Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities

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My latest book, “Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities,” was published in late 2006 by Carroll and Graf Publishers. Here’s some basic information on it below, and you can find more on Amazon.

Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities By Alex Marshall
ISBN 0-7867-1864-1 EAN 978-0-7867-1864-1
$29.95 Trade Paper
240pp, 8 1/2 x 11 Carton Qty: 20
Art & Architecture/ Urban & Land Use Planning
ARC010000 Fall 2006 Rights: W Carroll & Graf

Description:
“The pulse of great cities may be most palpable above ground, but it is below the busy streets where we can observe their rich archaeological history and the infrastructure that keeps them running. In The Secret Lives of Cities journalist Alex Marshall investigates how geological features, archaeological remnants of past civilizations, and layered networks transporting water, electricity, and people, have shaped these cities through centuries of political turbulence and advancements in engineering — and how they are determining the course of the cities’ future. From the first-century catacombs of Rome, the New York subway system, and the swamps and ancient quays beneath London, to San Francisco’s fault lines, the depleted aquifer below Mexico City, and Mao Tse-tung’s extensive network of secret tunnels under Beijing, these subterranean environments offer a unique cross-section of a city’s history and future. Stunningly illustrated with colorful photographs, drawings, and maps, The Secret Lives of Cities reveals the hidden worlds beneath our feet, and charts the cities’ development through centuries of forgotten history, political change, and technological innovation.” You can browse or buy it on Amazon.com.

Puerto Rico builds a train in the sky

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ALEX MARSHALL
Metropolis Magazine
October 2001

The startling truth about San Juan, a metropolitan area of 1.4 million people in Puerto Rico, is that most of it looks like New Jersey. It is a landscape of ugly roadways lined with strip malls, American franchise restaurants, and glass office towers overlooking impenetrable limited-access highways. Sure, there is Old San Juan, the sixteenth-century fortified city with its tiny cobblestone streets. But that citadel of the picturesque, which sits on a point of land in the harbor, is a tiny speck in San Juan’s overall breadth. The bulk of the city was developed after World War II, when tax breaks and other incentive programs brought in industry. And in good postwar fashion, American and Puerto Rican engineers and urban planners heavily promoted the highway as the proper spine for development.

With the construction of the Tren Urbano (Urban Train), San Juan, Puerto Rico, hopes to find a mass transportation solution to its dependency on congested highways.

Two generations later, San Juan has reaped the result. Although its citizens earn substantially less than stateside Americans, they actually own more cars per capita. In fact, Puerto Rico has one of the highest car-ownership rates in the world. Traffic is horrible. Residents tell stories of once ten-minute drives that now take several hours. Buses exist, both public and private, but they are trapped in the same traffic jams as the private cars.

 

Enter the Tren Urbano (Urban Train), a 10.7-mile, $2 billion heavy-rail system scheduled for completion in 2003. Its planners are attempting something extremely difficult: altering a landscape produced by one type of transportation, the highway, by introducing a different type of transportation, an elevated train line. The risk in this type of urban surgery is that the patient will reject the alien transplant. Parts of the line travel through older streetcar suburbs, which have remnants of a traditional urban fabric. But the bulk of the project goes through postwar highway-oriented development, which is the most difficult to adapt to mass transit.

Elmo Ortiz, the urban design manager for the project, is well aware of the challenges it faces. Like most of the staff, Ortiz works in a blockish brick building located off a busy highway. “We have sprawl, sprawl, sprawl,” says Ortiz, whose face is ringed with a corona of white beard and hair. “The transformation of the geography of this place is incredible.”

Tren Urbano has a chance of working, Ortiz says, because it is intended to facilitate the development of a new type of city, not just to transport people: “We are trying to create a new urban form.” He and others envision the conversion of the rail corridor into destinations where people can live, shop, and work around the stations.

“We need to bring development back into the cities, instead of continuing with the sprawl that we have throughout the island,” says Javier Mirand’s, manager of architecture at Tren Urbano. “We need higher-density housing with minimum parking and good access to transit. This is the first time in sixty years that there will be a dependable transit system on the island.”

In this, Puerto Rico is not unlike so many other American cities trying to fight sprawl with new passenger rail systems: Portland, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and even Las Vegas have adopted similar projects in recent years. The greater challenge is that Puerto Rico resembles other Latin American cities in its high levels of crime and general paranoid atmosphere of security. Even convenience stores often buzz in customers. Apartment towers have double-entry security at the parking lot and inside the building. Wrought-iron gates and bars, which at first might appear decorative, encase many suburban homes. Many once accessible public streets have been gated and locked, privatized by their community. “How do you create housing around stations where people want to live in a gated community?” Ortiz ponders out loud, grimacing at the challenge.

Mass transit is difficult in such high-crime, high-fear regions, because people don’t want to associate with strangers. A related problem is race: lower-class Puerto Ricans tend to be dark-skinned, and whiter upper-class citizens may shy from using mass transit if it requires them to encounter poorer commuters.

But as in other countries, Puerto Ricans are now talking about “smart growth,” environmental protection, and different living patterns. “There has been a big shift in environmental consciousness, and that is going to help us redevelop cities and control sprawl,” Mirand’s says.

A specter hanging over the project is the fate of another expensive elevated train line: in 1984 a $1 billion, 21-mile elevated Metrorail line opened in Miami. Isolated by sprawl, it has attracted few riders and is widely considered an enormous white elephant.

Maurice Ferre, mayor of Miami from 1973 to 1985 and a native of Puerto Rico, predicts a better chance for the Tren Urbano because it goes through more work centers, such as the university and Rio Piedras. But San Juan will have to expand its system if it wants long-term success, he says: “Metrorail in Miami is a failure because it is an unfinished system. It’s like taking a table with four legs, and only building one leg and expecting it to stand. Structurally the two are similar, but I think the one in San Juan will be more successful.”

Aníbal Sepúlveda, professor of urban planning at the University of Puerto Rico and author of the book San Juan: An Illustrated History of Its Urban Development, is pessimistic about the project’s chances, even while he hopes for its success. “I have not seen enough effort to plan around the stations,” he says. “It will not come automatically. There is such a low density. At the same time, we are still building highways and making it easier for developers to build tract houses.”

Sepúlveda also questions the appropriateness of an elevated train line. “We chose the most expensive project for the city, but not necessarily the best one,” he says. “It’s too much money. We will not be able to build future lines with the same technology.”

Because it is a heavy-rail system, Tren Urbano can move immense numbers of people cheaply. But it will only be cost-effective if enough people actually use it. Officials project an initial ridership of 100,000 a day, which is predicted to rise to 115,000 by year 2010. At those levels, revenues from the fares would pay about half the operating costs, which is typical for mass transit.

Ironically, the key factor in the project’s favor is San Juan’s horrible and worsening traffic, which may motivate commuters to take the train. With a $2 billion investment, San Juan and Puerto Rico have placed an expensive bet on the table. They may win a city with choices other than highways and sprawl, or lose both money and hope that a sprawl-oriented city and its citizens can ever be changed.

In Cairo: A Mega City Confronts its Challenges

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With the Middle East’s martial concerns filling the news, it was a change of pace this month to visit the region’s biggest city, Cairo, and examine more quotidian concerns, namely its urban planning policies and problems.

With approximately 18 million people (estimates vary), Cairo can be seen as both a problem and a solution to the challenges of a developing country. Cairo is, in one analyst’s term, a “Mega-city” – a huge, expanding cloud of population, much of it poor, that by some estimates is adding 1.25 million people a year. Where all these people live, how to give them water, dispose of their waste, and allow them to travel, are the central questions. The challenges of Cairo are, in a word, infrastructure.

In that, it is perhaps similar to New York, a metropolitan area it will soon surpass in size. But as our region struggles to add trains to the airport and another Hudson River rail tunnel, Cairo is more akin to New York of the 19th century. It is struggling to add a sewer system, subway service and parks.

All these needs have meant enormous investments in infrastructure. They are funding it in part due to help from their past (and some might say present) Colonial masters, France, Britain and the United States. The French helped finance and build the new subway, while Britain and the United States have helped finance and build a new sewer system as well as various other infrastructure projects seen around town. (The peace settlement with Israel has provided enormous financial benefits for Egypt. Since the Camp David accords in 1979, Egypt has received about $25 billion in aid from the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.) On the streets, Cairo is a bustling, lively place at all hours. Even at midnight, streets are full, with people sitting drinking tea and playing backgammon. About a third of the women wear the Hijab, the Islamic scarf or veil that wraps around the head, while a tiny percentage also wear the niqab, the veil that covers the face completely.

Long-time Cairo residents notice that the percentage of women wearing traditional Islamic dress has increased tremendously in the last decade. It is a statement now not only of religious faith, but of national identity.

Not only were the sidewalks crowded, but the streets themselves were jammed with cars, mostly tiny, box-like black and white Fiats that were usually decades old. Traveling a mile or two by car, often the only option, could take an hour.

The Metro: Tunnels Through Sand All this street congestion is one reason why the city’s new Metro has caught on so quickly. Line 1, which connected two existing suburban railways through a four-stop, center-city subway, opened in 1987. It has 27 stations. Line 2 opened in 1999 and has 18 stops, 13 of which are underground. Line 1 cost $585 million, much of it from France. Egypt financed the $3 billion for Line 2 mostly by itself.

The two lines cut across the city in a rough Xpattern, with Line 2 running beneath the Nile River to Giza, where the Great Pyramids await. Despite its newness, already 1.8 million “Cairenes” use the Metro daily. By comparison, this is almost three times the 625,000 riders daily on the Washington, D.C. metro system. People use the Cairo Metro even though its price, 50 pilasters (about 10 cents), is considered high.

In its design, the Metro is clean and neat, with wide passageways and platforms. Designing the individual stations involved factors that were more common a century ago in New York. In Cairo, much of the population is illiterate (one estimate was only a third of the population could read and write), which is why the subway designers have given individual stations strong visual identities.

At the Opera station on Line Two, for example, images of Pharonic women in ancient Egyptian dress, inlaid in tile on the station walls, greet those who pull into the stations.

“This helps people figure out where they are,” said Ezz Eldin Fahmy, a principal and architect with EHAF Consulting Engineers in Cairo, the firm that designed the stations. “When they see the triangles look like boats, they know they are in Rod El Farago station. We had the theme of boats because this used to be the only port on the River Nile.” Under design is a third line, which will cut across the city to from east to west, and extend eventually out to the city’s airport.

Waste In and, Hopefully, Out Until recently, the city’s overburdened sewer system backed up more than 100 days a year, flooding the streets with raw waste. The city’s only formal sewer system was one built by the British just before World War I for a city of about one million people. It was grossly inadequate.

Using US-AID and British money, the city over the last two decades has built an entirely new sewer system, including an enormous treatment plant north of the city. Because the old system was so overburdened, this did not mean simply expanding a new system, but building a new one from scratch.

“They had to rethink the whole network,” said Mona Serageldin, professor of urban planning at Harvard Design School and a Cairo native who teaches a course on the city. “It was a major challenge in design.” The core of the new system was a “trunk line” – the central line to which others attach. This trunk line is 5 meters in diameter, and extends in a sloping, gravity-fed descent from south to north through the city until it ends up by the new treatment plant at a depth of 25 meters. Now completed in its core phases, it is one of the largest sewer projects in the world.

But the city is still struggling to connect everyone to it. Millions of the city’s residents live in illegally built concrete and brick apartments that scatter out across the desert in endless waves. One analyst estimated that 25 percent of the households in Cairo lack water and sewer connections.

As this mega-city struggles with sewers and subways, it’s also fighting to direct overall growth patterns. To keep sprawl from gobbling up agricultural land up and down the Nile, the government is redirecting growth to the east and west, into the desert. This has meant the establishment of several “new cities.” One of them, New Cairo, has a growth area of 43,000 acres – the equivalent of nine Manhattans in land area – and 2 to 3 million people are expected to live there.

It’s difficult to love this new “city” blooming in the desert. One section of “New Cairo” looked like a Middle-eastern version of outer Houston, with mega-supermarkets, concrete apartment buildings and even a golf course blooming from the desert.

Still, directing growth there seemed better than by the Nile, and plans are to eventually have transit.

The city is also building parks. The biggest is the new 87-acre Al-Azhar park, planned as Cairo’s “Central Park,” built just outside the Medieval city walls on a 1000-year-old garbage dump. (City inhabitants essentially pitched their garbage over a wall, and the pile eventually grew higher than the city itself.) Now under construction, this park will include promenades, restaurants, orchards and ponds. Buried underneath this calm environment are more serious functions – three enormous water tanks, each 80 meters in diameter, the size of small stadiums.

“We have 16 million people and we have almost no open space – nothing,” said Dr. Maher Stino, one of the park designers, as he led a visitor around the park site. Nearby, workers chiseled away at slabs of limestone for a park restaurant.

“We want to help the public understand what a park is and how to appreciate plants and nature.

We also want something unique to Cairo. We don’t want a copy of Regent Park [in London].” As the New York region struggles with its own challenges, it can perhaps gain a bit of perspective in seeing a similar sized region struggle with far greater ones.

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First Published Feb. 20, 2003, in Spotlight on the Region, the newsletter of Regional Plan Association in New York City.

In Cairo, An Old University Moves Out To The Suburbs

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Egyptian Sprawl

By Alex Marshall

With its move to a new city in the desert, is the American University in Cairo buying sanctuary or isolation?

“I started wearing it six months ago; I just felt like I wanted to,” Nancy El-Orindy says about the traditional Hijab scarf that she, like many women in Cairo, wears over her hair. “We are supposed to be covered so we don’t attract too much attention from guys.” The 19-year-old student slouches in a wicker chair in the central courtyard of American University in Cairo, an unlikely school in the heart of the capital city of Egypt. Around her, classmates sit at café-style tables and chairs, and young men play basketball on a shortened, urban-sized basketball court behind a wire fence. As the students lounge, a half dozen or so cats, ubiquitous in Cairo, slink about the walkways, stairs, and tables.
Orindy’s story illustrates the Waring-blender whirl of money, culture, religion, and history in the region. On the one hand, she wears the Hijab as an example of her new commitment to her Islamic and Egyptian roots. On the other hand, she plays college soccer–a passion she probably picked up in her native Canada, where she was born to Egyptian parents. She speaks English better than Arabic. And the professional goal of this Hijab-wearing, Canadian-born soccer player? “I want to go to fashion school, to be a dress designer,” she says with an embarrassed smile. “I like Gucci and Prada.” She can’t wear the clothes of the designers she admires, she says, but she can still design similar items for other women.

Orindy is one of 5,000 students at American University in Cairo (AUC), a school that is confronting and capitalizing on similar cross-cultural forces. Founded by Presbyterian missionaries from Minnesota in 1919, it is presently “an Egyptian University with an international student body teaching an American-style liberal arts education,” says its immediate past president, John D. Gerhart. Many of Egypt’s most prominent officials send their children to AUC. Suzanne Mubarak, wife of Egypt’s current strong-man president, is a graduate of the school, as are the couple’s two sons. But despite its largely Middle Eastern student body, the board of the school is still mostly American, and some of its funding comes through a stream of income set up by the United States government. It is routinely called “the best university in Cairo,” and many Arabs see it as part of a way their region might modernize: by copying the best of American-style liberalism in the classic tradition, through openness, education, and scientific thought.

Now the institution is embarking on an equally cross-cultural expansion program. The school is moving its entire campus from the heart of downtown Cairo to a spot 30 kilometers or so outside the city, on the edge of the desert, where it will occupy 260 acres in the middle of a planned new city called New Cairo. AUC has hired some of the world’s top architects to design the grounds, buildings, and interiors. Currently under construction, the $300 million project is intended to help the school become, if it isn’t already, the premiere research and teaching university in the Middle East.

But the university is expanding at a time when the American presence in the Middle East is expanding in ways that are highly inflammatory, at least within the middle east. This past spring American jets were bombing Iraqi cities just across the Nile and Red Sea. As American troops neared Baghdad, 50,000 Egyptians protested the American war and battled police at Tahrit Square outside AUC’s front gates. In fact, several AUC students were injured fighting police. In moving outside the city itself, the school is escaping some of these turbulent forces. But is it buying sanctuary or isolation? In moving to a closed, gated campus in the suburbs, AUC is gaining space but may be losing its soul.
The map of New Cairo outlines 46,000 acres, or 72 square miles–the equivalent of almost three Manhattan islands. It is the latest in a line of a half dozen “new cities” Egypt has built over the last half century in attempts to channel its swelling population. Presently, New Cairo looks like the outer growth edge of Houston or Dallas, with the replacement of blocky Cairo apartment buildings for Texas-styles subdivisions. These apartment complexes are springing up on cul-de-sacs placed off wide, empty highways. Closer to the center city a typical pattern of amenities is going up, including two water-hungry golf courses and a huge Carrefour supermarket. If all goes as planned (a big if), state planners project that 2.5 million people, a population the size of Chicago’s, will live here. Near the site of the AUC campus two broad boulevards are planned; on a map at least, they are supposed to fan out in Beaux-arts style, with homes and other buildings between them.

In its location, shape, size, and relationship to the highway, the new campus essentially resembles a regional shopping mall. The new school will have two million square feet of floor space set on amoeba-shaped 270 acres. As with a mall, parking lots will ring the new complex, with shrubbery and other landscaping to soften their impact. Students, who in Egypt are accustomed to living at home, will drive or be driven on the city’s beltway highway to the school. Many students live in wealthy suburbs outside the city, so they will actually be closer to the new campus than the old one.

The buildings and spaces–designed by an international team of seven firms–are imaginative and subtle, drawing on the approach of Islamic architecture if not its well-recognized symbols. The campus has few horseshoe-shaped arches or minarets, but it does have a lot of courtyards, wooden screens, and pathways that blend inside and outside space–all common in Islamic architecture. At a time when upper-class Egyptians, like Texans, are proud of their ability to air condition spaces, the university will rely on substantially natural cooling devises like courtyards, “wind catchers”–open vents on upper stories that funnel cooler air into a building–and groves of lemon, palm, and olive trees. The primary architect is a joint venture of Sasaki Associates of Massachusetts, and Community Design Collaborative of Cairo, led by Abdelhalim Ibrahim Abdelhalim. On a site plan by Carol R. Johnson Associates and SITES International, Cairo, there’s also a library by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates; student housing, a main auditorium, and a campus center by Legoretta + Legoretta of Mexico City; and athletic facilities by Ellerbe Becket.

The school’s present campus occupies a relatively tiny 7.3 acres in the heart of an older “New Cairo,” the nineteenth-century city laid out by Khedive Ismail after a visit to Paris during its renovation under Baron Haussmann in the 1860s. The school sits at a central square as broad, Parisian-style avenues merge around it. In fleeing all this the university is gaining space and flexibility but losing a richer cultural context. Already privileged, its student body will have even less contact with ordinary Egyptians. Right now, the university has its own stop on the city’s new subway system, and it’s just a block away from the enormous Egyptian Museum, designed by the British under colonial rule. The medieval city is a short drive or walk away.

“They did not try hard enough to get it together downtown,” says one local architect. “There are plenty of good examples of urban universities, like the Sorbonne or Leiden. The students could even walk a half mile to a building. They will be away from everyone and everything on the new campus. I’ll be damned if I’ll go schlepping out there.”

Another potential pitfall for the school is whether suburban New Cairo will ever come together in a style that resembles what is on the planning documents. At a luncheon in February, after the official groundbreaking, at the Katameya Golf and Tennis Resort in New Cairo, school officials and city planners began arguing over the area’s future and who would pay for what. “We try to get natural gas, and [city officials] say, ‘Sure, for twenty million dollars,'” complains Hussein M. El-Sharwaky, vice president of new campus development at AUC. “We want a metro line, they say, ‘Okay. One-hundred and twenty million dollars.'”

One Egyptian planner urged the school to open the campus to the public. “Don’t put up a fence,” says Raouf M.K. Helmi, who has a son and daughter studying at AUC. “Open your playground, your library. Open your beautiful facilities to the people.” In fact, the new campus of AUC, like the old one, will be mostly closed. The public can enter the exterior courtyard, an arts center, and the school bookstore, but the bulk of the campus will only be admissible with a pass.
Sometime in 2007, the new campus is set to open. Although the school appears set to gain a bright new campus with all the amenities, it is hard not to conclude it will lose much of its connectivity with other citizens and sectors of society. In moving to the fringes of the city, an elite, isolated school will become more so.

Abdelhalim, the bearded wise man of Cairo architecture who came back to his native city after 11 years in Berkeley, says the new campus will be a center for the commingling of cultures and ideas, regardless of its location. Just as the school blends Islamic architecture within an American-style campus, he hopes it will fertilize the Islamic world with Western-style education, to produce a new Islamic version of it. The essential question, he says is “What does a liberal arts education mean in Egypt, within an Islamic community?”

–Published in Metropolis Magazine, September 2003

A Glimpse of Cuba in 1988

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It was lunch hour inside the Ministry of Commerce in old Havana. In a small cafeteria, in a building that dated back to the 1800s, workers ate baked fish, rice and beans, soup, salad and cake, off white dishes on tin trays. They washed down the food and cut the sweltering heat with cold water from sweating metal pitchers placed on each of the 20 tables. Like many of the basics in contemporary Cuba, the meal was subsidized and cost each employee only a few cents.

A clerk there, a 58-year-old man with crooked teeth and thinning hair, spoke about why life was better, now that a Communist government ruled his country.

“Before the triumph of the revolution,” he said in a gravelly voice, “it was a dictatorship here. Only a small group of people”–and he held up one hand with the fingers bunched together–“had money, jobs, power and opportunity in life.”

“Now there’s liberty,” he said, and he grinned. “People have jobs and money. Hospitals are free. I have two sons–one is studying economics at the University and the other electronics at technical school.” He patted his pants pocket. “I didn’t have to pay a cent for their education,”
“I come from a poor family of farmers. We had no chance before. Things are much better now.”

This is one of the faces of Cuba.

A mile or so away from the Ministry of Commerce, a middle-aged woman sat on her bed in a small room with soaring, 20-foot ceilings where she lived with her two small children.

In the fading light of the afternoon, she spoke of feeling oppressed in a country where people were jailed for saying the wrong things, where neighbors watched each other for “counter-revolutionary” activity and sentiments, where private enterprise was forbidden and foreign travel restricted.

She spoke of tiring of the interminable meetings of the Committee in Defense of the Revolution–one of the thousands of local block committees which monitored the actions and the ideology of their members.

She spoke of Cuba’s president, the former “guerrillero” who almost 30 years ago, gained international fame by ousting a dictator and successfully standing up to the United States–then the strongest nation on earth.

“Fidel Castro is a great leader,” she said softly. “But he is only a leader.

Lowering her head, she said,

“I feel like a pigeon in a cage here.”

This is another face of Cuba.

Through Castro’s leadership and Soviet subsidies, Cuba now has universal education and literacy; it has a widespread system of modern hospitals and rural clinics staffed by Cuban doctors using Cuban manufactured medicine; it has full employment; it has eliminated hunger and malnutrition. Anyone who has travelled through other Latin American capitals and seen the filth, the beggars that gather like flies, and the miles of cardboard shacks on the outskirts of town, knows this is a remarkable achievement of which other Third-World nations can only dream.

A price has been paid for this transformation, although Cuba is still a Caribbean-Latin nation of surpising charm and sensuality. Its denizens still dance the Rumba, the Conga and the Cha-Cha-Cha. They spend a surprising percentage of their income in restaurants and state-owned cabarets, where high-kicking dancers in sequined bikinis and two-foot high feather headdresses grind alongside throaty-voiced singers.
Havana, despite the halt of roulette wheels and the extinguishing of the neon trim that once laced its skyline, remains an intensely beautiful city. One of terraces flung out over streets filled with aging American automobiles of the 1940s and 1950s, of columns with vines slithering up over wrought-iron railings. A city of fading pastel colors, of chipped mustard-yellow plaster around salmon-pink doors with eggshell-blue trim.

The real loss has been the elimination of what Marxists contemptuously label “Bourgeois freedoms.” It is a country where word, deed and even thought are controlled to an astonishing degree. Cuba is not an El Salvador or a Chile, where citizens are tortured, shot and “disappeared.” But Cuba is one gigantic company town. To get along, one goes along.

In the past few years, the tight rein held on dissent has slackened a bit. Several hundred long-time political prisoners have been released and this August, a delegation from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights will visit Cuban jails to check conditions.

As for the press, Castro has urged journalists to be more critical and “less boring.”

Still, there is nothing approaching the glasnost of the Soviet Union. And instead of perestroika, Castro has begun a campaign of “rectification,” in which capitalist tendencies that have sprouted up–such as the private farmer’s market in Havana which was shut down in 1986–are weeded out. Castro, contrary to most other socialist-bloc countries, has chosen to continue along the path to “pure” communism. Castro can take such a route because most Cubans support him and his decisions.

The stoutest “Fidelistas” are the formerly poor and disenfranchised of the rural countryside. Prior to “the triumph of the revolution,”–the phrase heard over and over here–Cuba was a country of some wealth compared to the rest of Latin America, but with vast inequities in its distribution. Much of the rural population lived in huts of palm and wood, worked three months out of the year during cane-cutting season and seldom saw a school or a doctor.

Today, the closest thing Havana has to a slum is a “barrio” of wooden shacks on dirt streets by the Almendares River on the edge of Havana. Cubans call the neighborhood, “El Fangito,”–the muddy place–because the river periodically rises and floods the homes. From a distance, these plywood shacks look distressingly poor. Up close, one discovers electricity, running water, televisions and refrigerators. Still, some vestiges remain. Outside one house, an old woman washed clothes in an iron cauldron over a wood fire.
Most residents say they will soon move to new apartments they are building themselves as part of “Microbrigades.” In this program begun a year ago, workers leave their regular jobs in order to build housing, daycare centers and clinics. In return, they receive salaries but also the right to an apartment when finished.

The level of “Fidelismo” among the youth is a topic of concern to party elders. They fear youngsters who have no memory of the fall of Batista in 1959, or the victory over the United States at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, may lack fervor. The youth are, perhaps, beguiled by the Madonna songs played even on government radio stations, the Hollywood movies, such as Rocky, shown at government movie houses, and the fashionable clothes seen on the many tourists who come to Cuba.

Much of the youth remains committed to communism and the ideal of a new society. At Che Guevara high school, for example, the young women were as giddy in their adoration of Fidel and Che as American teenagers are of rock stars Sting and Bono.

But other young people are quite apolitically tired of the ever-present lines where one waits to purchace anything from a new bathing suit from a meagerly stocked store, to a shot of the thick, sweet black coffee drunk here. They would willingly trade their egalitarian society for a pair of Nike sneakers and Levi blue jeans.

On one of the beaches outside Havana, two young men, ages 18 and 20, approached me and asked if I would buy them several coveted Aditas T-shirts from the nearby tourist shop. At such shops, only foreigners are permitted entry and all prices are in U.S. dollars. It is the government’s way of gaining hard currency. What the young men were doing was quite common and quite illegal.

The 20-year-old had scraggly blond hair and scruffy stubble on a sun-tanned face. He was quite cynical.

“I’ll tell you what’s good about my country,” he said. “The sun”–aiming a finger at the burning sky–“the sea”–pointing toward the aqua-green water before him–“the girls”–motioning at the supine, bikini-clad bodies around him, and “the tobacco”–holding up his stubby unfiltered cigarette which he was smoking.

“That’s it,” he said.

I asked him what would happen if he talked like that to a neighbor.

“If they’re finks,” he said, “then”–and one hand quickly clasped the wrist of the other hand in the familiar gesture meaning police arrest and imprisonment.

Fidel’s position on dissent and expression are defined in a famous speech, later named the “Word to Intellectuals,” which he gave in June, 1961 before a group of writers, scholars and artists at the National Library. In one much quoted sentence, Castro declared that “within the revolution, everything. Against the revolution, nothing.”

Twenty-seven years later, it is still the guiding principle on civil liberties. Protection of the revolution is foremost. Interviews with top government leaders reveal a different conception of what human rights are.
“I believe that our people are freer than the poor people in your country,” said Jorge Enrique Mendoza, a close adviser to Castro who fought with him in the Sierra Maestra mountains in 1958. For 20 years, he was editor-in-chief of Granma, the nation’s top daily newspaper, which is published by the communist party.

“I don’t believe that an unemployed person can be free,” he said, “or a sick person, or someone who cannot go to school.

“I am not going to debate with you about party (communist) control of the press. It is certain. But we believe we represent the interests of the people. One can criticize specifics, but to make propaganda about capitalist ownership is not permitted. I would like to see a capitalist newspaper that attacked the basis of the capitalist system.”

In the area of religious freedom, a slightly wider circle is being drawn around what is “within the revolution.” The publication in 1987 of “Fidel and Religion,” has radically altered the status of religious faith here. In the 300-page book, which is a transcription of conversations between Fidel and Frei Betto, a Brazilian Dominican friar, Fidel talked favorably of his Jesuit upbringing and says, “I think one can be a Marxist without ceasing to be a Christian.”
“The fact that this book exists,” said Monsignor Manuel deCespedes, the archbishop of Havana. “is a very positive fact. Before the book was published, it was taboo to talk about religion.”

Wearing a black gown, and with a bald head and a quiet manner, deCespedes was the very image of a fatherly priest at an interview in his office in old Havana. He has established a close working relationship with Castro in recent years and deCespedes handles the complexities of being a Christian in a Marxist state with finesse. One the one hand, he says, “I am not a communist,” but on the other, he says, “a good Christian is not anti-anything.” This diplomacy has meshed with the government’s increasingly tolerant attitude.

deCespedes ticked off the figures that show how church participation has grown in the last few years. Church attendance up. Baptisms in Havana have tripled, from 7,000 in 1979 to 21,000 in 1987. Whereas formerly only the elderly attended Mass, now 10 to 20 young people are seen at each service. Last year, the church was permitted to import 30,000 copies of the bible for the first time.

On a recent Sunday in a beautiful old cathedral in Havana, a priest gave mass to about 75 people of all ages. Before the service, a group of teenage boys said “repression” against religious practice did not exist, but a certain amount of discrimination did.

“We don’t tell our friends at school about our faith,” said one 17 year old, “because they would stay apart from us if they knew.” He noted that because of his religious faith, he could not be a member of the Union of Young Communists.

Despite their loss of status, they supported their government and country. “Some people think Catholics are counter-revolutionaries,” said an 18 year old. “But that’s not true. We will pick up a rifle and defend our country when necessary.

“We are with the revolution.”

Until recently, Castro has never allowed an organized opposition group to exist. The exception, since spring of 1987, is the Cuban Human Rights Committee. The group is officially illegal, but operates in a limited fashion. It is allowed to contact groups such as Amnesty International and America’s Watch and to speak with foreign journalists.

“This small handful of people have had a tremendous impact,” said one high-placed western diplomat. “For the first time, Cubans have a source outside the government to publicize abuses by security forces and police.”

It’s leader is one Ricardo Bofill, 45 years old, who has spent 13 of the last 20 years in jail for such crimes as “enemy propoganda.”

Thanks to a massive campaign against him in the Cuban media, including a three-hour television documentary and full-page spreads in Granma, most Cubans are familiar with Bofill’s beady black eyes and scrub-brush mustache–and with some of his accusations.

The article in Granma on Bofill was a good example of current Cuban journalism, managing to pack every paragraph with a few pejoratives, lest the reader hesitate in forming an opinion. “Faker,” “swindler,” “liar,” “crook” and “bastard,” were some of the most oft repeated.

Bofill insists such tactics have helped his cause by giving it publicity. He operates from a small apartment in Guanabacoa, a ragged suburb of Havana of light-industry and plain, one-story housing, and has few recourses. He cannot leave his home, he says, because he is attacked by stone-throwing government police dressed as civilians when he tries to walk to the bus-stop.
Significantly, Bofill, once a professor of Marxism, looks towards the Soviet Union under Gorbachev as the best example of change for Cuba.

“These are the materials one has to read,” Bofill said, holding up copies of Moscow News and New Times, both Russian magazines translated into Spanish, “to find a path for Cuba to follow.”

Bofill does not deny the social advances made in his country. But, he said “you can’t separate public health and public liberty.”

“To judge the achievements of this country,” Bofill said, “you have to measure them in an integral form. For example, in South Korea and Taiwan, tremendous advances were made economically.

“But they were still dictatorships.”

So in Cuba, the debate between the right to eat, and the right to speak and think as one pleases, continues.

That Bofill is not in jail proves the government’s tight grip on dissent has opened slightly. But the sledgehammer attacks against him in the official press prove the parameters set on dissent are still in place: Direct criticism of government policies is not permitted.

In a recent article in The Nation, Professor Rene David of San Carlos Seminary in Havana was quoted as saying that Cuba has not “achieved the difficult balance between equality and liberty necessary for a more authentic fraternity.”

Fidel, because of his overthrow of Batista, the following social advances and his personal charisma, has built up an enormous reservoir of goodwill that has yet to be exhausted. For the time being, most citizens will continue to follow where he leads them.
–30–
Versions of this article were published in The Virginian-Pilot and The San Francisco Chronicle.

by Alex Marshall

What Makes A Neighborhood Viable?

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a roundtable debate – Alex Marshall and Andres Duany
Metropolis
May, 1995

Our article in May about the redevelopment of East Ocean View in Norfolk, Virginia (“When the New Urbanism Meets an Old Neighborhood”), has sparked discussion – verbal, written, and electronic – about similarities writer Alex Marshall sees between urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s and Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater – Zyberk’s plans for the Norfolk neighborhood. At the heart of the debate is a facet of New Urbanism that is disturbing to some critics and could impede the movement in the future: The majority of projects suggest an unwillingness to accommodate existing building stock into its new neighborhoods. New Urbanists call their movement the “architecture of community” – a questionable label when architects appear willing to remove existing communities to build new ones. But for now, the issue is whether this part of East Ocean View is viable enough to save.

ANDRES DUANY: In his article about our redevelopment project, Alex Marshall makes a false analogy between the neighborhoods destroyed by urban renewal in the 1950s and the site in Norfolk. Those martyred neighborhoods described by Jane Jacobs [in The Death and Life of Great American Cities] were poor but in possession of highgrade urban qualities supporting a fine tissue of society, including many homeowners. They were, as we say now, viable.

The 100 acres of East Ocean View were half-abandoned. Indeed, the area’s development had become undesirable so quickly that a good portion of the land had remained unbuilt. Most of the existing housing consists of decrepit Section 8 subsidized rental apartments, of a most degrading type, built in the 1970s by developers with nothing but exploitation in mind. The whole affair contributes to a very high incidence of crime. Their removal in Norfolk is akin to the justified demolitions of Pruitt-Igoe [the award winning St. Louis housing project often cited as a failure of Modern architecture] and other such products that were the object of Jane Jacobs’ attack, not of her defense.The people who lose their rental apartments will be assisted into housing by the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, which may well be the best-managed public housing in the country. They are certainly not being turned out into oblivion in the manner of the 1960s.

Apart from the apartments, the most controversy was caused by the 18 houses with middle-class resident/owners that are slated to go. Why these? Of the 18, three were on the beachfront, isolating the beach from the rest of the neighborhood. To make the beachfront public by eliminating these houses, the inland houses (the owners of only three of them wished to remain) were caught in the net of equal fairness (or unfairness). Designating these three otherwise acceptable homes for removal permitted the removal of those three that privatized the beach. The development of the neighborhood is designed in such a way that the three homeowners, retired couples who may want to remain for the rest of their lives, won’t be affected until the later phases of development, perhaps a decade away.

Granted, the decision for demolition was made before we were even interviewed for the project. But had we not approved, we would have walked away, as Marshall reported we did in Houston. There was an important condition to be respected: The City Council of Norfolk had voted unanimously for the complete demolition of the site. This was a very protracted, thoroughly public, and very contested process, through which the elected representatives of the people made a difficult decision. I understand this to be the workings of democracy and something to be intrinsically respected. I am surprised that Marshall does not report this.

Apart from the prerogatives of democracy, the stated intention of the Norfolk City Council is one that we support as a general strategy for urban cores: to decant the monocultures of poverty. This small area is responsible for the majority of the crime in East Ocean View, giving the entire bay – front of Norfolk its bad name and causing the middle class to shun it for the suburbs.

Poverty itself does not cause crime, the concentration of poverty causes crime (source: Reuben Greenberg, the brilliant police chief of Charleston, South Carolina). Our task was to design a properly balanced neighborhood which leaves the population with a mixture of the poor,the middle class, and even the wealthy. This is, in fact, the ideal of the New Urbanism, and not the demolition of fine old neighborhoods. Marshall did report accurately my politically incorrect statement to the effect that the inner cities do not need more affordable housing as much as they need housing for the middle class. . To live, our bankrupt cities need tax paying citizens. That’s a fact.

ALEX MARSHALL: The guts of Duany’s defense are that it is okay to tear this neighborhood down because it is troubled and the people are poor and the buildings aren’t pretty. I disagree with this philosophy. I won’t say that a government can never level a neighborhood, but the area’s existing homes would have to be in worse shape than those in East Ocean View, and the people who live in them treated more fairly.

Duany also makes serious errors that undercut his arguments and suggest how little he has paid attention to the neighborhood he is replacing. Here are the most obvious:

None of the homes in this area are Section 8 housing. All the homes, both apartments and single-family houses, were privately built. This part of East Ocean View has no public housing of any kind. The brick apartment buildings Duany is apparently referring to are standard suburban-style apartments built in the 1970s. Being brick, they are probably better than many such apartment complexes that litter the suburbs.

None of the families have been relocated to public housing. At last count, 75 families have been evicted from the neighborhood. The only guarantee the housing authority made was to place residents (who so desired) at the top of the waiting list for public housing – something that complies with federal law governing public housing. The fact is, East Ocean View has no public housing, so it is unlikely present residents would choose to become public housing tenants. By design, the city is using private banks rather than federal money to finance the project, which exempts the city from having to guarantee relocation assistance. Duany says residents “are certainly not being turned out into oblivion.” In fact, this is exactly what is happening to them.

Regarding the Norfolk City Council, Duany defends the urban renewal decision because the political decision was unanimous. The same urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s, which Duany joins in criticizing, was also approved by duly elected democratic governments. Does this mean it was right, or exempt from criticism? The fact is, the people in the condemned neighborhood had little political voice.

Duany asserts his plan will make the beach more public. In fact, an essential component of the city’s plans is reaping the profits from a series of new half-million dollar houses that will front directly on the beach.

Duany ends by saying he seeks only to “design a properly balanced neighborhood and to leaven the population witha mixture of the poor, the middle class,and even the wealthy.” His apparent capacity at self-deception amazes me. The new neighborhood will not have any poor people in it. The most the city has ever talked about is having homes in the price range of a high-school teacher – firmly middle-class.

Duany’s talk about diversity obscures the anti-urban nature of the project and his design. The new neighborhood, if built as planned, will be less dense and less diverse. By some estimates, up to 1,800 homes were in the East Ocean View neighborhood at the time the clearance project was launched. Duany would reduce the density to a third of that – 400 to 600. This area has blocks full of single family homes and apartments that are quite viable. It also has blank spots and abandoned housing, which would be perfect for redevelopment through a process that does not involve driving people out of their homes. The only reason to tear down the entire neighborhood is because of a cynical belief that no middle or upper-income person would be willing to move into a house next to that of a working-class person.

What if the city had taken the estimated $35 to $40 million the project will cost and subsidized the building of middle-class houses on those vacant lots Duany mentioned? Then the city would have had a chance of creating a genuinely diverse neighborhood, better off than the present one, but one not founded on force and exclusion. I am not against gentrification. Like Duany, I favor restoring a healthier tax base to center-cities. But there is a difference between gentrification – which I think of as a poor neighborhood gradually being infused with wealthier residents – and the clearance of people from their houses so wealthier people can be put there with the help of taxpayers’ money.

Norfolk is doing just what it wanted: tearing down a poor neighborhood and driving its people elsewhere – across city lines, some officials hope. When preparing the project, city officials used a feasibility study that estimates Norfolk would save millions of dollars in police and social costs because up to a third of the project’s displaced residents would leave town. In this noble endeavor, Duany is helping.

I don’t mean to say that Duany or his staff are without talent. His new plan has its beauty. Its planned road system carefully weaves around existing trees and carves out small parks. The mixture of town houses and grand homes with the now – standard front porches will be more interesting than the usual suburban subdivision. But Duany’s new neighborhood will have no history and reveal its lack of roots in its false, cheery appearance. It’s hard to resist concluding that Duany, the New Urbanist, is tearing down a real urban neighborhood to build a fake one.

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.”

Seaside At Twenty

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BY ALEX MARSHALL
METROPOLIS MAGAZINE, May 2001

The tip of Florida’s panhandle hangs out over the waters of the Gulf of Mexico like ripe fruit on a low-hanging branch, easy pickings. This skinny, 100-mile strip sits directly below Alabama, almost walling it off from the sea. Located in a different time zone, an hour behind the rest of the state, the panhandle has long been popular with vacationers. Nestled in the bosom of the old Confederacy, families from Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana have flocked to the small beach towns here, giving the coast the moniker of “The Redneck Riviera.” With its aqua-green waters and pure white sand, it probably rivals the real Riviera in natural beauty, if not in movie stars.

In 1981, a developer began a new resort community called Seaside. Located about midway between Panama City Beach and Destin, it was part of a new wave of growth that would hit these sandy shores in the next two decades, turning the coast into a long highway of resort sprawl. The Seaside developer was Robert Davis, who had inherited the 80 acres from his grandfather. Designed by Davis and architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the resort was a modified version of a small town. So startling was its image that it sparked a national movement called New Urbanism.

As Seaside prepared to celebrate its 20th anniversary, I traveled to this celebrated beach community to see what to make of it. I had written, often critically, about its progeny – the scores of “neo-traditional” subdivisions that now clustered around exit ramps on the outskirts of so many cities – but I’d never seen the mother seed. What was I to make of this very small, but very influential place?

I WAS HALFWAY through Seaside before I realized I was in it. The main state road coming from Panama City, 31A, is lined with condominium towers, resort subdivisions, roadside shops and other detritus. Seaside at first appeared to be just one more cluster of development, done in some vaguely historical style. “Damn, they really got their money out of Steven Brooke,” I thought, gazing out from my rental car. Brooke, a photographer, had taken many of the archetypal images of Seaside that had flashed all over the world, via books and magazines. Often set against a skyline at twilight, his photos had turned Seaside into a latter day Acropolis, a remote outpost of civilization on the Florida coast.

The more humdrum reality of the place was disorienting. I would see a beachfront home, and then on my brain plate would flash the archetypal photo I had seen of the same structure. In his book Seaside (Pelican Publishing 1998), Brooke said his early photographs “intentionally idealized and ennobled Seaside’s simple structures.” He succeeded: the photos were theatrical, not journalistic. Far from a major airport or interstate, located in the deep South away from press and academic centers, Seaside had benefited from its isolation. Most people saw only the photographs.

To see Seaside through a more ordinary lens, it helps to visualize 31A, the coastal highway that runs through it. It’s the spine of Seaside, the central artery, a commercial strip. But it’s clear that Seaside is an appendage to 31A, not the other way around. It’s one more resort development on a highway stuffed with them. Seaside was wealthier than I expected. Homes sell for an average of $700,000 to $800,000, I was told. The company produced newspaper, Seaside Times, recently listed a 2,420 square foot house for $2.25 million. I was also surprised by how few people lived in it. On a winter’s day, I walked the streets for hours, knocking on doors, looking for people. No luck. Management estimated that 90 percent of Seaside’s homeowners live elsewhere. And in winter, even the renters were gone.

The continual question that arises with Seaside, as with so many neo-traditional communities, is what exactly is it? It advertises itself as a small town, yet it’s legally a subdivision, with privately owned streets. Still, outsiders do attend community events and shop at its stores.

Davis, Duany and Plater-Zyberk did something different. Instead of high-rise condos on the beach, which wall off the views like oversized linebackers at buffet-table, they built homes and streets that were a short walk away. Surprisingly, rather than paying for the best view of the beach, people purchased the chance to be part of a self-constructed community. Davis and Duany commodified community. In the past, rich people bought isolation; at Seaside, they bought togetherness.

And it sold. Investing in a lot in Seaside in 1990 was the real estate equivalent of buying Yahoo stock before last year’s bust. But less mentioned by Seaside enthusiasts is that property and land values have doubled, tripled and even quadrupled all along this part of the coast, from Panama City to ritzier Destin. Bill Clinton, the Internet and Alan Greenspan had as much to do with Seaside’s financial success as its design. The wealth of the 1990s, and its lopsided distribution, has created a new class of wealthy families who suddenly could afford a second home on the beach.

Seaside and the neo-traditional movement it has spawned becomes a lot less confusing if they are understood as real-estate ventures, rather than acts of urban design. A developer and two architects created a successful product. They then went around the country, accompanied by professional marketers, selling this product to other landowners and developers.

It certainly worked in Florida. Neo-Seasides are popping up all over, including right next door to Seaside. The big development company Arvida, which owns huge swaths of land around here, is building a neo-traditional community called “Water Color” next door. To the East, Duany and Plater-Zyberk have designed Rosemary Beach, now under construction. These developments lack many of the attributes that make Seaside special: the narrow streets, the formal Beaux-arts street pattern, the walking paths behind the homes. They resemble more conventional subdivisions. Some, like Carillon By The Sea near Panama City Beach, have manned guardhouses at their single entrances. But all these developments have the tall homes with front porches that has become the Seaside style.

But Seaside is difficult to use as a model for conventional subdivisions, where people live year-round. While on vacation, people don’t need dry cleaners, large supermarkets, electronic stores, dentists, CompUSA’s, or any of the other 101 needs of daily life. They don’t drive as many cars. A resort community is akin to a college campus, with specialized requirements. Seaside, despite is prominence, is not really portable.

Seaside might have been something more if it had been part of a larger growth plan. If a state commissioner rather than a private developer had been in charge, you could have laid out “Seasides” every five miles or so, connected by mass transit, and built at the greater density that transit allows. Public authorities could have laid out efficient street systems. In between, a growth management plan could have prohibited development. The developer of Seaside, Robert Davis, immediately embraced this alternate history when we talked one night over dinner at a deserted Italian restaurant down the road. “I can see a point not far from now,” Davis said, “where it would seem completely natural that this entire area would be laid out by the municipal authorities, with minor adjustments as it went along.”

Seaside was clearly an exquisite place in some respects. The streets and tiny walking paths, the requirement that indigenous Florida trees and beach growth be used instead of grass, the care and variety of the wooden houses, made the place something to be admired or respected. It will age well. In addition to the homes, there are non-residential parts of Seaside: an outdoor amphitheater; the Seaside Institute, a non-profit New Urbanist think tank; and a tiny charter school. Most of these were grouped around the pretentiously named “Lyceum,” a grassy commons area. A community chapel is being built here, and Davis said some residents are raising money to build a tiny concert hall.

Still I couldn’t embrace the place emotionally. It was too cute, too controlled, too controlling. In truth, I preferred the beach communities with their simpler houses on unpaved, sandy streets that surrounded Seaside and predated it, like Grayton Beach, just a mile down the road. For all its charm, Seaside was too much about spinning illusions. The postal address was telling. The little business cards said “Seaside, Fl.” But legally Seaside is not a town at all, but part of the town of Santa Rosa Beach, which in turn is part of Walton County. When its few permanent residents participate in public life, they do so as citizens of Santa Rosa Beach.

Perhaps that’s the struggle Seaside best illuminates. Seaside celebrates both public life and a paradoxical escape from it into an exclusive, private realm. At some point, Seaside and the continued debates about its brethren may help us figure out which we value more.

–Alex Marshall is the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken (University of Texas Press 2000).

Putting Some ‘City’ Back In the Suburbs

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The Washington Post – 1996
Sunday, September 1, 1996; Page C01
By Alex Marshall

THEY ARE proliferating in former farm fields and distant suburbs all around Washington, these clusters of brick row houses that look as though they were airlifted out of Georgetown. Some are imposing, New England style Victorians with wrap-around front porches. Others are affixed with steeply angled stoops that suggest kids playing stick ball and neighbors swapping tales. so known as neo-traditionalism, New Urbanism is the architectural and town-planning movement that proposes to cure the ills of contemporary suburban life — from sterile communities to cookie-cutter architecture to disaffected politics — by refashioning subdivisions to resemble traditional small towns or big-city neighborhoods.

In these communities, or so the spiel goes, life will once again resemble the close-knit neighborhoods where some of our grandparents were raised. Families will live close together in homes and apartments that front on streets; they will walk down sidewalks to corner grocery stores and cafes. Young people will once again live next to old, rich next to poor.

It’s an idyllic picture, and one that is immediately appealing to anyone who has spent hours running errands along a crowded, chain store-lined suburban boulevard or lives on a suburban cul-de-sac. It is a concept that has caught the imagination of social thinkers nationwide, moving from the pages of planning journals to the cover of Newsweek, the pages of the Wall Street Journal and to dozens of other mainstream publications.

There’s only one problem: New Urbanism doesn’t work. It’s proponents 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 Washington are products of the Beltway and the rest of the superhighway system that laces the region.

New Urbanist developments are supposed to reduce the influence of the car. The idea is that people will live in small neighborhoods with houses clustered within walking distance of a town center. They will have narrower streets to encourage more walking and less driving. Kentlands, a much-touted subdivision outside Gaithersburg, was one of the earliest example of this genre. Haymount has been proposed in Virginia’s Caroline County, on the Rappahannock River just outside Fredericksburg. Other less-heralded renditions are sprouting in other areas of Maryland and Virginia, and indeed around major cities all over the country.

The problem is that, while these developments mimic the old 19th century streetcar neighborhoods, they keep the same transportation system that produces conventional suburbs. In other words, current New Urban developments follow the standard pattern for subdivision development. They sit right off a main highway. They often have but a single entrance. They have winding roads that are just slightly less confusing than cul-de-sacs.

They are, in effect, subdivisions masquerading as small towns, except with the homes pushed up to the street and a few front porches thrown on. So what you get, at best, is a neighborhood that looks like a Georgetown, but functions like any other subdivision built off the Beltway.

As a result, it should not surprise us that such places are not changing how people live. A resident will still drive to a Wal-Mart for a toaster or a McDonald’s for a hamburger. Because a subdivision is essentially isolated, these places do not have the diversity of people, the interplay of new neighbors and familiar faces that characterize both a small town or a big city. By and large, they draw a homogenous group of residents because their homes are targeted mostly at upper middle income buyers; diversity remains an illusive goal. And because people don’t actually work within these new towns, they tend not to shop there. As a result, the car remains the same dominant force that it is in traditional suburbs.

Indeed, the Achilles’ heel of New Urbanist developments has been their inability to change the way people shop, and the way retailers locate their stores. A case in point is Kentlands, where residents had initially hoped to have main street-style shopping rather than a traditional suburban strip mall. But at the developers’ insistence, the center was built on the edge of the subdivision with parking lots facing the highway — just like most other suburbs.

Even when developers have gone along with the vision of the New Traditionalists, their creations have not worked commercially. A corner store on a sidewalk, more dependent on walk-in traffic, cannot make a go of it without more of a Manhattan-like density of people around it, or at least much higher than anything New Urbanists are proposing. To be viable, such a store would also have to be one component in a network of traditional streets, not highways and Wal-marts.

To truly change the standard suburban style of living, with its dependence on the car and the heartbeat of the Beltway, you have to make more fundamental changes, and more politically difficult ones, than altering a few front porches or setback rules. You have to mention distasteful words like growth controls, parking restrictions and more investment in mass transit.

Of all these, metropolitan area growth controls are the most important. If Washington somehow managed a coordinated effort to limit development on new land, a task that would require the region to face its political fragmentation, existing communities would begin to revive, both in Washington proper and in surrounding subdivisions. As the density increased, so would ridership on the Metro. Freeways would make less sense. Commercial development would start to aim more at the center than at the fringes. The many scraps of vacant land left over in the last 30 years of development would begin to fill in.

But all this would come at a cost. If you limit new neighborhood construction in undeveloped, open spaces, you will have to raise home prices because the developers are right: It is cheaper to build on undeveloped land in more distant locales. If growth controls were strict enough, you would start changing the economy of cheap goods and cheap prices that is the American hallmark.

As it is, our habit of building huge freeways with relatively unbridled development has allowed for a greater and greater concentration of selling goods in super-sized stores. It’s getting so that stationery, tools, breakfast cereal, computers, stereos and more are bought at huge warehouse stores with rock-bottom prices that sit near a freeway interchange. But the clerk at the Circuit City who sells you a washing machine, not surprisingly, will not know your name. It is a tradeoff. For the most efficient distribution systems in the modern world, for the elimination of all middlemen, we get a life almost devoid of intimate contact between the home and the market.

We can’t have it all. We can’t have cheap homes, cheap goods — a more socially cohesive world comes with a more tightly controlled pattern of growth. New Urbanists have a chance of generating a realistic debate on how we build better, more livable communities. But they have to get their priorities straight. They have to give up the dollars generated by alliances with home builders intent on moving development ever outward. New Urbanism’s contribution to city planning will remain almost purely stylistic, unless it makes more effort to change the basic pattern of suburban development.

Cities of every era have had their drawbacks. Unless we start to rethink what we’re creating, our era will be known for cities that were dynamic, market-oriented and abundant, but which were also lonely, fragmented and disposable.

Alex Marshall is a staff writer for the Virginia Pilot in Norfolk and a regular contributor to Metropolis magazine in New York.

Old Cities vs. New Urbanism: The Beat Goes On

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AIA Architecture
May 1998
by Alex Marshal

When the faithful, the curious, and the skeptical gathered in Orlando, the debate over Celebration and the design philosophies of New Urbanism and Neotraditionalism twisted and turned for four days. Although there were dozens of speakers, the show stopper for many was the debate Friday night between Andres Duany, FAIA, New Urbanist leader and advocate, and Alex Krieger, FAIA, director of the Urban Design Program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Held in the Disney Cinema on the grounds of the Disney Institute, Duany and Krieger sat on stage in straight-backed chairs and traded comments and retorts. John Kaliski, AIA, of Santa Monica, Calif., moderated. He had a tough job controlling his eager participants.

The views of the two, and their differences, were clear, though. Krieger championed what might be called Old Urbanism: the health and prosperity of thousands of existing neighborhoods and downtowns, many of which are struggling to retain jobs, residents, and services. Duany championed reinventing the suburbs through New Urbanism. What was the conflict? Simply put, Krieger said encouraging more suburban growth sucked people and resources from the center city. Duany said the suburban expansion was inevitable, and it was better to do it well than to waste energy trying to slow it down. Deciding who was right was left to the audience. More controversial were Duany’s remarks on public housing, as he and other New Urbanists are actively involved in inner-city work.

On February 21, the committees pursued their separate agendas: The Committee on Design headed to Tampa, where they checked out the campus of Florida Southern University, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; the Regional/Urban Design Committee saw the 19th-century railroad resort Winter Garden; and the Housing PIA toured a number of Orlando’s infill housing projects.

On February 22, all attendees gathered for a final discussion on Celebration and New Urbanism. The questions emerging were: How would it age? Would the rigid design controls keep the project from evolving over time? Would it remain an isolated subdivision? Were its residents connected to or isolated from the metro area of Orlando? Was it a town or a subdevelopment? Writers Todd Bressi, Elizabeth Dunlop, and Nora Greer raised these and other questions and observations. No clear answers emerged, but all agreed the project was worthy of attention.

Alex Marshall is Norfolk (Va.)-based journalist and author of a forthcoming book on the contemporary city.

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