The Golden Flame Flickers Most Brightly In Cities

Posted on by
Reply

REVIEW OF CITIES AND CIVILIZATION
METROPOLIS MAGAZINE
BY ALEX MARSHALL

BOOK FACTS: Cities in Civilization, by Sir Peter Hall. Pantheon Books, New York, 1998. (Pantheon is a division of Random House). First published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London. 1,169 pages.

Thanks to Peter Hall, I know a lot more about theater, music and the formation of democracy. I know a lot more about shipbuilding, computers, car-making, movie-making and the birth of rock and roll. I know a lot more about electronics, painting, cotton-spinning and the printing press.

I also know a lot more about cities, although at first I wasn’t sure. Was studying the fusion of blues and country music in Memphis in the 1930s studying cities? But Hall has changed my definitions.

He has written a curious book, which, by the way, just happens to be a masterpiece. It is a huge tome of a book, a doorstop, weighing in at four pounds on my bathroom scales, a mere 1,200 pages, including footnotes. It is Hall’s life work, the probable conclusion to a long and distinguished career of writing more than 25 books, most of them about cities. Sir Peter Hall, already knighted for his contribution to his native England, took 15 years to think it up, research, and write it.

I say it is curious because Hall has written what is basically a history of creativity, using cities as a connective theme. Rather than talk about finely-built churches or elegant streets, the usual stuff of city study, Hall talks of what cities produce — their art, culture, technology, science and industry. Only in the last of the volume’s four books, does Hall talk about sewers, streets, water lines, and growth patterns, which I think of as the basics of city study.

Hall’s thesis is that most innovation in art, science, philosophy and everything else comes out of urban centers in short, dramatic bursts, usually just lasting a generation or two. These intense flowerings produce most human forward momentum.

Why did democracy, humanistic philosophy and the dramatic arts explode out of Athens in 400 B.C.? Why did painters and sculptors rediscover the naturalism of ancient Greece in Florence in 1400? Why did dozens of men, including William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, suddenly write hundreds of great plays in a short 40 year epoch in London around 1600? Why did the best and most innovative work in computers come out of the Silicon Valley in our present era?

Why indeed?

Hall takes these short epochs — New York at the turn of the century, Detroit at the birth of the car, the creation of socialist Stockholm in 1950, in all 21 city epochs — and lays them out for the reader. He asks the question, Where, and why there? and then seeks answers thoroughly. And I do mean thoroughly.

In asking why impressionism, post-impressionism and cubism all came out of Paris between 1870 and 1910, Hall tells a concise history of art, delving into the backgrounds of not just Picasso, but dozens of other painters, tracing how they arrived at Paris to begin revolutionizing what it means to put color and lines on canvas.

With shipbuilding in Glasgow, Hall tells us a history of the steam engine, a geology lesson on the importance of coal deposits near the city, and a discourse on the shift from wooden to iron shipbuilding.

With the rock and roll in Memphis, Hall tells how the fusion of negro blues and white country music produced Elvis Presley, which of course includes discussing the differences between African polytonalities and the diatonic European scale.

Whatever you are reading about, Hall takes you deep, deep inside. Did you know that the great Japanese electronic firm, NEC — Nippon Electric Corporation — was founded by Western Electric, the American company, in 1899? I learned this reading about the rise of electronic industry outside Tokyo at the turn of the century.

The book is a masterpiece not only because of the astonishing range and depth of Hall’s writing, but because he begins to answer his question Where, and why there? He begins to outline the murky shape of what defines the conditions of creativity.

At first glance, Cities in Civilization seems like a companion and answer to Lewis Mumford’s great master works of the 1938 and 1961, The Culture of Cities and The City in History. But while all three books are huge, and both authors trace cities through time, Mumford’s story is much more rooted in the physical world. He makes you see the design of cities, their architecture, and even when spinning heady theories about social order, he traces them back to things like density, streets and regional growth patterns.

Hall, on the other hand, sometimes ignores the physical world completely. In writing about the Silicon Valley, Hall expends hardly a word about the Santa Clara valley’s disjointed, sprawling, automobile-oriented form. Instead, he tells how William Shockley moving from Boston to Palo Alto in 1954 and founded the modern electronics industry.

Rather than rhyming with Mumford, Cities in Civilization compares better to a smaller, but similar book, Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts into Air (Simon & Schuster 1982). Like Hall, Berman is fascinated with why creative people emerge from particular places and time. Like Hall, he comes up with some similar explanations.

Both Berman and Hall concludes that creativity often depends on a kind of dissonance between observer and observed, an interplay between the status of outsider and insider. Berman says great literature often comes out of developing countries, like Argentina in this century or Russia in the last, because their intelligentsia gained a magnified perspective on the human condition by being aware of a vast world of ideas, but living in a poverty-ridden, earth-bound place.

Hall says creative people are often in a place, but not completely of it. Hall documents the incredible achievements of the Jewish bourgeoise elite in Vienna around 1900, who were almost, but not completely, integrated into the local culture. In ancient Athens, Hall informed me that a peculiar group labeled metics produced much of the art and philosophy. Metics were a kind of resident alien, not slaves, yet not fully citizens. Both Hippocrates and Herodotus, the founders of medicine and the study of history, were metics.

In addition to being the work of outsiders, Hall sketches other common conditions about where great things are likely to happen, which I loosely sum up here.

One, paradoxically, is disorder. Creative places tend to be swirling, often violent places, where social order is present but changing rapidly. The masters in renaissance Florence, for example, worked in a context of violent family feuds, political divisions, continual warfare and bloodshed.

Second: Great places at great times become so by being magnets for creative people of a particular bent. Paris sucked in potentially great painters from all over Europe, trained them, and then spat them out to the world as masters. The Silicon Valley today does the same with computer people. New York City, of course, has functioned like this for most of its existence in a wide variety of endeavors.

Third: The state usually fertilizes the soil of innovation, whether it be in shipbuilding or painting. The unaided Free Market is largely an illusion. French kings sponsored the great salons of art which first made Paris the capital of art in Europe, and which then provided a backboard for the impressionist to rebel against. Federal defense money underpinned the initial university and industrial computer work in the Silicon Valley.

Fourth: The group is as important as the individual. Even a Shakespeare or a Picasso does not act alone, but comes out of a big bunch of people working on the same challenges in the same time and place. Even a genius needs the shoulders of others to stand on.

Fifth: Money matters. Most creative periods either produced or were funded by great increases in the wealth. More money not only funds luxuries like art, but tends to produce the violent social change that fuels new perspectives.

Still, despite the rules, you can never predict just where great things are going to happen. Great creative epochs are like love affairs, which erupt suddenly, gather great speed and energy, and then quickly burn out. Which leads to another conclusion of Hall’s: great epochs are not sustainable. The necessary dissonance between a stable social or economic order, and a creative group of outsiders who challenge it, cannot last.

Hall’s thesis is fascinating. I could think of only one example to contradict it, but it’s a big one: The American revolution and U.S. Constitution. Founding a new nation in 1776 based on democracy, without queens or kings, that separated church from state and guaranteed personal liberty, was obviously a very big deal. Where did it come from?

Many of the most important thinkers and actors behind the American experiment came from Virginia, then an agrarian, plantation-centered land with virtually no cities at all. Because of the economics of plantations, the planters shipped their tobacco and cotton directly to England from their own wharves and had no need of cities, which are usually based around transportation. Because of this, larger urban centers never emerged in the state. Other than tiny Williamsburg, Virginia had no cities at all.

How then, was this agrarian state able to produce George Mason, who authored the doctrine of religious freedom and the separation of church and state? How did it produce Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry and many of the other intellectual underpinnings of the country? How did a a culture of enlightenment emerge from an agrarian, slave-based system of wealth and society?

How indeed. We’ll leave that question hanging.

Who should read this book? Its 1,169 pages are both alluring and intimidating. Rather than tackle it whole, I would advise most people to read the most appealing chapters first. If painting is your passion, read about Paris. If its the blues, read about Memphis. That way, you might gradually get suckered in to reading about shipbuilding in Glasgow, Swedish social thought in Stockholm, and event

Book review by the Austin Chronicle’s Penny Van Horn

Posted on by
Reply

May 4, 2001:
by Penny Van Horn

BOOK REVIEW: How Cities Work Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken
by Alex Marshall
University of Texas Press, 216 pp., $50; $24.95 (paper)

Does this ring a bell? “The standard choice today of lacing a metropolitan area with big freeways for purely internal travel means we will have a sprawling, formless environment.” Uh-huh.

Now more than ever, Austin could use accessible writing that addresses the challenges of urban sprawl. Journalist Alex Marshall (Salon.com, The Washington Post, among others) offers a clear-headed approach to the urban issues that so deeply affect Austin and other overgrown cities in his jargon-free new book How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken. He cuts right to the chase by spelling out the basic interaction of the three great controlling forces of urban growth — transportation, economics, and politics. The topics are overwhelming, but Marshall makes them understandable in the context of four case studies that form the backbone of the book.

First up is Celebration, the Disney-controlled development in Florida that is a paragon of New Urbanist design. New Urbanism claims to appropriate the best features of old-fashioned city centers such as those of Savannah, Ga., and Annapolis, Md., while also providing the amenities demanded by car-dependent suburban residents. Celebration sports limited street widths, houses built with porches close to the sidewalk, and a shopping street in its center. But the whole project was bankrolled by Disney, the shopping street is full of tony boutiques that rely on tourist traffic, and the faux-antique houses in Celebration cost three times as much as comparable ones in the neighboring — real — town of Kissimmee. Marshall convincingly portrays Celebration for what it is, one more suburban development dependent on yet another highway off-ramp. Far from offering solutions to sprawl, New Urbanism compounds it. Marshall writes: “The New Urban design philosophy is akin to dressing up a car to look like a horse-drawn carriage, and then saying you have brought back the intimacy and community of carriage life.”

Marshall is similarly critical of the endless suburbia that makes up the Silicon Valley of California. He outlines the history of the valley as it made the transition from fruit farming to microchip production, and probingly questions the logic that has allowed sprawl to take over prime agricultural land that in many places has prime topsoil 40 feet thick … sitting under freeways and strip malls.

Jackson Heights in Queens offers a contrast: a vibrant community that for generations has offered immigrants and their children a place to live and trade — without needing a car. Throughout these case studies and intervening thematic chapters, Marshall analyzes how Americans’ obsession with the car inherently prevents many of the improvements we say we would like made in the fabric of our cities.

Marshall’s most absorbing case study is of Portland, Ore. While he lauds Portland’s success in establishing a strict growth boundary, he also points out that the city benefited from doing so during the early Seventies, when environmental sentiment was cresting and when the region was even more culturally homogenous than it is now. Portland’s growth boundary, along with a ban on construction of downtown parking facilities, has supplied a form of creative pressure that has forced successive waves of real-estate development back into the heart of Portland rather than out into the countryside that surrounds it. This has meant higher density in the city’s core, which makes viable Portland’s showcase mass-transit system and downtown retail center.

Can something like this happen for Austin? Marshall’s analysis shows that any sort of worthwhile urban planning requires the sort of hard choices Austin has seemed incapable of making. “People are living differently in Portland because of the policies they have chosen,” he writes. “Actual shaping of cities requires making choices. More of this, less of that. Some people lose, some people win.” He also argues that government “is the only actor with the size and scope to make foundational changes” in the way our cities grow, and thus encourages a sort of government activism atypical in Texas: “[Portland’s planning policies] are no more activist than building freeways for more malls and subdivisions; they are just activist in a different way.”

If this new sort of activism ever will come to pass for Austin, it seems to be a long way off. But maybe books like this one can get the ball rolling.

Book review by Robert Behre

Posted on by
Reply

From Charleston Neighborhood Post & Courier
By Robert Behre
BOOK REVIEW: How Cities Work, By Alex Marshall

Journalist Alex Marshall shows how to end sprawl; the only question is, do we want to listen?

Are we bothered enough to make the tough decisions needed to change things? Make no mistake – they are tough decisions. Take the automobile (please!). Marshall notes that cities always developed according to the transportation of the day. Older downtowns feel different because they were built for pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages; Wal-Marts and post-World War II subdivisions were built for the car.

Marshall cites three steps needed to change the growth patterns found in most U.S. cities, including larger Charleston: recognition that residents have the right to direct growth.

While not dismissing property rights, Marshall notes that growth stems from public spending on sewer lines, schools and (mostly) transportation. If it’s our money, we should be able to say where it goes.

There needs to be recognition that we need to support other ways of getting around, especially within the city. He notes a trade-off: With more mass transit, bike lanes and sidewalks, you will have the option of not using a car. But to get this option, you have to accept that using a car will be more difficult, a recognition that growth control is not simply a local matter.

A city can tinker with its zoning laws, but today’s growth often leapfrogs past city limits and county lines. Only a regional approach – with the state’s backing – will work.

As the accompanying review by Rosemary Michaud rightly notes, Marshall’s solutions have had few serious takers.

But where she sees this as a lack of vision on Marshall’s part, there is an alternative view: seeing it as underscoring the difficulty of the task. ‘The problem for contemporary Americans is that enhancing social cohesion (and limiting sprawl) may mean giving up some things we really like, like personal mobility, low taxes, and a footloose economic structure,’ Marshall writes. ‘We have not figured out yet that creating wealth is not the same as creating community.’

Perhaps most importantly, Marshall explodes the outdated thinking that cities’ older downtown areas are different than the mid- to late-20th century development that rings them. To him, it’s all one big city. ‘The suburban world of highways, shopping centers, and office parks is now a place of blind market forces and impersonality – exactly what the city represented in the past,’ he says. Older downtowns have become cherished because we realize they’re a past art form that won’t be built anew. The question is where we go from here. We can pursue Marshall’s solutions or simply wait for personal jetpacks or flying cars.

‘Actual shaping of cities requires making choices. More of this, less of that. Some people lose, some people win,’ he writes.

‘What we are starting to see in Portland (Ore.) is a city that recognizes you can have easy suburban growth with big homes on large lots, or a coherent city with a vital mass transit system, but not both.’

Robert Behreis the editor of The Post and Courier Neighborhood Editions and a columnist on preservation.

Book review by John-Henry Doucette

Posted on by
Reply

Published: SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2001
Section: COMMENTARY , page J1
Source: BY JOHN-HENRY DOUCETTE

For a book that isn’t about Norfolk, there’s a lot of Norfolk in ”How Cities Work” by Alex Marshall.

And for a book that isn’t per se a criticism of New Urbanism, a design movement that attempts to incorporate urban ideals into suburban development, it misses no opportunity to knock the movement.

Marshall’s opinions of New Urbanism have been stingingly vocal, and among Hampton Roads planning and city officials his notoriety lives on.

A Virginian-Pilot reporter from 1988 to 1997, Marshall comes from a long line of Norfolkians. His great-grandfather, Albert Grandy, was the first publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.

Marshall was a Loeb Fellow in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University last year, and later moved to New York City. ”How Cities Work” was published last month (University of Texas Press, 288 pp., $50 hardcover; $24.95 paperback).

I recently sat down with Marshall in the basement cafeteria of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to talk about his book. The following is an excerpt from that conversation.

Q: Did you want to write this book when you were a reporter in Norfolk?

A: Yes. I’d been writing about cities for almost 10 years for the newspaper. I was constantly asking myself: How does this all fit together? Or what is making this all go?

Then, when I started writing for national magazines, I kind of had that same spirit. I guess in the course of these past eight or nine years I came up with some things that had not been said much.

Q: Such as?

A: I went to Europe on a fellowship in 1994, and it made me realize that suburban sprawl is not just a product of American bad taste. I really love traditional urban cities but you sort of have to examine your love.

Q: So. New Urbanism?

A: I started out as a big fan of New Urbanism and I ended up as a big critic. At first it seemed to offer a very coherent solution to urban sprawl. It seemed to say that we could have these really nice cities and places where people walk, where people do not rely on cars so much, if we just design things a little differently.

Q: In the book, you talk about designing the trappings of a city, but there’s no foundation.

A: Right – there’s no there there. A lot of it was going to Europe, which made me realize transportation is really a fundamental driver of development and of the type of development.

And, secondly, just visiting these New Urban places. If you pull away your starry-eyedness, you see these places as essentially charades or mirages. . . . just another isolated subdivision in the middle of a cornfield, not that much different from the isolated subdivision down the street.

Q: I thought your best argument was for transportation. Thing is, the car exists. People like their cars.

A: I’m not sure people realize how significant it was to have built those highways into Norfolk in the 1960s, that they destroyed Norfolk as much as they helped it.

The highway is as much of a knife into it as a helpful artery. Without the highway, arguably, Norfolk would have thrived more because, rather than fleeing into the suburbs, people would have stayed closer to the downtown, which would have kept more of the traditional downtown.

Q: How does Norfolk, which has the big mall and a highway running into the downtown, stay vital?

A: That’s the million-dollar question. It’s very easy to criticize. It’s much more difficult to work with what’s there. I think the mall is a very good thing, even if it’s horribly designed.

You could do a couple of things – though some of these proposals are outlandish. One, get the highway engineers out of downtown Norfolk. The new streets being built downtown are too much like suburban highways. They should be designing traditional city streets.

More radical things? Tear down some highways. Norfolk should have a Tear Down Highways contest. What would Norfolk lose? If they made it more difficult for commuters to reach their jobs at the naval base or medical center, so what? It just means people would move back to Norfolk. Other cities have done it with pretty big results.

More outlandish: Examine reviving the streetcar system. No city in the country I know of has done this, so maybe this means it’s a good idea. Most of the main streets in Norfolk have street line tracks buried under the asphalt.

Q: How important is it to have people live downtown? Or at least close by?

A: I think that’s a good thing. A lot of it is having a vision of what Norfolk should look like. My vision might be a dense, compact city where people can walk, bicycle, take the streetcar, bus or drive to a lot of different places. That has neighborhood business centers that are alternatives to the more standard neighborhood shopping mall model.

Q: Do you see MacArthur Center in that tradition?

A: My view on MacArthur Center is kind of nuanced. I think it’s a good thing it was built. Right now it’s helping downtown. I would have voted for it if I were on City Council.

But it’s fatally flawed in its design, which in the long run will probably hurt both the mall and the city. To repeat an old charge, it’s built like a hermetically sealed box, which limits how much the mall can help the rest of downtown – and which also limits how much the rest of downtown can help the mall.

If Granby Street continues to take off, it’s going to be very difficult for people to casually walk from Granby Street to the mall. It’s not impossible, but difficult. The mall lives and dies by itself too much.

Q: What are some of the good things that have happened downtown?

A: The Collins housing (a relatively new development along Boush Street) is very good but it’s also built too much as a suburban housing complex. The electric bus system is good.

All the cities in Hampton Roads have an unofficial policy of not allowing poor people to live there. It’s immoral, un-Christian and wrong. For all its strengths, the ward system has still not allowed Norfolk to treat all its residents as citizens.

Q: So if all that money spend in the 1950s and 1960s on redevelopment and transportation had been spent on a public transportation system, say, and not slum clearance or a highway that dumps into downtown, Norfolk would be a better city?

A: It would have required stunning 20/20 foresight, but in hindsight, yes. In the book, I talk about money, government and transportation, and all three are connected. On the business side, (people) should look at how they can change the region’s economic vantages. They should look at their key transportation link to the outside world.

Politically, if we can have more of a regional government and more state growth control and more regional land use plan, we would have less sprawl, more prosperous neighborhoods, and a more livable region. That would make us more attractive to businesses.

On the smaller-mode transportation, we should make our neighborhoods more livable and make car travel less of a priority. Using a car is a personal decision, but building highways is a public decision.

Book review by Joanna Mareth

Posted on by
Reply

The American Prospect
June 18, 2001
BY JOANNA MARETH

Book Review:
How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Road Not Taken, by Alex Marshall.
University of Texas Press, 243 pages, $ 24.95.

Celebration, Florida, is a picturesque town built from the ground up by the Walt Disney Corporation and planners Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, pioneers of New Urbanism. By some measures, Celebration is a success. It has a thriving downtown retail district and homes that sell for seven times what similarly sized houses in neighboring towns go for. What it doesn’t have, according to Alex Marshall in How Cities Work, is any real claim to urbanism, new or old.

Marshall, a journalist based in Norfolk, Virginia, picks out four places with little in common — California’s Silicon Valley; Jackson Heights, Queens; Portland, Oregon; and Celebration — for his study of the interplay of forces that determine the shape of cities and towns. In each instance, he shows how the public’s decisions and money are the most important variables in creating urban places. It is government, he emphasizes, that ultimately shapes cities by building the transportation systems that form the skeleton of any place. Rails, ports, interstates, and airports support the flow of goods and capital, while sidewalks, subways, and highways determine how people get around once they’ve arrived.

Silicon Valley, to take one example, may look like a hastily strung-together collection of supersize office parks and shopping developments. But governmental entities made zoning decisions, built mass transit, and stretched country roads into six-lane highways and suburban boulevards. Each decision requires trade-offs. Places with good public-transportation systems are rarely easy to navigate by car, as anyone living in a city like Boston can attest.

What Marshall finds in Celebration is a modern-day automobile subdivision that has been pinched and pulled to resemble small-town America, at least as it exists in popular imagination. But like most contemporary suburban developments, Celebration is dependent on the nearby interstate highway. The dynamics of such a place have not made Marshall into an enthusiast for New Urbanism. “Celebration and most New Urban developments,” he writes, “will remain winking ornaments on the more gritty reality of American urban life, make-believe worlds that, like Disney’s theme parks, lure a public and society

away from addressing the challenges such developments advertise with their image.” New Urbanism’s “have your cake and eat it too” approach should not be confused with real urban policy, which requires tough choices and the involvement of not-so-tidy institutions of democracy, as opposed to the top-down plans of well-oiled corporations.

Marshall’s paragon is Portland, where growth decisions are consciously channeled through local and regional governments. The policies are simple: Use growth boundaries to keep downtowns dense, build fewer freeways (or even tear some down), and fund mass transit. The results aren’t perfect. A ballot initiative approved by Oregon voters last November makes growth boundaries more difficult to enforce and may signal a backlash against the state’s strict land-use laws (a development that is too recent to have been included in Marshall’s book). Still, Portland remains one of the few midsize cities that have a thriving downtown and don’t compel their residents to drive everywhere.

Marshall writes: “If Andres Duany or Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk want to design towns, then they should be working for the planning department of some state or county. Their often elegant streets and squares should be drawn on public documents, which should match the transportation system government is designing.” Too bad that in most of the country, government doesn’t get much respect. In the absence of a cohesive national urban policy, the planning and design of communities have fallen under the jurisdiction of other, more energized movements such as environmentalism, historical preservation, and architectural philosophies like New Urbanism.

New Urbanism’s most important legacy may be the discussion it continues to provoke over the shape and design of communities and the fresh thinking it brings into the field of urban planning. In books, seminars, and demonstration communities like Celebration and Seaside, Florida, New Urbanists get people talking about what they mean when they talk about urbanism. And in fact, what people want isn’t new at all: the ability to walk to the store, drive less, get to know the neighbors. With its sidewalks, front porches, and densely built neighborhoods, Celebration provides these touches with corporate efficiency.

The task now is to move beyond Celebration and tackle the thornier question of how far we are willing to go to get the sort of pedestrian scale that is missing from most newer places. Are we really willing to drive less and live closer to our neighbors if it means giving up some mobility — and giving up the ability to stop undesirable elements at the front gates? Marshall’s enthusiasm for urban places and active government is contagious. Still, while historical memory is short, the bulldozer scars from midcentury urban-renewal projects haven’t disappeared. There’s hope that the almighty interstate won’t reign forever, but urban advocates who call for sweeping government intervention would do well to remember that we’ve been down that road before.

Copyright 2001 The American Prospect, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

Book review by Alan Ehrenhalt

Posted on by
Reply

BY ALAN EHRENHALT

The 20th century produced a pantheon of brilliant urban thinkers and planners. Some built, some mostly wrote, some did both. Some did better than others at translating their ideas into reality. But one way or another, we are living with the consequences of their vision: Ebenezer Howard’s “garden cities,” Le Corbusier’s “radiant city,” Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Broadacre City” — even Lewis Mumford’s unrealized dream of regional planning — all of them represent the baseline for anyone who wants to create a modern urban revival.

But there’s a dirty little secret that nearly all the legendary members of the urbanist Hall of Fame have in common. They really didn’t like cities very much — at least the ones they lived in and knew about. Wright and Le Corbusier considered the urban industrial metropolis of their time to be dirty, smelly, noisy, crowded and vastly inferior to the skyscraper-and-park cities they could conjure up on their drawing boards. Mumford acquired a reputation as one of the most passionate urbanists of all time, but what he really admired most was the medieval village, where, as he saw it, people could be in touch with nature every moment of the day. The more he saw of mid-century Manhattan, the unhappier he became.

The purpose of this column, however, isn’t to focus on this set of individuals, but rather to celebrate the accomplishments of the one great 20th-century urbanist who really loved cities — loved them for their noise, their energy, their complexity, for the sheer quantity of life they managed to generate.

As you may have guessed, I’m referring to Jane Jacobs. This year marks the 40th anniversary of her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Happily, Jacobs is alive and well, still writing and lecturing from her home in Toronto at age 85. Even more happily, her work has become a readily available classic, still on the shelves in almost every good bookstore in the country.

Nobody, of course, would be foolish enough to claim that Jane Jacobs’ wisdom has become settled doctrine in the world of city planning and urban design. The battles she ignited are still being fought, and not always with success for her side. But to a remarkable extent, she set the agenda in 1961, and it remains about where she set it. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that contemporary urban thought is a series of footnotes to Jane Jacobs.

When she wrote Death and Life, downtown renewal in American cities consisted largely of the destruction of two-story commercial structures, their replacement by large office towers, and the creation of huge windswept plazas in which no one congregated.

Now, at the very least, most of us realize that empty plazas are no urban adornment. But the person who first taught us that was Jane Jacobs, insisting that expert opinion was wrong: that successful cities are built out of street life — people of all sorts, coming and going at all hours, working, playing and gossiping on the same sidewalks, forming the casual relationships upon which trust can grow.

“Life begets life,” Jacobs wrote. Busy streets are safe streets. Empty streets are dangerous. That’s no more than simple common sense now. But it was heretical 40 years ago.

Death and Life was prescient in so many ways that one short column couldn’t possibly acknowledge them all. Jacobs argued for the reclaiming of seedy industrial waterfronts for recreational purposes. “The waterfront itself,” she argued, “is the first wasted asset capable of drawing people at leisure.”

She warned against single-purpose zoning and described mixed-use development as the foremost weapon in rebuilding a city neighborhood. Today that is accepted wisdom not only among New Urbanists but in the planning department of virtually every big American city.

Perhaps even more important — and certainly less heeded — was Jacobs’ corollary warning that financial capital and physical rebuilding will not restore a community whose social life has been depleted. “It is fashionable,” Jacobs wrote, “to suppose that certain touchstones of the good life will create good neighborhoods — schools, parks, clean housing and the like. How easy life would be if this were so!… There is no direct, simple relationship between good housing and good behavior…” and “important as good schools are, they prove totally undependable at rescuing bad neighborhoods.” Billions of wasted dollars and limitless human disappointment could have been averted by a public willingness to face up to those Jacobean truths.

Nobody is right about everything, though, and I would argue — although I doubt she would agree — that she was wrong about at least a couple of things. Based on her experiences as an activist in New York’s Greenwich Village, Jacobs felt that no organized urban neighborhood of fewer than 75,000 people could be large enough to wield meaningful clout in the political structure of a huge city. It seems to me that this was more true of New York in the 1960s than of cities in general. Communities smaller than Jacobs’ prescribed minimum have fought City Hall and won numerous times in the largest cities in the past 40 years.

Moreover, she was utterly disdainful of metropolitan regionalism. She described a region as “an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.” She thought that regional alliances and consolidation of political power were no answer to the difficulties either of cities or of the suburbs sprouting up around them. It seems to me that if regionalism is a difficult and often unpalatable choice, it may be the only realistic one left for quite a few of the struggling metropolitan areas in this country.

But if Jacobs was wrong about a couple of things, she was breathtakingly right about so many — and she was able to express her insights in a casual, ironic, unpretentious way that makes her as much a pleasure to read now as she was in the 1960s, when I first encountered her in college.

And that suggests one more crucial lesson about Jane Jacobs worth paying some attention to: She was an amateur. Jacobs was by training neither a planner nor an architect nor an urban historian nor anything else that might suggest uncommon learning in her field. She was a newspaper reporter from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who moved to New York with her husband and children in the early postwar years, settled into a Greenwich Village apartment, took an interest in Village affairs, read the urban policy literature, traveled around the country to check on other cities, and emerged with a fund of common sense that no formal degree or professional credential could possibly have given her.

It is a silly question to ask who will be the Jane Jacobs of the 21st century. No one will be; she is as original and irreproducible as anyone who has ever written about cities and community. But it may be reasonable to observe that, when and if someone makes literate and persuasive sense out of the next round of urban problems and challenges, it won’t be someone with a long series of titles and degrees surrounding his name. It will be someone with the virtues of an intelligent and curious amateur.

In the decade or so since New Urbanism exploded onto the local policy and planning scene, it has generated millions of words of analysis and prescription detailing how intelligent design can restore the sense of community and rootedness that city life has lost in the past half century. Some of this literature is readable and useful; some of it is not.

But none of it has seemed more sensible and appealing to me than How Cities Work, Alex Marshall’s new book of urban reporting and commentary. Marshall shares with Jane Jacobs one characteristic: He is an amateur: a longtime Virginia newspaper reporter whose methods consist largely of watching, reading, traveling and thinking.

Marshall is both sympathetic to New Urbanism and critical of it. His criticisms are simple and cogent ones. Essentially they boil down to this: Transportation is destiny. Communities are creatures of the transportation systems that grow up around them. American downtowns and Main Streets of the early 20th century were compact and vibrant because people walked there or came in on trains and moved in and out of stations twice a day. It’s fine to be nostalgic for the physical intimacy of the old-time small town or gritty city, but it’s impossible to have it in a society dependent for its mobility on the automobile.

Therefore, Marshall argues, there is something inescapably false about New Urbanist efforts to re-create a small-town America of picket fences, front porches and sidewalk gossip in developments constructed as enclaves along freeways and virtually inaccessible except by car. “Bringing back the street,” he concludes, “is not possible unless we bring back the forms of transportation that made it essential.”

Marshall would actually like to see those old urban forms return to life. He likes the idea of compact downtowns friendly to pedestrians and fed by fast and efficient public transportation. He is merely making the point that if we are to create such a societal change in the coming century, we will need to think through all the trade-offs and sacrifices it will entail. We will have to return to old ways of getting around. We will not be able to revive the neighborhoods of the past simply by redesigning streets and houses.

Reading Alex Marshall and rereading Jane Jacobs in quick succession leaves a similarly bracing feeling: Their books amount to a cold bath of common sense whose implications an urban cheerleader might just as soon avoid, but whose logic is ultimately difficult to escape.

This is not to say that Alex Marshall is the next Jane Jacobs. That would be unfair to both of them. It’s merely a reminder of something we might all stop and ponder. In urban policy, as in most other fields, smart amateurs are worth paying attention to. They have a way of keeping us all in touch with reality.

————————————————–

Alan Ehrenhalt’s Assessments columns from Governing have been collected in a book entitled Democracy in the Mirror: Politics, Reform, and Reality in Grassroots America. For more information on the book and how to order a copy, click here.

Wolfe’s Strange Tale of Architecture

Posted on by
Reply

In a war of words, the best wielder of them tends to win. So I’m hesitant to disagree with Tom Wolfe, one of the century’s best journalists and a great word wielder. Nevertheless, it bears saying that Wolfe’s entertaining and lengthy two-part screed in The New York Times on Sunday and Monday was largely rubbish. (See http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/opinion/12W OLF.html and http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/opinion/13W OLF.html ).

It’s not that I mind Wolfe’s defense of the diminutive, Edward Durell Stone-designed Huntington Hartford building at Columbus Circle, which the newly renamed Museum of Arts and Design proposes to substantially remodel into its home. It’s true I have never liked this building.

Being windowless, it looked like an unfriendly fortress to me. Wolfe’s piece caused me to see it differently. Perhaps it is worth saving.

What I reject in Wolfe’s tale is his meandering history of 20th century architecture, in which he encapsulates his defense of the Stone building.

Wolfe’s rhetoric and logic are as tortured as that of the architectural theorists he decries. Modernist architecture, whether you like it or not, was largely about fully using new technology, such as steelframe construction, in more and better ways, rather than blindly imitating past architectural styles.

Wolfe’s narrative about architects seeking to hide buildings from ‘the dominant regime’ and seeking to avoid bourgeois materials such as marble is simply not that true. Sure, a few theorists might have spouted off such talk, but such motivations were hardly the major thrust behind modernism, much less the architectural styles that followed.

What people like in architecture is notoriously personal and unpredictable. I myself am no fan of the 1950s-era glass and concrete box, preferring the more curvy buildings that new computer technology make possible. Whatever one’s taste, new times and new technology provide the means for new architecture, and by and large, this is a plus, not a minus.

–Alex Marshall

The Master Of Modernism

Posted on by
Reply

Published: Tuesday, November 3, 1998
Section: DAILY BREAK , page E1
Source: BY ALEX MARSHALL
SPECIAL TO THE DAILY BREAK

BACH WROTE his musical masterpieces in the 1700s at a time when many people considered his Baroque style passe. He proved them wrong.

Perhaps history might say the same about architect Richard Meier, the great master of modernism who labors away in the style three and four decades after its heyday. Meier designs smooth, gleaming white buildings that denote a purity of form and a fascination with light, space and structure.

Tonight, Meier will talk about his most recent project, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and share his thoughts on building, art and design. Meier will speak at Nauticus to the Hampton Roads chapter of the American Institute of Architects The event is open to the public.

Regardless of whether one is a fan of modernism, the architectural style developed after World War I that emphasized form and absence of ornamentation, no one denies that Meier is a colossus of the trade. He circles the globe with his fellow superstar colleagues such as I.M. Pei, Michael Graves and Cesar Pelli, touching down to build museums, airports and concert halls.

Meier has been in this select group for two decades, roughly since he designed the Museum of Decorative Arts in Frankfurt in 1979. In 1984, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize – the “Nobel Prize of architecture” – at the relatively young age of 49.

However, Meier has entered an even more rarefied, and difficult, realm with his selection in 1984 to design the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Known as “the commission of the century,” it is probably the largest arts-related construction project ever attempted at one time. Funded by the fabulous wealth of J. Paul Getty, the center opened last December after 14 years of hard labor by Meier and his company.

The final cost: a cool $1 billion.

As Meier recounts in his candid book, “Building the Getty” (Knopf 1997), the project was “of such scale, complexity, cost, and ambition that it consumed my life. . . . The Getty Center project turned into a long personal and professional journey.”

For the Getty Center, Meier designed six off-white boxes and cylinders that dot a hillside overlooking Los Angeles. The entire campus takes up 24 acres on the 110-acre site. Visitors park in satellite lots at the bottom of the slopes and are ferried by train and tram to the buildings. The heart of the center is the Getty Museum, a world-class showcase for European painting, sculpture and other art. But the center also includes a research institute, a conservation institute and an educational institute.

Meier faced hurdles as much bureaucratic as physical. The nearby civic league, the Los Angeles City Council and the Getty board all had their hands on Meier’s pen. It took seven years of negotiations to finalize the design. The conflicts forced Meier to adapt and rethink his style. He is known for his signature white, for example, but the museum ended up being clad in light gray stone from Italy, in part because of the opposition of the Brentwood Homeowners Association to a gleaming white building.

In Meier’s previous work, white was usually his preferred color. “White is, in fact, the color which intensifies the perception of all other hues that exist in natural light and in nature. It is against a white surface that one best appreciates the play of light and shadow, solids and voids,” Meier says in his book “Richard Meier Architect, 1964/1984” (Rizzoli 1984).

And just how good is the Getty? Time will tell. The reviews have ranged from ecstatic to mildly critical. In sheer hoopla, it has been overshadowed by near adulation that has greeted architect Frank Gehry’s new Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain. With its titanium skin and cartoonish forms, Gehry’s building was praised by Hubert Muschamp of the New York Times as practically single-handedly saving contemporary art and culture. But the Getty Center is so much larger than Gehry’s Guggenheim, both in size and concept, that a comparison between them is not entirely fair. Meier graduated from architecture school at Cornell University in the late 1950s at a time when modernism was king. Victorian cornice lines, Art-Deco swirls or any other type of “decoration” were out. Instead, the lines of a building were presented nakedly to the viewer, unclothed so to speak. Meier admired Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier, who was perhaps the loudest proponent of modernism. However, Meier was also influenced by the clean horizontal lines of Frank Lloyd Wright.

In Meier’s Smith House, the first independent commission of his career, one can see all the elements that would occupy his work for the coming three decades. Built in 1965-67, the house is a cube of glass, held together by white bands and white columns. A lone white brick chimney shoots up one side. The home, overlooking Long Island Sound in Connecticut, is Olympian in its purity.

In 1974, after mostly building expensive private homes for a decade, Meier completed a public housing project, Twin Parks in the Bronx. In a variation on the classic Le Corbusier fashion, Meier placed medium-size towers in a park, with little clear street frontage or defined public space. Whether fairly or not, to critics the project’s sad fate shows the danger of modernist urban planning.

It was about this time that modernism as a whole came under increasing attack. Smooth boxes of glass and steel seemed cold to some people. Architect Robert Venturi declared that “less is a bore.” Many believed that modernist urban planning principles were destroying core cities by inserting freeways and tall buildings set on plazas. The profession moved on to post-modernism, deconstructionism and even traditionalism. However, Meier did not abandon modernism, and is, in fact, perhaps the leading practitioner of it today. And he resolutely defends the philosophy.

“Until I see something better, I would say that modern architecture is what is the cutting edge of architecture,” Meier said in an interview last week from his New York office. “It is architecture that has no historical baggage to it, that doesn’t make references to things outside of itself, that deals with light and space.”

He acknowledged, though, that modernists no longer want to replace historic Paris with freeways and skyscrapers set in parks, as Le Corbusier proposed.

“Today, we have a sensitivity to what exists already,” Meier said. “We no longer want to wipe the slate clean.”

With the Getty complete, Meier has hardly stopped working. In the past few years, he has designed the Contemporary Arts Museum in Barcelona, Spain; the Canal+ headquarters in Paris; and the City Hall and Library in The Hague. He continues to receive and compete for prestigious commissions in the United States and abroad.

But with the Getty Center now open, Meier says he knows his life’s biggest labor is probably behind him.

Conclusion

Posted on by
Reply

Getting There: Building Healthy Cities

[Excerpt From Chapter Nine]

Of all the public decisions that go into place-making, the most important is what type of transportation systems to use. They will determine the character of the city and much of its economy. Do we pave roads or lay down tracks? Do we fund buses or subsidize cars? Do we lay down bike paths or more highway lanes? Do we build airports or high-speed train lines?

What is transportation for? That’s the essential question Lewis Mumford asked forty years ago.

In the first place, it’s for building the economy of a city. A city’s external links to the outside world, its freeways, train lines, airports, ports, and others, will determine the potential of its industry and people. The big links a city has to the outside world determine its economic potential, something most people do not grasp. Thus, people should think hard about, and usually be ready to fund, the new airport, the new train lines, the new port, and even the new Interstate if it actually travels somewhere new, though this is not likely these days.

As these external links are established, attention can be paid to the internal transportation network. We should recognize that the internal transportation serves a different purpose than the external transportation systems of a city. The layout of a region’s internal transportation will determine how people get to work, how they shop, how they recreate, how they live. The standard choice today of lacing a metropolitan area with big freeways for purely internal travel means we will have a sprawling, formless environment. Simply getting rid of the freeways–forget mass transit–would establish a more neighborhood-centered economy and dynamic. But we don’t have to forget mass transit. Laying out train lines, streetcar tracks, bus lanes, bike paths, and sidewalks–and forgoing freeways and big roads–will mean a more place-oriented form of living. Both the drawbacks and the benefits of such a style dwell in its more communal, group-oriented form of living. You will have the option of not using a car. But to get this option, you have to accept that using a car will be more difficult.

Transportation is not the only public decision. Policies on growth and development can help implement a transportation policy. Such policies are far less important than usually thought, however. The major transportation systems dictate the pattern and style of developments. Once those are established, ways will be found over and around zoning and land-use laws to build the type of development that fits with a big highway or train line.

But zoning and other land-use laws can be used to facilitate or support the type of development that goes along with a particular style of transportation. The best way to do this would be to move away from zoning and go back to actually designing cities. Governments would actually lay out street systems on paper, and then private or public developers could build them as needed. This would give a coherent structure to a metropolitan area. It would also mean better coordinating the relationship among states, metropolitan areas, and smaller localities.

Growth control laws and boundaries are a wonderful tool for shaping development. Conceptually they are great because they help the public and the planners focus on where they want growth to occur. But growth boundaries are misleading because they give rise to the perception that without them, houses and shopping centers would magically pop up like mushrooms after a good rain. They would not. In reality, development only occurs after the public has made a decision about where to lay out roads, train lines, sewers, and other public infrastructure. Growth boundaries are as much about inhibiting public development as private. They are lines that tell government, beyond this point, go no farther with your services. A better way to think about growth boundaries is that they are lines that demarcate to what point the public is going to extend its blessings, both in the form of transportation and in things like educating children, police services, and libraries.

But growth boundaries are not possible usually without addressing the tangled political structures of our cities. Which leads us to our third rule of thumb.

No Place Called Home

Posted on by
Reply

Community at the Millennium

[Excerpt From Chapter Eight]

“Another question: what is a community at the end of the 20th century? A focus group, a concentration camp, a chat room on the Internet, an address book, a dance club, all those afflicted with a particular incurable disease, a gender, an age bracket, a waiting room, owners of silver BMW’s, organized crime, everyone who swears by a particular brand of painkiller and a two-block stretch of Manhattan on any weekday at lunch hour.”
–Herbert Muschamp, from “The Miracle in Bilbao,” New York Times Magazine, September 7, 1997.

Coming Home

It’s a Saturday night and my house is filling with people. Some carry musical instruments. Some have sheets of poetry or fiction by their sides. Some carry nothing, but are prepared to stand up before a crowd of people and dance, perform theater, or tell a story.

We call it the Coffeehouse. We’ve been doing it now for seven years. The first Saturday of every month, friends and friends of friends come to our house to entertain and be entertained. Usually about fifty people show up. It’s a great time.

This coffeehouse is the highlight of the month, both for me and many of the people who attend. It’s not just the music, poetry, and other acts that bring people back, although these are good. It’s the chance to meet, connect, and talk with other people during the breaks. Through it, my wife and I have met many of our now good friends, and other people have made similar friendships and bonds. In a city where people come and go, it provides us a mechanism to make new friends as older ones leave town.

Why do I mention it? Because our coffeehouse is a replacement for what does not exist in the outer world. And the fact that it does not exist says a lot about our society at this stage in its history. I would prefer that a corner tavern or bar be down the street, where I could magically meet my friends and make new ones. I would prefer to be held up in a naturally emerging web of friends and family, growing out of the physical place where I live and the work that goes on there.

Our situation is ironic, because if anyone should have community “naturally,” it’s my wife and I. We live in Norfolk, Virginia, a port city on the Elizabeth River, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. Huge carriers make their home here, as do huge cargo ships that freight millions of tons of coal all over the world.

It’s been the home of my family on my father’s side for five generations. My great-grandfather came here before the Civil War. He was the first publisher of the newspaper where I started my career in journalism, The Virginian-Pilot. My father grew up one block from where I write this. My wife is a native of the area as well. My newest niece lives down the street.

Looking at my background, one might think that I live a life rich in contacts with the past and the world that molded me, a place where an intricate and perhaps suffocating web of family and friends who have centuries of combined experience support, argue with, and love each other. Which is not the case. I have no close friends from my childhood or high school years that still live in this town, or even the state. Most of my siblings have scattered themselves around the country, as is the wont of professional people these days. Various relatives–second cousins once removed and so forth–do live near me. I know none of them well. As one commentator remarked about Europeans in contrast to Americans, “They still have cousins.” Americans do not.

Various forces operating in the country and world today have pulled apart my “natural” community and scattered it to the winds. My own more cosmopolitan bent figures into this. I lived in Europe for a few years, attended college and graduate school in Pittsburgh and New York City. I am not able, nor do I desire, to sink back into the old-boy culture that does still exist here to a degree. I have a community around me, but it is one that I created or sought out, more than one I was born into. My community is in my coffeehouse, in the arts organizations I belong to, and in the civic work I do.

Community–the network of formal and informal relationships that binds people together–is a thin, tepid brew in this country. It has declined to the point where improving it, saving it, nurturing it have become slogans of a variety of movements in different, seemingly unrelated fields. In urban planning, New Urbanism promises to revive community through building subdivisions more cohesively. In political theory, Amiti Etzioni hopes to reduce crime and improve social health through his philosophy of Communitarianism. In journalism, the philosophy of Public Journalism, sometimes labeled Community Journalism, promises to rebuild community and a newspaper’s circulation base by having the press foster public dialogue and political participation. Our politics, our places, our press–all of these things run across power lines that jolt us with the message that something is missing in too many of our lives, some sense of cohesion and togetherness.

This desire many people have for richer, more connected lives is a valid one. I believe that a society grows out of its social, religious, and political compacts, on which ultimately even market relationships depend. But like the construction of coherent physical places, the construction of coherent communities is not something to be attempted directly. Rather, one has to understand what produces both places and communities, and what weakens them, and address those forces.

Most of what we call community in the past has been produced as a byproduct of other things: making a living, shopping for food, keeping ourselves and our families well, protecting them and our society from physical harm, educating them. We shopped for groceries, served in the military, and went to a doctor and along the way got to know the butcher, the fellow soldier, and the local doctor. All of these actions have become less communal, and so our society has become less community-minded. We buy our food at the warehouse-style supermarket, do not serve in the military unless we volunteer, and go to the impersonal HMO to get our cholesterol checked. If we want to revive community, then we should look at the trade-offs involved in making some of our decisions more communal again.

Place has something to do with all this as well. Walking to a neighborhood cafe for breakfast is a more communal thing than using the drive-through at a McDonald’s for an Egg McMuffin, although relationships can occur at either place. Driving on the freeway is less likely to generate relationships than riding a streetcar. Living in an older neighborhood fashioned around the foot is more communal than living in a contemporary one fashioned around the car. But the physical makeup of our places is just one factor in this trend.

John Perry Barlow, computer sage and former Grateful Dead lyricist, commented once that community is largely generated by shared adversity. This gets at the notion, true I believe, that our social ties, while beneficial, are not necessarily produced by situations we would choose. Although many of us miss community, we don’t miss poverty, disease, and war, things that produce community with some regularity. The problem for contemporary Americans is that enhancing social cohesion may mean giving up some things we really like, like personal mobility, low taxes, and a footloose economic structure. We have not figured out yet that creating wealth is not the same as creating community.

I speak without any sentimentality or nostalgia for the past. I believe, however, that the generally fragmented lives so many of us lead break up marriages, disturb childhoods, isolate people when they most need help, and make life not as much fun. We live, to speak frankly, in one of the loneliest societies on earth. If we are to change that, then we should look more closely at the various relationships in our society–political, social, economic, and others–and attempt to construct them in more communal ways. Deciding how to structure these relationships comes back to what I increasingly believe is our most fundamental relationship–politics.