What “urban” does not mean, to me, is tolerating crime, incivility or trash.
by Alex Marshall
The New York Observer
July – 2001
As the Mayor’s race begins to heat up, perhaps it’s a good time to prompt some discussion about not only crime, schools and jobs, but something both more conceptual and more concrete, such as what kind of city we want to be.
The words “urban” and “suburban” are irritatingly vague, and used as both pejorative and praise. To some, “urban” is still a code word for minorities and crime. To others, it means sophistication and a willingness to embrace rather than avoid, public rather than private, a street-based life. “Suburban” can mean narrow, isolating and sexless, or it can mean families, space and nature.
Some New Yorkers feel that the lines during the Rudy Giuliani years have been blurred: that the city is becoming too suburban (no sex shops, no noise, no nightclubs, no crime), and that the funkier streets of the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s — when the city was a rougher but arguably more interesting place — are making way for blocks that more closely resemble Garden City, Long Island (where Rudy grew up). It might be good to clarify the terminology, because it’s not always clear what people mean, or if they know themselves.
New Yorkers aren’t the only ones confused, however. Last month, 1,000 “New Urbanists” visited the city for their annual convention. New Urbanism is a movement, probably the leading popular-design philosophy in the country dedicated to making places more citylike. But those who call themselves “New Urbanists” are also not sure what that means.
New Urbanists have produced mostly fake urban places, like Disney’s Celebration in Florida. These places are essentially suburban subdivisions, built in cornfields and dressed up like small towns. Yet some New Urbanists, mostly on the West Coast, have helped accomplish more urban goals, such as building train lines and stopping highways.
Steven Bodzin, the spokesman for the Congress for New Urbanism, said the group chose New York for its convention this year because it was alien territory. The Northeast has few of those cutesy New Urban subdivisions, and the New York architectural establishment derides New Urbanists for liking the traditional architecture of columns, cornices and front porches.
“In the New York architectural world, there is a deep suspicion of New Urbanism,” Mr. Bodzin said. “Our single biggest source of criticism comes out of New York. So we decided to come here.”
Jonathan Rose, member of the prominent Rose development family and a developer himself, was the New York host for the convention. An avuncular man with a bushy beard, Mr. Rose said that New Urbanists can learn from New York, and vice versa.
“What New Urbanism has is a rap,” he said. “It has been extremely good at communicating its vision.”
The group’s travel schedule illustrated either its diversity or its confusion. The conventioneers toured the subway system and Greenwich Village, but also the placid, quasi-suburban Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills Gardens, with its privately owned streets. At the conference itself, held at the Altman building and the adjacent Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th Street, the group tried to work out its own definitions.
Key indicators popped up. For example, congestion — something New Yorkers struggle with — may be a sign of success rather than failure.
“We’re in New York because it’s a congested city,” G.B. Arrington, a transportation planner from Portland, Ore., told a small group. “Congestion is a sign of vitality. Maybe if your streets aren’t congested, you’re doing something wrong.”
And how about infrastructure? The average person, I suspect, does not realize how directly a city’s infrastructure determines its character. Build more subway lines and you get more city. Build more highways and parking garages, and you get more traffic and quasi-suburban settings.
Jaquelin Robertson, the elder-statesman architect from Cooper & Robertson, did a masterful job taking listeners through the city’s key infrastructure decisions, from the Erie Canal of the 1800’s to Robert Moses in the 1920’s and 30’s, stringing parkways across the region as “a kind of infrastructure emperor.”
“If the Roman Empire was about roads, bridges, aqueducts, Roman laws and Roman legions, then my adopted New York, the Empire City, was about parkways, bridges, aqueducts, New York real estate, Penn Station, Yankee Stadium,” Mr. Robertson said.
As a journalist who has written a book about cities, I have my own views about what constitutes urban — and what I’d like New York to become. To my mind, urban means building the Second Avenue subway line and making fewer accommodations for S.U.V.’s and more for social activities, such as drinking at street fairs or dancing all night. What urban does not mean, to me, is tolerating crime, incivility or trash. I would like a safe, diverse, dynamic and clean city with more trains and fewer cars, with funkier streets and more stoops instead of porches.
Maybe one of the Mayoral candidates will offer his own answer to the question: How urban do you want New York City to be?