Category Archives: Centrality

New Suffolk Courthouse: Will it Revive Downtown?

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By Alex Marshall
For The Virginian-Pilot

SUFFOLK — This handsome new courthouse of brick and stone that sits on Main Street is one answer to the question: how do we revive this city’s downtown?

Is it the right answer? This city’s center, with two-hundred years of history, was once a bustling place. Now, like Norfolk’s Granby Street and Portsmouth’s High Street, it has declined. All of these city’s main streets are shadows of their former selves, even though there are signs of life on all of them in the form of new businesses amid the vacant storefronts.

Built at a cost of $14 million, the new courthouse works with a new omprehensive plan meant to bring back downtown and manage growth in the suburbs. The courthouse adds 150 or so new bodies to Main Street, while a downtown plan is talking of doing things like carving in new streets, and turning an old high school into a civic center.

Will it work? To make a good prediction, we need to understand where the growth that fuels Suffolk’s booming suburbs comes from, and how it fits into the growth of the region. For it is finally only by understanding the region’s growth, and working with it, that Suffolk can hope to reshape its downtown into the vital, active community it once was.

Suffolk has lessons everyone can learn from. Its struggle to revive downtown is Norfolk’s and Portsmouth’s, while it’s struggle to manage growth is Virginia Beach’s and Chesapeake’s. In understanding how both are interrelated, the region can better understand how to shape itself.

THE CITY’S PLAN What does a courthouse have to do with downtown’s health? The idea is that the 150 to 175 workers in the courthouse will shop on Main Street, and buy lunch there, as will the defendants, lawyers, plaintiffs, reporters and everyone else that makes their way to a courthouse, whether by choice or command. At the same time, new sidewalks, new street lamps and benches make Main Street a more inviting place to be.

Does this work? Sure it does, and you can already see downtown changing. Several new stores have opened on Main Street, including a bookstore, a restaurant, a newsstand and a cappuccino bar.

The city has also followed this up with changes of which the other cities might take heed. Over the initial squeamishness of VDOT, it restored parallel parking on Main Street. This converts a semi-highway back into a public street. VDOT’s only requirement was that they continue to allow southbound traffic after 4.30 p.m. during rush hour, to which the city agreed.

This is something that other cities can look at. Many have still not realized that there is a conflict between moving cars quickly and creating an environment where storefronts can prosper. In most streets downtown, the priority should be on the latter.

Norfolk in particular could do a lot more in this direction. It’s downtown is littered with unnecessary left-turn lanes and other devises that take up parking lanes. On Main, Plume and City Hall avenues, the city could substantially expand on-street parking without seriously damaging traffic flow. It should be a top priority for the widened Church Street. This would give on-street businesses more parking spaces, and would alert passerby’s that these streets really are meant for shopping and strolling.

What else would Suffolk do? The downtown plan calls for carving in some new streets so that dead-end streets will now go through, and the street grid will be more complete. Because of railroad lines and topography, Suffolk has a fractured street system. It’s to the credit of the downtown plan, developed by UDA of Pittsburgh and its leader Ray Gindroz, that it focuses on this often-overlooked aspect of a center city’s health. By cutting through some new streets, and connecting unconnected ones, the city could bring new life to otherwise becalmed areas.

In addition, the downtown plans for turning the city’s old high school into a civic center, and renovating the old train station. Both of these are good ideas, but they will not provide a foundation for a revitalized downtown. Other means are necessary for that.

Rather than convert the high school, a wonderful old building, into a civic center, why not convert it back into a school? Suffolk schools are straining to find space for their students. Norfolk has shown with both Maury High School and Granby High School, now under renovation, that old schools can be rehabilitated and fully meet city and state codes, including the Americans with Disability Acts. Other localities around the country have made great strides in this regard. Maryland in particular has led the way in this regard. It makes no sense for Suffolk to build new schools out in the country, when a fine one in the city sits vacant.

How does the new Courthouse’s design rate? It’s an imposing building, as a courthouse should be, with sharp corners and trim that echoes older, more formal civic buildings. Its most admirable feature is that its designers had the guts to build it directly on the sidewalk, in line with the other buildings on Main Street. This completes the walls that form the living room of downtown. If the building had been set back, even by a few feet, the vibrancy and intimate feel of downtown would have been diminished. With luck, it could become a building that is still cherished and loved 100 years from now. That’s the kind of buildings we need more of.

But a new courthouse, new sidewalks, lights and benches, and even new streets and a civic center can only do so much. For downtown to fully revive, the growth patterns of the entire region have to be understood, and then the city’s policies changed so that some of this growth goes into Suffolk’s downtown and center city neighborhoods.

SUFFOLK AND THE REGION Suffolk now is a satellite city of Hampton Roads. Although it has some industry, most notably Planters Peanuts, Suffolk is not self-sufficient in jobs and industry but depends on the more industrial cities of Newport News, Portsmouth and Norfolk to give its residents jobs. Or perhaps another way to say it is that job creators in these cities give Suffolk new residents.

We can see this trend in the data on employment and residential growth in Suffolk and the region. From 1980 to 1993, Suffolk actually lost jobs on a net basis, according to city planning statistics. But it’s total population actually grew steadily over this time period.

Where should the new residents go? In answering that question, Suffolk decides the fate of its downtown. If Suffolk puts all the new residents in new suburban housing miles outside downtown, then downtown will remain a tired place. If on, the otherhand, Suffolk limits development opportunities in the suburbs, forcing both residents and developers to look to the inner-city, then its downtown neighborhoods and eventually businesses should re-emerge as well. New houses would be built on vacant lots, new businesses on parking lots and old houses fixed up.

To reinvigorate downtown, Suffolk needs to start pushing some of its housing demand back to the center. It can do this not only by limiting rezonings in farm land, but by also ignoring calls for new roads or improved roads outside town. Every new road built or expanded leads to more suburban housing outside town.

All this points to the inter-connectedness of the region. If the Navy cuts personnel drastically from Norfolk, for example, you can bet that new housing starts in Suffolk will decline as well. It also points the need for regional growth planning and management. It makes no sense for new jobs in Virginia Beach or Norfolk to boost housing starts in Suffolk and Chesapeake, with no city having complete say over where the jobs go or where the houses go.

POLICY STEPS If Suffolk wants to accompany its new courthouse with more complete steps to revive downtown, it can consider some of the following steps. Some of these actions the city has already considered.

*Sharply limit suburban development on the fringes of the developed area, particularly in the high growth areas in the Northeast and Northwest. The city has taken some steps to do this in the new Comprehensive Plan, which calls for stopping development in the South, and limiting it in the North.

But it needs to do more. Taming development in the rural south is a paper lion, because there isn’t much growth pressure there anyway. Why? Because it’s too far away from the jobs in Norfolk and Portsmouth. The North is booming because that’s where the easy commutes are. That’s also where Suffolk has to act if it wants to retain some form for its city.

A consultant’s report, used to prepare the Comprehensive Plan, recognized this dynamic. The report said bluntly that new residential and commercial development, whose nature and location compete with downtown, will continue to sap its strength.

Steve Herbert, the assistant city manager for development, agreed that the city’s downtown health was dependent on curtailing development elsewhere. Herbert said ultimately the city might have to look at some form of downzoning, in order to scale back some of the 24,000 houses that have already been zoned.

These are some of the hard questions the councils has to deal with, Herbert said. Downzoning is a possibility, but it’s a very difficult issue. We’ll probably have to have other ways to deal with it.

Although Virginia courts have traditionally frowned on downzoning, they have not prohibited it entirely. Rather, they have insisted that it be applied uniformly and in accordance with broad public goals. That might fit in Suffolk.

Suffolk could also consider clustering development around existing village centers in Chuckatuck, Whaleyville and Driver. That way, these village centers could be improved, the rural areas kept rural, and the historical character of these places respected.

*Kill the Southwest bypass. This planned VDOT project, if built, will trap downtown between two major highways, and will encourage new suburban growth off its exits.

The amazing thing is that some people still see a bypass as a way to improve a downtown. It’s like cutting off an artery to improve circulation. One need only to look at downtown Emporia, dead since the route 58 bypass was completed around it, to see what happens to towns with bypasses. You can find hundreds of towns in North Carolina and Virginia that have been improved out of existence with bypasses. You will often find signs saying Business Route, which will take you to a downtown devoid of businesses.

Along with killing the Southwest bypass, Suffolk should examine trimming back some of the other road improvements planned in and around Suffolk. Building big highways is the quickest way to facilitate suburban growth. Suffolk should examine every road and ask whether it needs it, and for what purpose.

Herbert acknowledged that the city was risking its downtown’s health with the proposed bypass. Herbert said that people need to understand that traffic and congestion are part of a downtown’s health.

When people complain about a lack of parking and too much traffic, I tell them that there are people in downtown Portsmouth who would die for that kind of problem, said Herbert, who left Portsmouth City Hall last year.

*Make it easy to develop in the center city. Downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods are full of vacant lots that could hold new homes and businesses. Clear away the red tape for these, and consider low-interest loans for home renovations. Make it easy to develop in town, harder to develop in the country. The century-old homes that scatter downtown, many of them quite affordable, are a precious resource that should be used more fully.

If Suffolk can manage to restrain growth its countryside, it might manage to have the best of both worlds: a stable suburban community, and a healthy downtown with businesses, residents — and a fine new courthouse.

JON: THIS IS A SIDEBAR. THE COURTHOUSE MAKES HISTORY The site of the new courthouse used to be the home of Suffolk’s City Hall and City Market. Inaa putting a new courthouse there, the city is returning to its roots.

For close to a century, the twin turreted City Hall and City Market served as the site for not only the town officials and police force, but for vendors selling live chickens and fresh produce, as well as dances, theater concerts and high school graduations, said Sue Woodward, a member of the Suffolk-Nansemond County Historical Society. (JON: THERE ARE PICTURES OF THIS IN THE PICTORIAL HISTORY OF SUFFOLK THAT PERHAPS WE SHOULD RUN.)

Like Norfolk’s old city market, which actually also had turrets, the Suffolk city market was the center of town in numerous ways. But in the early 1960s, the city, like Norfolk, sold its building and allowed it to be torn down. In retrospect, it was a horribly short-sighted decision. Both cities lost huge pieces of their history as well as buildings that could have been home for other uses.

At the same time Suffolk was tearing down its courthouse, it was also developing a new courthouse complex outside the center of downtown. In this it was also following Norfolk’s lead. It had moved its City Hall and Courts out of what is now the MacArthur Memorial, its old city market known as the Armory, and other buildings, and into the City Hall complex. In retrospect, these decisions were also mistakes. Moving the courts and municipal offices onto plazas outside downtown helped to isolate downtown and take away its customer base.

The magnitude of what Suffolk is doing can be seen by imagining if Norfolk decided to close its courts building on the windswept municipal plaza and move it back to City Hall avenue, where it used to be.

The decision to put the courts back in a more prominent position on Main Street fits with the role the courts have historically played — as centers of a town, both physically and symbolically. Courts can be thought of as anchors and rudders of society, and because of this, it fits that they should be placed in the center of town.

Before the car led to the fragmentation of cities, it was natural to build a courthouse at the center of town where everyone could travel easily to it. Bankruptcy laws still call for delinquent property to be auctioned off on the steps of the courthouse, probably because legislators could not imagine a more public place for a sale to occur. This accounts for the now comical sight of, in Virginia Beach, property being auctioned off on a courthouse that sits on the edge of woods and farms, miles away from the developed city’s bulk.


Building New Urbanism: Less Filling, But Not So Tasty

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This Article first appeared in Builder Magazine
NOV. 30, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

The old commercials for Lite beer by Miller which were once so popular gained their fame by having ex-jocks and other assorted celebrities stand at a bar, hold up a glass of amber-colored liquid, and repeat the slogan: “Tastes great, less filling.”

The advertising pitch worked for a while, but as any beer lover could tell you, all the “lite” beers were a pretty thin, tepid brew. The designer beers, which actually did taste great, but were also filling, shoved a lot of them out of the marketplace.

Most of New Urbanism, the new subdivision and home-building style that has been the rage in recent years, is a kind of lite-beer form of urbanism. Urbanism Lite. You take out most of the things that make urbanism urban — density, dependence on mass transit, less space for cars — and you leave some front porches, some reworked street systems, some different facades and a few alleys.

The attempt is to eliminate what people don’t like about small town or city living — less privacy and no place to park — and leave in what they do like about it, which are walking to a cafe, or buying a quart of milk without getting in a car.

But you can’t have one without the other. What you get is a slightly different looking subdivision lying off a main road on the edge of town, which functions pretty much like all the other subdivisions that surround it.

New Urbanism is a big tent philosophy and practice: that is, a lot goes on under that label. It is at various times: a theory or theories of urban design; a marketing campaign; a collection of people who love urban places; and a particular way of buildings suburbs that attempt to imitate older towns and city neighborhoods.

Some of the former has some value. But it is the latter that concerns me here. On a practical level, most of what is physically built under the label New Urban are these newer suburbs out on bare land. These are sometimes called TNDs for Traditional Neighborhood Developments. Are these new-fangled subdivisions a cure for, or part of the disease of, urban sprawl?

Let’s look on the big level of sprawl first, that of the metropolitan area. Atlanta is prime example of this. It spills across hundreds of square miles, with the result that many of its residents spend huge portions of their day stuck in a car. It’s not a very nice place to live. Excessive highway building, rather than making traffic better, has made it worse.

New Urbanism will not help much here. Building places like Kentlands outside Washington D.C., or the nearby Reston Town Center, will do nothing to shrink the size of a metropolitan area. They part of the problem. They are yet more subdivisions and shopping malls being built farther “out”, where they help reduce density and enlarge the metropolitan area.

Really limiting sprawl is pretty simple. It means building fewer big highways on the edge of town and investing a lot more in mass transit. It means growth boundaries. It means dramatically raising the price of gasoline so that the taxes cover the costs of both building roads, maintaining them and the associated costs, like policing and air pollution.

These are tough choices. For builders, any of the above would mean drastic changes in the ways of doing business. In Portland, Oregon, which is one of the few cities and states that have moved in this direction, builders find themselves doing more redevelopment work, from adding a room to an existing house, to “tear-downs” to be replaced with newer structures.

The growth boundary around Portland has had the quite unexpected effect of pushing out large corporate developers. There simply isn’t land available in the 1,000 acre chunks that they prefer. So instead, you see the rise of more locally-owned builders and developers, who will take 20 acres here, and 10 acres there to build some homes. Portland, which has a booming economy, produced a huge number of new housing units in recent years, but roughly a third of them was through redevelopment. The rest were generally not huge new subdivisions that you see outside Las Vegas or Houston.

The problem with the practice of New Urbanism, as opposed to some of its talk, is that it has generally shirked from confronting the tough choices that Portland and Oregon residents have faced to a degree. Instead, New Urbanists generally offer Americans a chance to “buy” their way out of the sprawl dilemma, in the form of cute new subdivisions and town centers.

Like a lot of marketing-driven products, this might work for a decade or so, until people catch on. Then it will go the way of Planned Unit Developments, New Towns, and all the other once new-models of suburban sprawl. And Americans will be left with actual problem unresolved and unfaced.

In general, New Urbanists are selling something they can’t deliver without charging a far higher price, and without making changes far more fundamental than redesigning a few homes. To understand why, it’s necessary to look more carefully at what we today call the suburbs and how they took form.

Cities are products of something. They represent the effect, principally, of transportation systems. The classic 19th and early 20th century neighborhoods that many people love, and which New Urbanism apes, were created by the extension of streetcar lines. Levittown was a product of a new car culture. The mega malls and grab bag of subdivisions that surround most cities are products of the limited access freeways, built at public expense. Developers and builders understand this far better than the general public.

But how about on a more individual level. Even if a neo-traditional neighborhood built on the edge of town won’t counteract metropolitan sprawl, will it deliver a better life for the people who live there?

The answer is no again.

Urbanism is a package deal. Once you weed out the stuff people don’t like about it — no place to park, smaller homes, closer neighbors — you also weed out the stuff they like about urbanism, like walkeable streets and nearby grocery stores.

The Achilles’ heel of New Urbanist developments has been their “downtowns,” the classic “main streets” meant to be at the heart of the developments. If they were built, and successful, it would be a significant improvement on suburban life. But the reasons these mini downtowns fail point to the structural flaws in the whole theory of TNDs.

Retail needs an enormous accessible customer base to succeed. Street-level retail in cities get this from enormous density and the therefore enormous quantity of people that walk by their front doors. Suburban retail get this by locating on a main highway where a high volume of traffic goes by their parking lots.

New Urban developments have generally tried to locate their mini-downtowns in the center of their low-density subdivisions. The result is that they have neither enough pedestrian, nor enough auto, traffic to make retail succeed. The “main streets” of virtually all New Urban developments have failed.

An exception is the Disney-produced Celebration in Florida. But it may be the exception that proves the rules. Disney had the enormous financial muscle to build the downtown first, before any homes were built or sold. It also had the marketing muscle to pull in tourists to its shops, even though the downtown lacks immediate access to a main highway. Tourists are making these shops succeed, not residents.

There are other tradeoffs and inadequacies that become apparent when you look at a neo-traditional development closely.

Peter Calthorpe, one the New Urbanists who is honest about the choices involved, has said the minimum density needed to make mass transit work is a gross density of ten units to an acre, with selective density even higher. Most TNDs hover around four units to an acre. The idea that these places can dovetail eventually with mass transit in some distant year is probably not the case, unless you acknowledge a tremendous amount of infill and expensive redevelopment. To really change how people live, you need mass transit in a development at the beginning, not the end.

The street system is another interesting thing to look at. Neo-traditionalists like to advertise that they have gotten away from the cull-de-sac, which has become the symbol of American bad taste, like tail-fins on that old Chevy. New Urbanists promise a more open and easy going grid.

But the “grids” these developments use are usually just as confusing and intimidating to outsiders as the standard pattern of cul-de-sacs and collector streets. These “grids” are usually a collection of loose skewed streets. They are less urban grids really, than descendents of the wavy street patterns used in 19th century cemeteries and later in early suburbs.

Finally, the treatment of the driveway and the garage in the standard New Urban house say a lot about its tradeoffs. The high priority of neo-traditional development is to get a clear, urban looking façade at the front of the house, usually reminiscent of Cape Cod or Georgetown. To get it, the driveway is put either on the side, or in the back off an alley. The same goes for the garage.

The result is that the residents lose their backyards, the classic spot of backyard barbecues and swing sets. So for the sake of the appearance of urbanism, residents sacrifice one of the prime pleasures of suburbanism.

Older towns, like heralded Charleston, Georgetown or Savannah, worked well with alleys and street facades because their residents didn’t have to worry about where to park the car. When these places were built, people walked everywhere, until they got on a train, a streetcar or a ship. Trying to replicate these building types in the context of a freeway and car-dependent environment is a false equation.

For the builder and developer, New Urbanism represents a dilemma of sorts. It can be profitable. Standard New Urban subdivisions offer smaller homes on less land at higher prices. This means higher profits, even though there is higher risk, because the development costs for streets are more, and the potential market is smaller.

But a developer would have to acknowledge that is not really selling what he is usually advertising: a cure to our sprawl-oriented life style. Instead, he is offering more a change of style than substance. And as with any style, there is the risk that people will tire of it and move on.

New Urban developments do offer some improvement on conventional suburbia. They sometimes offer “granny flats,” which give a mother-in-law or lower-waged worker a place to live. That’s a real improvement. I also favor experimenting, whether it be in the suburbs or the inner-city. But we should be honest about what we are selling.

Time will tell where the New Urban debate and practice goes. In the long run, it may lead to better, more real form of urbanism. It may cost more in its political choices, but it may be more satisfying, and most of all, may taste great.

In Paris, Hubris and Humility. Both Have Their Merits

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When it comes to urban design, the French have a unique ability to use heavy-handed state authority to produce systems that are technologically and aesthetically advanced. When successful, their state-trained engineers and civil servants produce stunning urban systems, like the TGV high-speed train network, that combine high technology, artistic elegance and coordinated efficiency. This can be seen not only in the TGV system, which has helped keep Paris a center of Europe and thus economically vital, but also in the country’s state-run nuclear power system, and its phone and electrical systems. Even the arching brick tunnels of the city’s 19th century sewer system are elegant.

When unsuccessful, however, the French way can produce grotesque white elephants that seem to emerge unchanged from the heads of their designers, and then lay flat upon the earth, unloved and unlovable. The modern La Defense office district outside the central city illustrates this possibility, an immense complex devoid of urban energy.

A recent visit to Paris confirmed all of this, again. As New York moves forward with the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, as well as the continual renewal of the city itself, both examples are good to keep in mind.

The new Meteor subway line and the surrounding development districts show French urban design at its best. This number 14 line runs from the heart of old Paris on the Right Bank to the new Bercy office district, then under the Seine to the “Bibliotheque Nationale Francois Mitterrand,” the new national library built on the Left Bank. The French have not only designed a great subway line but have used it as an instrument of urban development.

The Meteor trains are completely automated and operate without drivers, probably one reason the line has the lowest operating costs in the system. The individual cars of a train are linked by rubber gaskets, like the long accordion-style buses in New York. The entire train is open to walk through, which distributes riders more efficiently and provides a feeling of openness. The train whooshes into stations behind a glass wall that protects those on the platform from the open pit of the tracks. Once in the station, the doors and the glass wall magically open in unison to allow riders to enter or exit. The stations are architecturally ambitious. The Gare de Lyon station includes a jungle-like garden that blooms behind glass directly behind the platform. I was impressed by all of this, although not as much as I was three years ago, when I rode the Meteor shortly after it opened. Since then, the New York subway has been improved with new trains and ongoing station renovations, and so the contrast between the systems this time was not as great. Still, the new Meteor line, and the Paris metro system as a whole, has an elegance and verve that New York doesn’t match.

Alan Cayre, supervisor of the Meteor line at the French transportation authority RATP, said his agency gives architects more authority than is typical, and that his office keeps aesthetics in mind from the beginning. Even the pylons on the elevated portion of a new light rail line, he noted, were designed by architects.

The Meteor has two goals, Cayre said: “To ease congestion on the number one line, [the city’s oldest line which runs directly through central Paris], and to be an instrument of development for the new Bercy district and around the Biblioteque Nationale.” I interviewed Cayre in his elegant office in the Bercy district overlooking the Seine river, with the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame visible in the distance, as well as the new glass-fronted offices beside the Austerlitz train station directly across the river. Like many French officials, Cayre spoke little English and I stretched my uneven French around the subject of urban design.

Cayre’s offices, with their blond wood walls, and the building itself, which is the new home of the RATP, are themselves examples of the French inclination toward bold urban design. I complimented Cayre on his wristwatch, which had a gray face on which simple black strokes marked the hours.

“Oh this,” he said. “This is no big thing. It was done by one of the designer of the Meteor line, someone who has unfortunately passed away.”

Clearly, Cayre cared about design. I felt like I could draw a line from his watch to the sleek hallways of the building, to the high-tech glass walls of the Meteor line which his office supervised and constructed. It was hard not to compare Cayre’s offices with some of those of the New York City Transit I had seen, which were standard, uninspired office cubicles.

The French have poured billions of dollars into the districts connected by the new transit line, in addition to what was spent on the Meteor itself. It is their effort to jump-start development in the areas that their planners believe are ideally suited for Paris’ future growth.
Contemplating these development districts, I wondered how New York would change if it conducted urban design in the French manner.

Consider Long Island City in Queens. For decades, the state and city have talked about developing this district that lies directly across the East River from Midtown Manhattan. But apart from some modest design improvements, the authorities have done little more than rezone property, which in itself took years. Under the French model, the state and the city would have already poured billions into designing and implementing a master plan.

Of course all this costs tax money. In fact, the French could only build the new Meteor line because there is a payroll tax that funds transportation, as well as national financial support for the regional entity that runs the metro system.

The pitfalls of French urban design can be seen in the rapidly aging La Defense office complex on the outskirts of Paris. Completed in the late 1980s under Mitterrand, the complex is a stunning example of architectural purity and efficient urban design. The complex’s imaginative hollow-cored, rectangular office tower, the Grande Arche, lines up with the axis of the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysees. Every aspect of the French transportation system, from highways to subway to bus to intercity rail, connects underground beneath this complex.

Above ground, ambitiously-conceived office towers sprout from a wide plaza, as well as new residential towers. Its development was a 40-year story, and its roots are in the Le Corbusier inspired ideal of towers on a park or plaza. As a watercolor drawing, or a model in Styrofoam, the complex is breathtaking, its ambition laudable.

But in person, this complex is stunningly dead.

“I come here only to work,” said Claude, a welldressed man I talked with as he walked across the plaza. “To get together with friends, I go to Central Paris. This is only to work.” Ant-like people make their way across vast plazas. Below ground, people listlessly shop at a central shopping mall. “Feels like Albany,” to paraphrase a remark about the initial WTC site designs, could not be more accurate. Where is the “energized crowding” that defines great urbanism?

Traditionally, this has taken the form of great restaurants, stores and cafes along sidewalks on traditional streets. I have no problem with abandoning these old forms, as long as some successful new forms can be found to take their place. Are there any?

With about 20 million square feet of office space, 140,000 workers and 33,000 residents, the La Defense district is larger in size than the former World Trade Center complex, but in the same ball park. The French claim it is the largest office district in Europe.

It’s difficult not to see La Defense as a giant warning sign to the designers sketching visions for the WTC site. If built, would any of the designs presented at the Winter Garden in December produce “energized crowding?” It is hard to keep this in mind as one reacts viscerally to the imaginative forms seen in the scale models now on display. I instinctively loved Daniel Libeskind’s proposal. But what would it feel like to walk across his plaza built below grade as part of a memorial complex? Would it not swallow up any single person or even groups of people? The Corbusier ideal of towers in the park has supposedly been discredited, but most designs for the WTC site have their roots there. The one exception, the Peterson/Littenberg plan that reinstalls the old streets on the site, may be condemned as “traditional.” But does any other plan address the site on the finer-grained level necessary to produce vital urban space, as well as a great skyline? The old World Trade Center, despite having some merit as a pair of skyscrapers, lacked energy as an urban space. We appear to be on our way to building a new one that may be equally antithetical to vibrant city life.
Given the financial resources being made available to the WTC redevelopment, New York should be able to emulate French urban design at its best, rather than its worst. I see a great new transportation hub, architecturally ambitious, that links to vital new urban spaces featuring the best of contemporary architecture. Can anyone get us there?

–Alex Marshall, Senior Editor, Regional Plan Association
First Published Jan. 6, 2003 in Spotlight on the Region, RPA newsletter.

Trading Places

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The City and the Suburb

[Excerpt From Chapter Four]

“The sloughed-off environment becomes a work of art in the new invisible environment.”
— Marshall McLuhan in a conversation with William Irwin Thompson; quoted in Thompson, Coming into Being

“The bloodthirsty national merchants and the Chamber of Commerce have pretty well gutted the place I remember and taken and hucked the town’s original character into the overall commercial park. The center of town, which when I was a kid hadn’t changed much in the century, and was pleasingly timeworn and functional, has now either been torn down or renovated for artificial preservation as an example of itself.”
— description of Lexington, Kentucky, from Richard Hell’s autobiographical novel, Go Now2

The King William neighborhood in San Antonio is an elegant place of huge turreted Victorians sitting on expansive lots. German immigrants built the homes in the mid–and late nineteenth century, after they had grown rich industrializing the city. In San Antonio then, you were as likely to hear German on the streets as English or Spanish. An old photograph from the 1880s shows a sign on a bridge warning people to walk their horses. The notice is given in three languages–English, German, and Spanish.

Like many beautiful old neighborhoods, King William now mixes entrenched urban homesteaders with tourism. In one count there were more than seventy bed and breakfasts in the neighborhood, and tour buses cruising the streets have been regulated. It’s ironic, because in the 1960s, the neighborhood was nearing abandonment, with the huge old homes falling into disrepair. But a wealthy believer bought and renovated a handful of homes, and suddenly a reverse exodus was on.

The tourism load is heavy in part because the neighborhood sits just a stone’s throw from downtown and the city’s famous River Walk, the winding subterranean path along water’s edge now lined with restaurants, stores, and souvenir stands. Aboveground are the city’s largely turn-of-the-century streets and buildings, which also include the ancient Alamo Mission and the modern shopping mall built a few years back. The mall gives armies of conventioneers another place to spend money.

I stayed in King William in 1997, in one of the ubiquitous bed and breakfasts. I was there on a magazine assignment, and I began my morning around the dining table with two couples who were there on vacation. They were from New Orleans, but the husbands knew San Antonio well because they traveled there frequently on business.

Knew the suburbs, that is. Like most businesspeople in the area, they conducted the bulk of their business out in the peripheries of the metropolitan area, in an environment of sprawling highways, office parks, and shopping centers that was casually called, no kidding, “Loopland.” The name came from the beltway that encircled the metropolitan area and spawned the subsequent sprawl. It was a maddening, unholy place. Glass buildings were shoved right up to the high-speed freeway, and the system of exit ramps seemed like something out of a Mad Max movie. But this was now the true Main Street of San Antonio, the place where the wealth of the metropolitan area was produced, and where the bulk of new businesses and industries were formed.

In fact, so strong was Loopland’s pull that the two businessmen, despite having traveled to the city for years, had never been downtown before or to any of the adjacent picturesque neighborhoods. The entire downtown, which includes the Alamo, the River Walk, and the business district, was a mystery to them. It was only now, on vacation, accompanied by their wives and children, that they were taking the chance to see “the city.”

The couples’ relationship with downtown is a good example of how contemporary center cities and suburbs have traded places. Older center cities–when successful–tend to be small, precious places with a limited function and market. The downtown of San Antonio was a make-believe world suitable for wives and children, who could pretend or believe they were seeing the real San Antonio.

The real San Antonio, of course, was out in Loopland. That’s where the wealth of the region was being produced, that is where new businesses were being formed.

The parts of San Antonio’s downtown that had been unable to convert themselves into tourist centers were dying. That included lovely but abandoned nineteenth-century office buildings and grand old theaters. Why? Because the business and essential living of the city were no longer being conducted in the center, and so the streets and buildings were no longer able to make a go at it by being utilitarian tools. They could only make it, to paraphrase Richard Hell, as artificially preserved examples of themselves.

The suburbs and city have reversed historic roles. The city now represents order, stability, community, and the human scale. The suburbs have become the example of constant change, gigantism, uncontrolled technological forces, and the rule of the marketplace. Whereas once the city symbolized a merciless, soulless world, and the suburbs calmness, family, and nature, the two worlds have almost completely traded places in what they represent.

Marshall McLuhan’s statement “The sloughed-off environment becomes a work of art in the new invisible environment” is an accurate description of why this has occurred. The urban grid of streets grouped around a port or a train station or a streetcar line has ceased to be the central marketplace of society. It has been replaced by a tangle of streets built around freeway exits. And so the older form has gone from something utilitarian, a tool, to something whose aesthetics and value can be seen more clearly and admired because we are now outside it. The urban street is, to quote Joel Garreau, author of Edge City, an antique. And like an antique, it is seen as valuable merely for being, not for what it does. In San Antonio, the downtown plays an important role in the economy by nurturing tourism and the convention trade. But this is a passive, more gentle function than serving as the central arena of industry or the marketplace.

An antique, whether it’s an object or a process, can be studied, perfected, and honed, similar to blues music, basket weaving, or the construction of handmade paper. But the form is not alive in the same way as suburbia. We can love cities because we are no longer in them. From society’s collective new home in the suburbs, we look back on them in wonder. I wonder when this will happen to the suburbs? When will we admire a cloverleaf, an off-ramp, and a gas station with an attached convenience store simply for their form and style?

I am not scoffing at the task of reviving the city. Ultimately it is not just the urban city but the metropolitan area that is, or can be, “a work of art,” perhaps because we are now mentally outside of it in our global marketplace and Internet-enveloped world. If we are to grapple effectively with the artistic challenge before us, then we must understand city and suburb together and how they interact as a whole.

What I seek to do in this chapter is to understand the dynamic between our more traditional urban forms and the newer suburbs, and how this in turn relates to the dynamic of the metropolitan area as a whole. To understand city and suburb–and I use these words more in an iconic sense than a literal one, for I believe the true cities today in a practical sense are entire metropolitan areas–we need to understand how city and suburb have been viewed in history and what goals they have represented. When twelfth-century Italian princes built great urban piazzas, and when nineteenth-century park designers built great suburban subdivisions, what were they striving for? What heaven were they reaching for, and how far did it exceed their grasp?

The Master Hand

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The Role of Government in Building Cities

[Excerpt From Chapter Six]

In 1817, the governor of New York convinced the state legislature to spend $7 million to finance a canal from Albany to Buffalo. Eight years later, after thousands of workers had carved a channel through rock and earth, the Erie Canal was complete. The 350-mile canal opened the entire upper Midwest to shipping, and cemented New York City’s role as transportation hub for the nation, and as the country’s greatest city.

In 1919, the U.S. Navy, concerned that the country was losing the race in radio technology to Europe, created the Radio Corporation of America–or RCA. It was funded as a joint project between government and private business, and the Secretary of the Navy sat on its board. Later spun off as a completely private enterprise, it grew into one of the largest and most important companies in home and commercial electronics and communications.

In 1995, Denver opened its enormous new international airport, its cream-colored canvas peaks glinting in the sun. It was a big risk by taxpayers. But like New York state’s gamble with the Erie Canal two centuries previously, it was meant to move the Rocky Mountain metropolis into the position of a central transportation hub for the nation.

What all these actions or events have in common is government, government, government. In this chapter, I seek to make clear the role of government in creating both the architecture of place, and the related architecture of economics or wealth. In this antigovernment country, virtually founded on hostility to the enterprise, we tend to obscure government’s central role in creating the places where we live, the jobs we perform, and the money we spend. Government, whether it be a republic, monarchy, theocracy, or dictatorship, is more central to our lives than many of us acknowledge or understand.

From an urban planning perspective, it’s important to understand the role of government so we can more easily grasp the levers of power when we desire to make real changes.

Americans tend to think of government as something outside themselves, a kind of regulatory body that interferes with the working of both an economy and the development of places. According to this view, the shapers of cities and the creators of wealth are the individual actors: the developer, the house builder, the company owner.

But government–that is, us–almost always lays down the concrete slab that economies and places are built upon. Government not only creates the laws, and operates the courts and the police, it then lays down the roads and builds the schools. In a modern economy, it then proceeds to set up a Federal Reserve System, a Securities and Exchange Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and other more elaborate financial infrastructure.

I sense that most people do not understand this, and the reason can be laid at the feet of an insidious idea called “the free market.” We tend to think that places and economies just happen, built by the invisible hand of Adam Smith if by anyone. In our mind’s eye, we tend to see supermarkets and subdivisions proliferating across the countryside, driven by consumer choice and the decisions of banks to finance them. We tend not to see the government’s prior decision to build an Interstate through the area that made the whole thing possible.

The intersection of place and economics is often in transportation. The decision of what transportation system to build, something almost always done by government, tends to create both an economy for an area or metropolis, and a particular physical framework organized around that infrastructure. So when Denver builds a big airport, it also creates the loose physical structure of warehouses, offices, and shopping centers that proliferates around airports. When New York City built its subway system (which was nominally private but steered and aided by government), it also created the possibility of the dense networks of skyscrapers that would follow. The Interstate Highway System created both a new economics of transportation and a new lifestyle organized around suburban living.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

We would understand government’s role in both places and economies if we understood better what government is.

Government, to put it unsentimentally, is “a system of authority,” from which all other forms of authority, including ownership of property, derive.12 In a democracy, that authority derives from the consent and will of the people. Managing this authority for the highest and best use is the central task of the people.

In this country, this understanding of political community has been replaced by rigid beliefs in the free market, without an understanding that the “free” market itself only exists through its creation and maintenance by a political state. The “free market” is a political act first. Politics comes before economics. By this, I mean the economic system we live under, in both the nation and the globe, rests on a foundation of political decisions that establish said system’s existence and form. Politics determines economics.

The capitalist system is a political act that creates a publicly defined set of rules enforced by the “system of authority” of government. Markets can be said to exist without governments only if we define markets as blind desire. “Free” markets exist only as created and underpinned by government. The polity creates the system of laws and courts and police that lets the “free” enterprise system operate.

The equations of economists, even at their most convoluted, seldom have a line saying something like “Right here there is a 10 percent chance that forces from a rival company will break through the factory’s defenses and shoot the CEO in the head.” That would be an actual free market, which we can see in operation in the drug markets nationally and globally. The illegal-drug cartels act little differently than France, England, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as they warred to control markets, robbed each other’s ships, and fought to control supply lines.

The current global economy, so often held up as an example of the benefits of the free market, was not only created by technological advances like the computer or the telephone, but from the political arrangements that allowed their introduction and peaceful operation. It was politics that allowed for the laying of a transatlantic cable, and for the creation of a system of laws and courts that governs trade. Even mailing a letter to Europe relies on a slew of postal treaties worked out in the nineteenth century.

People may forget that we had a fully functioning global economy in the sixteenth century. England no longer seizes ships from France laden with goods from India because it and most countries have a series of political agreements that allow for “free” trade. These agreements not only prohibit the use of force, but they also provide a mechanism for adjudicating disagreements and for setting standards. The peaceful creation of wealth through a market economy is always based on the establishment of a prior political system. Peaceful global trade has emerged over the last two centuries because a system of political authority has emerged that creates the structure within which a global economy has to operate.

In effect, we have a world government. We can see it in action when the World Court at The Hague in Holland orders the United States to accept tuna caught in nets that harm porpoises, even though America’s own laws prohibit its sale. Sorry, says the World Court, but the system of global trade you agreed to prohibits your discriminating against other countries’ products on this basis. Pull at this thread and you find a vast structure, including things like the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the latter supervised by the World Court, which in turn reports to the United Nations. These institutions, though, should serve the interests of their polity and not just the short-term interests of individual businesses or even countries.

The gradual ability for governments to replace the rule of force with the rule of law changed the form of cities, as well as the form of trade. Historian Eric H. Monkkonen says that the emergence of the nation-state allowed new forms of cities and towns to develop. Before the viable nation-state, only settlements that could defend themselves were possible. This took the classic form of the city-state. When “the state and the city separated,” it allowed more specialized forms of cities and towns to emerge, which in turn allowed a greater percentage of the population to urbanize.13

The classic model of a free market, where businesses operate unhindered by government interference, is comparable to a perfect vacuum created in the laboratory. I use this analogy, though, in a way contrary to the usage of many economists. With markets, it is government that restrains the “natural” forces of power and violence from rushing in and contaminating the perfect vacuum of the free market. Another analogy is that of a soccer game. Government not only referees the game, judging when players are offside and so forth, but also creates the field, its parameters, and how you play.

Government is often thought of as a parasite on free enterprise, or at least as dependent on it. But the reverse is more true. To paraphrase architect and organizational theorist Ted Goranson, behind Adam Smith’s invisible hand is an invisible arm–government.14 Again, this should be obvious, but I suspect it isn’t. The standard mental model of capitalism is that this magic system of supply and demand operates by itself, without human aid or deliberate organization of any kind. These are basic tenets of Economics 101, handed down by the priests of the system, the economics professors.

If you want to look at how markets operate without government, just look at the buying and selling of crack cocaine, or of bootleg whiskey during Prohibition in the 1920s. Without government, the act of exchanging value becomes quickly mixed with the use of force to control a market or command a sale. Indeed, since government itself is a system of authority, a system of regulated force, it can be said that in its absence, another “government” quickly emerges that establishes through force a system of rules and regulations by which trade can occur. The Mafia can be compared to a private government that is competing with the established government’s authorized monopoly on the use of force and subsequent ability to establish rules and structures.

Russia and some of the newly emerging capitalist countries are having problems establishing a functioning capitalist system because they don’t have enough government, not the converse. Capitalism only operates where there is the rule of law, including a court system to keep a record of contracts and enforce them. It operates even better if government creates a transportation system, a clean water supply, and other basic public goods. The limited liability corporation is a foundation of modern capitalism that is completely a political creation.

“All liberal rights presuppose or imply the dependency of the individual on the collectivity and on the principal instrument of the collectivity, that is, on the coercive-extractive state. This is a truism and a banality,” but one that has been forgotten in the modern era, says Stephen Holmes, writing in The American Prospect in an article titled “What Russia Teaches Us: How Weak States Threaten Freedom.”15

As Holmes writes, it is ironic that in this era of calls for lower taxes what Russia suffers from is the absence of sufficient taxation. Total tax revenues in Russia are at about 10 percent of the economy, which is insufficient to create a public sector to establish the rule of law and a healthy infrastructure.16

Part of our misconception of government is due to our emphasis on the Bill of Rights, which, as Holmes writes, is really a spelling out of a set of “negative liberties.”17 They focus on being free from government. But essential liberties also come from government’s presence. What makes democracy so revolutionary is that it established the concept of being free to participate in government, that this system of authority, which is what government is, could be controlled by the people, the polity, the public.

The failure to recognize that a market economy is a political choice and creation first and foremost leads to a belief that an economy operates by itself. The “laws” of supply and demand magically lift all boats to their highest and best use, without the aid of human intervention, goes the standard fairy tale. Part of this confused belief system comes from economics being classified as a science, and the conviction that, because equations and numbers are used, it can be compared to physics or chemistry. But humans are different than falling apples or sodium combining with chloride. They are their own actors, and can combine and perform in a variety of ways, many of which no one can guess.

Lewis Mumford posits that with the industrial revolution, nations adopted a new religious belief in classical economics to replace the belief that an all-seeing, all-knowing father God had laid out an orderly and just path for the world.

“The most fundamental of these postulates was a notion that the utilitarians had taken over, in apparent innocence, from the theologians: the belief that a divine providence ruled over economic activity and ensured, so long as man did not presumptuously interfere, the maximum public good through the dispersed and unregulated efforts of every private, self-seeking individual. The non-theological name for this pre-ordained harmony was laissez-faire.”

The idea of Adam Smith’s invisible hand shaping prices and production for the common good is a marvelous model that is true in some situations. The problem is, most students of economics accept it as being solid as an axe. They then proceed to pick it up and wield it indiscriminately. But the market only operates efficiently and for the benefit of everyone when the products of a market can be converted into something that can be bought and sold for money. Saving a historic building, for example, might greatly enhance the wealth and overall appeal of a town, not to mention the daily lives of its citizens. But it is very difficult to “marketize” the view of a church by charging people for the privilege of walking by it.

Not only do markets not always maximize public or individual good, they actually often degrade it through the same mechanisms meant to produce value.

There are many, many situations where people, all pursuing their maximum self-interest, make things worse for everyone, themselves included. Our treatment of the environment is the most obvious example, and the one most likely to topple the laissez-faire theology. It is simply too apparent that, left to themselves, people and companies will pollute the air, water, and land to the detriment of all without some larger system of legal control. Traffic is another. Everyone trying to get to work quickly and easily by car creates a traffic jam where no one gets to work quickly. Yet another example is the widespread distribution of guns. Individual actors, trying to maximize their personal safety, increase their physical danger, because a more dangerous world is created by the sum total of the actions of everyone arming themselves.

What’s troubling is how a proper understanding of the role of government in our lives is being undermined by a steady barrage of libertarian and antigovernment rhetoric. This language obscures the real relationship people have with government. It’s like criticizing the boat that keeps you afloat.

The version of the Republican Party dominant at the end of the twentieth century has been tremendously destructive in this, and should be rightly held responsible for the misconceptions many Americans hold. Republican leaders like Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi frequently wield the motto that “You know how to spend your money better than the government.” According to this analysis, government is akin to a thief, robbing taxpayers of their hard-earned pay. If government should exist at all, then, goes this line of thought, it is at best a necessary evil, best kept small and minimal.

This theory obscures the fact that government creates the wealth the people hold in their hands and are now reluctant to give up. A dollar bill is signed by the Secretary of the Treasury for a reason. Money is a communication device produced by a political agreement, both literally and in a wider sense. Not only does government print the money, but it also creates the conditions under which money can be “made.” It also creates the infrastructure of wealth creation, like public education and transportation systems.

America’s tortured, confused relationship to government can be seen in our tortured, chaotic, and confused transportation systems. Whether it’s trains, planes, or automobiles, the confusion between public and private has produced the worst of both worlds. Government puts too much money into highways and then prices the use of them too low, and so they are massively congested. Government shortchanges passenger train travel, leaving citizens with a skeletal, impoverished system. Government has ceded control of the skies to commercial airline companies, even though these for-profit companies depend on a public system of airports and air traffic controllers. This has left air passengers often running a gauntlet of high ticket prices and lousy, take-it-or-leave-it service. In general, we are a rich country with a surprisingly impoverished and incoherent transportation system.

Much of this would change if we recognized government’s central role in the architecture of our lives. Once this is accepted, arguments about the size of government become less ideological ones and more practical ones. Whether government or private enterprise performs a task becomes a question of efficiency. It is often beneficial to limit the scope and role of government, but this does not change government’s essential relationship to our lives.