Category Archives: Regular Columns

Teaching New Urbanism

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BY ALEX MARSHALL
FOR OCTOBER 1997 ISSUE
METROPOLIS MAGAZINE

Every July for the past few years, architect Andres Duany had taught a three-day workshop at Harvard on New Urbanism, the urban design philosophy he helped mold and promote. A group of architects, developers and other professionals were given the basics of neo-traditional design, while Duany and the New Urban movement got the imprint of Harvard’s esteemed name.

No longer. Before this summer, (1997) Duany fired off a letter saying he could “no longer associate his name with a school that is not fertile ground for urbanism,” said Alex Krieger, an architect and director of the urban designprogram at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Why the withdrawal? According to Krieger, Duany spurned the school after the school had spurned his efforts to expand the course to regular students at the Graduate School of Design. As it was, the course had been part of the school’s summer series of professional development courses.

“Andres has tried very hard to convince the world that Harvard is teaching New Urbanism, but that is not happening,” said Krieger, who has worked with Duany on projects dating back to Kentlands in the late 1980s.

“I still consider Andres a friend, but the relationship between Harvard and New Urbanism is strained. . . .They (the New Urbanists) wanted to win us over, or at least use our names, and they have been rebuffed.”

The dustup is an example of the tentative and often uncordial dance between the New Urbanists and the traditional architectural establishment in academia. The New Urbanists are making inroads, but slowly and in the face of much skepticism.

To those ignorant of the term, New Urbanism is the loose design philosophy that advocates reviving many of the building principles of traditional towns and cities. That means everything from pushing homes up to the streets, to mixing, or attempting to mix, businesses in with homes. It also is part of a debate about how to achieve a greater community and public life in this country, and whether design has anything to do with that.

Design professionals in universities are debating whether New Urbanism offers a coherent theory of design, and the validity of New Urbanism’s criticism of the traditional architectural education as overly centered on creating the architect as artist who creates unique, sculptural forms.

So far, New Urbanism is popping up in a few schools around the country, mostly because of a few professors who have embraced its ideals. An exception to this is the architecture school at The University of Miami, led by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, which has the New Urban theory as its spiritual core.

Beside Miami, schools frequently mentioned by New Urbanists are the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Berkeley has long offered a joint degree in architecture and city and regional planning, but has recently begun a small master’s program that combines architecture and New-Urban style town planning. Several of the architects in the office of Peter Calthorpe, a leading New Urbanist, are graduates of the program or school, said Daniel Solomon, a professor at Berkeley.

Solomon said the school was more fertile territory for New Urbanism because it had long integrated urban design with architecture. Since the early 1960s, regional planning and architecture have been housed in Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Design, Solomon said.

At the University of Washington, Douglas Kelbaugh has led efforts to teach New Urbanism. Working with students, Kelbaugh has led about 10 charrettes in the Seattle area working with New Urbanism principles.

“New Urbanism is not a formal component of the education there,” Kelbaugh said. “It’s something I and a couple of other faculty members push.”

At the University of Southern California, Stefanos Polyzoides, one of the founders of the Congress of the New Urbanism, has integrated much of the philosophy into his course.

Other professors and schools mentioned by New Urbanists are Mark Schimmenti at the University of Tennessee and Ellen Dunham-Jones at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The most cohesive and complete program is at the University of Miami, which has about 280 undergraduate students and 50 at the graduate level. There, the idea of architect as city, or at least place, builder is integrated into the curriculum from the beginning.

Plater-Zyberk, dean of the school and New Urbanist leader, said students begin their education with a course in the “history of settlement,” and then work their way down, narrowing the lens, until they arrive at the individual building.

“We do it in reverse,” Plater-Zyberk said. “Instead of starting with the smallest increment and growing, we start with the urban contextual environment first.”

The school was recently awarded funding for the Henry R. Luce Professorship in Family and Community by the foundation named for the founder of Time and Life magazine. The professor, who has yet to be selected, will lead an unusual joint program between the architecture school and the school of medicine. Using resources from both schools, Plater-Zyberk says the program will focus on repairing and rejuvenating East Little Havana, home to many of the new immigrants in the Miami area.

The program in East Little Havana is an example of how New Urbanists are trying to shift architectural education away from the Howard-Roark ideal of architect as lone artist, to someone who uses his or her facility with space to create a better context for both buildings and people.

That’s a big jump, say New Urbanists.

“New Urbanists are challenging some of the core values of the traditional architectural establishment,” said Shelley Poticha, executive director of the Congress of New Urbanism in San Francisco. “That single buildings aren’t the most thing to focus on. That the place and the fabric are important, and that the architecture should contribute to the place.”

Polyzoides, echoing many others, said there aren’t that many jobs for solitary artists, which he said most architectural schools train students to aspire to. The myriad tasks that should be available to architects – from construction manager to laying out the insides of a K-Mart – are not because architects are not trained to be practical managers of space.

“Architecture schools are in deep denial,” Polyzoides said. “They support an architecture system based around star performers. But the chance of becoming a builder like Frank Gehry is equal to the chance of being a teammate of Michael Jordan.”

Polyzoides said he would like to reform the studio system that is the core of most architectural education. Having students design alone and compete with other students re-inforces the hyper-indivualistic and competitive tendencies of architecture. Instead, Polyzoides said he has his students work together to solve tasks like fitting streets and buildings into an oddly shaped parcel of land.

The larger problem, said Solomon and others, is ending the division between planning and architecture. Some universities even house city or regional planning in separate schools.

“The idea of bringing together the architecture school and the planning school is at the crux of New Urbanism,” Poticha said.

Some of the hostility towards New Urbanism comes from New Urbanists attempting to claim credit for all good urban design over the last two decades, said Krieger.

“It’s galling what is attributed to New Urbanism,” Krieger said. “All of a sudden, everything that is being done in Boston, like the gentrification of South Boston, are all examples of New Urbanism. They have co-opted urbanism. Anything having to do with cities in any shape or form is New Urbanism, even though the majority of their product remains out on the periphery.”

“We don’t teach New Urbanism,” said Krieger of Harvard. ” There are courses on good urbanism.”

Krieger suggests half-seriously that perhaps urbanists should “co-opt” the term New Urbanism, since the name seems to be selling well.

“If the name helps people get involved in cities, let’s use it even more,” Krieger said. “That’s the cynical side of me speaking.”

How Urban Should Your City Be?

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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?

Those Old Rules Can Come In Handy. Just ask James Bond.

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WINE COLUMN
First Published in PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE
SEPT. 23, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

Knowing and paying attention to the old rules can come in handy. Just ask James Bond.

When the Russian agent managed to point a gun at Bond’s heart in the novel “From Russia With Love,” Bondmentally kicked himself for not realizing at dinner an hour earlier that the blond gentleman across from him was not who he appeared to be.

The gentleman’s English accent had been perfect. But, while chatting with Bond over a nice filet of sole, the beefy guy had ordered a glass of red wine. Bond had noticed this curious behavior, but only now, with his life in danger, did Bond realize that this had been the sign the proper English gentleman was actually a Russian agent.

Bond got out of his predicament, needless to say, and went on to give more lessons on food and social etiquette, which are always woven into every Ian Fleming novel.

But how about that advice about red wine and fish? Does it still hold true?

Absolutely. As a general rule, red wine and fish do not marry well. The tannins and stronger flavors in a red wine often set off a violent chemical reaction with a white fish that can be not only unappetizing but downright unpleasant.

I say this defiantly, in the face of a wave of words from various wine writers who have been proclaiming of late that red wine certainly does go with fish. These nouveau trendsetters say all rules are off, that God is dead, that all is permitted. They will find a way to marry a 20-year-old Bordeaux with a mess of catfish.

Don’t you believe them. In general, red wine goes badly with most types of seafood, unless the seafood is heavily masked by other flavors. I am a conservative in this, but I am also correct. There are some exceptions. But these are ones that prove the rule, not break it.

Salmon, an oily dominant fish, goes well with Pinot Noir, a Rioja or any lighter red wine. The oiliness and strength of the fish holds up against the red wine. I love ordering Salmon in restaurants, for I get to enjoy fish and my favorite color of wine, which is red.

Salmon is the only fish I have found that goes well regularly with red wine.

But a sauce or spice can change the flavor dynamics. Dump a red sauce on just about anything, and a red wine will go well with it. A spicy shrimp Creole or jambalaya has no problem holding up to a Cote du Rhone. But when the primary flavor you taste is tuna, sea bass, scallops or oysters, shun the temptation to be daring and go red. Be a traditionalist instead. Go white.

But what type of white? As a general rule, a Sauvignon Blanc, whether it is from California, Bordeaux or Sancerre, is a my favorite white wine with almost any type of seafood. The crispness frames the fish well, without covering up its delicate flavors. A Chardonnay, by contrast, can overpower fish with its oak and vanilla flavors.

But there are plenty of other white wines to choose from.

A good place to try for yourself is at the Dockside Inn Restaurant in Virginia Beach, in the shadow of the Lesner Bridge, next to Henry’s. The Dockside Inn, which is partnered with the Lynnhaven Seafood Marina, has one of the finest wine selections in the area. The wine department is more like a wine store. It is housed in a small store immediately adjacent to the large restaurant dining room. With most wines, you can go in, pick out your bottle on the extensive shelves, and order the same bottle off the wine list in the restaurant a few feet away.

And oh, what a selection. Just with whites, you can find an extensive collection of Rieslings, Gewurtraminer(sp), Sancerres, Viogners and many others.

The palate and pocketbook behind the wine is Angelique Kambouropoulos, who with her husband Costas, own and run the marina and the restaurant. The wine selection is Angelique’s department.

Angelique agrees with me that Sauvignon Blanc is often her reflexive choice with seafood, because of its crisp acidity. She is fond of those from New Zealand.

Although now she deals with wine professionally, her passion for wine began when she was selling real estate in Northern Virginia 15 years ago. She loved the way it made food taste better, she said. Eventually, she began planning the wine list for her husband’s restaurant.

“I love quality,” Angelique says, as she contemplates her row after row of well-bottled shelves. “I don’t care how long it takes to sell a great bottle. I want the best.”

She offers about 30 wines by the glass. It helps people learn about wine to be able to easily taste a variety of different wines, she said.

I forgot to ask her if she is a fan of James Bond. But on matters of the grape, she agreed with him. When it comes with flesh from the sea, white is usually right.

Searching For The Heart Of Darkness

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BY ALEX MARSHALL
WINE COLUMN FOR PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE
JAN. 11, 2001

The fluid in the glass was black and dark, as if someone had emptied out his fountain pen into a glass of water. I eyed it suspiciously, then swirled, sniffed and tasted.

It was wonderful. A rich assortment of tastes cascaded over my tongue, backed up by a healthy dose of tannins. It was like a variation of a good Bordeaux.

I smiled appreciatively at the waitress. I had never heard of the wine she steered me toward: Madiran. I was in a small, French restaurant in Manhattan, Chez Bernard on West Broadway. It had classic French food at reasonable prices — and a wine list worthy of a three-star restaurant in Paris. The waitress had steered me away from the $2,000 bottles of old Bordeauxs, and to this wine I had never heard of, Madiran, for $30.

Madiran, I would learn from her and others, was a small region near the French-Spanish border. The makers used the local “Tannat” grape mixed with more familiar grapes like Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon. The Tannat grape, whose name derives from “tannins,” gave the wine its dark, inky blackness. The one I had enjoyed, a 1996 Chateau Bouscasse by Alan Brumont, was one of the best rated, it turned out.

Impressed with this wine from an unfamiliar region with an unfamiliar grape, I called up some of my wine buddies to get their thoughts.

Phil, who imports wine for a living out in Portland, Oregon, was impressed. “You’ll see a Madiran on the lists of most restaurants in France,” he said. “But it’s not very common in the United States.”

Phil had two on his wholesale list, both made by Domaine Berthoumieu.

After Phil, I called up Jim Raper, my former boss at The Virginian-Pilot and a wine enthusiast par excellence. Raper, who is now in Lexington, Va., had lived near the Madiran region in France for a while. He noted that the Madiran is close to where Armagnac is produced, the competitor to Cognac. He remembered enjoying a bottle one afternoon.

“I was up in there, on the way to Biarritz, and stopped and bought a bottle in a grocery store,” Raper recalled. “It was a 1989. It was fantastic.”

Although still not well known, Madiran is slowly being discovered. Bonny Doon, the iconoclastic California wine company, has begun importing a Madiran. Owner Randal Grahm has called it “Heart of Darkness”, in honor of its color, and slapped on a wild smear of a label designed by Ralph Steadman.

Country Vintner of Richmond is distributing it in Hampton Roads.

“They are big, inky, very different wines, made from old vines,” said Pat Dudding of Country Vintner. “They are awesome, because they have such intensity.”

So I had fun both drinking and investigating the origins of my “Madiran.” But speaking more generally, Madiran is an example of the type of lesser-known but excellent wines you should keep an eye out for. Once found, you get the benefit of a good wine at reasonable prices — and the pleasure of telling your friends about it.

What other nice wines are out there?

David Hollander, with National Distributing Company in Norfolk, said he likes the California wines from the Monterey and Lake County districts, which he said produce great wines but are less famous than nearby Napa or Sonoma.

“You aren’t paying for the expensive land,” Hollander said.

Peter Coe of Taste Unlimited said bottles of Rhone wine from the Costieres de Nimes appellation are flying off the shelves. They retail for $9.95 a bottle.

The trick is to trust your taste buds. Many now expensive wines were not so a decade or two ago. I know people who used to buy Ribero del Dueros, the well-known Spanish wine that ranges from $20 to $50 a bottle, when the were $6 a bottle.

They are kicking themselves now for not buying several cases.

Romance Novel – To A Man – Reads Like Female Porn

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Published: Thursday, March 3, 1994
Section: DAILY BREAK – page B1 Source
BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER

My JOURNEY into romance novels began with an article in one of my favorite magazines, Whole Earth Review, the San Francisco quarterly that regularly runs against the mainstream current.In that issue, budding romance novel writer Augusta Wynde defended the chunky paperbacks featuring pectorially well-endowed young men like Fabio on their raised inset covers. These books sell in phenomenal numbers, she pointed out, yet are virtually ignored by the mainstream press and literary world, more so than other types of genre fiction such as mysteries, detective or science fiction.

“Reading bad detective novels is considered mildly eccentric; reading romance novels is evidence of irreversible vapidity,” Wynde said. “The New York Times Book Review regularly reviews mysteries, and occasionally reviews science fiction, but never reviews romance; the very idea seems almost embarrassing in its silliness.”

It is sexism, Wynde said, adding that women read romance novels, and the male literary world dismisses the books because of that. Playing around with guns, Wynde said, is more respectable than playing around with good-looking young men who might rip your bodice. Romance novels, Wynde said, get their power by using “heightened emotional intensity, not action.” So putting down romance is putting down emotions.

This seemed like a good argument to me. Maybe the romance novel really was misunderstood. Plus, I’ve always been interested in the contours of the female psyche. So I plucked off the grocery store rack “Sweet Liar” by Jude Deveraux, an author whom Wynde recommended.

“Her characters are entertaining and sympathetic,” Wynde said of Deveraux.. “She has a knack for wonderful fantasies. She’s immensely popular, and she deserves it. Her prose is uncluttered.

The royal-blue cover showed a jeweled broche and said, “The Dazzling New York Times Bestseller.” A note about Deveraux inside the back cover said more than 20 million copies of her books were in print.

The plot was this: A woman in her late 20s, Samantha, reluctantly travels to New York to search for her lost grandmother. In New York, circumstances force her to live in the same townhouse as a friend of her dead father’s, 30-year-old Michael. (In “Sweet Liar,” circumstances always force Samantha to do something.)

Samantha and Michael end up playing detectives and searching for the lost grandmother. The heart of the novel though, was Michael’s tortuously slow conquest of Samantha. For no apparent reason, Samantha was intensely hostile toward Michael, and he had to slowly break down her will, chapter by chapter.

Not a bad plot. But there was a strange hot-house air about the novel, especially in the descriptions of Samantha and Michael. It was as if I’d entered a room I wasn’t meant to be in. It reminded me of something.

Then it came to me. The novel reminded me of reading explicit sexual writing aimed at men, like the Forum section of Penthouse magazine, where readers detailed their supposed sexual exploits.

Romance novels, it hit me, were female pornography. As with male pornography, it was for women a generally private world, where unbelievable things were free to happen purely as a backdrop for something else. In Sweet Liar, Michael kissed Samantha in the street before they were introduced to each other. It was like in Penthouse when the airline stewardess offers herself to a passenger after a minute’s conversation. They also both objectified the opposite sex to an extreme.

Wynde’s thoughts that romance novels were really emotional dramas didn’t hold up to me, at least not with this book. Samantha and Michael seldom developed or interacted on a true emotional level. The romantic interplay was mechan-istic.

The feverish portrayal of courtship also revealed something about women, or at least about some women. In Sweet Liar, Samantha was a spoiled, brattish child. She treated Michael atrociously, often kicking, slapping and elbowing him. Michael not only put up with her, he showered her with gifts like designer clothes. (Samantha, though, didn’t figure out that Michael was spending thousands of dollars on her. She lived in this protective fog of ignorance, although she wasn’t meant to be a stupid woman.) Michael had his own faults. He would often manhandle her, preventing her from leaving rooms or shoving her along.

Lovers of romance novels, it seems, have, in their fantasies, a taste for passivity and a hint of violence.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with reading romance novels. A fantasy is a fantasy. But it’s interesting that descriptions of courtship may occupy the same place in the female psyche as descriptions of love-making do to men.

I don’t know how Sweet Liar turned out. The story pulled me about halfway through but then I stopped. I couldn’t stomach any more.

The Demolition Man

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by Alex Marshall
This article first appeared in Metropolis
MAY 1995

Metropolis writer Alex Marshall spoke to Andres Duany about his role in the controversial plan to bulldoze East Ocean View in Norfolk. At the time of the interview, the city had bought few houses and only a small amount of demolition had taken place. Planning officials gave Duany wide latitude in recommencling whether some homes or areas should be saved from demolition. For now, the bulldozers have been idled by a commission that ruled that the housing authority offered a property owner just half of what his property was worth. The authority is appealing, but if the ruling stands, it will drive up the cost of the project to the point that the development would have to proceed in stages, if at all.

METROPOLIS: You seem to be in the position of Baron Haussmann, who built his grand boulevards through the neighborhoods of nineteenth-century Paris. People are saying, “We love your ideas, but we don’t want our houses torn down.” What responsibility do you have to the people who now live in East Ocean View?

DUANY: I think it’s the ancient [question of the needs of the] individual versus the community. You have to find where to draw that line. And it’s very, very difficult to draw it. In this case, that work has been done. The Norfolk city council has made the decision and everybody is out.

METROPOLIS: The residents aren’t actually out yet.

DUANY: Well, the vote has taken place. Now we can see what the best community plan is and see who can stay and who cannot stay.

METROPOLIS: If your design gets built, are you concerned that your kind of urbanism will be less authentic than what exists there now?

DUANY: The neighborhood will still be mixed in income, but exactly the other way. Now it’s 95 percent rental and five percent owner. Under the new plan, it’s going to flip to be 80 percent owner and 20 percent rental. The scale will be healthier. Remember the statement that poverty does not cause crime. Poverty in concentration causes crime.

METROPOLIS: New Urbanism was founded in part as a reaction against urban renewal. Now you are participating in an urban renewal project.

DUANY: There’s a big difference between the neighborhoods that were wiped out in the 1950s, which were little Georgetowns, with darling houses and first-rate urbanism, and this stuff [the homes in East Ocean View], which is extremely exploitative. Even if I were most benevolent and broad-minded, I could save only 10 percent of the buildings. It’s not like [how it used to be done], where there were great places that were just misunderstood and demolished.

METROPOLIS: Do you ever wake up in a cold sweat at night and say, wait a minute, I’m involved in an urban renewal project?

DUANY: Well, I’ve never been involved in the side that causes demolition. I’ve always been on the repair side. I’ve actually resigned from projects because of not wanting to be involved in demolitions. I’ve been to charrettes in which contracts were signed and I just walked out the first day.

METROPOLIS: Where did this happen?

DUANY: In Houston, in an old black neighborhood. Actually, I quit because there was a very nice apartment building and some very nice 1940s housing. It was a total slum. But it was so beautifully designed that I thought it was of architectural value. Basically, at the end of the first day, I said, “Either you trust me to decide what stays and what goes, or you don’t.” And I walked. I was on the airplane the same night. But I’m in a very privileged position, because I have more work than I can handle. Most planners can’t do that. They have to eat.

METROPOLIS: Is it bad for your practice to be involved in a project that forces people out of their homes, even if you are doing so for the sake of better architectural quality?

DUANY: I suppose it is, yes. But it’s easy for me to say, “I didn’t do it.” The whole thing has been made so easy for me. I’ve been protected from this beautifully. Because [the city council made the decision] before I got here.

METROPOLIS: But you do have some misgivings about it?

DUANY: Well, I’d rather it wasn’t the case, I must say. But on the other hand, affordable housing is not what cities need. Because it doesn’t pay taxes. It bankrupts cities. That’s the problem with Philadelphia right now. The whole trick here is to bring the middle class back to the city. The whole challenge is getting middle-class people to come in and live with lower-income people.

METROPOLIS: Is it possible to do some selective demolition and gradually bring the neighborhood up?

DUANY: I think the political reality was “Where do you draw the line?” Because all the people have terrific rights. Basically, [the planners] decided that if we’re unfair, we’re unfair to everybody. And that’s a form of fairness.

When The New Urbanism Meets An Old Neighborhood

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by Alex Marshall
This article first appeared in Metropolis
May, 1995

East Ocean View in Norfolk, Virginia, is a neighborhood on death row, awaiting execution by bulldozer. Residents are being forced from their homes to make way for a brand-new village designed by Andres Duany. If this sounds like old-fashioned urban renewal, well, that’s what it is. It employs the same logic: cities can be fixed by plowing down neighborhoods and replacing them with better buildings and wealthier folks.

The presence of Duany adds a twist. As a partner of Miami-based Duany/PlaterZyberk Town Planners, he is an acknowledged leader of the New Urbanists, the self styled white hats of contemporary architecture who seek to reform America’s wayward landscape. Their remedy is as much moral as it is aesthetic. They believe that traditional town planning – by which they mean a grid of streets lined with trees and front porches, studded with shops and parks – can heal the nation’s fractured sense of community. In East Ocean View, however, the New Urbanists’ championing of the ideal of community is being put to the test. In essence, Duany is now facing the same charges that smeared the Modernists he so disdains: Is it people he cares about – or buildings?

The drama is being played out in a city of a quarter million, the center of a metropolitan sprawl inhabited by 1.4 million. Over the last few decades, Norfolk has lost a third of its population, while the suburbs have boomed, tripling in size. Although the city has a huge commercial harbor, it’s still basically a Navy town, relying on the massive Norfolk Naval Base and related installations to pump dollars and jobs into the economy. For almost half a century, Norfolk has been looking for ways to stem the tide of white flight and bring the middle class back to the city. Since the early 1950s, huge chunks of the city have been bulldozed; many lots remain empty, awaiting private-sector investment that has never materialized. At the moment, the city is leveraged to the hilt in a variety of downtown renewal schemes, including a suburban-style mall supported with $100 million in loans and free infrastructure.

In East Ocean View, bungalows, duplexes, and brick apartment buildings sit on a grid of streets on a peninsula sandwiched by the Chesapeake Bay and one of its estuaries. For decades, people have speculated that it could be a prime piece of real estate. In late 1993, not without controversy, the Norfolk city council approved a plan concocted by the housing authority to purchase 100 acres. The bulldozers have already bit into a few of the roughly 350 buildings that make up more than 1,500 homes. The city hopes that a new neighborhood, aimed at the middle and upper classes, will both rid the city of social problems and help its tax base. It’s undeniable that the present neighborhood has its troubles. Prostitutes loiter at certain intersections; young men in bulky jackets handle a brisk drug trade with passing motorists. But as residents will tell you, it’s one of the few places in the Norfolk metropolitan area where a working-class family can afford an apartment within a block or two of the beach. It’s also one of the more integrated neighborhoods, about two-thirds white, a third black, mixed pretty evenly. The homes range from neatly tended to boarded-Lip and abandoned.

The locals include people like Barbara Caffee, who with her husband has owned a house there for 30 years and raised a family. Her small home includes a basement they added themselves, plus an addition where her mother lives. Caffee, who is president of the neighborhood’s civic league, says flatly that they won’t leave. “I would understand eminent domain if they were going to put in schools or roads,” she says. “But to take down our house to build a home for someone else? I don’t understand that.”

The Caffees are among the few home owners there. Most residents rent, including Claudette Durclen, a 27-year-old nurse’s assistant who shares an apartment with her eight-year-old daughter. Durden says her biggest concern about leaving is her daughter. “She has friends across the street, friends out back, and friends across the road,” the young mother says, pointing from her balcony. “It would be hard having to start all over.”

Duany’s design for East Ocean View sharply reduces the total population of the neighborhood, a paradoxical path for neotraditionalists, who usually extol the advantages and efficiency of high density. Instead of 1,500 homes, Duany’s village has between 400 and 600, ranging in price from $70,000 to $500,000 or more – beyond the reach of 95 percent of the current residents. The new streets and buildings are meticulously laid out and designed. In classic neotraditional styles, the proposed town houses and fancy homes sit close to the street, side by side. About the only things the plan retains from the existing neighborhood are the trees; they’re needed to lend the new development some character and to provide a windbreak against ocean breezes.

Since the city is not using federal money, it is not required to assist residents in relocation. The housing authority has promised three months of free rent, and will bump any resident who requests it to the top of the public housing waiting list. But the city has been quite explicit in its hopes that some of these people will just go away. When the housing authority first unveiled the project, it included an economic report estimating that roughly a third of the neighborhood’s citizens would leave town, thus saving the city money on social services and police.

The city council approved the project a year before Duany came to town. But partly because of the controversy, city officials looked to Duany for approval of their plans to tear down the neighborhood. One official described Duany as “the doctor” with ultimate authority to decide whether to save or amputate the “diseased leg.” During a week-long charrette held in a senior citizens center, Duany discussed saving a few homes, but decided against any guarantees. A completely clean canvas, Duany opined, was more valuable than saving homes for a few lucky people.

In the course of the charrette, Duany did not duck complaints from those being forced to move. Elderly couples sought him out, and he listened patiently to what they had to say. Then he explained why their homes had to be torn down to build a better, more beautiful neighborhood.

Duany’s argument rests on two main points, one financial, the other architectural. The most important consideration, he says, is that the new neighborhood would raise the city’s tax base. The sacrifice of low-income residents is for the common good of the city.

“I’d rather it wasn’t the case, I must say,” Duany says. “But on the other hand, affordable housing is not what cities need. Because they don’t pay taxes. They bankrupt cities. That’s the problem with Philadelphia right now. The whole trick is to bring the middle class back to the city.”

Of course, cities need stronger tax bases and new ways to stem the tide of middle-class flight. Many of the original urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s were designed for that purpose. But there’s no evidence that such programs work any better now than they did then. Clear-cutting a neighborhood often exacerbates social problems by splitting up supportive relationships and scattering poor residents into new and unfamiliar surroundings. Sometimes, that means the streets. Some of East Ocean View residents are refugees from past urban renewal schemes. Now they face the same thing all over again.

Duany’s support for the project seems to clash with certain core values of the New Urbanists, many of whom are inspired by the philosophy of Jane Jacobs and her methodical critique of urban renewal, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Further, Duany’s New Urban vision for East Ocean View comes at the expense of what is already an urban neighborhood. It’s got a street grid, with a variety of building types and a mix of incomes. One of the city’s best restaurants, and virtually the only building likely to be spared, is in East Ocean View. The buildings are not all situated according to strict neotraditionalist tenets, but the basic parts are there. The neighborhood is urban not only in its buildings, but also in the way the community interacts. This is not some cul-de-sac haven of isolated citizens. It’s the kind of neighborhood where you see a group of friends in T shirts, their young children in tow, heading to the beach with a six-pack of beer to enjoy a summer afternoon.

Outsiders often express surprise that the city is pursuing such an old-fashioned strategy. But Norfolk is something of an anomaly, as David Rice, executive director of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, freely admits. “Cities lost enthusiasm for redevelopment in the Sixties and Seventies,” says Rice, almost boasting. “Except for Norfolk. We pressed on.”

It’s hard to see what advantage Norfolk has gained by this persistence. Likewise, it’s hard to tell how Duany reconciles his professed faith in urbanism with his actions in East Ocean View. His flip architectural assessment of the homes people are being turned out of seems narrow and ill considered. Cities are not defined by buildings alone; they are made up of an intricate web of relationships- physical, social, economic, cultural- that are rooted to places. The trouble with cities is that there are so many forces tearing these relationships apart. You would think architects would have learned by now to be healers, not wreckers.