Category Archives: Design

Learning to Walk: Not Always So Easy in the Contemporary City

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Driving along Route One in New Jersey last week, looking at the mammoth car dealerships and shopping centers lining the eight-lane highway, it was difficult to see how the words of noted Danish urbanist and architect Jan Gehl applied in such an environment. Where was there a public space to revive? Where was there a place to put a sidewalk cafe, a bicycle lane or a bench?

Gehl had spoken that same night before an audience of public officials and interested citizens in nearby Princeton, most of whom were participating in The Mayors’ Institute on Community Design for two days at Princeton, organized by Regional Plan Association and the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, Office of Smart Growth. Gehl spoke at McCosh Hall, inside one of the classic stone buildings at the university, as students made their way outside over a thin blanket of snow.

Gehl, Director of the Center for Public Space Research at the School of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, has been practicing his profession for four decades. Similar to William “Holly” Whyte in New York City, Gehl has spent his career examining and analyzing public spaces, studying how to keep them vibrant, or make them so. His books include New City Spaces; Life Between Buildings; and Public Spaces-Public Life. The distillation of his work centers around that most ordinary of activities: walking. “We are born to walk,” Gehl said, as he sauntered across the stage, demonstrating one version of that activity. “We are slow-moving animals. All our senses are designed to move at 5 kilometers an hour. Everything important is done on our feet, as we were meant to be.

Walking is more than walking. Walking is life.” He also praised related activities, including sitting, standing, watching and bicycling. His work is a study of urban pleasure, and the ways of producing more of it.

His ideals are classic historic cities like Barcelona, or revived newer ones like Portland in the United States. His native Copenhagen has been his workshop. There, thanks to several decades of what Gehl called “tweaking,” people stroll, bicycle and hang out as a matter of course. His statistics are amazing. Thirty-three percent of people in Copenhagen bicycle to work, Gehl said, while another third use public transit.

The key to generating great public spaces, of course, is taming that dominant master and mistress of most American cities, the car, and the devices created to handle it – the highway, the parking lot and the garage. Citizens must ask their leaders to place other priorities ahead of moving as many cars through a place as possible, or parking them once they get there.

This means removing parking spaces and lanes of traffic. In Copenhagen, the city’s traffic engineer has methodically removed parking spaces each year, while adding space for cycling and walking. “If you remove the parking,” Gehl said, “people won’t drive.” His portrayal of bicycling in Copenhagen would startle many Americans, who tend to view it as primarily a sport. “It’s a transportation system,” Gehl said of cycling.

“It’s not just for the freaks with the bicycle helmets and the padded elbows.” With regards to public spaces, Gehl said, there are four types of cities: the Traditional City, the Invaded City, the Abandoned City and the Reconquered City. Traditional cities are those like Venice, where people have never stopped walking. An invaded city is one like Naples, where leaders have allowed cars to take over squares and sidewalks. Abandoned cities are those like Houston, with ghost-like centers.

Reconquered cities are those like Portland, where citizens have reclaimed the public sector through wise policies.

Seeing the urban vitality Gehl described as a possibility, it was difficult not to endorse his prescriptions. But were they really valid for much of the contemporary American landscape? Suburban municipalities like Virginia Beach, which is actually the most populous city in Virginia, lack any center to reconquer, much less abandon. At times, Gehl seemed to assume the existence of a traditional city framework. He twice spoke about “starting at the railway station” when talking of how to revive public spaces, seemingly unaware that most American cities lacked them.

Still, his words clearly applied to traditional towns like Princeton, which has a centuriesold structure of streets and buildings to revive.

In these traditional towns and cities, attempts to squeeze in more parking garages and more lanes of traffic are viewed by some as eroding the community’s charm. Adding more bike lanes, buses and jitneys, and actually removing parking and traffic lanes in most towns in the tri-state area would be revolutionary here.

Change is possible. It was somewhat gratifying to learn that Copenhagen was not always a Mecca for bicyclists and boulevardiers. In the 1960s, Gehl said, Danish planners were actually discouraging cycling under the theory that this would reduce bicycle accidents with cars. It was not until the gas crisis of the 1970s that planners began to revive the practice. Over the coming years, planners encouraged strolling and walking as well, and pedestrianized more streets and plazas. Many people objected, Gehl said, because they thought it was not consistent with traditional Danish character that valued privacy and the home. The Danish were not Italians, they said, accustomed to dwelling in public places.

“Now, we are more Italian than the Italians,” he said. “We have developed a public-life culture that no one would have thought possible 40 years ago.” Particularly astute were his observations of how the needs of people have changed over the generations. Once, people hungered for open space; now, they hunger for each other.

“One hundred years ago on a Sunday, people would rush away from the crowded city into the woods,” Gehl said. “Today on a Sunday, people rush from the undercrowded suburbs into the overcrowded city.” Gehl’s philosophy was a possible challenge to the architects and designers of the World Trade Center site. He criticized what he called “dog-shit planning,” where each architect lays his piece, and the space left over is considered public space. According to LMDC’s Alex Garvin, the opposite will be true at Ground Zero, with the chosen designer focusing first on the public spaces. If so, Gehl would approve.

“The proper hierarchy of planning,” Gehl said, is “life, space and buildings, not buildings, space, life.”

–Alex Marshall, Senior Editor, RPA.First Published Feb. 6, 2003, in Spotlight on the Region, of Regional Plan Association in New York


A Bicycle Can Get You From Here to There

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That’s Good For You, Good For Everyone Else.

Wednesday, May 26, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

I’m going to talk about bikes today. So I’m going to speak very slowly, so my colleague Dave, “I’ll get out of my car when they pry my cold dead hands from the steering wheel” Addis, will perhaps understand me.

It’s funny about bicycles. When I suggested a while back accommodating them more on local roads, Addis, who has become the leading supporter of the traffic-jammed, suburban status quo, could only think of Bejing or Bombay. Yellow and brown hordes on rusty bicycles jostling for space on dusty roads with chickens and stray dogs yapping at their heels. Who wants that?

A different image comes to my mind. I think of two of the wealthiest and most civilized cities on earth — Amsterdam and Copenhagen. In my travels there, I remember beautiful women in elegant skirts, and men wearing fine linen suits, bicycling along to work or shopping.

All that biking was good for the natives. In Copenhagen, I remember a grandmotherly women blithely pedaling by me as I, on my rented bicycle and anemic calves, struggled to keep up with her.

I think of Seattle — another wealthy, liveable city — where the buses have bike racks and people put up with the steady drizzle to ride bikes everywhere.

Bikes have about them the aura of the childish, the silly and the inconsequential. They needn’t. For trips of a few miles or less, bikes can be the perfect vehicle. They are easy, casual and convenient. Add a rack and you can carry a bag of groceries or a shopping bag.

We have the perfect terrain for bicycling. We are as flat as Holland, with better weather than Seattle or Copenhagen. But we build everything so reflexively for the car, we rule out other ways of getting around.

In Amsterdam and Copenhagen, something like a third of all trips are by bicycles. Last time I checked, Copenhagen planners were hoping to see this rise to 50 percent.

A lot of people using bicycles transforms cities. To state the obvious, it’s a lot easier to accommodate a rack of 10 bicycles in front of a store than a parking lot for 10 cars.

New Norfolk City Manager Regina Williams got this right away when I spoke to her about it. Every person that rides a bike is one not driving a car, she said. It frees up space on streets, and represents another parking space that does not have to be built. There is no reason downtown Norfolk could not have thousands of commuters, shoppers, students coming into downtown every day by bicycle. Older cities, with their densities and finer grained network of streets, are ideal for bicycles.

In Hampton Roads, Virginia Beach should be the worst place to bike and in a lot of ways is. A city built around high-speed corridors like Virginia Beach Boulevard will always have difficulty accommodating a guy on a bike. Still, the city has done a good job of including separate bike paths on some of its newer streets, like South Independence Boulevard around Green Run. It also has a wonderful route from Fort Story all the way out General Booth Boulevard in the newer suburbs.

Norfolk and Portsmouth are lousy places to bicycle. This is a tragedy because it should be the opposite. Their older, straighter and narrower streets with clear, right-angle intersections are safer and better for bicycles. A cyclist can mix with traffic on a Colley Avenue in Ghent, or around Olde Towne, without dread.

But the same cyclist will eventually come to one of the giant, high-speed highways, like Brambleton Avenue or London Boulevard, that have been ploughed through these cities without much thought. Even crossing one of these roads is difficult, much less biking in them.

A perfect example of this is at the corner of Brambleton Avenue and Botetourt Street on the edge of Freemason in Norfolk. You come across the Hague on the lovely footbridge from Ghent, originally built for streetcars, and are then faced with a raging river of highspeed traffic on Brambleton Avenue. No crosswalk. No stoplight. I have seen a dad with two little children, all on bikes, trying to dart their way across this rushing stream without getting killed. I fear someone will be eventually.

In the short term, Norfolk and other planners need to add cross walks, stop lights and other devises to accommodate bikes. In the longer run, planners need to narrow traffic lanes on major highways like Brambleton or Waterside Drive. Narrower traffic lanes slow down cars, and frees up space for bike lanes and on-street parking. Planners need to think about bikes as naturally as they now think about cars.

This isn’t just being nice. The middle-class rides bikes, and if Norfolk and Portsmouth wants more of them, or to keep the ones they have, they need to make it easier for them to pedal places.

Right now, Norfolk thinks about bikes last, if at all.

Why doesn’t the MacArthur Center Mall have any bike racks in front of it? This is such a natural and obvious thing to do, when parking is both tight and charged for, you have to wonder what was on their minds.

One hopeful sign. The redesigned Church Street in Norfolk includes bike lanes, one planner told me. That’s a great start. If we start including bikes in our thinking, there’s no reason we can’t be the Copenhagen of the East Coast. Automobile Addis might never leave his well-cushioned front-seat, but the rest of us would like to now and then.


Urban Renewal in Norfolk

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What Was Lost: A lot.
What Was Gained: Not Much.

BY ALEX MARSHALL
Tuesday, August 10, 1999

The 1950s was about new stuff, not old stuff. The United States had spent two decades postponing consumption as it fought the Great Depression and then World War II. It was ready for new cars, houses, roads and ways of doing things. With a vengeance.

It was in this spirit that from 1949 into the early 1960s, Norfolk proceeded to tear down most of the buildings and streets built over the previous 275 years. A city founded in 1680 was left with little built before 1900. Cities around the country followed its example.

When the dust had ettled in the early 1960s, old East Main Street, lined with burlesque houses and bars, was gone. Gone was the original Commercial Place, where stevedores and merchants traded drinks in ancient taverns while they waited for ships to unload. Gone were the central city markets, where dozens of produce, dairy, meat and fish merchants sold their wares at small stands under mammoth roofs. Gone was the city’s old Union Station near the Elizabeth River, where travelers stepped off trains into the heart of the city. Gone was the entire neighborhood of Atlantic City. Gone was the city’s oldest core, a tight web of streets dating back to the city’s founding.

But the city didn’t just tear stuff down. In the place of the old, the city built: wide new roads, like St. Pauls Boulevard, Tidewater Drive, Virginia Beach Boulevard extension, Brambleton Avenue and the interstates; housing projects, including Roberts Park, Diggs Park, Young Park, Grandy Village, Bowling Park and others, which now ring downtown; new civic buildings, including a new City Hall, jail and courts complex, which would sit on a plaza nestled by freeway on-ramps; and vast windswept parking lots, where city officials would wait — and wait — for promised new investment to materialize.

How did the city afford all this? With lots and lots of nearly free federal money. Norfolk was first to take advantage of the 1949 Federal Housing Act, which paid 80 percent of urban renewal and gave cities new legal powers to take private property. The country had just finished winning a world war, and was ready to attempt and pay for drastic changes, even if a few eggs were broken to make this particular omelet.

Norfolk’s fervor in urban renewal traces back to its concept of “slums” and the city’s passion to get rid of them.

Even before World War II, city leaders looked out from the old City Hall and saw crumbling buildings with poor residents with few options. Many structures were wooden, and lacked indoor plumbing. A 1936 survey by the WPA showed that of 954 dwellings in on area between Monticello and Church Street (now St. Pauls Boulevard), 900 of them lacked flush toilets. About a third of the homes were in need of “major repair.”

Other buildings were more solid, made of brick and stone. But these were used for things city fathers weren’t proud of, like bar and burlesque shows. Of course, there were also family restaurants, hotels, tailors and offices, but these old-style establishments were not seen as anything special worth saving when a brand new city, one of highways, shopping malls and civic buildings, could be created.

Discussion of creating a housing authority was active in the 1930s. Finally in 1940, the City Council overcame its longtime resistance and created the Norfolk Housing Authority, after the Navy swung behind the effort. Lawrence M. Cox, who would lead the authority for almost three decades, would become its first executive director. This organization, later renamed the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, would lead the way, and still does, in the city’s effort to reinvent itself.

But before the city could do much, World War II intervened. Downtown would deteriorate even further as thousands of sailors and civilian workers flooded its streets and swamped its housing. City leaders greatly disliked the reputation the city earned as one giant honky-tonk.

After the war, Norfolk was the first city in the country to have an urban renewal plan approved under the new Federal Housing Act. The city received $25 million in 1949 to build 3000 units of public housing. In 1951, the city proceeded to clear 127 acres of land between Monticello and Church Street, now St. Paul’s Boulevard. In 1953, another major slum clearance project was announced.

As the decade proceeded, city leaders fell in love with the bulldozer. In projects beginning in 1949, 1951,1953, 1957, 1958, 1961 the City Council, through its creation the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, ripped out dozens of streets, knocked down hundreds of buildings and evicted thousands of families from their homes. At the same time, it built new highways, new civic buildings, and new public housing.

Under then Mayor Duckworth, the city would announce a clearance project or an expansion of a current one almost every year. In 1957, the City Council approved the destruction of Atlantic City, a relatively stable neighborhood, that used to exist around the midtown tunnel entrance and underneath the medical complex. In the same year, the city would commence clearance of the central core of the city, which would lead to the construction of a new City Hall, courts complex and jail. These renewal efforts would also create the famous blank “17 acres,” which would stay empty for 35 years before the MacArthur Center was built.

By the mid 1960s, most of downtown, with the exception of Freemason, Granby Street and part of Main Street, had been cleared.

With almost a half century’s perspective, what can be said about the city’s vast urban renewal effort?

Given the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear the city went too far, too fast. City leaders had envisioned a new city of freeways and plenty of parking that would compete with the suburbs. Instead, the destruction of the older networks of streets and buildings would accelerate the migration of retail activity to the suburbs. The passion to build big highways and freeways made mass transit less workable and made downtown, in comparison to the easy-parking suburbs, less viable.

While initial projects in the early 1950s had focused on crumbling wooden shacks beyond repair, later efforts of that decade would tear down scores of pre Civil War buildings of brick and stone, many dating back to the 1800s. These could have formed a base for tourism and downtown residential living.

Frederick Herman, an architect who served on the city’s design review board during this period, said the city tore down numerous treasures. In retrospect, Herman said, it’s clear the city’s wholesale clearance was the wrong approach.

“Norfolk probably had as many 18th century and early 19th century buildings as Georgetown,” Herman said in an interview in 1996. “And they were basically intact until the early 50s. Some were rundown, but a lot of them could have been rehabilitated.”

True, the city would gain a rebuilt Main Street lined with tax-paying office skyscrapers. But under a different plan, these might have emerged elsewhere while keeping the waterfront intact.

The city also lost less tangible things, like its historical memory. Norfolk not only tore down buildings, but erased ancient streets, dating back to the city’s founding. No longer could someone walk downtown, and remember at a glance where they or their forefathers came from.

But the 1950s were a different time. Norfolk’s old downtown homes, like those that still exist in Freemason, had been abandoned by the upper classes for two generations. The prosperous set had long moved out to fashionable Ghent, Park Place, Colonial Place and other new streetcar suburbs. Historical preservation was a tiny idea. Few people imagined a time when a young lawyer or business person would pay dearly for the privilege of living in a crumbling 18th century house with bad plumbing.

And Norfolk was certainly not alone in its love of destruction. Almost every city in the country pursued urban renewal. Like Norfolk, these cities often erased buildings and streets of great historical and economic value. It’s was a sign of the times that New York, New Orleans and Alexandria considered Greenwich Village, the French Quarter and Alexandria’s Old Town as candidates for urban renewal.

Savannah, whose historic district now attracts six million visitors a year, began tearing it down under urban renewal in the 1950s. This city of Spanish moss hanging over graceful squares has since been made famous in movies like Forrest Gump and books like Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil. But in the 1950s, like in Norfolk, its leaders envisioned a new city of skyscrapers and freeways. Only a backlash by prominent citizens saved most of the city’s unique structure of homes around squares, although some were lost.

It’s tempting to think what Norfolk and other cities would look like if the federal government had given money to renovate old buildings and improve mass transit, as well as for tearing buildings down and building new highways. What if Norfolk had improved its trolley system, and given grants for landlords to repair and renovate their properties?

But that was not to be.

Only after downtown urban renewal was over, would the city began trying to recreate new things in the style of what it had torn down. The new townhouses on Boush Street being built now, for example, mimic the urban homes that once lined Freemason and other streets downtown.

Historically, urban renewal remains a brief, although consequential, period in the history of American cities. By the mid 1960s, urban planners would start to turn against it. Jane Jacobs would startle planners by praising the traditional city street. Scholars would label urban renewal “Negro removal,” because of the thousands of poor, usually black families removed from their homes. In Norfolk in the 1960s, attorney and later judge Joe Jordan denounced urban renewal as racist. In the 1990s, Milwaukee is following the lead of some other cities in trying to tear down some of the highways built during the urban renewal era and rebuild a city of streets, mass transit and walking.

Norfolk was and is unusual in that it started urban renewal early, and has continued it long after it has lost fashion nationally. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city tore down and rebuilt virtually all of Ghent east of Colonial Avenue, moving thousands of black families from their homes. In the present day, the city is clearing a section of East Ocean View, and in the process evicting roughly a thousand families, in an attempt to build a new, more prosperous neighborhood.

For better and for worse, Norfolk continues to believe in the power of the bulldozer.

Typing For Non-Conformists

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The Dvorak alternative keyboard is a boon for the aching hand.

BY ALEX MARSHALL

I’m writing this essay in a different language. It’s called Dvorak.

The words in my mindnd on the screen are coming out the same as always. But my fingers on the keyboard, the tool I use to translate mental words to written ones, are moving differently than they have over the last 20 years. My fingers are speaking Dvorak.

Perhaps it was an impending middle-age crisis, but at age 39, after a decade as a journalist and two decades typing everything from college papers to months-long newspaper projects, I wanted to see if I could do something as fundamental as shift my system of typing.

So I switched. “Dvorak” (pronounced duh-VOR-ak), to the uninitiated, is the more efficient keyboard layout designed by efficiency expert August Dvorak in the 1930s. With Dvorak, the letters are laid out to correspond, roughly, with their frequency of use: All five vowels, for example, repose under the left hand. Five common consonants rest under the right hand. Your fingers stay put more and cover less ground.

As I write this, my fingers are staying mostly on the middle row of the keyboard — the home row. In Dvorak, 70 percent of one’s typing usually happens there. This compares to just 30 percent on Qwerty, as the standard keyboard layout is dubbed.

It wasn’t just a whim that prompted my switch. Although I liked the idea of typing more quickly and easily, I also thought it might ease my RSI (repetitive stress injury). Like roughly half the adult population, it seems, I am bothered by wrist and hand pain brought on by too much typing. I thought Dvorak might help.

Dvorak is also one of those visionary systems I have a weakness for — one of those big “if onlys,” like Esperanto, the invented language that its proponents hoped the world would adopt as a universal tongue. Or the Wankel rotary engine. Or the Macintosh computer. Or the flat tax. All these systems hold out the appeal that “if only” the world switched over, everything would work better. They’re frankly utopian visions: Someday, we will all use Dvorak on Macintosh computers as we write in Esperanto to our congressmen about the new flat tax.

But this particular revolution may indeed be coming. In the typewriter era, switching to Dvorak was virtually impossible: No one made typewriters with Dvorak keyboards — and even if they had done so, you would have had to lug around your own machine to every job or place you wanted to type.

But with computers, all you have to do is change a file in the operating system and presto — you have a new keyboard. Boosted by these possibilities, thousands of people around the country are switching to Dvorak. Dvorak has also inspired a dozen or so Web sites that promulgate its virtues.

The biggest boost for Dvorak came when Microsoft began pre-installing it in Windows. In most versions, you simply open the Keyboard file inside the Control Panel and then switch to Dvorak using the Properties file inside the Language selection category. (Depending on the computer, you may then be prompted to insert the installation disk to complete the switch.)

For this milestone on the road to universal Dvorak typing, we can thank two Dvorak fanatics, Linda Lewis and Randy Cassingham. Lewis is the founder and president of Keytime, a typing school and products seller in Seattle; Cassingham is author of “The Dvorak Book” and the online column This Is True.

A few years ago, Lewis and Cassingham journeyed across the water from Seattle to Redmond to meet with Microsoft executives and argue the case for Dvorak. It worked — the 800-pound gorilla of operating systems began including Dvorak in Windows soon afterward. It was a huge victory for the Dvorak contingent. Before that, Cassingham said, to use Dvorak, you had to type in MS-DOS, because Windows would not recognize a software conversion to Dvorak.

My own dear Macintosh, I’m sorry to say, does not pre-install a Dvorak file. But switching is still pretty simple. You can buy a Dvorak file from Keytime or download one free from several sites, like this. Then, you just drop it in your system folder, and Dvorak becomes one of the languages you can switch the keyboard to, like Dutch or Finnish.

Just how many people use Dvorak? Hard to say, but far more people than ever have in the past. Cassingham said offices are studded with people who have switched to Dvorak on their own. Among the high-profile converts to Dvorak use is Nathan Myhrvold, chief technology officer for Microsoft.

Cassingham has been typing in Dvorak for about 15 years. At first, he relied on software conversion programs he wrote himself. “I’m a writer, and as a writer, output is money,” Cassingham says. “I used to type on Qwerty, and my hands would be aching after a long article. My hands never ache now, even though I write a lot more. I used to type 55 words a minute. Now I type over 100.”

But the Dvorak revolution has implications beyond helping freelancers make more money. Along with the standard Dvorak layout, August Dvorak also invented a one-handed layout for both the right and left hands. Microsoft now also includes these in Windows as a benefit for disabled users.

Switching to Dvorak is more an effort of will than of skill. When I switched a year ago, I gave myself one week for the task, during a break I had in researching a book. For those seven days, I dedicated one hour each morning to practicing Dvorak. I used a book and software package called “Skillbuilder” that’s available from Keytime.

It was a scary time. There was that moment midweek when I found myself between shores, unable to type Qwerty, but still not having mastered Dvorak. My fingers felt awkward and clumsy. But at the end of seven days, I had learned Dvorak enough to do my work — to walk, if not run, where I wanted to go.

And a year later? I count the switch a success, if a mixed one. My typing speed is only slightly faster than it was before. (I was shocked to learn, when I tested myself before I switched, that I was typing 90 words per minute in Qwerty — I guess daily journalism is good for something.) I now type about 100 words a minute in Dvorak. Cassingham says I will gradually increase in speed and flexibility over the years to come.

Dvorak is integrated into most of my environment. It’s installed on my Macintosh desktop and laptop. It even comes pre-installed on my AlphaSmart, the $250 word processor I use on the road. If I desired, I could buy premade Dvorak keyboards from several vendors. As it is, I’ve attached clear plastic letters, which I bought from Keytime, to show the Dvorak layout without hiding Qwerty.

My RSI is still there, but it has diminished. Under Qwerty, my hands resembled deranged spiders as they flew over the keyboard, making awkward stretches to this or that letter. Now, they are more like workers in a good union, as they hoe away at the main row.

First printed in www.SALON.com | Oct. 12, 1998

Alex Marshall is a freelance writer. His first book, “How Cities Work,” has now been published by University of Texas Press. It was written in Dvorak.