Oh, and Mapcase, I fear you’re correct in predicting that European cities are probably going to follow the American path as immigration increases. It is a sad fact of human nature that that should be so, but there you have it. I have already witnessed it in parts of Berlin and London.
Because without transportation you’re stranded in the middle of nowhere and you have no choices. An “office park” Projects sounds even worse than an inner-city Projects.
Great thread and great ideas, opinions, etc. expressed. I can’t add much.
What I do find very encouraging is that urban centers are making a comeback. Living downtown (at least here in Richmond) is very hot right now and tons of redevelopment projects are ongoing. These projects aren’t displacing anyone - they’re transformations for former industrial and commercial sites into apartments and “living above the store” concepts. This is having the added benefit of producing spin-off of small retail spaces to serve the new residents. These spaces also serve the families that have not fled to the suburbs and who have remained in their inner-city neighborhoods.
As was pointed out, cities and spaces go through cycles much like everything else. The commuting distances, prices, sense of disconnection, and blandness of suburban America has resulted in a contraction of people back to the urban core.
One of my favorite bits of urbanism wisdom is the Rule of Thumb that says that at about 6% of the population minorities become “visible.” IOW, below that percentage minorities are not perceived as competition for jobs. They don’t have the numbers to form cohesive communities to be perceived as enclaves or ghettos. They don’t have enough political clout to be noticed. They’re there but not really seen.
Obviously, the exact percentage varies from situation to situation but I like this because it is one of few observations that has explanatory power. It explains why long-integrated, apparently stable minority communities suddenly seem to erupt into clashes with the rest of the population even though no obvious change has taken place. It explains why neighborhoods seldom evenly integrate but usually turn over from one group to another. And it explains why the immigration issue lies dormant for years or decades and then suddenly becomes a major political battle.
A well-know study is associated with this but I can’t dredge up a cite from memory or even be sure that 6% is the right number. A pat on the back to anyone who can locate the original.
And, parenthetically, it’s too bad elmwood hasn’t found this thread. He’s a professional urban planner, used to live in Buffalo, and disagrees with me on some of these issues, IIRC. It would be interesting to hear his take on things.
Just some other random observations.
Do we need cities? is the wrong question. The right question is do we need old-fashioned urban cores to power metropolitan areas? We definitely need metro areas, which translate as the modern equivalent of the city-state. Jane Jacobs’ The Economy of Cities is inadvertently the book that explains the city-state notion despite her bias against suburban areas.
(The books in Samuel R. Delany’s Neveryon series are the only ones I know to explore city-states in these terms in fantasy. They’re unlike anything else in the field, but therefore not for every taste.)
The reality is that people have been escaping cities for more pleasant suburban residential areas as long as there have been cities. The Roman rich lived in suburban villas.
Another Rule of Thumb. The average time of travel to a job remains at 45 minutes no matter what the mode of transportation is. In more recent times, the upper middle class started moving out of cities in large numbers when commuter railroads made the trip reasonable. The classic example are the Main Line suburbs outside of Philadelphia, although Shaker Heights in Cleveland is another equally good one. As I noted earlier, the middle and upper working classes used subways in NYC in the same fashion. See 722 Miles : The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York, by Clifton Hood.
These linear developments limited growth until after WWII when the auto allowed any plot of land to be transformed. As soon as that happened, the cities vanished. Yes, it happened to occur at the same time at the U.S. became a superpower but it was mostly coincidental. The auto is the most important invention of the 20th century in the U.S., because it more than any other single thing changed our world.
Distance has always given an illusion of safety in all urban history. That’s why the suburbs are always perceived as so comparatively safe, and people are always shocked, shocked! when a similar amount of crime takes place. smiling bandit’s observation: “Would you feel safe and happy raising your children there?” If the anwer is no, then none of the other things matter." is exactly correct. It explains the suburbs and will always do so unless and until conditions in both suburb and city drastically change.
Fantastic posts, everyone. I would have chimed in earlier, but I fear being stuck at the computer for hours, trying to offer a Planning 101 lesson in 100,000 characters or less. (Excuse me for any typos; my eyes are tired.)
The roots of contemporary US suburbs isn’t found in 1950s Levittown, 1920s bungalow belts or 1890s gentleman’s estates; they date back to colonial times.
In the 1700s, two dominant concepts of urbanization occured in Europe. The British viewed low-density garden suburbs as the ideal; lower densities would be healthier, and distant suburbs would be farther removed from the smoke and grime of Industrial Age factories. The French view was just the opposite; grand boulevards by Haussman, low-maintenance apartments as the ideal and most convenient place to live, and improved pubic sanitation to allow healthy living at higher densities.
For cultural reasons, the United States, and to a large extent developed English-speaking countries that were former UK colonies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) followed the UK model. The Jeffersonian ideal of the United States as a rural nation also helped to plant the seeds of suburbia in the nation’s collective mindset.
Today, with a little bit of variation, the urban form of cities in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are all similar; poorly thought out urban renewal projects in the 1950s, sprawling suburbs of single-family houses and big box retail today. Race dis play a larger role in shaping the destiny of American cities. Problems faced by American cities because of racial issues is even more exaggerated in post-apartheid South Africa. When it comes to race as a factor in shaping urban form, the Johannesburg metro area can be described at Atlanta X-Treeem, and Cape Town as San Francisco X-Treeem.
“The price of leadership” is the reason why the United States can seem so backwards in many areas. The US electrified its cities first, but when Europeans electrified they saw the shortcomings of 120 volts AC, and upped the standard to 220 volts. The US got color television in the 1950s, but the technology is more primitive than the higher-definition PAL and SECAM system devised years later. Same thing with cars; as Exapno Mapcase stated. Vehicle ownership first become widespread in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Urban sprawl happened in those countries before the rest of the world, who learned by example what not to do.
Again, I apologize for typos or incomplete thoughts. I’m kinda’ tired, my eyesight a bit blurry today, and my brain is operating at about 60%.
A term that is gaining increased use among planners is third place. The first space is your home, the second your place of work. At the peak of American urbanism, the third space was seen as the commons; public gathering spaces in your neighborhood such diners, bars, Main Streets, and so on. These were the places where you would meet and interact with your neighbors. The idea of a “third place” is especially prominent in Mediterranean cultures, where the public gathers in squares and plazas “just because.” Consider the Spanish tradition of “the paseo.”
When suburban shopping centers began to supercede urban streetcar strips, the “third place” began to disappear. What were once elements of the public realm now were privatized. The message sent to those visiting wasn’t linger and enjoy, but keep moving, keep shopping, keep spending. An increasingly popular response to the “emptiness” of suburban living, and often modern urban living, is recognizing the importance of the “third place,” and attempting to recreate it on some level.
Let’s look at urban renewal projects. The housing was in poor condition, the commercial districts derelict, but there was a very vibrant “third place” in many of those now-gone communities. What replaced them were environments that made establishing such third spaces harder; seas of parking lots and poorly maintained landscaping around high-rise projects, blank walls offering nothing of interest to those walking past them, Urban renewal was well-intentioned, but it destroyed the human-scale elements that made up an ideal “third place.”.
Brutalism peaked during the 1960s and 1970s, and was very popular for public buildings; courthouses, state colleges, municipal buildings and the like.
Look through architecture books of the 1970s, and you’ll find drawing upon conceptual drawing of brutalist structures; architects loved them. To this day, many architects will defend brutalism; they claim to appreciate the clean, monumental, solid feel of the style. Ironically, that’s the same reason why most laypeople hate brutalism; no other architectural style feels as much like a punch in the face, IMHO.
The major problem with most brutalist structures, IMHO, is not itheir form but how they carry out their function; devoid of human scale, presenting nothing but blank walls as a public face on street level.
That story is something of gospel in urban planning these days.
But I think the opposite is true. Urban streets, with their sidewalks and storefronts, have no lingering places. The message there is to go into the stores or move along. You couldn’t linger if you wanted to.
Enclosed shopping malls, on the other hand, do encourage lingering, with their benches, their plantings, their faux waterfalls and piped in music, their food courts, and their play centers for little children. The open storefronts are also more inviting to browsing passersby, instead of the “you’re either in or you’re out” enclosed storefronts of an urban street.
The enclosed climate also allows visitors to stroll around in comfort year-round. How much socializing is there on a city street when it’s freezing and you’re being careful not to slip on the ice and snow?
I’ve just finished reviewing (and recommending denial of) an Urban Mixed Use project here that misses these vital elements. Urban centers can work if there are public spaces, plazas, and amenities for lingering. Sadly, these often come at the cost of more square footage for retail or commercial space (no one has to rent a place in the plaza if all you want to do is sit, watch, and drink some coffee).
As to the success of indoor malls, I’m seeing more and more of them fail and they are being replaced by variants that harken back to downtowns. Store fronts open to the sidewalk or courtyard, with some interior spaces that permit the shopper to come inside in inclement weather. Almost all of the traditional shopping malls here are suffering and everyone is flocking to the new models.
[QUOTE=Walloon]
That story is something of gospel in urban planning these days.
But I think the opposite is true. Urban streets, with their sidewalks and storefronts, have no lingering places. The message there is to go into the stores or move along. You couldn’t linger if you wanted to.
Enclosed shopping malls, on the other hand, do encourage lingering, with their benches, their plantings, their faux waterfalls and piped in music, their food courts, and their play centers for little children. The open storefronts are also more inviting to browsing passersby, instead of the “you’re either in or you’re out” enclosed storefronts of an urban street.
The enclosed climate also allows visitors to stroll around in comfort year-round. How much socializing is there on a city street when it’s freezing and you’re being careful not to slip on the ice and snow?[/QUOTE
The interior of shopping malls may be designed to encourage lingering but whether any actual lingering occurs is another matter. Granted my experience is limited, but I haven’t really seen much lingering (in the “third place” sense) going on at malls. Even in food courts, if people do sit down, they usually do so just long enough to quickly gulp down whatever fast-food they bought. I think this is because when people are at a mall, their mindset is different than when they’re in some urban neighborhood with street-level shops. The location of malls have a lot to do with this.
Unlike urban neighborhood shops which are within close walking distance (or, at most, a short drive) from your home or workplace, enclosed malls are often miles away from them. Malls also tend to be very pedestrian-unfriendly since they’re frequently surrounded by freeways, wide boulevards designed solely for cars, smaller strip malls, and endless acres of parking spaces. To visit a mall, you have to get into a car and travel at least several miles away from your home or workplace so, when you get there, you feel don’t have that sense of closeness that you would have in an urban neighborhood. You feel somewhat distant and cut-off and that tends to inhibit people from making malls a true “third place.” Basicially, you want to get in, find what you’re looking for, buy it, and get out–no tarrying.
This is only true - and that an extent - if the “you” referred to is an adult.
Teens, OTOH, treat malls as their third space and do linger there. Think of the term “mall rats” coming into the culture. (They may do so to an extreme in some times and places, but there is always an extreme somewhere.)
The huge problem in most urban environments is to find a safe place for the kids and teens to linger. In some ways this is a false issue: look how many people learn skills by being on the streets, in all the different ways that term can represent. Even so, in today’s culture, parents will overwhelmingly feel safer if their kids are wandering around a mall on a Friday night than if they’re on city streets. Another huge reason why suburban culture connotes safe culture and cities do not.
Overall, I think your comments on malls are mostly wrong. Although it’s not a great book by any means, Paco Underhill’s Call of the Mall : The Geography of Shopping does explain why malls are the way they are better than most attempts do. Nobody cares if malls are not pedestrian-friendly. Just the opposite: they are deliberately so the better to keep urban bus-arriving visitors at bay. Nobody cares if you have to take a car to a mall: you’re in your car all the time anyway.
Malls are not male-oriented in the first place: they exist for females, both in terms of shopping and expectations. Cities are far more male-oriented; it is just harder to deal with children in an urban environment because the child-friendly amenities are limited. Suburbs developed when women and children started having a proportionally higher status in the family than in the early part of the century, which is not at all coincidentally when women in mass numbers started having cars of their own or took control of the family car all day when dad commuted to the city. If you had to explain the modern American suburbs in one sentence alone, that one would be tops.
I should’ve excluded young teens from my comments. Mall rats exist because kids want to get away from parents, parents want to spend some time away from whining adolesecents, and–as you said–the mall is viewed as a safe place to dump them off for a few hours. However, I think teens don’t spend as much time hanging out at malls once they get older and learn how to drive.
I wasn’t necessarily arguing that urban neighborhoods were superior to suburban shopping malls. I was just trying to point out that malls, by their nature, cannot become “third places” in the lingering and socializing sense (except, of course, for the aforementioned “mall rats” who pretty much depend on Mommy and Daddy for transportation).
This is another problem with malls: they age very quickly. It seems the lifespan for these structures is about 30 to 40 years before they’re either extensively remodelled to get a new lease on life or abandoned and torn down. (Where I live, for example, a 30 year-old mall that had been expanded in the 80’s, steadily lost all its stores over a period of three years until it was an empty husk of a building.) Commercial evolution is by-passing the enclosed mall and the next trend seems to be big-box stores (and internet sales). Unfortunately, big-box stores are less likely to become “third places” where people linger and socialize than malls are.
Just to get back to the original topic of the evils of modernist architecture, I’d like to point out one failing of that style that seems relevant to the overall failure of urban renewal proects. One of the general principles that the modernists believed was that form follows function. The ideal was to view buildings as machines for whatever activity they housed. A huge flaw in this logic was that buildings quite often are still standing after their original purposes have found no need to be in that location. Genererally speaking, the intent of many of these proects was to segregate the various purposes from each other, and this is ensconced in the very form of the buildings. If you want to gentrify a housing proect, it’s probably easiest to just start from scratch. If you need more low-income housing, you can’t just use the vacant shopping mall.
Others have mentioned many of the flawed assumptions underlying the urban renewal movement, but I think the modernist style often chosen exacerbated the problem by making it difficult to adapt from the theories of the planners to the realities of the proects as built. The schemes were intended to result in a perfect city that would therefore never need to change. Stasis is pretty similar to stagnation, and stagnation is economic death for a city.
Look at the grandiose plans of Le Corbusier and his acolytes and ask yourself how one would could adapt those plans after they were built to fix any problems. Planning anything so massive and expecting to get it perfect was an act of exceptional hubris, and many people paid the price. Similarly, Le Corbusier seems to have designed his roads and parking garages on an esthetic idea of how big they should be, rather than any sort of real notion of how big they really ought to be. Although it seems to be only recently that anyone has bothered to think about the fact that traffic in cities increases as new highways are added, with people’s willingness to tolerate congestion the primary limiting factor, rather than their need to travel.
I couldn’t resist resurrecting this thread to link this article that was posted today on aldaily.com. The search for ways to revive our cities continues…
I was just reading an article in the Wall Street Journal that was celebrating the fact that downtown Philly had added 10,000 residents since 2000. However, the population of the city as a whole has actually fallen in that time. And the metro area grew by at least ten times as much.
There’s nothing bad about attracting people to downtowns, but the facts say that doing so is simply irrelevant to the larger picture.
I have to like Kotkin’s article because it agrees to the last detail with everything I’ve been saying. 
(The book that it mentions, The City: A Global History, is a good, very short, history that is well worth reading.)
Cities are not about the hip young. Or the rich. Or even the poverty-stricken. They’re about families, especially middle-class families. Families create neighborhoods, demand better services, start stores and businesses, maintain continuity and longevity. The hip young will move elsewhere as soon as the hipness goes away.
And the only way cities will attract and keep middle-class families is if they make their schools the equal of those in the suburbs. And there is no power on earth that can achieve that in the foreseeable future.
Today’s Slate has a fascinating review/article - Suburban Despair: Is urban sprawl really an American menace? by Witold Rybczynski - telling the history of European suburban expansion in Robert Bruegmann’s new book Sprawl: A Compact History.