-density, gridded infrastructure of Milton Keynes (1972) was realized instead of Hook (as the last British new town) was due to the adoption of the American free-market, land speculation model, derived from Melvin Webber’s rationalization of Los Angeles as the ultimate, automotive, “nonplace, urban realm.”9

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The viability of low-rise, high-density development as an alternative to the current patterns of megalopolitan development has been well demonstrated by various architects, including the Austrian Roland Rainer, in his Puchenau Siedlung under construction on the Danube, near Linz, from 1960 to 1980; a project that would be elaborated as a general principle in his seminal book Livable Environments of 1972. For Rainer, the imperative still remains one of maintaining a balance between culture and nature. For him, the cultivation of the land and the biosphere are strategies with which to compensate for the maximizing drives of our technoscientific, motopian economy. Irrespective of the topographic potential of low-rise, high-density settlement, the fact remains that the American megalopolis has already been built and that there is little chance of radically recasting it. The alienating “nonplace, urban realm” is already a ubiquitous condition covering vast areas of the continent and clearly there is little that can be done to humanize this ruinous situation except possibly the gradual application of fragmentary landscape interventions. This may be the most fundamental reason why landscape design is of greater cultural consequence today than the traditional environmental disciplines of architecture, planning, and urban design. The proliferation of heat-absorbing, blacktop parking areas and shopping malls; the miles of treeless commercial strip; the general lack of parks and recreation spaces; and the constant depletion of the soil caused by excessive storm water runoff, not to mention the pollution of the water table and the land itself through the excessive use of nitrate fertilizer and detergent—all may be open to mediation through the adoption of more sustainable techniques and through remedial topographic treatments, always assuming that society will not only be willing to undertake such works but also to maintain them. PLACEFORM VERSUS PRODUCTFORM

The term productform derives from the Swiss architect Max Bill, who employed it to refer to industrial design elements, which are determined by constraints of production rather than by ergonomic or functional considerations. The so-called high-tech architects have clearly done much to transform the craft of building along these lines—they have frequently created buildings that have been determined as much by fabrication methods as by function. It is obvious that such sophisticated building techniques challenge our traditional building methods, particularly where these have become too expensive or where they are ultimately unattainable due to the degeneration of craftsmanship. As the high-tech architects have convincingly demonstrated, this is an age that favors lightweight, longspan construction; tessellated skins; thinner and more efficient insulating membranes; and above all, cybernetically varied modes of production rather than simple serial prefabrication. Ours is the epoch of miraculous glasses, of 339

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10 Renzo Piano, Technology, Place and Architecture: The Jerusalem Seminar in Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1998), p.133.

laminates and plastics, of gluing rather than welding, of prestressing and posttensioning, of servomechanisms and “smart” buildings, rather than manually operated controls. Moreover, whether we like it or not, it is a time when up to two-thirds of the average building budget is consumed by electromechanical services rather than by built fabric itself. Against all these lightweight, dry technological developments we must nonetheless set the placeform, that is to say the foundational, topographic element that is usually cast into the ground as a wet, heavyweight component in order to provide a substantial base for the productform, the structure that is invariably erected on top of it. As Italian architect Renzo Piano has put it: “The primary structure itself constitutes the place; it is sculpted in position, as it were, like a bas-relief. This part is normally massive, opaque and heavy. Then you craft a light, transparent, and even temporary piece of architecture, which is poised on top of it. In such a combination, the heavy is permanent and the light is temporary. I believe that it is possible to create a tension between these two aspects, the place and the building, or rather the place and the crafted fabric. They are of two different worlds, but they may certainly coexist.”10 Whether the superstructure is light or temporary, partially handcrafted or industrially produced, will no doubt vary from project to project, but clearly this cultural perception of a dialogical relationship obtaining between the “earthwork” and the “roofwork” is a culturally apposite way of regarding the interaction between a wet, landscaped, placeform and a dry, rationally assembled, productform. The capacity of the placeform to resist the homogenizing tendency of universal, consumerist technology may go beyond the earthwork, however, particularly if we turn our attention to the roof and the enclosing membrane, both of which are envelopes potentially responsive to the specific location of a given work. In this respect, sophisticated buildings are being realized (with increasing frequency all over the world) in which the roof, the cladding, the fenestration, and the earthwork are equally expressive of the values of the particular climate and topography into which the work has been inscribed. The way in which such a technological, “value-laden” sensibility comes to be gradually incorporated into the everyday culture may be suggested by citing the way in which place-conscious, sociocultural benefits come to be incorporated into building legislation. Once again we have evidence that such legislation is never as neutral. Current Dutch building law mandates that all office structures must be provided with manually operable windows, as opposed to the common practice in the United States where it has long been the norm to fully air-condition office structures and hence to seal the fenestration hermetically throughout the building. This maximizing approach has three undesirable results: first, it becomes impossible to ventilate the building naturally when the climate happens to be temperate; second, the building consumes excessive amounts of energy; and third, the 340

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standard curtain wall that generally results from such an approach is deprived of any means of expressing the climate in which it is situated. Much the same applies, as I have attempted to argue elsewhere, with the optimum rationalization of sitework, where contours are bulldozed flat in order to realize immediate, short-term economies at the level of the foundations. To what degree new methods, techniques, and materials may be effectively and appropriately used must surely vary from case to case, but in all instances 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 the overdependence on nitrates and insecticides in modern agriculture. In the first instance, the consequence has been the generation of drug-resistant bacteria; in the second, we are confronted with the continual pollution of nonrenewable resources, along with evidence that now indicates that nonorganically cultivated food is detrimental to health. One may cite innumerable examples of similar negative procedures in building, from construction of museums in which no natural light is admitted in order to exclude even the slightest trace of ultraviolet light, to the building of ever larger supermarkets and shopping malls that are not only “unsustainable” by definition but also invariably isolated from the topographic grain of the surrounding landscape. The maximizing of such shopping facilities, together with the recent proliferation of gated communities, can hardly be regarded as environmentally or culturally sound solutions to the predicament of land settlement. It is one of the virtues of building that in many respects it is inherently anachronistic. Thus when it comes to construction we would be more apposite if we settled for the adjective “appropriate” rather than “high” technology. It is this hybrid approach that brings us to acknowledge those architects who have attempted to design buildings that are not only harmoniously integrated into the landscape but also climatically responsive: that is, designed in such a way that that they are well insulated, partially ventilated, cooled, and heated by natural means, thereby allowing the internal climate to vary with the external environment. All of this becomes of a greater critical import when one takes into consideration the concept of embodied energy in relation to the durability of builtform, of which Peter Buchanan has written: “The common building material with the least embodied energy is wood, with about 640 kilowatt-hours per ton (most of it consumed by the industrial drying process, and some in the manufacture of and impregnation with preservatives). Hence the greenest building material is wood from sustainably managed forests. Brick is the material with the next lowest amount of embodied energy, four times (4X) that of wood, then concrete (5X), plastic (6X), glass (14X), steel (24X) and aluminum (126X). A building with a high proportion of aluminum components can hardly be 341

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11 Peter Buchanan, Ten Shades of Green (New York: The Architectural League of New York, 2000), p. 9.

12 Buchanan, p. 8.

green when considered from the perspective of total life cycle costing, no matter how energy efficient it might be.”11 One cannot resist observing that clear cutting, as opposed to sustainable forestry, is still standard practice in the American lumber industry and that as long as our current pattern of gasoline-driven, suburban commuting prevails, energy-efficient construction will not sufficiently reduce our overall consumption of energy even though buildings are said to account for half the annual energy consumption. There remains the possibility that in the long run, a world shortage of oil will render our current patterns of automotive commuting unviable. In the interim, smog will continue to be the order of the day and automotive congestion will increase. But oil is not the only foreseeable scarcity in the future, for an intractable, looming problem is the relatively imminent shortage of water. Of this Buchanan writes: “Though the earth is mostly covered with water, less than one percent of this is fresh and most of this is now contaminated. Yet buildings continue to use and pollute vast amounts of water. Green buildings conserve and recycle water in a variety of ways. Rainwater is captured and used for plants and flushing toilets; ‘grey’ water from showers, baths and basins is also used to flush toilets and repurified through reed beds that are part of the building’s landscaping.”12 Populists are given to celebrating the seeming abundance of the consumer society and the way in which this fulfills the popular desire of a classless society, in which a liberal “third way” comes to prevail, to the exclusion of totalitarianism. How this implicitly democratic alternative is to be environmentally cultivated and maintained, when 25 percent of the world’s population uses 75 percent of the world’s energy, is far from self-evident, particularly in North America, where currently only 34 percent of the people vote and the maldistribution of wealth is notorious. Although we know that liberal democracy cannot be realized once and for all and that in all probability it has not been fully achieved anywhere, it is by no means evident that our telematic, technoscientific civilization will be able to further its development. REFLECTIVE PRACTICE

Given the “spectacular” character of the epoch, there appear to be as many ways of practicing architecture as there are architects. While this pluralism may stem in many instances from superficial stylistic variations, these nonetheless evoke the issue of what should be the ethical role of the architect in the face of the technological sublime; a challenge rendered the more ironic by the fact that architects, in any event, are only responsible for less than 10 percent of the built environment. Put in doctrinaire terms, there would appear to be only two categorically different choices facing the architectural profession, and schools of architecture, today.

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The first of these and the one which, given the sway of fashion, the profession seems increasingly inclined to adopt, is to embrace the technique of the spectacular without any reservations; to enter, under the rubric of avant-gardism, the generation of unprecedented plastic visual effects, preferably derived from digital processes and dependent for seductive effect on the extravagant use of new high-tech materials. The rationale supporting this exotic impulse, which often has the nerve to characterize itself as subversive, is not so hard to divine since it surely relates to the continual attempts made by the profession, ever since the 1960s, to legitimize its practice in terms of technological fetishism; in addition, that is, to the perennial compulsion towards some identifiable “originality” as the sine qua non of individual competition. The second basic choice is to establish a distance from the technoscientific whirlwind without denying the potential capacity of advanced technology and the unavoidable effects of its influence. This last position is, in my view, a more objective and ethically responsible alternative and one which comes closest to Donald Schon’s concept of “reflective practice” of which he wrote in 1982: The idea of reflective practice leads . . . to a demystification of professional expertise. It leads us to recognize that for both the professional and the counterprofessional, special knowledge is embedded in evaluative frames which bear the stamp of human values and interests. . . . Whenever a professional claims to “know,” in a sense of the technical expert, he imposes his categories, theories, and techniques on the situation before him. He ignores, explains away, or controls those features of the situation, including the human beings within it, which do not fit his knowledge-inpractice. . . . If technical expertise is value-laden, and technical experts have interests of their own which shape their understandings and judgments, then we will recognize the need for social constraints on professional freedom. On the other hand, we will also respect the professional’s claim to extraordinary knowledge in the areas susceptible to technical expertise, and we will place a special value on practitioners who reflect-in-action both on their own evaluative frames and in situations which transcend the limits of their expertise. 13 Schon’s critical conception of reflection-in-action leads inexorably not only to the evaluative framing of life situations as a necessary prerequisite of any responsible design procedure but also to the recognition of a certain limit, which may be applied to architecture and technology alike. Thus, I would argue it is necessary for the architect not only to take advantage of modern technology but also to retain a certain skepticism with regard to its ideological dimensions and hence to resist its propensity for proliferating placelessness. 343

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13 Donald Schon, The Reflective Practitioner (New York: HarperCollins, Basic Books, 1983), pp. 345–346.

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Schon argues that there are two interrelated levels at which reflection-inaction ought to take place. The first of these concerns the relationship between the architect and the client—the latter should participate actively in the design discourse along with the architect and the various technical consultants. The second level turns on the civic responsibility of architects to relate their one-off designs to the larger general principles that impinge on their resolution, thereby to engage the body politic in the formation of environmental policy and so to pass from reflection-in-action to democracy-in-action. This brings us to the double-edged character of the placeform as an enclave, for while the gated community can only be rejected, as a morbid, reactionary symptom, causally linked to the inequitable distribution of wealth, a critical work has also to be bounded in order to sustain itself against the miasma of value-free placelessness that engulfs it on every side. The building as placeform exists not only to ensure a certain tranquility within its boundaries but also to posit a ground within which the subject may sustain its being against the indifference of the megalopolis. And while I have broached this issue before, most notably perhaps in my interpretation of critical regionalism, I would like to reassert the argument here in more objective terms, namely, as the framing of the body-being, within the limits of microspace, sensitively inflected so as to accommodate the needs and desires of the subject within a given place and climate, at a particular moment in time.

This essay was originally published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 54, No. 3 (February 2001). 344

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TECHNOLOGY

STEVEN A. MOORE (2001)

INTRODUCTION

In the 1980s and early 1990s the topic of regionalism enjoyed considerable visibility within architectural discourse. The prospect of a progressive or a critical regionalism seemed an antidote to both the regressive fantasies of postmodern historicism and the various proposals for a deconstructivist architecture inspired by European linguistic theory. Since the mid-1990s, however, the regionalist moment has waned. The progenitors of that conversation, Kenneth Frampton, Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, have moved on to other topics and the projects of those architects who embodied the critical regionalist attitude have been re-framed by other discourses. This state of affairs is, in my view, a rather natural, if not entirely satisfying development. In the maturation of any conversation some possibilities are suppressed just as others are amplified by the exigencies of the situation. The purpose of this article, then, is to reconstruct those suppressed possibilities contained within the modern conception of regionalism that might yield unsuspected theoretical opportunities that are relevant to contemporary conditions. In short, I wish to argue that technology and place should be understood as the suppressed core concepts that are contained within regionalist architectural production. This is not to say that regions are constituted only of places and technologies, but that these concepts are central to our understanding of what a “region” might be. The interrogation of these core concepts, then, is an opportunity to reconsider the history of regionalism as a concept. Before I argue that the concept of regionalism should be renovated in one direction or another, I have a responsibility to review how the core concepts of place and technology have been used in the past. In what follows I’ll first define the concept of place by reconstructing the rationale behind its devaluation as a concept relevant to modern conditions. Because the contemporary recuperation of place is often a conservative reaction against modernist ideology it will be helpful to put this discussion in a historical context before looking further. In their essays on “Critical Regionalism,” Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre documented five historical stages in the evolution of the concept of regionalism in Western culture: the picturesque, the romantic, Nazi Heimat, the commercial, and finally, Critical Regionalism. I find their analysis to be helpful and will review their genealogy for the benefit of the nonmodern thesis to follow. Having defined the concept of place through the disciplines 345

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1 I should make clear at the onset that when using the terms “modern,” “postmodern,” and “nonmodern” I refer, not to architectural styles, but to the philosophical assumptions that lead to material choices. 2 John Agnew, Place and Politics (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 62. Agnew also discusses the theme of the historic devaluation of place 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 Agnew interrogates the concept of “place,” I use the term “region” interchangeably in this text. “Place” and “region” do not mean the same thing, but for the purpose of this discussion I conflate them. 3 For example, crime statistics reveal that the murder rate in New York City is dramatically lower than that of rural Arkansas. See Box Butterfield, “Nationwide Drop in Murders Is Reaching to Small Towns,” in New York Times, Tuesday 9 May, 2000. Available at .

of geography and history I’ll then consider how we might understand the modern construction of technology. Kenneth Frampton has, of course, deeply mined the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s critique of modern technology as a way of informing his Critical Regionalism hypothesis. Rather than revisit that discourse, however, I will borrow from the contemporary literature of science and technology studies to provide a sociological view of how technological systems are developed. My own position is very supportive of the Critical Regionalism hypothesis originally constructed by Tzonis and Lefaivre, and fully developed by Frampton. There are, however, hanging threads in that conversation which tug at a contemporary understanding of the topic. In my view it is necessary to resolve the internal tensions implicit in Frampton’s hypothesis that (too freely) mix the underlying modernist assumptions of critical theory, particularly those of Jurgen Habermas, with the underlying postmodern assumptions of Martin Heidegger. I will attempt to resolve this opposition by constructing a nonmodern position that avoids the conflicted attitude toward the concepts technology and place that are implicit in both modernist and postmodernist thought.1 Before I can map a nonmodern position from which Frampton’s Critical Regionalism hypothesis might be renovated, however, it is necessary to better define my terms. DEFINING PLACE

The geographer John Agnew has argued that, in modernist thought, the traditional 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, argues Agnew, is assumed to define both “a physical setting for social relations” and “a morally valued way of life.”2 In the conflation, place has been erroneously equated with local concepts of traditional morality. Modernist thought, in Agnew’s analysis, fails to understand society as a dynamic process that transforms, but does not abolish or invalidate the concept of region. As a result, moderns tends to reify moral concepts as places. In other words, our characterization of big cities as dens of iniquity, and small towns as the vessels of morality is ideological, not empirical.3 Second, beginning in the nineteenth century—a period that witnessed the dramatic evaporation of traditional communities—social scientists attempted to project the trajectory of history. Common to all of these a priori projections was the polarity of “community” and “society.” Writers as dissimilar as Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx saw community as being “coercive, limiting, or idiotic,” whereas national societies were characterized as liberative. Conservatives, such as Auguste Comte, saw the loss of traditional village forms as the loss of the ideal social type. In contrast, the politics of nation building and the liberative project of Enlightenment 346

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became an ideology of “antitraditionalism.” To free humans from feudal bonds to the land, and the hierarchical relations inscribed there, was understood by moderns to be the grand scheme (or teleology) of history. The German sociologist, Max Weber, popularized this historical tension as the transformation of Gemeinschaft into Gesellschaft.4 This logic suggests that the modern reification of moral codes and the teleology of history conspired to devalue place as a concept relevant to the conditions of contemporary life. “Becoming modern’ involves casting off ties to place (in work, recreation and sense of identity) and adopting an ‘achievement oriented’ or ‘class conscious’ self that is placeless.”5 Agnew argues, in concert with the postmodern geographer Edward Soja, that the devaluation of place was most vigorously promoted by Marxist ideology.6 For traditional Marxists to consider social behavior as in any way determined by the conditions of place would have been to subvert the dialectic order of causality. Marxist logic has traditionally held that material order arises from a dialectic relationship with social activity. But if Marxists devalued the concept of place on ideological grounds, there is considerable irony in the recognition that it has been market forces that have most effectively 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 societies owe their unique character to the conditions of their territory) amounts to nothing less than racism and the fetishization of place.8 We will return to the logic shortly. In a friendly renovation of this Marxist logic, Agnew argues that places cannot be understood within the limited dimensions of architecture or physical geography.9 Rather, Agnew argues that the variables that characterize places are multi-valent. He offers three elements, or scales by which we might understand the phenomenon of place: location, sense of place, and locale.10 By location, Agnew intends that a place can be understood as a geographic area encompassed by the objective structures of politics and economy. In this sense, places are linked together, for example, by the interests of the E.C. (European Community), or the Monroe Doctrine. Using the same 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 it is the same corporate structures that manage the oil fields of the North Sea and those of Texas. It is these structural conditions of political economy at the macro-scale that most concern Marxist scholars. At the other end of the spectrum Agnew argues for the existence of a sense of place. By this term he means the local “structure of feeling” that pervades Being in a particular place. This dimension of place includes the inter-subjective realities that give a place what conventional language would describe as character or quality of life. For example, the reverence that the 347

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4 Although Max Weber is commonly credited with the coinage of these terms, they belong to Ferdinand Tonnies who first used them in 1887. See Ferdinand Tonnies, Community and Society (New York: Harper, 1963). 5 Agnew, Place and Politics, p. 231. 6 Soja’s position is associated with the tradition of Critical Theory; however, his intention is revisionist. See Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), p. 120. 7 I am indebted to my colleague Stephen Ross for this insight. 8 Anna Bramwell, for example, has argued that German anti-Semitism arises from the doctrines of environmental determinism. To generalize that all Germans share a genius that originates in the forest and that wandering Jews share a rootlessness that originates in the desert is a classic example of determinist, reductivist logic. See Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Richard Walter Darre and Hitler’s Green Party (Abbotsbrook: Kensal House, 1985). See also Jeffery Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 9 Agnew’s concern is apparently that those of us who are most concerned with the physical world— architects and physical geographers chief among the suspects—are prone to fall into the trap of environmental determinism. 10 Agnew, Place and Politics, p. 28. The definition of these terms is further amplified in his essay “Representing Space,” p. 253.

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11 Thomas Misa, “Retrieving Sociotechnical Change From Technological Determinism,” in Does Technology Drive History? Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds. (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1995), pp. 115–142.

citizens of Austin, Texas reserve for a swim in Barton Springs, or the stylish ambition of street life that New Yorkers enjoy, are ontological, rather than objective, dimensions of place. It is at this scale that the complex human poetics of place are experienced. It is the inter-subjective construction of conditions experienced as a sense of place that most concerns constructivist scholars and phenomenologists. Between objective location, and the subjective sense of place, Agnew establishes a middle ground, or locale. This scale of place is the setting in which social relations are constituted. Locale includes the institutional scale of living to which architecture contributes so much: the city, the public square, the block, and the neighborhood. I want to claim that by considering the concept of place, or region, from this meso-scale we avoid two problems. First, we can appreciate the insights of Marxists, but avoid the over-determination that derives from their preoccupation with the seemingly objective conditions of political economy. Second, we can appreciate the insights of constructivists and phenomenologists, but avoid the underdetermination that derives from their preoccupation with the subjective conditions of atomized reality.11 It is the “elastic” scale of all three dimensions, viewed from the meso-scale of the city-state, which best describes a place. By understanding the concept of place as a dynamic process that links humans and nonhumans in space at a variety of scales, we might get beyond the opposition between those who understand the concept as a set of objective structures and those who understand it as a set of romantic myths tied to subjective experience. REGIONALISM AS A HISTORIC STRATEGY

12 Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, “Critical Regionalism,” in Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Preceedings (Pomona, CA: The College of Environmental Design, 1991), p. 4.

Agnew’s analysis of the devaluation and reconstruction of place is helpful, but doesn’t tell us much about how place, or the concept of regionalism, has been employed in architecture. The essays of Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre are more helpful. These authors distinguish “regionalist” architecture from “regional” architecture as a matter of political content. Where a “regional” architecture is constituted by an isolated craft tradition that adapts to local ecological conditions, “regional-ist” architecture implicitly “criticizes an architectural order that claims universal application.”12 The regionalist position, then, is both reactive and liberative. It reacts against imposed a priori standards and seeks liberation from a power that is considered foreign and illegitimate. Tzonis and Lefaivre’s first regionalist category, 18th century English picturesque architecture, is a good example. It is no accident that Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–1683), was a member of the Whig Party, a promoter of a parliamentary form of governance, an antimonarchist, a nationalist, and an advocate of constructing a picturesque landscape. The cultivation of a landscape that intensified the natural 348

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topography and flora of place was, for Shaftesbury, an asthetic tactic that would foreground the rigid imposition of classical order upon local order. Rather than tolerate the classically ordered formal gardens adopted by the monarchy, which were associated with the claims of absolute rule, the Whigs cultivated a landscape of particularity in the hope that it would nurture the liberative politics inscribed in the genius loci. Tzonis and Lefaivre’s second category, romantic regionalism, continues the project of political liberation from central authority that was initially found in the English picturesque, but it employs new tactics. Where the picturesque was a spatial strategy, romantic regionalism also employs temporal strategies. In the projects of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and John Ruskin, for example, architecture is constructed as a “memory machine”—a setting that evokes one’s sense of belonging to a familiar history. The romantic, however, should not be confused with the merely eclectic. Where the eclectic chooses what appears to be best from diverse sources, the romantic recuperates a seemingly authentic ethnic history for the purpose of reconstructing lost authority. In this sense, romantic regionalism employs the previously introduced doctrines of environmental determinism, which have roots in architectural theory going back to Vitruvius. In his Ten Books, Vitruvius argued that Africans to the south were dim-witted because their climate was too hot. Using similar logic, Vitruvius argued the Germans to the north were no less dim-witted because their climate was too cold. In this logic it follows that Roman genius emerged from the just right environmental conditions of the sacred region of Romulus and Remus. Like Vitruvius, the romantics of the 19th century credited nature, or those who presumed to speak for her, with cultural constructions. The architecture of German National Socialism, or Heimatsarchitektur, the third of Tzonis and Lefaivre’s categories, is post-romantic in that its goal was one of neo-tribal regimentation rather than liberation. Although the volkish fantasies of Albert Speer clearly emerge from German romanticism, they invent an “authentic” taxonomy of forms that is intended to exclude those others that threaten the spatial purity of the race. Nazi Heimatsarchitektur, or literally, “homeland architecture,” relies upon the doctrines of environmental determinism, but with a particularly malignant twist of logic. Hitler, Himmler and their cohorts argued that just as Germanic genius was derived from the enchantment of the Black Forest, the shiftiness and untrustworthiness of Jews, for example, was derived from a life of wandering in the desert. Heimatsarchitektur, as in contemporary Bosnia and Kosovo, leads to a spatial project of ethnic cleansing. Following the Second World War, regionalist strategies were appropriated less by totalitarian regimes than by the market. Tzonis and Lefaivre describe “commercial regionalism,” their fourth category, as an architecture of tourism. Corporate sponsorship of the local can be understood as one of 349

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13 Ibid., p. 20. The authors credit the term “defamiliarization” to Victor Schlovsky, a member of the “Russian Formalists” who coined the term around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. See also Victor Schlovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Critique, L.T. Lemon and M. Reis, eds. (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).

many tactics discovered by the market to differentiate its products in an endless sea of mediocre suburban choices. This is true particularly in the American West, where the propinquity of the place-form has been sacrificed to 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 a potent critique of commercial regionalism while others have maintained the opposite—that New Urbanism is itself a product differentiation strategy that succeeds in the market only to the degree that it extracts value from socalled “authentic” places. In this view, a distinction between “authentic” regionalist houses in places like Austin, and what my colleague David Heymann refers to as “yuppie limestone starter-mansions,” has become somewhat moot. The cynical marketing of architectural motifs precludes an understanding of place as an environmental reproduction grounded in traditional construction practices. It is into this historical context that Tzonis and Lefaivre have cast their proposal for a fifth category, that of “Critical Regionalism.” These authors argue that architecture can mount an effective resistance to the traditionally restrictive conception of place as well as to the hegemony of the global market through a strategy of “defamiliarization.”13 They mean by this term that architecture should evoke meaning and thought rather than emotion and excitement—that architecture should evoke critical consideration of the cultural and ecological origins of construction practices rather than feed the folk scenographic fantasies which allow them to withdraw into familiarity. For Frampton, Critical Regionalism is an attitude rather than a set of motifs—it is a set of ever-evolving tectonic practices rather than a look. By slowing down cognition, rather than appeasing consumer lust for instant gratification, critical regionalists hope to engage the inhabitants of a region in a thoughtful consideration of what it means to live locally. This is an ontological rather than a representational project. This distinction suggests that the labor and material practices employed to construct a place are more important than visual references made to the traditional canons of architecture or to the artificial icons produced by Madison Avenue. Although we lead lives increasing dominated by universal forces, the critical regionalists argue that some of those forces might act to stimulate, rather than repress, creative response to the material condition of the places into which we are thrown. Although Tzonis and Lefaivre’s genealogy of regionalism is extremely helpful, it implies a classically modernist teleology about which I am skeptical. Although their successive historical categories ring true, I doubt that there is any historical necessity, Marxist or otherwise, that will drag our understanding into the critical consciousness they advocate. Rather, I will argue, places spring up in response to those interests that are most effective at gathering resources. The social construction of places is an 350

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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 the definition of technology. Conventional thought understands place as only physical in quality. Similarly, technology is commonly understood to be physical hardware—radios, refrigerators, or computers. Such a materialist definition tends to consider the social construction of such objects as outside the competing interests of society.14 In the positivist tradition, technology is understood as the asocial application of scientific truths. In the philosophical tradition of Heidegger, technology is understood as an ontological practice. In contrast to both of these traditions, the literature of science and technology studies has demonstrated that technology, far from being constructed outside society, and far from being the singular practice of the poet, is a system that is inextricably part of society.15 Technology, like place, is a field where the struggle between competing interests plays out. The sociologists Donald MacKenzie and Judith Wajcman have argued that the concept of technology, like place, includes three qualities. In their construction, technology includes “human knowledge,” “patterns of human activities,” and “sets of physical objects.”16 Rather than return to those discourses, like Frampton’s or Heidegger’s, that examine technology, or techne, through ontological lenses, I find it helpful to examine technology as a process of social construction. In MacKenzie and Wajcman’s definition, knowledge—the first characteristic of technology—is required, not only to build the artifact, but to relate the natural conditions upon which the artifact works, and to use the artifact. The second characteristic of technology, “Patterns of human activity,” or what I would prefer to call human practices, refers to the institutionalization, or routinization, of problem solving that inevitably occurs in society. The practices of architecture, carpentry or farming are examples. 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 knowledge 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, are related by a tripartite structure that is not accidental. Figure 1 will help to make this point clear. The limited point of the diagram is threefold: first, that places and technologies are both spatial concepts with related structures; second, that these qualities are dialogically related; and third, that modern forms of knowledge, like the economics of location, tend toward the abstract and 351

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14 Reductive, materialist definitions of technology tend to be less sophisticated in their understanding of the social construction of artifacts. However, Bruce Bimber’s essay, “Three Faces of Technological Determinism,” in Russian Formalist Critique, L.T. Lemon and M. Reis, eds. (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1965) develops a very scholarly, yet reductive, definition of technology as limited to apparatus. Bimber’s project, however, leads to other ontological problems beyond the scope of this study. 15 I have discussed the various traditions within science and technology studies elsewhere in greater detail. See Steven A. Moore, “Technology and the Politics of Sustainability at Blueprint Demonstration Farm,” in Journal of Architectural Education, 51/1 (September 1997): pp. 23–25 and Technology and Place: Sustainable Architecture and the Blueprint Farm (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001). 16 Donald MacKenzie and Judith Wajcman, “Introductory Essay,” in The Social Shaping of Technology (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1985), p. 3.

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Figure 1. The dialogic qualities of place and technology.

17 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 117.

18 Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present (J.A.I. Press, Inc. 1986), pp. 1–40, and We Have Never Been Modern.

over-determined (meaning that the outcome of events is strongly tied to structural conditions) while our understanding of objects and sense of place tends toward the under-determined (meaning that the outcome of events is weakly tied to structural conditions). These points serve only to magnify the centrality of locale and practices as the glue that holds the discourse of places and technologies together. To argue that place is a spatial concept is a tautology and requires no further backing. However, to argue that technology is a spatial concept requires some explanation. Bruno Latour’s term technological network is helpful in this regard. Latour has argued that, “Technological networks, 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 knowledge, human practices, and nonhuman resources—the latter being the stuff—steel, wood, water, etc.—from which the objects themselves are made. His point is that technology is essentially a spatial concept because its operation depends upon the mobilization of human and nonhuman resources 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 in communications technology, many now argue, have radically collapsed the 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 material intentions of the producers, the concrete qualities of their purely social network are materialized as a global technological network. A technological network produces spatial links that tie the social network of producers to those nonhuman resources required for construction. This is a central argument of this study that has, as we shall see shortly, important implications for how we understand an architecture of place in a contemporary context. My argument is that technology is best understood, not through history, but through geography. History interprets reality as human 352

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events in time. Through temporal interpretation we might better understand the causal sequence in which humans construct artifacts. In contrast, geography interprets reality as human events in space. Through spatial interpretation we are more likely to understand how technological networks operate to dominate the places inhabited by humans and nonhumans. It is geography, then, that offers methods more relevant to this inquiry because it is through similar spatial structures that technologies and places are constituted. Henri Lefebvre has argued two points that reinforce the dynamic relationship between technology and place that is claimed here. First, that social spaces are produced by technology acting upon nature.19 Lefebvre’s second point is that each society—or, as Marxists would have it, each mode of production—produces its own peculiar type of space.20 What architects might extract from Lefebvre’s logic is that the differing qualities of places are more a matter of technological practices than aesthetic choices because such practices are always already spatial. For example, the practice of carpentry requires not only forests and citizens to house, but the spatial mechanisms that link them. This is the heart of what I will characterize as the dialogic relation of technology and place. In constructing this dialogic relation between place and technology, I should make clear that I am not building a case for environmental determinism, which would be to say that places cause technologies. Given different cultural conditions, the sets of objects that dominate any particular place might be different. Given constant environmental conditions, the interpretive flexibility of culture is entirely contingent. I want to argue that environments do shape technologies, but are in turn shaped by them.21 As a corollary, I am not building a case for technological determinism, which would be to say that technologies cause places. The same logic holds that technologies do shape places, but are also shaped by them.22 The point here is that the relation of place and technology is both spatial and discursive. It is a dialogue of cause and effect, means and ends. They are inseparable, but contingent concepts that lead inhabitants of a place to a dialogic narrowing of cultural horizons. Following the development of the telephone, for example, business practices were extended by the possibility of synchronous communication across space. As a result, business people spent many unproductive hours playing “telephone tag.” Although the physical distance between people could be radically collapsed, their places could be joined only by available technological space. After the development of the internet, however, business practice has become increasingly asynchronous. The places where we work are connected to each other through wider and more porous linkages that are independent of time. The changing technological linkages between places are both reflective of, and determinant of, how we conceive our work, perceive our co-workers and live our lives. 353

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19 Implicit in this point is the claim that original nature, if it ever existed at all, has long ago been incorporated into second nature, which is a work of society. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald NicholsonSmith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991 [1974]), p. 190. 20 Ibid., p. 31.

21 Anthony Giddens is credited with developing the Theory of Structuration which is an attempt to synthesize the seemingly opposed principles of voluntarism and determinism. He argues that humans are free to transform social structures, but are also products of those structures. My argument here, regarding the relation of places and technologies, is drawn from the same logic. See also MacKenzie and Wajcman, The Social Shaping of Technology, p. 6. 22 Philip Brey has examined how “space-shaping technologies” have disembedded the contemporary phenomenon of place. Where Brey’s study has focused upon the role of “connectivity development” in transforming the experience of place, my own emphasis has been on what Brey terms “local development.” See Philip Brey, “Space-Shaping Technologies and the Disembedding of Place,” in Philosophy and Geography 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 now be related back to the topic of regionalism. The dialogic structure that I propose to exist between technology and place is only in part consistent with the modernist assumptions that lie behind Frampton’s Critical Regionalism hypothesis. Extension of Frampton’s hypothesis, then, requires different (nonmodern) assumptions. THE NONMODERN THESIS

Figure 2. The value opposition of place and technology in modern thought. 23 I want to stress that I am not making a claim in this diagram that modernism or postmodernism can be described entirely within the limits of these two concepts. Rather, I only suggest that these concepts are particularly helpful, as heuristic devices to get at those qualities of our time that are relevant to a discussion concerning regionalism.

In this short essay I will not try to fully explicate the Critical Regionalism hypothesis. Between 1983 and 1990 Frampton produced no fewer than six separate essays that fully accomplished that goal. In my view, what might be more helpful in the current discussion would be to examine what I’ll refer to as Frampton’s antinomy, or the unresolvable conflict between Frampton’s mix of modernism, as it is embodied in the doctrines of critical theory, and postmodernism, as it is embodied in the place-bound doctrines of Martin Heidegger. The simplest way to illustrate this conflict is demonstrated in Figure 2. Here I have plotted the way that modernism and postmodernism value the concepts place and technology.23 The point of the diagram is to argue, as did Agnew, that moderns have generally held a negative attitude toward place because the social hierarchies inscribed there restrict human liberty. Conversely, moderns have held a positive attitude toward technology, because it is the machines invented by us that, science claims, will free us from the drudgery of place-bound tyrannies. The flip side of this diagram is to recognize that postmoderns, far from constructing a new worldview, have merely inverted the relationships constructed by modern thought. Where postmoderns desire to recuperate the propinquity of place and value it positively, they have become evermore skeptical of modern technologies and the unintended consequences that have followed in its wake. The malignant promises of atomic power and industrial agriculture are salient examples of the fears nurtured by postmoderns like Heidegger, or the American poet-farmer Wendell Berry. Another way to argue this point is to claim that conservative postmoderns, at least in their attitude toward place and technology, are only anti-moderns. In the world of architecture, a figure like Leon Krier exemplifies this position—his drawings value the premodern city as the place that embodies ideal civic relations, but he employs technology only as a scenographic or instrumental tool required to realize those social relations. The problem, or the opportunity found in Frampton’s Critical Regionalism hypothesis, then, is that it relies upon assumptions drawn from opposing philosophical traditions. Critical Regionalism proposes to value both technological means and the propinquity of place as positive forces in history. I want to stress that the problem I see here lies not in the expressed 354

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goal, which is admirable, but in the incompatibility of the assumptions upon which the hypothesis relies. By relying alternately upon the opposing assumptions of critical theory, which are modern, and those of Martin Heidegger, which are postmodern, Critical Regionalism is led to philosophical confusion.24 What is needed, in my view, is not more hybridizing of disparate sources, but a single set of philosophical assumptions that will lead to a coherent position. Fredric Jameson has hinted at such a direction. Jameson has argued that the philosophical assumptions of Critical Regionalism 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 by nonmodern assumptions. Figure 3 demonstrates this conceptual possibility. Bruno Latour has used the term “nonmodern” to argue that we have, in practice, never been modern at all, by which he means that modernity has been so powerful, and sometimes environmentally destructive, precisely because it has concealed our existence within nature.26 By embracing the Cartesian assumptions that position us outside nature, we have made those nonhuman “Others” with whom we share the planet available for domination and exploitation. If being modern means the isolation of subjects from objects, and the isolation of humans from nonhumans, then, I agree with Latour that we have been modern in theory, but never in practice. It is a condition like pregnancy—one is never “sort of” modern. In this sense, modernity has been a convenient license to plunder nature, not an anthropological fact. The nonmodern thesis proposes to erode the Cartesian distinctions between humans and nonhumans. In the nonmodern view, we are no longer subjects empowered to contemplate and order up resources from afar. When we examine how the world really works we are compelled to recognize that we—riders and horses, politicians and voters, bricklayers and

24 In philosophical discourse Herbert Marcuse attempted a similar blending of Heidegger and Marx. In Marcuse’s case, however, the project was further confused by the inclusion of Freud as a third pole. To be clear, I am not suggesting that such hybridized texts are unhelpful, only that their confused assumptions lead to previously unrecognized possibilities. 25 Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 187– 203. 26 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

Figure 3. Alternative theoretical positions with regard to the concepts place and technology.

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27 Ibid., pp. 51–55.

28 The term “sustainability” is much used and much contested. For an excellent analysis of the term see Simon Guy and Graham Farmer, “Reinterpreting Sustainable Technology: The Place of Technology,” in Journal of Architectural Education, 54/3 (February 2001): pp. 140–148. See also, Scott Campbell, “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities: Urban Planning and the Contradiction of Sustainable Development,” in APA Journal (Summer 1996): pp. 296– 312. The term “eco-tech” has come into use to describe the environmentally responsible projects of those firms, like Sir Norman Foster & Partners, that were previously described as “high-tech” practitioners. For example, see Catherine Slessor, Eco-Tech: Sustainable Architecture and High Technology (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), p. 7.

bricks—are “quasi-subjects” and “quasi-objects.”27 These terms suggest that what distinguishes a subject from an object at any given moment in time is only a temporary advantage in power relations. At one moment we are empowered to control conditions, and at the next moment we find ourselves being ordered about by the digital logic of machines that determine our health care benefits, or which telephone company will bill us each month. My point here is that, in a nonmodern world, humans and nonhumans have more in common than they don’t. In such a world, places show up as place-making is practiced. In other words, it is hard to distinguish between the qualities of a place and the technologies employed to make them. This nonmodern logic further suggests that there is no effective distance between culture and nature. If there ever was such a thing as primeval nature—nature untouched by human invention—it has long ago disappeared. Far from lamenting the lost garden of human origins, nonmoderns see not ruination, but increasing opportunities in which human institutions can creatively participate in the cycles of natural systems. Participation in nature just might produce life-enhancing conditions that will benefit all us quasi-objects. I recognize that the nonmodern thesis that I am proposing, and Figure 3 in particular, leaves many questions unanswered. I should dwell on this diagram long enough, however, to point out that just as Critical Regionalism constructs a positive nonmodern synthesis, a negative nonmodern synthesis resolves the modern dilemma equally well—at least from a purely rhetorical point of view. The position that I label as radical nihilism in the diagram is, I think, best exemplified by the projects of Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. The negative nonmodern position is, of course, disinterested in the topic of regionalism, so that discussion can be left for another day. When taken up, however, the first question to be asked must be: “can a double-negative constitute a life-enhancing course of action?” 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 in Figure 3 undefined. “Sustainability” and “eco-tech” are concepts related to regionalism and the current discussion, but are well documented elsewhere.28 The term that appears in the upper left-hand corner of Figure 3, “regenerative architecture,” does, however, demand more discussion because it describes the heart of the nonmodern thesis. This term is borrowed from the landscape architect John Tillman Lyle. By placing this term in this position in the diagram I am proposing to substitute the word regenerative for Frampton’s word critical. This language is proposed because “critical” must always refer back to the modern, dialectic assumptions embraced by “critical theory.” Just as Jameson would renovate 356

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Critical Regionalism as a postmodern doctrine, I would renovate it as a nonmodern doctrine.29 I am arguing that the philosophical trajectory of Critical Regionalism is most comfortable, not in its modernist origins, nor in postmodern Marxism, but in a nonmodern, dialogic future. Lyle defines a “regenerative system” as one that “. . . provides for the continuous replacement, through its own functional processes, of the energy and materials used in its operation.”30 In this definition, the notion that technology might “provide for the continuous replacement . . . of energy and materials used in its operation” does not mean that architecture might overcome the second law of thermodynamics, and thus escape the concept of entropy. While it is not possible for any technological system to reconstitute all of the energy consumed in its own creation, architecture—or “place-forms” as Frampton would have it—can certainly participate far more effectively in the natural energy flows of a place than is the current technological practice. It is through such participation that entropy might be radically reduced. Lyle offers the concept of “regeneration” as an alternative to the now common term, “sustainability,” because, in his view, to simply sustain current entropic conditions is inadequate. I agree, but for different reasons. In my view, to merely maintain the status quo of material systems is a necessary, but insufficient strategy to achieve life-enhancing conditions. It is equally necessary to recognize, as does Latour, that all material systems are technological networks in the sense previously defined. In other words, they are politically constituted. This political recognition requires that we reject the status quo of social systems as equally entropic. It is simply a passive form of positivism (traditional science by another name) to imagine that ecologists can repair the ecosystem in isolation from political processes. Lyle’s definition of a regenerative system, then, is flawed because it ignores the social and political constitution of an ecosystem. Rather than attempt a comprehensive redefinition of what a regenerative architecture might be in this short essay, I’ll suggest a single political characteristic that we might add to Lyle’s scientific definition: a regenerative architecture will seek to engage human institutions in the democratic reproduction of life-enhancing places. This is not yet an adequate definition of the possibilities foreseen in this essay, but it does point toward a cultural horizon where the dialogic relationship between technologies and places can be better understood.31 Having now defined place and technology as the core concepts upon which regionalist architecture depends, I can conclude by summarizing this discussion in three short propositions: First, it is politically desirable and ecologically prudent to reproduce regionalism as a practice relevant to contemporary conditions. Regenerative architecture provides a framework through which we might reconstruct and extend that discourse. 357

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29 Jameson, Seeds of Time, p.194.

30 John Tillman Lyle, Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development (New York: Wiley, 1994), p. 10.

31 In Technology and Place: Sustainable Architecture and the Blueprint Farm, I examine a single case of architectural and agricultural production that provides enough empirical evidence to support an eight point definition of regenerative architecture.

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32 The other firms represented in the exhibition include: Foster and Partners, London; Clare Design, Sydney; Jourda & Perraudin Architectes, Kassel; Andrew Lee for Hackland + Dore Architects Ltd., Edinburgh; Michael Hopkins and Partners, London; Lake/Flato Architects, San Antonio; Rick Joy Architects, Tucson; Fernau & Hartman Architects, Berkeley; and Brian MacKay-Lyons Architecture Urban Design, Halifax. For a review of the exhibition, see Muschamp, “Good Buildings, and Good for You,” New York Times (April 16, 2000).

Second, to do so we must understand the historic uses and abuses of regionalism as a concept, with particular regard for the geography of power relations. It is both possible and desirable to make places that relate human institutions to the natural cycles of a region without resorting to appeals that authenticate, and thus legitimize, the authority of entrenched social networks. Rather, a regenerative architecture might consciously, and democratically, construct places that relate humans and nonhumans in lifeenhancing and ever-changing practices. Third, although Critical Regionalism offers a positive and life-enhancing direction for architectural practice, its own assumptions are conflicted and require renovation as a nonmodern polemic for architectural production. The articulation of regenerative architecture is a first attempt to meet this challenge. In sum, these propositions are an attempt to reconstruct the suppressed possibilities of an ongoing discourse. By examining the core concepts of regionalism we find a vocabulary through which we might interpret the contemporary projects of such architects as Webler + Geissler Architekten, Stuttgart; Herzog + Partner, Architekten, Munich; Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Paris; and Neutelings Riedijk Architekten, Rotterdam. The projects of these firms, and those of six others, were collectively documented in the 2000 exhibition, Ten Shades of Green, organized by the Architectural League of New York and guest curated by Peter Buchanan.32 What these projects share is a dialogic attitude toward the variables of technology and place. In each case documented, these architects have found unexpected technological opportunities through rigorous investigation of ecology and physics, local building practices, and/or the objects themselves. Similarly, they have found unexpected topological opportunities through rigorous investigation of global economic structures, local sense of place, and/or the unique ordering systems of the cities and neighborhoods in which they have built. Most important, however, is that these architects investigate the qualities of place through the qualities of technology, and vice versa. My only uncertainty about the projects exhibited in Ten Shades of Green is that too little is known about the social and political context of their production. Although curator Peter Buchanan did an admirable job of interpreting these projects through multiple lenses that examined such avisual issues as “embodied energy,” “total life cycle costing,” and “community and connection,” I would like to know more about the technological networks that were forged by them. In the scheme of things, however, these are quibbles. The emergence of these projects, and their positive public reception, is an extremely hopeful event, one that leads the way toward a nonmodern dialogic of technologies and places. As I have implied throughout this essay, the nonmodern dialogic requires that the discipline of architecture be reconstituted as a political, rather than an aesthetic practice. Through this reconstitution the canon of architecture 358

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would be re-conceived as, not a set of heroic objects, but the material record of life-enhancing discourses. This proposal suggests that architects would no longer design “things” per se. Rather, we would design the political 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 Technology and Place: Sustainable Architecture and the Blueprint Farm (Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press, 2001). Portions have also appeared in “Reproducing the Local,” 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 the thesis proposed. 359

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IMMANENT DOMAIN Pervasive computing and the public realm DANA CUFF (2003)

Machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods. Mark Weiser

1 See David A. Fahrenthold and David Nakamura, “Council Attacks D.C. Surveillance Cameras.” Washington Post, November 8, 2002, p. B01. There is a growing literature and spreading activist movement against the recent, rapid expansion of video surveillance systems. Two websites documenting activist projects are from the New York Civil Liberties Union (www.mediaeater.com/cameras/) and from Washington, D.C.’s Electronic Privacy Information Center (www.epic.org/privacy/ surveillance/).

Surveillance, voyeurism, and exhibitionism collide.

In 1991, the late Mark Weiser wrote a prescient essay for Scientific American foretelling the age of ubiquitous computing which he described as “embodied virtuality,” in contrast to then cutting edge virtual reality. It is this very distinction that motivates the present essay. For architects and urbanists, there can be no more significant revolution in digital technology than the spatial embodiment of computers embedded everywhere. This essay makes the argument that while embodied virtuality has emerged from clear historic precedent and origins, it raises four distinct implications that hold the potential to change our ideas about space and spatial practices. First, our environment is enacted and given life, not in the sense that robots are actuated, but that the entirety of the physical environment is recreated as a potential source of coordinated, interdependent actions and reactions. Whether this enacted environment is actual or imagined, as Foucault argued in the case of the panopticon, it reformulates our notions of power and moreover, our relationship to the world around us. Second, visibility both literal and metaphorical is transformed. What was solid and opaque becomes transparent, yet what makes the hidden accessible is itself invisible. Third, further erosion of the concepts of public and private force their reconsideration. In particular, questions of surveillance, control, and exhibitionism render the distinction between public and private new. Fourth, heightened security and surveillance possibilities hold the potential to restructure civility, or public life as we know it. In Britain, in the four years following terrorist attacks in London, there was a fifty-fold increase in surveillance networks. Post-9/11 America is experiencing a similar expansion, with even more sophisticated systems and little debate about the “Orwellian potential.”1 The consequences for the public sphere are paradoxical given the intrinsic nature of information technology to bite back—to be turned and used in ways opposed to its original intent. This essay introduces topics for debate, essentially asking more questions than it answers. The four-part argument for a transformed public sphere raises provocative issues for architects and urbanists. Just as the panopticon spatially embodied a complex cultural order in the 18th century prison, so 360

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will embodied virtuality stand as the spatial manifestation of the 21st century. We are only just beginning to realize the forms pervasive computing will assume. Consider Spielberg’s 2002 sci-fi movie Minority Report, where futuristic biometric scanners can identify shoppers and emit a siren song of personalized consumer preferences as they pass through the mall. This portrays a near future, and it is at this generative phase of development that architects and urbanists must engage pervasive technologies. While pervasive computing applications within the private sector, like advertising, may have a deep impact on society, I wish to explore ways that the technology is applied within and by the public sector, and in particular, by the state. Although there are clear technological precedents for the emergent, pervasive 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 intelligently yet fallibly, and its failure is complex (versus the thermostat, which is responsive but singular and unintelligent); and (3) that intelligent systems operate spatially, yet they are invisible (unlike robots). For utopians like Weiser, these distinctions suggest that an environment embedded with intelligent computing can be nuanced in compelling and even more natural ways, “as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.” Embedded networks, however, are just as likely to spark dystopic views, as have all preceding technological breakthroughs. Now, as pervasive computing grows, there is a certain urgency to its critical review by all those concerned with the public sphere. 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 networks because it implies not only physical space but also the metaphorical space of public discourse, social norms, interaction, and social sentiment. I want to make a strong distinction between what has been called “cyberspace” from what I will call the cyburg.2 Cyberspace is defined as having no physicality, no matter, and no Cartesian duality because there is only the mind, and communication is the only transaction: “Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.”3 If cyberspace is dematerialized space, the cyburg is spatially embodied computing, or an environment saturated with computing capability. It is the imminent stage of digital media that places computation in all things around us, from our own skin and bodies (bio-technology and nano-tech medication), to our clothing, our cars, our streets, our homes, and our wildernesses. The 361

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2 “Cyberspace” was first coined by science fiction writer William Gibson, then taken up in architecture by writers like Michael Benedikt in Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1991) and Christine Boyer in Cybercities (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). 3 From “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” by John Perry Barlow, who first applied sci-fi writer William Gibson’s term cyberspace to the digital social space enabled by the internet. See http:// www.eff.org/~barlow/DeclarationFinal.html.

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cyburg is the opposite of Christine Boyer’s cybercity and may indeed functionally sidestep all the dystopian visions of disembodied, disengaged, socially remote cyber-life. No longer residing in the abstract space of the internet, digital communicating, processing, and sensing increasingly actuate the world around us. Ironically, as computing becomes more pervasive, we will exist simultaneously within both cyberspace and cyburg-space. This dual existence characterizes a new postmodern space. Our own agency is enhanced by the cyburg, for we can know and act in more powerful ways. Complementing our empowerment is the newly enacted environment. Not only do the walls have ears, but networks of eyes, brains, and data banks to use for purposeful action. Though we are reluctant to attribute agency to objects in our surroundings, it is a stance that won’t survive long. These embedded systems can be said to have intelligence insofar as they link together diverse data bases and change their response according to new information as well as the consequences of their own actions. Baudrillard, in an essay on “Consumer Society,” says that the ecology of the human species has fundamentally mutated from a life surrounded by other human beings, to a life surrounded by objects.

4 Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings (edited by Mark Poster; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 29.

5 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1998), p. 283 (first published 1964).

The concepts of “environment” and “ambiance” have undoubtedly become fashionable only since we have come to live in less proximity to other human beings, less in their presence and discourse, and more under the silent gaze of deceptive and obedient objects which continuously repeat the same discourse, that of our stupefied (medusée) power, of our potential affluence and of our absence from one another.4 This could fundamentally mutate once again, as our objects/environment are no longer silent but active, nor are they obedient but indirectly willful. New capabilities of pervasive computing systems will expedite the restructuring of everyday life, since they permit what we considered the context to become a bonafide agent in the public arena. This is the opposite of early projections about electronic technology. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan wrote “The telephone: speech without walls. The phonograph: music hall without walls. The photograph: museum without walls. The electric light: space without walls. The movie, radio and TV: classroom without walls. Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his Paleolithic ancestors.”5 Instead, speech is issued by the walls, the museum’s walls present visitors its works of art according to their particular viewing habits, or any of a myriad curatorial themes. Street lights monitor as well as regulate traffic by assessing variable fees and suggesting less-crowded routes; public park sensors scan for unusual behavior and known criminals, reporting each to the authorities; smart glass becomes more obscure and 362

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reflective during the hottest part of the day; stores can identify your vehicle and send drive-by messages tailored to your past consumer behavior. These new levels of information, security, conservation, and access are balanced by heightened possibilities of intrusion, tracking, classification, and exclusion. Thus our urban environment can be qualitatively transformed so that it occupies a new status and role in everyday life. We can be complicit with the sidewalks, rejected or embraced by a park, bombarded in the streets with advertisements.6 Marshall McLuhan, sometimes called the “oracle of the electronic age,” argued that the content or message was not just distorted but defined by the media. Had he lived to see pervasive computing, his thesis might have extended to question the boundary between space and subject, between the advertisement, the object being advertised, and the reception of that ad. Even if we are less technological determinist than McLuhan, his analysis sets the stage for embedded virtuality.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-frame action in his time-sequence photographs, infrared sensors, microsensors, and processors can network together to build a dynamic portrayal of what otherwise could not be known. Doctors can track the real time progress of an ingested medication or see the internal anatomical details of a surgery patient; firefighters can get critical information about the fire as it rages and their rescue efforts; the migration of endangered whales can be closely monitored. “Visualization technologies” provide access into what was opaque, knowledge where there was previously ignorance, bringing close what had been remote—all these capabilities of pervasive computing transform our ideas about space. Now that police equipped with increasingly common thermal imaging technology (and a search warrant8) can drive past a house and “peer through” the walls, our ideas about not only privacy but the walls themselves must change. Even stranger is the use of the same imaging to see where a person has been—sensors of the past tense. This new technology goes beyond the often-mentioned collapse of distance promulgated by fax, telephone, or overnight delivery. It also represents the possibility of new knowledge that will enhance safety, inform action, and provide perspective. Publicly accessible monitors that display moment-by-moment readings of everything from water quality to activity in the public square to traffic patterns, can provide a type of information previously unavailable and potentially community-enhancing. Pervasive computing can open up the workings of an otherwise inaccessible mystery, whether that be the performance of a building’s structure in an earthquake or the nanny’s 363

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This image portrays a post-9/11 proposal to reduce traffic in lower Manhattan via remote surveillance that monitors the number of people per car to assess variable fees. The fewer passengers, the more it costs to drive on the streets. 6 The formal likenesses between physical urban infrastructure—the sidewalks, streets, systems of parks, sewers, and electrical grids—and pervasive computing networks facilitate each one’s absorption of the other. 7 McLuhan also recognized the connection between space, society, and technology. In his discourse on the book he says: “Printing, a ditto device, confirmed and extended the new visual stress. It created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and isolation from others.” In Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 50. 8 See Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court Decision regarding privacy and thermal imaging searches: “Justices Say Warrant is Required in High-Tech Searches of Homes.” New York Times, June 12, 2001.

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Traces of the people on the couch remain in the thermal image, so that we can now record not only aspects of the invisible, but the past. 9 These are Barthes’ italics; The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (translated by Richard Howe; New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), p. 5.

10 Jeffrey Rosen’s informative essay entitled “A Watchful State” was published just after 9/11 in the New York Times Magazine, October 7, 2001, pp. 38–43, 85, 92–93.

11 For a comprehensive and articulate discussion of the changing notions of public space, see Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Tridib Banerjee, Urban Design Downtown (Berkeley, CA: U.C. Press, 1998).

behavior while mom and dad are at work. There is an irony here: it is invisible, miniaturized sensors that make formerly inaccessible realms visible. That irony of pervasive computing is related to longstanding critical inquiry into the relationship of seeing and being seen. For example, Roland Barthes characterized the mythical status of the Eiffel Tower explicitly in these terms: because it “transgresses this separation, this habitual divorce of seeing and being seen; it achieves a sovereign circulation between the 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 monitored and 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 point of 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 of monument, the opposite of geographic centeredness, the opposite of subjectivity and objectivity. Consider the extensive implementation of closed circuit TV in London as well as other cities in Great Britain. Journalist Jeffrey Rosen found that the cameras, intended to reduce terrorism, were primarily used to watch hookers, girls in tight T-shirts, and young men of color. Expected to protect society, bored security guards become voyeurs, reasserting their own discriminatory stereotypes and sending a chill over public 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 should the signage go? It could also post: “by the London Police”; “your facial features will be scrambled”; or “connected to Interpol data base.” Such signage under our current assumptions of the city is the public space equivalent of Duchamps’ “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Being watched for unclear purposes by uncertain authority contradicts basic notions of public space.11 The uncertainty goes hand-in-hand with nano-technologies, with embeddedness, with surveillance, and even closed-circuit TV. Unlike Maupassant who could choose to dine in the Eiffel Tower in order to both escape its presence and reverse its relation to the city, the surveillance state is intrinsically omnipresent. There is no escape except perhaps to exhibitionism. PRIVATE AND PUBLIC

Exhibitionism, the tendency to show off something that is generally held to be private, is part of modernity and has long had its spatial component. When Napoleon III and Georges Eugene Haussmann opened the great 364

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boulevards of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, cutting swaths through working class neighborhoods to link axial monuments, they also ushered in modern urban life. Baudelaire wrote about this new unified city space—a space of human activity and physical connectedness. Wide sidewalks, streets lined with trees, cafes, and multitudes of citizens from across Paris came to characterize the city. A new public realm was made, and with it came a new definition of the sixteenth century dialectic between public and private. By some accounts, these highly public gestures created the frame for a kind of anonymity, so that the street both concealed and exposed its drama simultaneously. Marshall Berman, in his analysis of modernity, says “For lovers . . . [Haussmann’s Parisian] boulevards created a new primal scene: a space where they could be private in public, intimately together without being physically alone.”12 Haussmann’s boulevards shaped the modern city, opening intimacy to publicity across Paris, but they also promoted state control of the physical whole and the populace. A parallel transformation is occurring in our own decade: the reformulation of public and private urban life resulting from a sophisticated, digital connectivity. Even now, wireless networks available to cell phones and a variety of handheld devices enable people in public space to 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 intimate present, surrounded only by the company of strangers. Wireless internet already exists at offices, airports, and college campuses, and more recently commercial establishments like Starbucks are instituting their own networks available to customers for a fee. The results are paradoxical: greater connectivity coupled with increased isolation, intimacy paired with distance, privacy with publicity. Although pervasive computing’s multiple effects will take time to comprehend, new displays of intimacy and their dismal shadow, terrorism, are enabled by transformations of visibility, privacy, and publicity. Some of pervasive computing’s impacts are clearly extensions of those wrought by the telephone and the automobile, heightening individual privacy in the city, collapsing spatial distance, and restructuring physical space. But some consequences are unique to the electronic age. Perhaps the most profound impact concerns the realms of public and private, traditionally separated by semi-public/semi-private zones. This continuum has served to describe regions of social life and space for centuries. Public life, public space, and public man have stood for a certain notion of civility where chance interactions among strangers produce a societal tolerance. Many technological advances and social transformations have been accused of weakening the public sphere, including the automobile and the concomitant suburbs, the air conditioner, the elevator, and resultant skyscraper. However, only the most recent technological innovations threaten to dissolve the public-private continuum altogether. This is possible when what was once 365

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12 Marshal Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 152.

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13 This is the concept of public life constructed by Richard Sennett in his seminal book, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 295.

14 Irwin Altman offered this classic definition of privacy in The Environment and Social Behavior (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1975).

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 identity card). In The Fall of Public Man, sociologist Richard Sennett decries the crisis of public culture, arguing that public life had succumbed to an ideology of intimacy and personality, in turn sparking the transmutation of political into psychological order. If we agree with Sennett, then the eroded boundaries between public and private are merely further dissolved by the advent of embodied virtuality. But while Sennett saw public man in a free fall, 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 the remote counteract isolationism and withdrawal from public life? Similar to the way that Jacob Riis’s photographs of the slums at the turn of the 20th century showed “how the other half lives,” there are ways that remote sensing could expose previously hidden worlds. To adopt the view that the private is public requires the replacement of Sennett’s public man with a subject no longer bound by conventional public-private distinctions. Privacy, at the other end of the traditional polarity, has been defined as 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 intrusions while engrossed in a book. Indeed, privacy has been formulated as the central concept integrating socio-spatial behavior. This notion of privacy hinges on individual subjectivity: my desired levels of access, my boundaries. While it seems obvious to anyone experiencing “cell yell” (private cell phone conversations audibly broadcast to proximate strangers) that boundaries are difficult to establish, it may be less obvious that these boundaries are corroding. The continuum model, from private to semi-public, to public, might instead be replaced by a nested metaphor where publicity has infected privacy in every conceivable context, and vice versa. Moreover, embedded networks undermine the pretense that we control our environment or our boundaries within it—a pretense fundamental to the construct of privacy. The usurpation of privacy by means of technology is a modern phenomenon, but not a new one. Indeed, the concerns about pervasive computing’s intrusion into everyday routines were echoed in Rudofsky’s 1955 book on American domesticity, and an unnervingly diminished solitude in daily life. He worried about media technologies replacing conversation with mere listening: The latest invention in the art of listening introduces a prankish element into what is left of social intercourse. The pocket recorder, a gadget heralded as “of unparalleled usefulness,” can be counted upon to remove 366

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the last dregs of privacy from our lives. Originally designed for military and diplomatic secret service, it enables everyone to strike out a line of one’s own murky practices; . . . “Just stick it in a pocket and pin a tiny mike under your lapel (or wear the facsimile wristwatch mike!)—[the joyous exclamation point is theirs, not mine]—and you can record the words of anything within about twenty feet; you simply put your hand in your pocket and flick a silent switch.” What, one may ask, makes the promoters of the new furtiveness so sure that we shall keep on talking? 15 He goes on to imagine counter spying techniques, like scattering “antiacoustic confetti” all over our houses. Sounding like an inversion of the “smart dust” being developed for military purposes, Rudofsky’s concerns may have been technologically prescient but socially off-base. Legal privacy standards maintain social norms, but at the same time social norms evolve so that “the last dregs of privacy” are redefined. Perhaps the increasing numbers of surveillance cameras will have no more chilling effect on social life than did the tape recorder. But on the other hand, one could say Rudofsky’s worry was merely misplaced: Walkmans, not secret listening devices, are the pocket recorder’s greatest blow to social intercourse. If our awareness of the new social roles for wireless technologies was growing before September 11, 2001, it became our collective nightmare as last, loving calls were made from cell phones at the top of the World Trade Center and from within the fourth plane before it crashed in Pennsylvania. As it turned out, terrorists too were linked by cellular technologies that suited their mobile, network-structured organization. In the wake of 9/11, a surveillance society lurks. We can look again at the case of Great Britain: after terrorist attacks in London in the early 1990s, installation of closedcircuit cameras to surveil city streets and squares increased dramatically. In 1994, 79 city centers had surveillance systems; there were 440 such systems by 1998; and by 2001 there were over 2.5 million surveillance cameras across Britain. There, the average citizen is photographed three hundred times each day.16 By contrast, the average American was photographed seven times a day in 2001 by surveillance cameras. Since 9/11, there has been a proliferation of surveillance systems like the 100 cameras proposed for Times Square, and 300 for Los Angeles International Airport. The impact of ubiquitous surveillance cannot yet be known, but it is clear that the security interests of the state have negative consequences for individual privacy. The Patriot Act, signed into law just one month after 9/11, expedites counterterrorism efforts by easing restrictions on electronic surveillance. Our online activities are more likely to be monitored and data is easier to collect from I.S.P.s in what is often called “domestic spying.” In 367

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15 Bernard Rudofsky, Behind the Picture Window (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 196.

16 Rosen, “A Watchful State.”

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17 Reuters, “Washington Plans Unprecedented Camera Network.” New York, February 13, 2002; story ID: 593227.

Diller and Scofido’s first web art project, for the Dia Foundation, investigates live office webcams. 18 See www.mediaeater.com/ cameras.

19 See http://www.diacenter.org/ dillerscofidio/intro.html.

Washington, D.C., police activated a “command center” after 9/11 to monitor in integrated ways criminal data bases and surveillance cameras that operate in “shopping areas, streets, monuments, and other public places in the U.S. capitol.”17 Proposals for a “smart” national identity card resurface regularly, with computer chips to identify the user, limit access, and track the 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 social impacts will result. Sociologist Anthony Giddens describes the “disembedding” mechanisms of modernity. By this he means those mechanisms that break apart social relations across space and time, that remove local control of 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 are anonymous. Thus, although any abstract system requires trust of the anonymous (e.g. that nuclear reactors are built well enough to withstand terrorist attacks), that trust is intertwined with intrinsic doubt. The streets are surveilled by the police, yet we know that the police are not always trustworthy and that surveillance systems can be hacked. The pervasiveness of the systems is astounding: as early as 1998, a map of “every camera, public or private, which records people in public space” in Manhattan documented 2397 such cameras.18 It may be the urban designer’s task to create physical space or new forms of visibility to restore social bonds. In their project entitled “Refresh,” architects Diller and Scofidio created a project from a dozen office webcams. In considering why these cameras exist, the architects say: The live cam phenomenon can be thought of as a public service, or a mode of passive advertisement, or it may be a new type of exhibitionism, or selfdisciplinary device. The desire to connect to others in real time may be driven by a response to the “loss” of the public realm. But however varied the motives, live cam views always seem casual and lacking dramatic interest and content; they appear unmediated. Despite this apparent innocence, cameras are willfully positioned, their field of vision is carefully considered, and behavior within that field cannot help but anticipate the looming presence of the global viewer.19 In such applications reside possibilities for critique and modification of pervasive surveillance. And the critique emanating from the arts can spark debate that contributes to evolving social norms. Consider Lars Spuybroek’s D-Tower project for Doetinchem in the Netherlands. The whimsical multi-media project includes a website that surveys participating townspeople’s emotions on a monthly basis, and those emotions are in turn displayed in differing colored surfaces of the tower: when it is deep red, 368

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passersby know the town is feeling more love and happiness than hate and fear. PUBLIC LIFE

The examples above hint at possible ways pervasive computing will nudge a newly defined public life into existence. It will be part of the historical trajectory of technology’s socio-spatial implications for public life, as is the development of plate glass with the resultant shop window, and the television with the interiorization of residential space. In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (cybernetic organisms, like us), Donna Haraway argues that digital capabilities will transform everyday life: “No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household.”20 Just as Haraway sees the previously private household’s restructuring, there are parallels in the public sphere where common ground grows more individuated and privatized because of wireless technology. And public space can incorporate, even publicize, that which was remote and inaccessible: a town broadcasts its emotions; a school projects a children’s collaborative art project as it develops or webcasts their music lesson. Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon captured a formal-social symbiosis, whereby a spatial model arose to typify and exemplify a complex nexus in cultural history. Koolhaas’ description of the skyscraper as proximate stacking of unrelated lives captured the essence of the twentieth century. The imminent equivalent is the city of embodied virtuality: the cyburg for cyborgs. The embedding of tiny computers and their networks into the city brings promise and uncertainty. Creating a realm of dispersed displacement, surveillance aims toward a particular space or spaces. It, and we know not what or who “it” is, observes us and our actions, emotions, histories, and reactions. These observations may be known to us (screening for passengercarried weapons at airports), uncertain to us (visible cameras linked to unknown processors, such as face recognition systems and criminal data bases), or opaque to us (cyber-interceptions of potential terrorist communications). Thus, the actuated environment, our actuated surroundings, can now “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 remain ignorant. In a realm of dispersed displacement, discourse about centers and margins becomes irrelevant. For lovers walking hand in hand while speaking simultaneously by cell phone to their respective spouses, spatial dislocation is crucial and unquestioned. In this they remain secure. But they cannot be certain even about the immediate other: with whom is she speaking? Is she with 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 369

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D-Tower, a tower, a questionnaire, and a website for the city of Doetinchem. (Project by Lars Spuybroek of NOX studio in Rotterdam, in collaboration with artist Q. S. Seafijn, 1998–2003.) 20 Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review, 15/2, no 80, March–April 1985, p. 67.

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was not possible prior to wireless technologies whereby everywhere is connected. There is no spatial logic nor spatial guarantees for intimacy. Publicity likewise embodies uncertainty. Public life is spatially located, but also displaced and dispersed, requiring new logics and new physical forms. CONCLUSION

21 Mitchell’s e-topia argues that digital technology will transform the city in myriad positive ways (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2000).

22 Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 264.

Digital House. (Project by Hariri and Hariri, 1998.) Both interior and exterior walls are liquid crystal displays in this demonstration of new electronic technology for House Beautiful magazine.

The age of pervasive computing is imminent; its implications for architecture and for the city are just beginning to emerge. It is clear that ubiquitous and mobile systems will alter fundamental ideas about public and private, civic life, invisibility, and environmental agency. Each of these terrains is situated within the domain of design, giving rise to new architectural concerns. The existing literature projects consequences with either a utopian tone (as with Weiser’s seminal article of 1991 and William Mitchell’s e-topia) or a dystopic view (e.g. Rosen’s essay on British CCTV).21 Instead, in this preliminary exploration of issues, I have tried to present a double view, utopian and dystopian, equally aware of the promise and uncertainty that lies within embedded networks. Under such circumstances, the architect’s goal must be to embed civility in a pervasively computerized public realm. If the “public geography of a city is civility institutionalized” and if civility is, as Sennett puts it, “treating others as though they were strangers and forging a social bond upon that social distance,” then the designer must invent means to embed the possibility of civility into both new pervasive technologies and new urban geographies.22 What does it mean to embed civility in the public sphere? I would offer three linked guiding principles, information, choice, and control, which architects must find ways to embody in physical form. The first goal is to provide useful information about the embedded networks so that the public maintains an awareness about otherwise imperceptible systems. Information then contributes to people’s ability to make choices about their public lives, and simultaneously returns to them a degree of control. A parallel from the 1960s and early 1970s: the Vietnam war protests and “love-ins” that rejuvenated life in urban America’s public sphere were catalyzed by television broadcasting. Anti-surveillance web-camera performances in public settings are a similar phenomenon. Until awareness of pervasive computing is heightened, the lack of public debate restricts architecture’s full participation in the project to embed civility. Nevertheless, the simultaneous existence of cyberspace and cyburg-space creates a socio-spatial-digital arena like none before. Its origins are inherently modern: the modern world of contradiction and display, and where, as Marx famously put it, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” In Giddens’ conception of the late-modern condition of increasingly abstract systems, he cites intensifying conditions of risk and danger. Within his array of risks, one component is the created environment or 370

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socialized nature. This is “the infusion of human knowledge into the material environment.” Giddens identifies rightly “the altered character of the relation between human beings and the physical environment.”23 What I have called the enacted environment, Weiser’s embodied virtuality, is knowledge extended such that the material environment is infused also with intelligent action and reaction, data gathering, surveillance, and networked information. The intensity of risk increases substantially, but so can the intensity of experience. Giddens concludes his exegesis of modernity with the ways it might be engaged, which parallel the ways an era of embodied virtuality could be engaged: pragmatic acceptance, sustained optimism, cynical pessimism, and radical engagement. The last is the domain architects and urbanists must inhabit when designing to provide information, choice, and control. Radical engagement, or what Giddens at one point calls utopian realism, is indeed the ken of designers who use their expertise to reveal, contradict, play with, or intervene in pervasive computing. As a first step, designers are projecting information on surfaces that were formerly static. Works are increasingly interactive and customized. Here, the opportunities for informed choice and control can grow in complexity, sophistication, and diversity over the coming decade. The immanent domain of a newly public realm depends upon it.

This essay was originally published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 57, No. 1 (September 2003). 371

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23 These two quotes are taken from Anthony Giddens’ The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 124 and 127 respectively.

Spuybroek’s water pavilion for the Ministry of Water Management and the Destra Expo (1994–1997) in the Netherlands. The building incorporated digital sensors to activate light, sound, and projections according to the visitors’ movements through space.

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CITY OF DREAMS Virtual space/public space EUGENIA VICTORIA ELLIS (2000)

ARIADNE’S VEIL

1 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 43–44.

2 Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 68, 123–128.

3 Doob, p. 116.

4 Alberto Pérez-Gomez, “The Myth of Daedalus,” AA Files 10 (1985): 52. 5 Isidore de Seville, Etymologiae 15.2.3.

It has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason why I was describing it to you: from the number of imaginary cities we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything 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 a ball of thread in the other: one to be used to silence the Minotaur’s bite, the other to retrace his steps.2 Theseus had been armed with these dual pelotons by Ariadne to face the two great dangers of the labyrinth: the monster within and the maze’s entangling inextricability. Theseus was successful in both slaying the Minotaur and in escaping Daedalus’s creation. His victory dance at Delos with the children who had escaped with him, first circling in one direction and then winding back, mimicked not only the path they took through the labyrinth on their escape, but also celestial harmony: the first pattern 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 the third movement all stood still like the earth, around which everything else circles. It has been said that both the human architect Daedelus and the 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 cities and so, too, have most mazes been named after cities, for example, Troy, Jerusalem, Babylon, Nineveh, and Jericho.3 Movement through a city’s architecture was the dance; and the space of the city was the space of ritual. Neither architecture nor city was an abstract, geometrical entity.4 According to Isidore of Seville, “urbs” is derived from “orbis” because ancient cities were always circular in form.5 Jericho was circled by the Hebrews for seven days and, like Ariadne, Rahab helped the Hebrew spies escape from the city with the aid of a scarlet thread. Troy was the archetypal 372

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Heavenly Jerusalem, medieval woodcut.

city for many medieval people, and the circling Trojan Ride became known as the founding of the Roman city. The ritual dance was related to the ritual of the foundation of cities in Roman times,6 when an essentially invisible ritual created an invisible wall that made the city secure; the ritual was so important that it had to be re-enacted periodically to re-inaugurate the founding of the city. In classical times, the founding of a city began with the calling of its founder in a dream.7 The city would then be inaugurated by a recognized seer, an augur who was especially gifted: one who could see heavenly bodies that are invisible to the ordinary mortal. The augur would project this celestial vision onto the landscape and oversee the plowing of a furrow around the site discovered by its founder. The primordial idea of the city is contained within the labyrinth: a dialectic of seemingly opposing characteristics that reveals order out of apparent chaos. The labyrinth itself is a splendidly ordered complexity that confuses us only when we cannot comprehend its underlying system. Cities are labyrinths of a dual nature: inherent within their complex artistic order is a bewilderment experienced by someone so immersed in this order that its abstract pattern cannot be seen without the vision provided by the change in perspective obtained when elevated above the confusion. Ariadne’s thread is required to provide that insight when one is tangled within the turnings of the maze. The maze itself has characteristic dualities that are all held in balance and are all perspective-dependent: blindness and insight, chaos and order, confusion and clarity, path and plan, unicursality and multicursality, vision from within time and from beyond eternity.8 There are two varieties of labyrinth: the unicursal maze and the multicursal maze. 373

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6 Hermann Kern, “LabyrinthCities, City-Labyrinths,” Daidalos 3 (1982).

7 Ivan Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness (Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985), pp. 12–15.

8 Doob, p. 189.

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9 Doob, p. 48.

Typical circular unicursal diagrammatic.

10 Doob, pp. 46–48.

Example of an early multicursal labyrinth of the so-called Chartres type. 11 Doob, p. 188. 12 Doob, p. 130.

13 George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 21–22.

The unicursal model has its origins in the visual arts.9 Its structural basis is a single path that twists and turns, defining the most circuitous route conceivable and the longest possible way to get to the center; there are no choices, the maze-walker simply goes where the path leads. It has only two certain points: entrance and center. The characteristic quality of movement through the unicursal maze is steady and continuous, and involves time more than decision. Ariadne’s thread is not required. The multicursal model derives from the literary tradition.10 Its structural basis in contrast incorporates an extended series of bivia, or an array of choices. The multicursal maze is dangerous even if no minotaur is lurking, for one risks getting lost and remaining perpetually imprisoned. The characteristic quality of movement through the multicursal maze is halting and episodic, with each fork or alternative requiring a pause for thought and decision, and emphasizes an individual’s responsibility for his or her own fate. This maze is potentially inextricable and escape depends not only on the maze-walker’s intelligence, memory, and experience, but also on the kind of guidance provided by Ariadne’s thread: insight, instructive principles, signposts, or advice along the way. In a unicursal maze one learns by precept; in a multicursal maze, by dialectic. The need for a seer or visionary to clarify the meaning of dreams and visions, to provide Ariadne’s insight, illustrates the dual or multiple perspectives implied by mazes, which can be seen in part (from within) or whole (from above, or through memory and insight).11 What seems to us to be an inextricable prison is simply what divine order looks like when viewed from within time, where a linear and sequential perspective is natural.12 From a more enlightened or celestial point of view, the confusing maze is a simple and well-ordered structure. The multicursal labyrinth has origins in the literary traditions of classical antiquity, and its attributes can be seen replicated in present-day computer systems logic, particularly in what has come to be known as hypertext. The unicursal labyrinth can be compared to analogue technology: the recording of sound and visual information through a serial or linear process, the access of which is sequential, for example, a cassette recording or video tape. The multicursal model is similar to digital technology, which removes the need for sequence by allowing direct access to a particular piece of information through a series of bivia (an array of choices) by branching through networks, for example, a compact disc. The word text derives originally from the Latin word for weaving and for interwoven material. The electronic linking which has reconfigured text as we have known it has created a hypertext: a form of textuality that permits multilinear reading paths.13 Hypertext can be conceived of as a vast assemblage, which is defined by Derrida in Speech and Phenomena: “The word ‘assemblage’ seems more apt for suggesting that the kind of bringingtogether proposed here has the structure of an interlacing, a weaving or a 374

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web, which would allow the different threads and different lines of sense or force 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 a multicursal labyrinth and could be used to define characteristics of computer 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 of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared 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 other forms of data that are linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web, and path.17 In The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch studies the mental image of the city formed by its citizens; and accordingly, defines its clarity upon the ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern.18 Coincidentally, two of the elements Lynch uses to define the city’s image are node and path. Paths are the channels along which the citizenobserver moves, such as streets, walkways, and transit lines.19 Nodes occur at the crossing of paths and are often the foci of civic activity. The texture of the city is dependent upon the weaving together of nodes and paths, which in turn determine the pattern and geometry of the city’s fabric. The reading of the image of the city is hypertextual and is perspectivedependent: moving through the city is a labyrinthine dance; its image unfolds through movement along a path; at each node there are alternatives that require reflection; there are many entrances and no right one; and there is 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 dialectic of oppositions that both bewilders and illuminates, the attributes of which together define their contradictory spatial logics: one side of the analogy has to do with the construction of space, the other the construction of information networks; one side is material, the other immaterial.21

COMPUTER MATRIX/CITY METRIC

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. William Gibson, Neuromancer 22 375

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14 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 131.

15 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), pp. 5–6. 16 Landow, p. 4. 17 Landow, p. 3.

18 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1988), pp. 2–3. 19 Lynch, p. 47.

20 The notion of the labyrinth as a network, and of meandering through the city and in the process weaving a veil, was inspired by Marco Frascari’s article, “A New Angel/ Angle in Architectural Research: The Ideas of Demonstration,” Journal of Architectural Education 44/1 (November 1990): pp. 11–19; in particular “. . . a meander is a labyrinth that works as a net. In a net every point is connected with every other point.” (p. 13) 21 M. Christine Boyer, Cybercities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), p. 15.

22 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), p. 51.

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23 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963), pp. 136– 137. 24 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, vol. I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 131– 132. 25 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as 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, “The Superblock,” Essays in Architectural Criticism (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1981), pp. 83–102.

The spaces we inhabit, the social relationships we form, and our modes of perception have historically been influenced by the way we receive information. For example, prior to the printing press, information was relayed orally and its transmission relied upon memory. Thought patterns were based upon the ability to think in terms of the inter-relationships encouraged through the use of mnemonic devices.23 Before newspapers were readily available, people congregated in churches to hear sermons that were coupled with news about local and foreign affairs. Eventually the newspaper began to replace the pulpit and churchgoers learned about local affairs in silence at home.24 The format of the newspaper, periodical, and illustrated magazine with texts laid out in columns of disparate narrations and juxtaposed to illustrations, required the reader to develop a new way of processing information from fragmented data.25 With today’s electronic data processing and digital technology, we will have to develop new modes of perception that will allow us to navigate through the web-like disjunctive array of highly mediated information.26 The computer matrix is a space of rupture and discontinuity that parallels the fragmented space perceived by a society continuously in motion: driving the freeways and shopping at the mall.27 The space of the computer recedes into an electronic matrix that pulls the user into a total withdrawal from the world, distancing engagement with one’s surrounds and the city itself.28 A transformation of our cities is taking place such that the material space of the city metric, which once was measured by traditional western geometry, work, buildings, and the machine, is being replaced by the ethereal space of the postindustrial city, which is beginning to be defined by the computer matrix, leisure, cyberspace, and the information network. The public realm of the ancient city was representational. Not only did activities of a public and collective nature occur there, but the public realm itself also symbolized those activities.29 The medieval city belonged to the merchants and artisans. The church, the market square, the buildings of the guilds, and the city gates were its representational elements. The public realm was defined by its axial roads (paths) and their crossing (node) where the market square and church were usually located. The medieval city and its architecture were crafted according to the guild tradition whose principles were transmitted, like an aural literary tradition, by rules of thumb. On the other hand, the Renaissance city belonged to the politicians and politics. The representational elements were its public monuments such as civic buildings, obelisks, and coliseums, which in themselves were metaphors of collective or ceremonial functions. The medieval marketplace, which was generally located at its geometrical center, became the actual center of political power. The Renaissance city and its architecture were designed according to Platonic geometrical principles and conceived as total 376

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projects. The city and its buildings were an act of an individual mind and were constructed by builders who merely carried out the visions of this mind according to a preconceived plan. The mental image of the historical city, whether based on commerce or politics, is one of interaction, ceremony, and ritual provided by a public realm that was representational of those activities. 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 metaphorical status of today’s postindustrial city is one of a consumptive postmodern society gradually consuming itself. The American city of today is a symbol of both the real and virtual distance created by the shift from nineteenth-century industrial production to contemporary information technology. This has been a long-term process which began in the 1930s due to the highways created by the Works Progress Administration and the single-family cottage subsidies funded by the Federal Housing Administration. Urbanism was replaced by suburbanism due to the diminished perception of distance provided by travel in an automobile over accessible and connected roadways. Like the market square and the church, but without the symbolic significance, the shopping center at the crossroads of highways began to appear to support these suburban communities.30 According to Fredric Jameson, features of a new type of postindustrial society began to emerge: a mobile automobile culture, new types of consumption, the pervasive penetration of advertising and media throughout society, and the replacement of the traditional tension between city and country with the suburb and universal standardization.31 For this postmodern culture, reality has transformed into images and time has become fragmented into a series of perpetual presents. The change from an urban society to a suburban society (completed by the time of the 1990 census, which recorded a suburban majority for the first time in this nation’s history) parallels the radical break from modernism to postmodernism: from an industrial economy based on the machine and the production of tangible goods and services to a postindustrial economy based on electronic technology and the production of the intangible commodity of information, or, in other words, a basic shift from traditional manufacturing to more service-oriented businesses. This shift has necessitated a restructuring of our cities in response to this change in status. Today, the images associated with the industrial city are negative: declining economic base, pollution, the past, and the old, a city on its way down. Being in the industrial city is associated with work and the world of production. In contrast, the postindustrial city is seen as the bright new future: clean, efficient, crime-free, high-tech, on the economic upswing, based on consumption and exchange. Postindustrial life is associated with 377

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30 Neil Harris, “Spaced-Out at the Shopping Center,” The Public Face of Architecture, ed. Nathan Glazer and Mark Lilla (New York: The Free Press, 1987), pp. 320–328.

31 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), p. 125.

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32 John Rennie Short, Lisa M. Benton, William Luce, and Judith Walton, “The Reconstruction of a Postindustrial City,” Journal of Architectural Education 50/4 (May 1997): 244–245. 33 Uwe Drost, “The Transformation of Urban Identity in a Post-Industrial Society,” Body, Technology, and Design: Proceedings of the 11th Annual A.C.S.A. Technology Conference (1993): 122– 125.

34 Richard A. Plunz, “Detroit is Everywhere,” Architecture (April 1996): 55–61.

35 Mike Davis, City of Quartz (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 223–226.

36 Udo Greincaher, “The New Reality: Media Technology and Urban Fortress,” Journal of Architectural Education 48/3 (February 1995): 176–84.

37 Heidi Landecker, “Is New Urbanism Good for America?” Architecture (April 1996): 68–77.

the world of leisure as opposed to work.32 The postindustrial city can be categorized into three broad classifications: cities of fragments, fortresscities, and cities of the “new urbanism.” Cities of fragments are those cities like Houston or Atlanta, which have disconnected metropolitan fringes comprised of suburb after suburb.33 The structure of these cities is formless, fluid, and homogeneous without center or periphery. They are defined by the automobile and the highway, are thinly populated with occasional spots of density, and appear limitless as they fade into the countryside. Their symbolic identity lies with the highways and beltways that define them as networks of endless circulation without space or dimension. Cities like Detroit and Los Angeles might be described as fortress-cities that clearly demarcate social boundaries. These cities openly expose American apartheid: whites reside safely in the suburbs, while poor minorities live in the city.34 For example, due to advances in technical production and the streamlining of factory processes, Detroit’s urban automobile 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-World colony than an urban American community. Detroit’s poor residents are held prisoners in a city with an urban center replete with the empty carcasses of abandoned skyscrapers, which were left by corporations who discovered it to be safer and more economical to operate from a suburban location electronically connected to the rest of the business world. This is a far cry from a decade or so ago when the urban skyscraper was a symbol of a corporation’s power and success. On the other hand, Los Angeles has created a dense, compact, multifunctional core area of billion-dollar, block-square megastructures from the erasure of its historical core.35 This new Downtown is comprised of superblocks and has a self-contained circulation system, every amenity imaginable for the nine-to-five businessperson, and an impenetrable edge defining it as a citadel separate from the rest of the central city. The affluent in LA live in fortified enclaves outside the city limits complete with encompassing walls and gates, security cameras, restricted entry-points with guards, both public and private police services, and privatized roadways.36 Cities of the “new urbanism” can be conceived of as both cities of fragments and fortress-cities. These cities are being developed in suburban locations based on a nostalgic urban structure reminiscent of the historic city but without the context provided by the density of population and cultural diversity.37 These cities can be developed anywhere any time. They are loosely based on the notion of a small town of mixed-use occupancy in three- to four-story buildings, generally comprised of streetfront retail with residential on the floors above. This ideal urban core might then be accessed on foot by the newly built surrounding neighborhoods. The urban planning 378

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of these cities is generally modeled on the desirable qualities of walkable cities such as Charleston, South Carolina, or Venice, Italy. Besides the goods and services required for the inhabitants, the industry to support this type of city is anything within driving distance or that is accessible electronically to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, these developments ultimately attract a single class of resident and are destined to become privatized middle- and upper-income enclaves. The postindustrial city is increasingly making apparent the sharp division between those who have technology and those who have not. Traditional public space is disappearing and being replaced by privatized pseudo-public realms. The richness and character of any urban environment comes from a sheer density, which necessitates that there are people on the streets at all times of the day co-mingling races, creeds, and cultures. This city is the city of dreams: where people from different backgrounds and lifestyles brush shoulders with each other, which spurs an imagination of the unknown. The imaginable can only be triggered by difference. Diversity is the connecting thread of the city of dreams. THE DANCE OF SUPERABUNDANT LIFE

The comparison between the forms of play discovered and created by men, and the uninhibited movement of play exhibited by superabundant life, can teach us that precisely what is at issue in the play of art is not some substitute dream-world in which we can forget ourselves. On the contrary, the play of art is a mirror that through the centuries constantly arises anew, and in which we catch sight of ourselves in a way that is often unexpected or unfamiliar: what we are, what we might be, and what we are about. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Play of Art”38 The universal civilization and homogenous culture we find ourselves in today is a result of a global commodification, which was forecast by Walter Benjamin early in the twentieth century when he wrote that the “world exhibitions glorify the exchange value of commodities. They create a framework in which commodities’ intrinsic value is eclipsed.”39 Paul Ricoeur has described this situation as one in which mankind is approaching en masse a basic consumer culture where everywhere “one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminum atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda, etc.”40 Globalization and unification of commodities have created a society that has lost the object of its desire. The object no longer has value in itself as an object inasmuch as its value is dependent upon something intangible such as the control, power, or prestige it might bestow on its possessor.41 According to Kenneth Frampton, this cultural change has created attitudes that “emphasize the impotence 379

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38 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Play of Art,” The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 130. 39 Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 151. 40 Paul Ricoeur, “Universal Civilization and National Cultures” (1961), History and Truth, trans. Chas. A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), p. 276. 41 Roland Barthes, “The New Citroën,” Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), pp. 88–90.

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42 Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), p. 25.

43 Rosalyn Deutsche, “Questioning the Public Space,” Public 6, ed. Mark Lewis, Andrew Payne, and Tom Taylor (Toronto Public Access, 1992): 49–64. 44 Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” The AntiAesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 126–130.

45 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Festive Character of the Theatre,” The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 57–65.

of an urbanized populace which has paradoxically lost the object of its urbanization.”42 In so doing, urban public space has transformed into pseudo-public realms defined by privately owned megastructures such as hotels and shopping malls; while simultaneously electronic space is being restructured into public space. The megastructure is a privatized public space: a new kind of commercial environment based on a rigid exclusion of undesirable populations, available only to those who can afford to be there, heavily policed, and equipped with high-technology surveillance to ensure optimal control and public safety.43 Public space, which once was the theatre of the social and the theatre of politics, is disappearing.44 Once a heterogeneous “scene” mirroring human activity, the public realm has now been replaced with the privatized and homogenized public space, such as the shopping mall, which acts as a screen and a network. This postmodern change began when the status of the object as a mirror of its subject changed and took on a new dimension 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 virtues of communication, which invade everything as true public space disappears. The “real” scene has become a screen or network of infinitesimal memory and an endless stream of information. Architecture of a human scale has become a system of matrices: what once was acted out or projected mentally and psychologically here on earth as a metaphorical scene, is now projected onto the screen of absolute reality, without any metaphor, as an image of reality that is also a simulation of reality. In the traditional city, space was like a mirror or scene which derived its qualities from an imitation of life through participation in the ritual of living. In ancient Greece, this “play” of life was reenacted through the ritual dance, which had its origins in religion and the festival, and from which theatre developed in ancient Greek culture.45 The uplifting experience of the festival is one that raises its participants out of everyday life and elevates them into a kind of universal communion. Participation in the festival is one of enactment, or re-presentation, in which time is suspended so that the past and present become one in an act of remembrance. This vital essence of the festival creates a transformed state of being that produces in the participant a dreamlike mirage of reality. The origin of theatre was in the city streets: where people gathered and were of equal significance to the actors; where the city’s citizens were actors in the play of urban life. The primordial idea of the ancient city was contained within the labyrinth and the ritual dance. The space of the city was the space of ritual and architecture was the “dance” that re-presented the order of the world. Because postmodern culture is moving away from being a scene or mirror of life, the labyrinth can be taken to symbolize the city as a network of information and communication and as a screen upon which the play of life is projected. 380

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The urban environment of the postindustrial city is disassembling from its historical roots, and reassembling as fortress-cities. Urban public space is disappearing and re-appearing as pseudo-public realms disengaged from the city and located peripherally in the network of the suburban landscape. The postindustrial city is being evacuated by its community, leaving its empty space as a metaphor for a disembodied computer matrix. Activities of a public nature are being miniaturized and simulated in the electronic inner world of information. The lesson we are learning is that information does not need the public realm, which originally gave the city its form and representational value.46 The information network is a labyrinth of a dual nature: the “public” is increasingly being redefined as a composite of privates by a global system of communication that is only available to those who can afford the technology. Societies can now be grouped into the information-rich and the information-poor: there are some areas of this country experiencing what has been called “electronic redlining” and are being denied video, voice, and computer communications.47 The postindustrial city of inter-connected computers holds the promise of permitting a complexity of relations by bringing people together through information and communication without the physical limitations of geography, time zones, or conspicuous social status. However, communication on the internet is in isolation, which cuts the 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 relational and 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 realm can be experienced at a distance from the privacy of one’s own living room via a network of televisions and word processors. The postindustrial city is becoming a screen upon which life may be projected as a simulacrum substituting for an absent presence. In cities such as Detroit the vacant carcasses of abandoned skyscrapers stand as tower-museums of ruins. These cities can be seen as endemic of the future American city: devoid of its occupants, who now safely reside in cities of the “new urbanism” with global connections from the privacy of their own homes without the discomfort of brushing sides with the unclean. The postindustrial city may become a placeless space: a modern day labyrinth whose sole purpose is to be a node in the network of the endless flux of circulation, information, and communication. Lacking the experiential, the postindustrial city may become a placeless space to pass through on the way to somewhere else. Without its citizens, the ritual dance cannot take place in the postindustrial city. There can be no scene involving the play of life. In order for postindustrial cities to become viable public urban places they must be able to encourage the city’s citizens to become actors in the play of urban life. Ideally, and with foresight, the postindustrial city 381

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46 Martin Pawley, Theory and Design in the Second Machine Age (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 178.

47 Steve Lohr, “Data Highway Ignoring Poor, Study Charges,” New York Times, 14 May 1994.

48 Michael Heim, “The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace,” in Cyberspace, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1994), p. 75.

49 Neill Bogan, Chea Prince, and Glenn Harper, “A Brave New World?” Art Papers (July–August, 1997): 16–22.

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will return to the labyrinth of the legendary Daedalus: a labyrinth that symbolizes the order of the city through capturing the trace of the ritual dance.

This essay was originally published in the Proceedings of the 88th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2000. 382

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Page 383

INDEX

Absurd, Theater of 239–40

263–4; reflective practice 342–4; and urban

Acconci, Vitto 285–6

design 237

action space 281–3, 288–90

Arendt, Hannah 80, 83, 292–3, 294

Acuña, Rodolfo 92–3

Ariadne 372, 373, 374, 375

Adler, Cy 40

armatures/enclaves 238–9, 240

A.D.O.B.E. L.A. 87, 93, 94

Armonics 191–2

Adorno, Theodor 157–8, 164

art 150, 284–7

affordable housing xx, xxi, 78, 173, 176,

Artaud, Antonin 239–40

182

Artnews 150

Aga Khan award 71

ARUP Engineers 160

agglomeration 304, 305–6, 311

Asco 87, 89n13, 91, 94

Agnew, John 346, 347

Assemblage 93

A.H.O.Z. (Affordable Housing Overlay

Association of Collegiate Schools of

Zone) 78

Architecture xxiii, 105

air conditioning 320–1, 340–1

Athens 272

airports 337

Atlanta 109, 209–11, 214–15, 292, 378

Alexander, Christopher 20, 338

Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn 267

Allen, Gerald 268

Atlantic Station 292

Allen, Stan 121–2

Atlantic Terminal 108

Allen, Woody 7

atria 215n55, 265

Alliance Texas 299

Auge, Marc 297n1

Almogran 301–2

avant garde 108–9, 161, 343

Alsunut Development Company Ltd. 301 Alvo, Nebraska 150

Baca, Judith 89, 90

Alys Beach 174

Back Bay, Boston 7–8, 254

American Bicentennial 58

Baird, George 213

Amsterdam 229–31, 233

Bakhtin, Mikhail 96

Anderson, Sherwood 259

Balanchine, George 163–4, 164

anti-abortion 273

Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles 276–7

anti-city xvii, 54

Balinese cockfight 96

antiterrorism 364, 367–8

Ballets Russes 163–4

anti-war demonstrations 283

Baltimore 8, 266

Appadurai, Arjun 90, 94, 297

Banham, Reyner 26, 321

Aranya Nagar 17

Barcelona 281n1, 288–90

Archer, Dennis 116

Barlow, John Perry 361n3

Archinect 117–18

Barthes, Roland 204, 364, 375

Architectural Association 227

Bataille, Georges 209

Architectural League of New York 358

Battery Park City xix–xx, 105, 181, 182–3,

architectural types: deconstructivist 345;

184, 282, 287–90

environmentalist 53, 71; high-tech

Battle, Guy 336

339–40; postmodern 214–15; regenerative

Baudelaire, Charles 365

356–8; vernacular 73, 107–8, 168, 200,

Baudrillard, Jean 24, 25, 26, 30n15, 204, 362

315

Beacon Hill, Boston 254

architecture: computer-aided design 335; as

Benjamin, Walter 288n12, 379

frozen music 214; green theory 73–4;

Bentham, Jeremy 240

iconic value 196; loss, narrative of 271;

Berlin, Isaiah 129

modernism 242; public space 260–1,

Berlin Wall 222

383

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INDEX

Berman, Marshall 365

Buber, Martin 321, 322

Berréby, Gérard 36n14

Buchanan, Colin D. 267

Berry, Brian J. L. xviii

Buchanan, Peter 341–2, 358

Berry, Wendell 354

Buffalo 8–9

Bhabha, Homi 89

building materials 316, 341–2

“Big & Green: Toward Sustainable

built environment: economic spaces 303;

Architecture in the 21st Century” 52–3 bigness 69–70, 71–4, 207–8, 220–8 Bijlmermeer 204, 229, 233, 234

homogeneity 307–10, 311; human interaction 4; identity 324; social change 105; stewardship 57–8; transects 106

Bill, Max 339–40

Buñuel, Luis 209

biometric scanners 361

burial grounds 257–8

Bishop Ranch, San Ramon 268

Burnham, Daniel xxi

Black and Veach 144 black culture xviii, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86

Cain, Louis S. 317, 322–3

Blake, Peter 28, 29

Calquhoun, Alan 73

Blake, William 203, 204

Calthorpe, Peter 176, 191, 195

Blau, Eva 166

Calvino, Italo 9, 372

Bloomberg, Michael 250

Canal Street, New Orleans 28

Bloomington 7

Capello, Odin 41–2

BMW plant 109

capitalism 129, 235

Bocage Plantation 330

car use: city/country 46, 378; congestion 51,

Bond, Max xxi

250; Ford 48; oil consumption 55–6;

Borden, Iain 36n12

pollution 336; and public transport 13,

borderlands 7, 75–6, 88

263; sprawl 109; suburbs 12; see also

Boston 7–8, 130–3, 254–5, 258; see also New Urban Ring The Boston Conference 136

Casa Familiar 77–8, 79

Boston Fens 141

CCTV 250–1, 364; see also security cameras;

The Boston Globe 136

surveillance

Boston Public Library 261

CCTV Building (Koolhaas) 160

Boston Society of Architects’ Committee on

Celebration 190

Municipal Improvements 132

cell phones 367, 369–70

boulevards 260, 365

Centennial Olympic 292

boundaries 10, 78–9

Central Park, Manhattan 222–3

Boyer, Christine 210, 362

Cerda, Ildefonso 221

Brambilla, Roberto 267

Certeau, Michel de 34, 41; bricolage 94;

Bramwell, Anna 347n8

Crawford 293; The Practice of Everyday

Braungart, Michael 55

Life 35–6; Sadler on 37; walking 38, 40,

Brey, Philip 353n22

44

bricolage 94

Chanel, Coco 162–3, 165, 162

Bridgeport 176, 178, 184

Chanel exhibition 155

Briggs, Detroit 116

charity 98

Britain 282, 338, 360

Charleston 379

Broadacre City 25

Charlestown 131, 136

Brooklyn 184, 267

Charlottesville 28

Brown, Bill 40

Chase, John 115–16

Brown, Denise Scott 210

Chermayeff, Serge 338

brownfield sites xx

Chicago: agro-industrial past 308;

Browning, Robert 9

architectural growth periods 200; financial

Brown’s Chapel, Selma 85

center 304–5, 309; Halsted Street 128;

Bryan, John xxi

Lakeshore Drive Apartments 264; Loop

384

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highways Carpenter, Ben 268

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INDEX

xxi, 200; and Los Angeles compared

Columbus, Indiana 197

310–11; Millennium Park xxi, 105; and

commodification 72, 336, 379

New York compared 308; World

common good 134, 272

Columbian Exposition 96

commons 251, 254–6

Chicago School 303

Commonwealth Avenue, Boston 258

Chicano culture 87–8, 90–1, 92

communication 7, 241, 338, 369–70

Chicano Youth Conference 88n4

communications technology 352

Child, Susan 287

community: democracy 119; Everyday

China 160, 208, 250–1, 298

Urbanism 111, 117, 118–19;

Christian Science Monitor 72

infrastructure 138, 151; isolation 148;

Churchill, Winston 161

marginalized 95; Mumford 321; New

C.I.A.M. 125, 230–1

Urbanism 112; place 346–8; suburbs 258;

CIDCO 300

urban design 15–16, 180–1

Cincinnati 147

composite grafting 65, 68

Cincinnati University 118

computer-aided design 334–5

circuitboards 67, 68

computers: embedded 360; obsolescence

Ciriani, Henri 17

62n4; recycling 62n6; space of 376;

cities: central sites 59; dominant cultures

ubiquitous 360, 363–4, 365; see also

81–2; Holston 279–80; as labyrinth

pervasive computing

372–3, 380, 382; landscape 121, 140–1;

Comte, Auguste 346

and nature 223; primary elements 197–9;

Condé Nast Building 52–4

public realm 10, 376–7; and regions

Coney Island, New York 203, 205–6

176–7; society 15; see also public space

congestion 51, 250

cities, types: corporate 299; everyday/

conglomerates 301

extraordinary 96; fortress 378, 381;

Congregational church 255

functionalist 125; global 269, 309;

Congress for the New Urbanism 106

incremental 118; instant 283–4; machine-

connectivity 9, 10, 122, 148–9, 370, 379

city 240–2; mixed-use 109–10, 187,

Connery, Nancy Rutledge 138

378–9; modern 377; postindustrial 381;

Consolidated Edison 52

postmodern 34, 237, 282; Renaissance

Constellation 266

376–7; self-contained 268; walkable 12,

consumerism xxv, 12–13, 129, 342

35–6, 379; working xxi, 13; see also edge

Contini, Edgardo 267

cities; garden cities

control 20, 234–5, 240–1

citizenship 110, 112, 138, 272, 273, 279–80

Cook, Peter 225n12

City Beautiful movement 107, 261–2

Cooper, Alexander xix, 182

city islands concept 220, 221–2

Corboz, André 31

City Parks movement 224

Corner, James 124–5

Citywalk 12, 274

counter-spying techniques 367

civic liberalism 129n6, 134

La Courdangle, Saint Denis 17

civil rights marches 283

courthouses 24–5, 85, 118, 256

Civil Rights Movement 80, 83, 86

Covent Garden, London 118, 238–9

civil traditions 24, 25, 251

craftsmanship 173–4

civil unrest 274–5; see also riots

Crane, David 21

class xviii, 148, 248, 258, 259–60, 262,

Crawford, Margaret 87, 93–4, 115–16, 292,

272

293, 294

Clinton, Bill 138, 153

crime statistics by region 346n3

Cloud Gate (Kapoor) xxi

critical regionalism 345–6, 350–1, 354–5,

C.N.U. (Congress of New Urbanism) 109

356, 357

COBRA 36–7

Crown Fountain (Plensa) xxi

CoEvolution Quarterly 53

cultural cleansing 12, 166–7

collage 62–3, 64–5

Cultural Revolution 156

385

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INDEX

culture 83–4, 281–2, 335–6; see also black culture

difference 192, 279; see also diversity Digital House 370

Culver City 118

digital technology 185, 376

Cumberland Mall 268

Diller + Scofidio 368

Curitiba 108

Dionne, E.J. 133–4

Cusato, Marianne 192n10

the disadvantaged 108, 192

cybercity 362

Disney World 12

cybernetics 335

dispersal 304, 369

cyberspace 361, 370, 375

dis-placement 24–5, 369

cyborg 61n3

districts 327–8, 329–32

cyburg 361, 370

diversity 195, 248, 379

Czechoslovakia 152

Dogon village 199

Czerniak, Julia 123n19

Doshi, B. V. 17 Douglas Loop, Louisville 118

Daedalus 372

Downing, Andrew Jackson 258, 259

Daley, Richard M. xxi

downtown xvii–xviii, 10, 168, 186n4

Dali, Salvador 209

Downtown Athletic Club 207, 233

Dallas 268

Driehaus Awards 159, 160

Dallas County Courthouse 85

dross 61; design experiment 66–7; post-

Danube quays 165

praxis 63–4; reuse paradigms 65–8

D’Aprile, Dario 42

D-Tower 368, 369

Davis, Cullen 282

Duany, Andres 116, 176, 191, 208

Davis, Mike 128, 210, 271

Dubai 299, 300, 301

Davis, Robert and Daryl 173, 174

Dubai Internet City 299

Dear, M.J. 277n7, 305

Duchamp, Marcel 64, 364

Debord, Guy 37, 334

Dukakis, Michael S. 132

defamiliarization 350

Duke, Doris 159

La Défense 206, 216, 223–4

Dutch Pavilion, Expo 2000 74

democracy: community 119; grid system 18, 27–8; in-action 344; public space 251,

Eastgate 73

291, 294; representative 333–4;

Ebene Cybercity 299

technoscience 334; tolerance of differences

Eckstut, Stanton xix, 182, 287

192; urban design 118

ecological engineering 150

Democratic People’s Republic of Korea 298 Democritus 64n12

149–51

demonstrations 272–3, 283

economic spaces 303, 307–10

Denver 32, 107

eco-tech 356

Denver Art Museum 108

edge cities 7, 12, 186, 204, 206, 208, 241,

department stores 261

242

Depression Era 179

Edgemar 32

derelict people 98; see also homelessness

Edificio Mirador, Madrid 161

dérive 36, 37

Edmund Pettus Bridge 85

Derrida, Jacques 69, 195–7, 204, 374–5

egalitarianism 18, 27, 112, 163, 256–7

Descombes Architects 234

Eiffel Tower 364

determinism: environmental 347n8, 349;

Eisenman, Peter 158, 186, 196

rationality 30n15; technological 353, 363

El Al freight plane crash 234

Detroit 9–10, 116, 309, 378, 381

electricity blackout 52

Deutsche, Rosalyn 291n1, 293

electricity consumption 46

Diaghelev, Serge 163

electronic data processing 376

dialogic relations 353, 358

Electronic Now 109

Dickens, Charles 203, 204

elevators 53

386

16:21:08:05:08

ecological factors xxiv–xxv, 45, 68n14,

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INDEX

Eliot, Charles 257

First Amendment rights 265

Eliot, T.S. 203, 204

First Baptist Church, Selma 85

Ellison, Ralph 80, 81

Fishman, Robert xxiii, 105, xviiin3

Emaar 301

Flathead Country Courthouse 24–5

Emergency Relief Appropriation Act 179

Flyvbjerg, Bent 337–8

Emerson, Ralph Waldo 6, 211

Folse, John 330

emerymclure architecture 327, 328, 330

“Footprint Mapping” (Fujimura) 42, 43

Empire State Plaza, Albany 208

Ford, Henry 48

enclaves 180, 237–40, 241, 378

Foreign Trade Zones 297, 298

energy consumption 46, 47, 49, 52, 340

Forest Hill Gardens, Queens 8

Enlightenment 26, 346–7

forestry, clear cutting 342

environment 336, 362

Forty-Second Street, New York 12

Environmental Design & Construction 53

Foster, Jodie 210

environmental determinism 347n8, 349

Foster, Norman 69, 71

Environmental Protection Agency 188

Foucault, Michel 237, 239–40, 360, 369

Environmental Science and Technology

Los Four 91, 94

article 152

Fowle, Bruce 53–4

environmentalism 47, 74, 151–2, 189

Fox & Fowle Architects 53

ethical struggles 302

fragmentation 34, 62–3, 133–4, 378

ethnic cleansing 349

Frampton, Kenneth 70, 71, 248, 345, 346,

ethnic neighborhoods 200, 257, 262

350, 354–5, 379–80

EuroDisney 33n18

Frankfurt School for Social Research 157

Europe 112, 113, 298–9, 336

Fraser, Nancy 271, 272, 273, 274–5, 293–4

Everyday Urbanism 105; citizen control 110;

Fred Jordan Misson 98

community 111, 117, 118–19;

Free Trade Zones 301

egalitarianism 112; public realm 292;

freedom 24, 25, 28, 207–8, 228

Speaks on 113; Upton on 115n4;

Freixes, Dan 289

vernacular paradigm 107–8

French Quarter, New Orleans 327–8

Everyday Urbanism (Chase, Crawford and Kaliski) 115–16, 119

Fresno mall 267 Frontline 160

e-waste 62

Frost, Robert 10

Expo 2000 74

Fry, Maxwell 70

Export Processing Zones 297, 298, 301

Fujimura, Noriyuki 42, 43

exurban highway interchange 188

Fuller, R. Buckminster 321

Exxon Tower 31

Furley, David J. 64n12 Fusco, Coco 89

facial recognition software 41

Futternan, Marc 191n9

Fairmount Waterworks 142–3 Falwell, Jerry 134

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 379

Faneuil Hall 266

Galleria, Houston 268

Fathy, Hassan 70, 71

Galleria Mall 268

favelas 118

Gandelsonas, Mario 69, 70, 71, 131

Federal Housing Administration 377

Gap San Bruno 71, 73

Federal Plaza, Manhattan 286–7

garden cities 7, 107, 122, 179, 241, 242

feminist activists 273

Garreau, Joel 242

Ferguson, Homer L. 178n10

Geddes, Patrick 240, 317–18

Ferriss, Hugh 206, 208

Geertz, Clifford 96

festivals 96, 380

Gehry, Frank xxi, 32, 108, 158, 159, 185,

Fifth Avenue, Manhattan 30

196

Fifth Street, Los Angeles 99

Geldzahler, Henry xviii–xix

financial markets 309

Generic City 211–13, 292

387

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INDEX

Genet, Jean 209

Harbor Place, Baltimore 266

Georgetown, Washington 128

Harlins, Latasha 275

Gibson, William 361n2, 375

Harrah’s Casino 330–1

Giddens, Anthony 353n21, 368, 370–1

Harrison, Wallace 206

Gideon, Sigfried 156–7, 158

Hartford, Connecticut 176

Gladys Avenue, Los Angeles 101

Harvard Graduate School of Design 213–14

glass technology 54, 340, 362–3

Harvard School of Architecture 155–6, 158,

Glatt, Linnea 144

167

global warming 52

Harvard Square, Cambridge 128

globalization xvii–xviii, 17, 72, 73, 248, 297,

Harvey, David 210, 251

305–6, 379

Haussmann, Georges Eugene 364–5

Gnaizda, Robert 53

Hawaii 313–14

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 349

Hawkins, Stephen 225

Goldberger, Paul xix, xx

Hayden, Dolores 89n13, 94

Gomez-Peña, Guillermo 88–9

Hayes, Michael 156–7, 158, 164

Goodman, Paul xxii, 269–70

Hedgewood Properties 189n7

Goodman, Percival xxii, 269–70

Hegel, G.W.F. 158

Goodstein, David 55

Heidegger, Martin 321, 346, 351, 354, 355

Gorky, Maxim 205

Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis 267

Graff, Frederick 143

Herrón, Willia 89–90

graffiti 91

Hertzberger, Herman 231, 233, 234

Grand Avenue, Los Angeles 108

Herzog + Partner 358

Great Saunter 39–40

heterogeneity 7–8, 127, 128–9, 134

Greece, ancient 380

heterotopias: enclaves 237–40; machine-city

green belts 241, 317–18

240–2; urban design 242–3

The Green Braid xxiii

Heymann, David 350

green buildings 70, 72, 121, 342

highways 24, 151, 263, 377, 378

Greenbelt, Maryland 179

Hismen Hin-nu Terrace, Oakland 16

Greenberg, Ken 109

history 34–5, 158, 159, 212–13

Greendale 179

HITEC City 299

greenfield sites 7, 59, 338

Hodge, Gerald 323

Greenhills 179

Hohokam irrigation canals 144

Greenough, Horatio 25, 316

holes 120, 122, 123

Greenwich Village 47

Holl, Steven 108, 111

grid system: agency of 32; Battery Park

Holland 141, 267, 340–1

City xix–xx; democracy 18, 27–8; fluidity/

Hollinger, Barbara 150

movement 27; Kalispell 24; movement 26;

Hollywood 305, 306–7

social order 30

Holston, James 279–80

Gropius, Walter 155–6, 158

Holtzclaw, John 45

The Grove, Los Angeles 118

home ownership 179–80

Gruen, Victor 267

homelessness 22, 271, 277–8

Grupos 91

homogeneity 128–9, 134, 140, 252, 307–10,

Guggenheim Museum 30–1 Gulf Coast 109

311 Hong Kong 300 Honolulu 322–3

Habermas, Jurgen 271, 272, 273–4, 293, 346

Honolulu Park Board 313

Habraken, N.J. 229, 231–2, 234–5

Hood, Raymond 206, 208

Hadid, Zaha 108, 109

Hook, Hampshire 338, 338

Halbwachs, Maurice 80, 84

HOPE VI xxi, 111, 161, 187, 188, 192

Halsted Street, Chicago 128

Horsfall, T.C. 177

Haraway, Donna 61, 369

Horton Plaza, San Diego 17

388

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INDEX

House Beautiful 370

Great American Cities xviii, 48, 194, 208;

House Rules 93

incremental city 118; organized

housing: affordable xx, xxi, 78, 173, 176,

complexity 194–5; parks 49; plain, old

182; industrial 177–8; local projects 17;

brick buildings 198; Soho xix

mass 231–2, 234–5; public 176; social

James, Sharpe 152

161; see also enclaves, HOPE VI

Jameson, Fredric 355, 356–7, 377

Housing Act 263

Jarzombek, Mark 72

Housing and Urban Development: see HUD

jazz 157–8

Houston 31, 109, 268, 378

Jefferson, Thomas 19, 27, 28, 48, 56, 314,

Howard, Ebenezer 179, 241, 242 HUD (Housing and Urban Development) 180, 181n22, 264; see also HOPE VI

316 Jeju 300 Jenny, William Lebaron 159

hurricane damage 109, 116, 189

Jensen, Ron 144

hypertext 374, 375

Jerde, Jon 117, 274 Jericho 372

identity cards 251

Jerusalem 372, 373

import replacement concept 199–200

Jesuits 27

individualism 28

Johnson, Hildegard Binder 27n

industrial housing 177–8

Jones, Pettus & Pyatock 16

inequalities: access to information 381;

Joseph, Franz 165

wealth 176, 186, 248, 272

Josselyn, John 254

infill 112, 236

Journal of Architectural Education xxiii

information network 381

Judaism 157

information technology 299–300

Jussieu University 225–6

information transmission 376 infrastructure: Cincinnati 147;

Kahan, Richard 182

commonwealth 146–8; community 138,

Kahn, Louis 117

151; connection 148–9; cultural utility

Kalamazoo 266

139, 140–1; ecological function 149–51; as

Kaliski, John 115–16

landscape 141–3; maintenance 146–7;

Kalispell 24, 26, 33

Phoenix 144; public spaces 147–8;

Kaplan, Daniel 53

working cities 13

Kapoor, Anish xxi

Ingersoll, Richard 208

Karl Marx Hof 166

Institute for Applied Autonomy 41

Katrina, Hurricane 109, 189

Institute for Classical Architecture 158–9

Katrina Cottage 192n10

Institute of Transportation Engineers 188

Kaus, Mickey 128, 129, 134

insurgency 279–80; see also riots

Keane, Thomas J. 38

International Movement for an Imaginist

Keillor, Garrison 143

Bauhaus (IMIB) 36

Kelbaugh, Douglas 115–16, 196, 202, 295

Internationale Situationniste 36, 37

Kennedy, Sheila 62n7

Internet 191, 333–4

Kentlands 294

invisibility 83, 85

Kepes, Gyorgy 63

Ionesco, Eugène 239–40

Kerouac, Jack 26

iSee 41

Khartoum 301

Isidore of Seville 372

King, Rodney 275 King Abdullah Economic City 299, 300

Jackson, John Brinckerhoff 140, 141, 150

Kish Free Zone 300

Jackson, Kenneth 330–1

kit-houses 192n10

Jackson Square, New Orleans 118, 328–9

knowledge economy 308

Jacobs, Jane: border vacuums 49; Dark Age

Koning-Eisenberg 118

Ahead 113–14; The Death and Life of

Koob-Sassen, Hilary 304

389

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INDEX

Koolhaas, Rem 118; on Atlanta 209–11,

Lefebvre, Henri 251, 293, 353

214–15; Berlin Wall 222; Big Brother

Lefort, Claude 293

Skyscraper, Sweat Shop Economy 160;

Legorreta, Ricardo 274

bigness 69, 71, 207–8, 220–8; Bijlmer 229,

L’Enfant, Pierre-Charles 49

235; CCTV Building 160; claustrophobia

Lerup, Lars 198

205n6; Content 160; Delirious New York

Lettrist International 36

203, 205, 206, 210, 233; edge cities 204,

Lewis, Sinclair 259

206, 208; and Eisenman 186; essays 160,

Libeskind, Daniel 108, 196

203, 221; EuroDisney 33n18; as

libraries, public 261

existentialist 217; “Exodus” 227, 228;

Lindbergh City Center 292

Generic City 211–13; green building 70;

Living Rooms at the Border 78–9

interview 291; Jussieu University 225–6;

Lloyd Shopping Center, Portland 265

Le Corbusier 207, 209; “Learning

local dimension 73, 316, 321–2

Japanese” 203, 211; making do/making

locale 347, 348

real 219; Manhattan 206; Melun-Sénart

location 347–8

122, 123, 221, 222; mixed-use urbanism

Lockhart, Texas 256, 259

109–10; Post Urbanism 108, 110–11,

Logan Valley Shopping Center, Altoona 265

195–7; Pritzker Architecture Prize 220;

London 250, 338

radical nihilism 356; Singapore 209,

Los Angeles: Baldwin Hills 276–7; Banham

215–18; skyscrapers 369; S,M,L,XL 203,

on 26; as borderland 88; and Chicago

204, 207, 209, 210; sprawl 223; surrealist

compared 310–11; Chicano culture 87,

influences 204; urban theory 227–8; void

92; Citywalk 12, 274; civil unrest 274–5;

123

counter-publics 271; downtown 10, 98,

Kostof, Spiro xxii

378; East 90–1, 92; Fifth Street 99; as

K.P.F. architects 301

fortress city 378; Gladys Avenue 101;

Krauss, Rosalind 286

Grand Avenue 108; The Grove 118;

Krieger, Alex 3, 5, 130

Hollywood 305, 306–7; homelessness

Krier, Leon 109–10, 174, 195, 282, 354

277–8; Latino culture 87; Metropolitan

Krier, Robert 282

Transportation Authority 50; missions 98;

Kubla Khan 9, 372

murals 99; neighborhood centers 191n9;

Kwinter, Sanford 211

Omar Avenue 98; Pershing Square 274, 278; politics of identity 91; public space

labyrinth 372–4, 375n20, 380, 381, 382

274; rationalization 339; San Julian/Sixth

Lafitte’s Landing 330

Street 98, 100; Skid Row 98, 118; street

Lagerfeld, Karl 155, 163

vendors 275–7; Towne Avenue 100, 101;

Lai, Richard 21

transport 45; as urban model 305–7;

Lakeshore Drive Apartments, Chicago 264

Whittier Boulevard 90; Zona

landfill 131, 144–6, 183

Los Angeles Police Department 98

landscape 120, 122, 140–1, 310, 348–9

Los Angeles School 303

landscape urbanism 120–1, 124–5

Lo/Tek 64

landscaping 212–13

Loudoun County, Virginia 49

land-use planning 139

Louisiana, Southern: languid spaces 324–32;

languor 324–32

residential structures 325; tourism 331–2

Las Vegas 109, 240

Louisville, Douglas Loop 118

Latino culture 87

Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia 364n11

Latour, Bruno 352, 355, 357

Love, Tim xx

Le Corbusier 121, 139, 207, 209, 230–1,

Lovins, Amory 53

264, 282

Lucy & Phillips 58–9

L.E.E.D.-N.D. 189

lumber industry 342

Lefaivre, Liane 345, 346, 348–51

Luna Park 203, 205–6

390

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Centroamericana 276

landmarks 8, 30, 327–8, 329–32

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INDEX

Lurie Garden (Nichol) xxi

Maupassant, Guy de 364

Lyle, John Tillman 356, 357

mazes 373–4

Lynch, Kevin 9, 325–6; The Image of the

media technologies 366–7

City 196–7, 375; A Theory of Good City

megacenters 268–9

Form 19–20, 241–2

megalopolis 339

Lyndon, Donlyn 266

megaplex 135 Meier, Richard 197

McCoy, Lester 313, 314, 317, 322

Melun-Sénart 122, 123, 221, 222, 226n16

McCreery, Sandy 36n12

memes 198, 200, 201

McDonough, William 55, 71, 72

memory 83–4, 84–5

McGrath, Ben 38

mental map 34, 144

McGraw-Hill Tower 31

mercury contamination 152

McHarg, Ian 121, 123–4, 125

Mesiniaga, Menara 71, 73

MacKenzie, Donald 351

Metropolitan Museum 155

McKinley, William 8

Mexican muralists 89

McLuhan, Marshall 242, 362–3

Mexico–US border 75–6, 301

Magazine Street, New Orleans 267

Michigan Debates on Urbanism 194

Main Street concept 32–3, 258–9

Michigan University 116

maintenance 146–7, 150–1

Midtown Plaza, Rochester 267

Maki, Fumihiko 212, 217

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 9, 200

Malaysian traditions 73

migrant workers 75, 76–7

Mandl, Dave 42–3

Millennium Park, Chicago xxi, 105

Manhattan 46, 48; Central Park 222–3;

Miller, Henry 209

congestion charging 250; Federal Plaza

Miller, Richard B. 52

286–7; Fifth Avenue 30; Guggenheim

Milton Keynes 338–9

Museum 30–1; Koolhaas 206; landmarks

Minneapolis 267

30; Lower East Side xx–xxi; Lower

Minnesota Department of Natural Resources

Manhattan Expressway xviii; Rector Place

152

287; Rockefeller Center 30–1; security

Minnesota University 152

cameras 40–1, 250; South Cove

Minority Report (Spielberg) 361

287–8

Miranda, Vicente 289

Manhattan Waterfront Greenway 40

Miss, Mary 287

Mao Tse Tung 156

Mississipi river 189, 324

maquiladoras 301

mixed-use buildings 107

market urbanism 105

mobility 6; see also movement

markets 108, 186n4, 306

M.O.C.A. (Museum of Contemporary Art)

Markova, Alicia 163 Marsh, Benjamin C. 177 Martínez, Rubén 87–8

93, 94 modernism 155, 161–2, 166, 240, 241, 242

Marx, Karl 370

molding 64–5, 67–8

Marxism 28; aesthetic theory 158; bigness

M.O.M.A. (Museum of Modern Art) 69,

225, 235; community 346–7; Frankfurt

161, 167

School 157; production, mode of 353;

Moneo, Rafael 205

reification 63

money liberalism 129n6, 134

Massachusetts 8, 9

monumental buildings 261–2

Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority

Moore, Ruble Yudell student center 118

133, 136

Moore, Steven A. 351n15

Massachusetts State House 254

Moses, Robert xviii, 48, 241

mat building 121, 122

Mostafavi, Mohsen 126

Matisse, Henri 163

movement 26, 32, 33, 77

Matura infill system 236

El Movimiento 88

391

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INDEX

Mumford, Lewis xvii, 8; air conditioning

community 112; creativity 189–90;

320–1; community 321; open planning

criticism of 195; flexibility lost 112, 113,

320–1; parks 313–14, 319–20, 322–3;

192; interconnectedness 198–9; Kelbaugh

regionalism 314, 315–16, 320, 321–2;

on 116; modernism 161–2, 166; neo-

Report on Honolulu 321; The South in

traditionalism 185; organized complexity

Architecture 314, 315, 316, 321; sprawl

194–5; pattern books 190; post-

318–19; Technics and Civilization 314–15,

industrialism 185; and Post-Urbanism

317, 321; Whither Honolulu 313, 314,

194; rules 189; sprawl 186–7; successes/

315, 316–17

failures 155; typology 110; urban design

municipal bankruptcy 176, 184 muralism 89, 99

188–9 New York City 30; asthma rates 47; Atlantic

Murguia, Edward 88n4

Avenue 267; Brooklyn 184, 267; and

Muybridge, E. 363

Chicago compared 308; Coney Island 203,

M.V.R.D.V., Pig City 74

205–6; crime statistics 346n3; ecology 45–6; Forty-Second Street 12; General

N.A.F.T.A. 299

Development Plan 181; green credentials

Najle, Ciro 126

47, 54–5; Metropolitan Transportation

Napoleon III 364–5

Authority 50; public transport 45;

National Building Museum 52–3

Rockefeller Center 282; sidewalks 262;

National Conference on City Planning 177

Smith’s walks 38; Soho xviii, xix;

National Historic Preservation Act 264

songlines 39; South Bronx 184; South

National Register of Historic Places 264

Street Seaport 266; 4 Times Square 52–4;

Native American earthworks 150

traffic 51; utopian project 45; walking

natural resources 150–1

projects 43–4; see also Battery Park City;

Natural Resources Defense Council 188 nature: and city 223; as fake 212–13; land use 139; landscape 120, 348–9; transcendentalism 222

Manhattan; Roosevelt Island New York State Urban Development Corp. 182–3 New York Times 250

Naureckas, Jim 39

New Yorker, The 38, 53

Navogazing project (Capello) 41–2

Newport 178n10

neighborhood centers 191n9

Ngo, Viet 150

neighborhoods 8, 77, 189

Nichol, Gustafson Guthrie xxi

neo-avant garde 108–9

Nicollet Mall 267

neo-traditionalism xix–xx, 107, 185

Nietzsche, Friedrich 205

networks 301, 309, 352, 358

nihilism, radical 356

Neutelings Riedijk Architekten 358

Nixon, Richard 180

Neutra, Richard 314, 321

nodes/paths 375

New Bedford, Massachusetts 9

Nolen, John 48

New Haven 255–6

Nolli plan analysis 221

New Jersey 176

nonmodernism 355–6, 358

New Museum of Contemporary Art 42

non-state forces 297, 301

New Orleans 116, 143, 324; Canal Street 28;

Nora, Pierre 80, 84

French Quarter 327–8; Jackson Square

North Adams, Massachusetts 8

118, 328–9; Magazine Street 267; River

Notre Dame architecture students 158, 159

Road 326–7; St Charles Avenue 326

Nuremberg Rally 283

New Songdo City 301 New Urban Ring, Boston 128–9, 130, 132–4, 135–6, 137 New Urbanism 105, 106–7, 378; City

obsolescence 62n4, 66, 67, 327 office buildings 261; see also skyscrapers

Beautiful movement 107; commercial

Ohio 52

regionalism 350; as commodity 294–5;

oil consumption 55–6

392

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Oakland 16

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INDEX

Olmsted, Frederick Law 141, 178, 222–3, 225, 257 O.M.A. (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) 122, 123, 229, 233–4, 356

Piano, Renzo 340 Picasso, Pablo 62–3 Pig City, M.V.R.D.V. 74 Pioneer Courthouse Square, Portland 118

Omar Avenue, Los Angeles 98

Pioneer Square, Seattle 282

“One Block Radius” (Ray and Mandl) 42–3

pipeline corridors 151

O’Neill, Shayne 226n16

Pirsig, Robert L. 26

Ong, Aiwa 297

Pittsburgh cottage 259

On-Site 161

place 345, 346–8, 353, 356; see also space

Open Building group 235–6

placeform 340, 344, 350, 357

Owen, David 5

Plan for New York City 181 plantation culture 330

Pacific Design Center 70

planting 212–13

panopticon 215n55, 240, 360–1, 369

plastic matter 65–6, 68

The Parachute (Koob-Sassen) 304

Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 116, 176, 191

Parade of Fools 97

Plensa, Jaume xxi

Parc de La Villette (Tschumi) 120–1

Plessy v. Ferguson 82

Parc du Clot 289

Pocket Wall 67, 68

Paris 197; La Défense 206, 216, 223–4;

political economy 177

Haussmann 365; Koolhaas on 212; Villa

politics of identity 91

Dall’Ava 209

pollution 152, 336

parking 169

Polo, Alejandro Zaero 121

parking lots 54, 108, 262, 339

Polo, Marco 9, 372

parks: class 259–60; design 125, 227;

population density 7, 46, 47–8, 50–1

egalitarianism 256–7; Jacobs 49;

Portland 118, 265

Mumford 313–14, 319–20, 322–3;

Portman, John 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 214,

Olmsted 257; as playgrounds 260; public/ private 265, 292; ribbon-design 319; voids 222; see also specific parks

215n55 Post Urbanism 105, 108–9, 110–13, 195–7, 199

pathways 326–8, 375

postcolonialism 89

Patriot Act 367–8

postindustrialism 185, 186, 190–1, 268–9,

Pearce Partnership 73

377–8, 381–2

Pedestrian Pocket concept 176

postmodernism 214–15

pedestrian realm 188–9, 235

poststructuralism 205

Ped-GRiD program 191n9

poverty 22, 250, 257

Pei, I.M. 197

preservation 58–60

Pelli, Cesar xix, 69, 70

Princeton Forrestal Center 268

Pentagon, New Map 75

Pritzker, Jay xxi, 159

Peopled Space experiments 285–6

Pritzker Architecture Prize 220

Perimeter Town Center 292

privacy 363–4, 366, 367

Pershing Square, Los Angeles 274, 278

The Private Public 292

pervasive computing 361, 362, 363–4,

private sphere 247–8, 364–9

365–6, 370

privatization 176

Petersham common 255

productform 339–40

Phalen neighborhood 152–3

production, mode of 353

Philadelphia 142–3

proof-of-attendance shops 328

Phillips, Michael 53

propinquity 7, 11

Phoenix 50, 56, 144, 145–6, 152

proximity 7, 11

Phoenix Arts Commission 143, 144–5

psychogeography 36, 37, 43, 44

Phoenix Public Arts Plan 143–4

PsyGeo Conflux 41, 43

photography, time-sequenced 363

public art 260

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INDEX

public buildings 168

reurbanism xvii–xviii, 105

public realm: cities 10, 376–7;

reuse paradigms 4–5, 9–10, 64, 65–8

communication 369–70; Crawford 292;

Richards, Brian 337n3

defined 247–8; loss of xxii, 271, 368;

Richardson, H.H. 314, 316

recreation 268; streets 254–5; see also

Ricoeur, Paul 379

public sphere

Rieff, David 72, 73

public space: architecture 260–1, 263–4;

Riis, Jacob 366

Arendt 292–3; Battery Park City 183;

Rijnboutt, K. 232

centred 31; commercialization 262;

Ringstrasse, Vienna 134, 135

democracy 251, 291, 294; design 281–2;

riots xvii, 272–3, 275, 283

fear in 262; infrastructure 147–8; loss of

ritual 372, 373

274; Loukaitou-Sideris 364n11; parks

River Road, New Orleans 326–7, 329–30

265; postindustrialism 381–2; privatized

Riverside, Illinois 8

265, 380; rethinking of 273–4; streets

Rochester, Midtown Plaza 267

267–8; traditional 379; use of 36, 256,

Rockefeller Center 30–1, 206–7, 282

291; see also walking

Rocky Mountain Institute 53, 54

public sphere 247–8, 271, 272, 273–4, 360–1, 364–9; see also public realm

Rogers, Richard 71 Rojas, James 87, 92–4

public transport 45, 50–1, 263

Roland Park, Baltimore 8

Puerto Rico 314

Romans 349

Pyatok, Michael 16

Romero, Frank 87, 91, 91–2, 94 Romose-Washington Metro Watershed

race xviii, 80, 83, 85–6, 184, 275

District 152

Radburn layout 319

Roosevelt administration 314

Raffone, Salvatore 137

Roosevelt Island 177, 181–2

railroad stations 261

Rose, Charlie 158

railways, high-speed 336–7

Rosemary Beach 174

Rainer, Roland 70, 71, 339

Rosen, Jeffrey 364

Rapid Transit Development 149

Rossi, Aldo 197–8, 201, 202

rationality, determinism of 30n15

Rotterdam Architecture Biennale 76–7

rationalization 337–8, 339, 341

Rourke, Howard 3

Ray, Christina 42–3

Rouse, James Wilson 266

recycling 54–5, 152

Rouse Corporation 128, 266

reflective practice 342–4

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 316, 317

Regional Contribution Agreements 184

Rowe, Colin 158, 282

regionalism: authenticity 315; biotechnic

Rudofsky, Bernard 198–9, 366–7

314, 317; commercial 345–6, 349–50;

Rumney, Ralph 36n14

critical 345–6, 350–1, 354–5, 356, 357; as

Ruskin, John 349

historic strategy 348–51; Mumford 314,

Rutsky, R.L. 333

315–16, 320, 321–2; Nazi Heimat 345–6, 349; New Urban Ring, Boston 132–3,

Saarinen, Eero 197

135–6; picturesque 345–6, 348–9;

Sack, Robert 361

romantic 345–6, 349

Sade, Marquis de 209

region/place 176–7, 348

Sadler, Simon 36–7

rehabilitation of buildings 58–60

St Charles, Sales Centre 191

Reijndorp, Marteen 295

St Charles Avenue, New Orleans 326

Riley, Terence 161

Saint Denis 17

religious right 273

St Paul, City of 152

Renzo Piano Building Workshop 358

Saipan 301

retail centers 168; see also shopping malls

Salazar, Rubén 90, 91–2

reterritorialization 279

Salk Institute 117

394

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INDEX

Salt Lake City 191

Simulated Urbanism 292

Salvucci, Fred 132

Singapore 209, 215–18, 300

San Diego 17, 75–6, 78–9

Singapore Planning and Urban Research 209

San Julian/Sixth Street, Los Angeles 98, 100

Singer, Michael 144

San Martin, Ignacio 56

Sitte, Camillo 269, 282

San Ramon 268

Situationism 36–7, 41

San Ysidro 78

Skid Row, Los Angeles 98, 118

Santa Monica 32

SKIL 300

Sao Paulo 309

skyscrapers 70–1, 264, 369; abandoned

S.A.R. (Foundation for Architectural Research) 232, 233

381 skywalks 267

Sassen, Saskia xvii–xviii, 69, 334

Sloterdijk, Peter 297

saxophone 158

smart buildings 340

Schlovsky, Victor 350n13

Smart Growth 49, 109, 188

Schoenberg, Arnold 157

SmartCode 189

Schon, Donald 343

Smith, Adrian D. xxi

Schuman, Tony xx

Smith, Caleb 37, 38

Schuylkill River 143

Smith, Joseph 19

Schwitters, Kurt 64

Smith, Neil 210

Scientific American 360

Smithson, Alison 120, 121, 122, 123, 225n12

Sclar, Elliott xx

Smithson, Peter 121, 225n12

Seagrove 169

Smyser, A.A. 323

Seaside 168–9, 184, 190, 294; affordable

social behavior 30, 105, 347

housing 173; architects 173, 175; building

social housing 161

types 171–2; craftsmanship 173–4;

social work 177n8

twenty-five years on 172–5; zoning code

society 15, 176, 346–7

171

Soho xviii, xix

Seattle 282

Soja, Edward 34–5, 37, 347

security cameras 40–41, 250, 252; see also

songlines 39

CCTV; surveillance

Sorkin, Michael 271

segregation 83, 85–6, 148, 378

South Bronx, New York 184

Selma, Alabama 80, 85

South Cove 287–8

Sennett, Richard 128, 129–30, 271, 366, 370

South Street Seaport, New York 266

serpentine bridge (Gehry) xxi

Southfield 9–10

Serra, Richard 284, 286–7

space: Arendt 83; boundaries 78–9; civic

Sert, Jose Luis 3

xxi, 168; embedded computers 360;

services sector 306–7

formal/informal 118; form/outcomes

sewage treatment system 150

303–4; human behavior 20; languid

Shaftesbury, Anthony, Earl of 348–9

324–32; marginal 284; movement 33; and

Shanghai 309

place 285–6; ritual 372; shared

Shawmut peninsula 130–1

consciousness 34, 37; social relationships

Shenzhen 251

85, 376; Soja 34–5; speed 324; and time

shopping malls 12–13, 264–5, 266–7, 292, 341, 380

156; see also public space Speaks, Michael 113

Shorewalkers 39–40

Special Economic Zones 297, 298, 301

Shurtleff, Arthur 132

spectacle 283–4

sidewalks 258, 262

spectacular society 40, 342–3

Sierra Club 49–50

speed 324

Silicon Valley 305

Speer, Albert 283, 349

SimCity 16

Spencer, Herbert 346–7

Simmel, Georg 321

Spielberg, Steven 361

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sprawl xvii; cars 109; control of 338n6; dissatisfaction with 57–8, 176, 180;

ontological practice 351; place 345, 353; socio-politics of 248–9

Koolhaas 223; Mumford 318–19; New

technology parks 301

Urbanism 186–7; population density

technoscience 334, 343

47–8; public transit 51

telecommunications 269

Spuybroek, Lars 368, 371

telephone 353; see also cell phones

Stapleton 107

Ten Shades of Green 358

Starbucks 251–2

Tennessee Valley Authority 314

Starrett, Theodore 205

termit mounds 73

state control 24–5, 240–1, 247–8

Terry, Quinlan 159

Steiglitz, Alfred 7

text/texture 8–9, 374–5

Steinbeck, John 26

thermal images 364

stewardship 57–8

Theseus 372

Stravinsky, Igor 157, 164

Thoreau, Henry David 7

street people 98, 271

Tijuana 75–6, 77

“Street Stripes with Memory” (D’Aprile) 42

Tilted Arc project (Serra) 286–7

street vendors 275–7

4 Times Square, New York 52–4

streets 9, 32–3, 254–5, 267–8

Tocqueville, Alexis de 26, 28, 291

strikes 272–3

Tokyo 9

structuration 353n21

Tonnies, Ferdinand 347n4

Suarez, Ray 291

tourism 329, 331–2

suburbanization 12, 48, 57–8, 133, 335, 377

Towne Avenue, Los Angeles 100, 101

suburbs 8, 140, 252, 258–9, 268–9; see also

Traditional Neighborhood Development 106,

sprawl

176

Sudan 301–2

traffic reduction 51, 250, 363

Sullivan, Louis 159

transcendentalism 222

superabundance 379

transects, built environment 106

Superstudio 227

Transfiguration, Church of the 38

surveillance: antiterrorism 367–8; Bentham

transit: see transport

240; borderlands 75–6; CCTV 250–1,

translocal chains 304–5

364; Geddes 240–1; impact of 367–8;

transport 13, 51, 106, 149, 201, 241, 263,

increasing 360; state 247–8; traffic reduction 250, 363; unfreedom 252–3

335–6 Tribune Building competition 200

Surveillance Camera Players 40–1

Troy 372–3

surveillance cameras: see CCTV; security

Tschumi, Bernard 120–1, 185, 290n15

cameras sustainability xxv, 356; building materials

Tugwell, Rexford Guy 179 Tzonis, Alexander 345, 346, 348–51

341–2; Lyle 357; re-use 4–5, 9–10; socioeconomics 57; stewardship 58

UN Studio 226n18

sweatshops 301

unfreedom 252–3

Sylvan Street, Selma 85

Ungers, O.M. 221 Union Rescue Mission 98

Tafuri, Manfredo 240

United Arab Emirates 300

Taylor, Peter 309

Universal Studio 12

Team X 121, 122, 123, 125, 231

university campuses 265

Tech Center, Denver 268

Upton, Dell 115n4

techno-culture 333

urban art 83, 90–1; see also public art

techno-junk 61–2

urban design xxv, 1, 3, 18; architecture 237;

technological determinism 353, 363

as catalyst 15, 16–17; community

technology: culture 335–6; defined 351–4;

development 15–16; democracy 118;

geography 352–3; networks 352, 358; as

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future 20–2; globalization 17;

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heterotopias 242–3; meaningfulness

Walton County, Florida 169

14–15, 21–2; New Urbanism 188–9;

Washington, D.C. 49, 50, 51, 128

strategies 134–5;

waste facility 145–6

see also grid systems

water quality 151, 152, 342

urban development xxiv, 128, 176–7, 184

Watercolor 173

Urban Land Institute 109

waterfront sites xx

Urban Process 3

waterways 152–3

urban redevelopment 12, 263

wealth inequalities 129, 186, 248

Urban Revisions 93

Webb, Michael 225n12

urbanism 120, 159, 247–8; see also cities

Webber, Melvin 338

urbanization 54, 380

Weber, Max 347

U.S. Green Building Council 109, 188

Webler + Geissler Architekten 358

U.S. Housing Corp. 178

Weese, Harry 197

utopian project 26, 45

Weimar Bauhaus 155 Weiser, Mark 360, 371

Van der Ryn, Sym 70, 71

West, Cornell 80–1, 147–8

Van Eyck, Aldo 231, 233

wetlands, drained 140

Vastu-Shilpa Foundation 17–18

Wexner Center 93, 94

Vaux, Calbert 222–3, 225

Whiteread, Rachel 64

Velvet Turtle 268

Whittier Boulevard, Los Angeles 90, 91–2

Vendalores Ambulates 276

wind-catching techniques 73

Venetian Casino, Las Vegas 240

wireless technologies 367, 370

Venice 379

Wolch, Jennifer 277n7

Venice Hospital 121

women’s rights 272

ventilation 320–1, 340

Woodhull, Joel 149

Venturi, Robert 28, 158, 197, 210, 267

woodlands 140, 148

vernacular cultures 73, 107–8, 168

Woods, Lebbeus 202

Vienna 65–6, 134, 135, 166, 282

Woodstock 284

Viennese Social Democracy 166

Works Progress Administration 377

Villa Dall’Ava, Paris 209

World Columbian Exposition, Chicago 96

Virilio, Paul 333–4

World Financial Center xix, 70

visibility/invisibility 363–4

World Trade Center xix, 35, 69, 183, 208,

visualization technologies 363

367

Vitruvius 349

World War I 177–8

voids 123, 221, 222

World War II 179–80

voyeurism 252, 360, 364

Wright, Frank Lloyd 25, 314 Wright, Richard 82

Wachsmann, Konrad 334 Wagner, Otto 165

Yasgur, Max 284

Wagnerschuler 166

Yeang, Kenneth 71, 73

Wajcman, Judith 351 Waldheim, Charles 120, 121, 126

Zimbabwe 73

walking 9; de Certeau 38, 40, 44; cities/

Zizek, Slavoj 72, 73

suburbs 12, 35–6, 379; distances 190;

Zona Centroamericana, Los Angeles 276

mental map 34; Phoenix 56

zones 77, 94–5, 171, 298–302

walking projects 36, 37, 43–4

Zupan, Jeffrey 50

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