The Characteristics of Living Cities

In biology, there are seven accepted characteristics of living things. These characteristics are used to determine whether a thing is living or non-living. Likewise, I think we can apply this logic to urban development. In my last post, I suggested that many of the large-scale developments that are meant to emulate an actual city are little more than a 'decorated corpse'. This time I hope to flush out how we can tell whether a development is a 'living' city or just a decorated corpse. I would like to use a list of characteristics somewhat like the example in biology, although I hope not to get bogged down in the analogy. Cities are, of course, not living organisms. They do not literally consume 'nutrients' and then excrete waste, though consumption and waste disposal are important parts of city planning. The point here is not to work hard on making a literal analogy with a living organism, but to figure out what the markers are that indicate that a city is healthy, unhealthy, or downright dead. There may be a better analogy than a living organism anyway, such as animal herds or insect hives. I'll leave fine-tuning the analogy to a future post. For now, we'll simply leave it as the 'living city'.

(As a side note, I would like to acknowledge the Center for the Living City, which does great work in advancing the understanding of cities and which, like myself, takes the term from Jane Jacobs. They do not, however, endorse my particular viewpoint or this blog.)

The first thing we must ask when trying to determine what characteristics we should look for is: What do we mean by 'living city' or 'healthy city'? Since we're not talking about an actual living organism, what determines whether the city, or some portion of it, is alive or dead? Healthy or unhealthy? To answer that, I think we have to ask what the city is for. Why do we have them? One might tread the path of history to define what a city is for, but I rather think that if the reason for the city isn't currently valid, then it isn't a valid reason for the city's (present tense) existence. So the question is: What is the city for. What does it do that other forms of human settlement can't? And let's be clear: I'm not only talking about the biggest cities. When I talk about cities, I'm also talking about the small ones. As long as the place is thought of as a city by the people who inhabit its sphere of influence, I think we can consider it a city. Not every development is a city, for sure, but I'm not interested in a hard line that defines cities vs other types of human development. At least not for the purposes of this discussion.

The Decorated Corpse

I'd like to take a look at City Creek Center, a major project in Salt Lake City, Utah. It represents the height of contemporary thinking in urban planning. I'd like to talk about why it does not represent legitimate, healthy urban development, but instead kills the living city, if anything remains, and then decorates the corpse so that the place may look healthy on the surface. I took the title of this post, it's worth noting, from Robert Venturi's landmark study of the vernacular architecture of Las Vegas, in which he describes the difference between 'Ducks' and 'Decorated Sheds' in the world of Architecture. In the world of urban planning, a similar dichotomy exists between decisions about the living city and creative ways to decorate the urban cadaver. After discussing this concept, I'll apply it to the particular project of City Creek Center and argue why that isn't a legitimate replacement for healthy urban development, and is likely detrimental. 

The south side entrance to City Creek Center at Richards Street. The 99 West Apartments (formerly The Promontory) are seen in the distance. ( Mangoman88)

Venturi's take on the difference between 'Ducks' and 'Decorated Sheds' is that Ducks (taken from a duck-shaped roadside stand on Long Island selling eggs) are buildings that are  designed to be specifically and only what they are. Conversion to another use would be impossible or at least quite difficult. The Decorated Shed is a building that is designed in such a way that would allow it to accommodate a wide variety of uses. It may be a clothing store today, but it may very well be a coffee shop tomorrow. One need only change the sign and the interior design. Venturi makes no judgements about this, only an observation and a note to other architects to have more respect for the decorated shed than is normally shown, considering their ubiquity and usefulness in our society and economy.

I completely agree with Venturi that we should all have more respect for the decorated shed. These are the buildings that we all live our lives in. Whether we live in them as apartment buildings and condos, or work in them as office towers and retail stores; these buildings are largely what make the city. They allow the city to function economically and socially. But I am taking only the term (the Decorated _____), not the larger concept. And I am most certainly making a value judgement. What is happening in American cities right now with mega-projects like City Creek Center (this project is certainly not alone) is that space that should be reserved for a healthy urban marketplace is instead being turned over to development companies who then decide to bulldoze the living city and replace it with a per-fabricated version of a city where low value uses don't exist and (consequently) neither do low value people. If you thought urban gentrification had negative aspects, wait till they can just skip the middle man and replace the old development with a finished product that they've deemed appropriate. And it's killing the cities we live in. If you can't tell that the city is dying, that's the point. It's a decorated corpse.

The Frozen City

I'd like to examine the effects of zoning and other policies that shape development in American cities. I want to look at the specific example of my own neighborhood, which is considered to be one of the better neighborhoods in Salt Lake City (from a planning perspective). It follows all of the New Urbanist/Progressive Planners' dictates regarding what makes for great urban development: mixed densities, mixed uses, walkability, and proximity to city center. It's great on paper. But I would like to humbly suggest that it's a great example of why a checklist of ingredients is not a very good way to measure a neighborhood's (or city's) health. All the ingredients are here because the living city, many years ago, developed them as this particular suburb of Salt Lake was urbanizing. But then a funny thing happened. The city was frozen and this particular neighborhood was in the middle of transition between an all-residential neighborhood and a more urbanized central neighborhood. It was frozen at precisely the stage of urbanization that the New Urbanists are so nostalgic for, so it checks off all their boxes. And it certainly does represent healthy urban development. Fifty years ago. If design is the only consideration in city planning, it still should. But it doesn't. I'll be suggesting why it no longer represents healthy urban development as well as how the city was frozen.

(Ice storm photo from NASA.gov)

Firstly, why do I say the city was frozen? I mean that it was frozen from a development perspective, not literally, of course (though we did freeze over a couple of times last winter). The Avenues is not unusual in that its development has been frozen by various city policies. Exclusive use zoning and density/intensity limits are two common ways of 'freezing' the neighborhood. But other policies can strengthen the effect. Anything that reduces the chances that something new is going to be built contributes to the freeze. Even much beloved Historic Preservation ordinances can contribute to the freeze effect if overused. Policies aren't the only thing that can cause this freeze. Lagging economic development can also freeze needed new construction. The freeze also happens because uses are inflexible. If an old office can't become a loft, or an old shop can't become a furniture repair, then the neighborhood will likely find itself unable to adapt to a changing reality and also stands to become obsolete, unable to offer to potential residents the things they need. 

Policies are the primary way in which this 'freeze' is achieved, but American attitudes are the root source, at least today. Americans have become used to the idea that they should be able to determine the specific uses of the land in their neighborhood. It is not considered outside the valid reach of city policy to prevent certain types of unwanted development, even if that particular land use is not directly disruptive to the neighboring residents. While I'm fervently democratic in my philosophies on how government decisions should be made, I'm just as fervent in my believe that not all decisions should be made by government. I believe that certain things should be outside the purview of government. Such things would include land uses that do not cause a direct and legitimate grievance to neighbors. Much of the industrial and commercial uses that are prohibited under current zoning laws would be on that list.

To be sure, there are plenty of things that should not be allowed, but I think that selecting certain areas of the city where they can and certain areas where they can't be done automatically creates areas of privilege and areas of plight. The solution to undesirable uses is to prohibit them inside the city or to regulate their activities in such a way as to make the use tolerable to the rest of the city. But beyond the problem of inequitable treatment, these prescriptive zoning policies also have the effect of freezing the city. Because land uses can no longer shift over time to adapt to the needs of the neighborhood, they remain their original use. Eventually, neighborhood needs (like a grocery store, for instance) go unfulfilled and the source of that need (residents) move elsewhere. The need is removed, lowering the demand on the land market, and the residents who wanted the grocery store go elsewhere as well. Land values crash and the economic activity that would have caused the neighborhood to grow and change over time slows or stops altogether.

Usually, this process means that the neighborhood ceases to change or develop, and can no longer produce the sort of environment that citizens want. Occasionally, as in the case of the Avenues, the neighborhood becomes quite popular years later because of that freezing effect and demand returns as people seek housing near the city center. The neighborhood seems quiet and unchanged, which it is, and attractive compared to housed further away from the city center or more integrated into the urban fabric. Most places that have experienced the effects of the policies that caused the freeze however, aren't so lucky. Most are simply unable to serve the needs of their citizens, and therefore lose land value until they only attract the lowest income residents. This is where we get blighted neighborhoods, unable to attract new capital or support their own costs through their tax dollars. Freezing a neighborhood's development is a sure way to kill it.

Redevelopment Decision Making: Why Design Focus = Bad Design

The point of this blog is the problem with focusing too much on design. I'm of the opinion that we have been doing this in the United States for a good hundred years now and it has always been the case for urban planning in a more general sense. But one thing I don't want to imply is that there is no connection at all. It is certainly true that a well planned city can be greatly enhanced by good design. But design is irrelevant to a poorly planned city and a beautiful design cannot make up for bad planning. So what do I mean by planning, if not design? Real city planning is policy, almost exclusively. Policy does have a geographic element, of course, but layout and aesthetics are tertiary concerns at best. In short, even the best design can't really work unless it's adjunct to a well functioning, economically and socially healthy city.

That's where we go badly off the rails in the planning profession. Almost everything that's done in planning is focused on design, if not composed entirely of design. What do we end up with? At best, we have cities that look great, but are strangely empty. At worst we end up with cities that neither work well nor look very good. That seems to usually be what happens. 

And the reason should be evident. Cities don't work in two block segments. Cities must be integrated enough that neighborhoods work as a unit and, if possible, neighborhoods should be networked together as well. When new things are added the primary concern should be how they will work within the system as it already functions. If individual elements are added piecemeal this is usually the primary consideration. Housing would be added in an area with a high potential for housing sales and a car park would be added to an area that wasn't already overflowing with parking spaces. If lots are developed individually it isn't hard to keep the main focus on the area's function and allow the design to take its position as a tertiary concern. 

Then come big developments. The big malls. They can be downtown malls with office towers included or suburban malls with all the standard cineplexes and department stores, but they tend to have one thing in common: they fail to integrate with their surrounding areas. The reason for this is that they aren't intended to do so. They're designed to attract people from all around the metro areas and beyond. The people who finance, design, and build them could care less about their urban functioning because they have another purpose, which is why design takes the front seat. But the problem is that when these places have exhausted their primary purpose, they end up being a useless eyesore that either gets abandoned, has to be re-purposed, or demolished. 

They create a 'hole' in the urban fabric that damages, not enhances, the neighborhood that they're in. Almost without fail, mega developments do not match the neighborhoods that they're in. To be certain, this does not doom every mega project to failure. Some mega projects are necessary and some are beneficial. But by their very nature, they don't integrate into the surrounding area, which means they don't function very well as a part of the city. They may very well serve their intended purpose, unless that purpose is to blend into the surrounding city. They can't because they simply work at cross purposes. Their function will always be opposed to the city's function.

And that is where the design fails. Design is a combination of form and function. When a design fails to function properly, it's a bad design. It may look perfectly delightful, but when it doesn't function properly, it's bad design. When designers seek to make a project beautiful, more power to them. I like beauty as much as the next guy, but when their concern is how the project functions internally, without consideration for the surrounding environment, their project is doomed to failure, at least from the city's point of view.

I do realize that these sorts of projects will never disappear entirely, and they probably shouldn't, but we should consider the implications for the surrounding neighborhood every time we hear that a mega mall has been proposed in the middle of the city. Or a convention center is planned for downtown. These sorts of projects bring as many problems as they bring benefits and the tendency of city officials to praise the projects and even spend taxpayer dollars to attract these projects should be reconsidered strongly. As a rule of thumb, if the neighborhood residents collectively reject the project, it probably isn't good for the neighborhood. Projects that flatten the neighborhood and replace it with something else aren't exactly an 'improvement'. 

What we think we want

What do we want out of life? Americans will often tell you that what they want is a home in the suburbs with two cars in the driveway. (The spouse and kids are not relevant subject matter here.) Eighty percent of Americans would prefer to live in a single family home, according to builderonline.com. It's possible that builderonline is a bit biased, though. Furthermore, I would suggest that many Americans are being convinced to buy something that they didn't really want in the first place. That, of course, is the whole point of marketing and the suburban, 'single family home/two cars (or more) in the driveway' lifestyle has been marketed to the American public ad infinitum. It's everywhere you turn in popular media, from sit-coms to commercials. And the social norm in the United States is definitely that everyone will want and pursue this lifestyle.

A few of us buck the trend, but we pay the price. From shitty mass transit and development laws that make traditional urban structure nearly impossible in most cities, living a normal life without adhering to the prescribed lifestyle can be a hassle. Furthermore, those who decide to live in multifamily units and reject the multi-car ethic are made to subsidize the lifestyles of the majority, not only because we pay the same taxes and get vastly differing levels of service, but also because buying a home provides a tax break that renters never get ( though condos and townhouses do provide the tax benefit) and even though drivers pay taxes and fees that others don't, the money collected comes nowhere near the monetary cost of meeting the demands of the driving public, much less the total cost to society, which includes things like pollution and resource depletion.

Considering these things, I am forced to wonder about the 80% statistic touted by builderonline and undoubtedly reiterated by the industry as a whole. How deep does a survey go in probing the desires of the American public? Do Americans actually want the lifestyle associated with that single family home, or are they simply responding to an entire century of marketing and social pressure as well as the financial benefits of being part of the home ownership system?

I think the answer is in where we spend our leisure time. On those occasions where we can pull ourselves out of normal, everyday life and we get to choose where we are and how we live for just a few minutes or a few days, where we choose to go is very telling. Specifically, I think the places where we shop and where we vacation are excellent indicators of the environments we actually like to be in. You may find this argument to be a stretch, since the examples I give are wholly part of the suburban, low density lifestyle. But that's my point. Within that suburban lifestyle, constant efforts are made to emulate a normal urban structure. One that works and is comfortable for the patrons. And the ones that do it well are able to charge a premium for the experience, which I think indicates that it's in high demand.

Elimination of Space, Destruction of Time

Before anyone stops reading under the assumption that this week's post title is nothing more than an exercise in hyperbole, I should reassure the reader that I am speaking about human perception, not the eradication of real space and time. The topic I wanted to cover in this week's post is how modern development patterns as well as transportation systems (and by that I am mostly referring to the automobile) has affected our awareness and experience of the spaces in which we live and between the origin and destination points when we travel. The destruction of time has been twofold. The past has been eliminated through the removal of people from the places that hold our history. Suburban places have no history and so sever us from any past or worse yet, encase that past in a museum-type preservation that definitively separates it from the living city. The second destruction of time is the future. Longevity. People have a vague idea that when they grow old, they will retire, and that it will probably not be in the place that they have spent the majority of their lives (if they've actually spent their lives in any one particular place), but the problem goes much deeper than that. Even a (nuclear) family that has spent the majority of its years together can expect to see the children leave the community at adulthood, never to return. The parents will likely leave for a retirement community when their working lives are over (no pun intended, really), but even if they opt to stay, their tenure will be up the minute they can no longer drive, maintain their yards, or pay their property taxes. The family will certainly have no lasting connection to the community and the property will simply pass back into the 'musical chairs' version of home ownership that the majority of the country participates in.

 

Whoa, Davros! We're jut talking about human perception here, not the actual destruction of reality. Geez.

The Kind of Problem a City isn't: Why Battle Burnham, Part II

The last chapter of Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities is entitled 'The kind of problem a city is'. In that chapter she describes the three kinds of problems science has learned to address, in chronological order: problems of (1) simplicity, (2) disorganized complexity, and (3) organized complexity. Problems of simplicity are problems with two variables. Disorganized complexity refers to a number of variables too large to track individual relationships, for which statistical methods have been developed. The last problem, science is just beginning to deal with. They are problems of systems, which I wrote about in last week's post, though the idea of systems theory was not to be developed for a few more years. Jacobs is essentially talking about understanding cities as systems of human beings. She references the fact that systems theory began its popularization in the fields of biology because modern biology could not have progressed by trying to understand an organism through statistical analysis alone anymore than they could have progressed by simply analyzing the individual chemical reactions at the cellular level. The organism, as well as ecosystems, must be examined as an interconnected system of parts in order to understand the functioning and purpose of any individual part. Cities too, must be understood as a complex system of interconnected parts if we are to understand them in any useful way. Jacobs goes on to describe cities as being part of nature just as their creators,  human being, are. Since cities are the creations of human beings, they are part of, if not erupting directly from, nature. This is why the same methods of analysis that are used for biological systems are useful in examining cities. 

Daniel Burnham circa 1890s

Which brings me to my focus for this blog. While Jacobs argues for understanding cities through a lens we now call systems thinking, my focus is somewhat more narrow: separating out what kind of problem the city isn't. To be precise: it isn't a design problem. One of the main obstacles to solving the problems of the city in the twentieth century was the ongoing assumption that urban problems were problems of architecture and/or design. In my opinion, this sort of thinking (in the United States, anyway) can be traced back to Daniel Burnham, the turn-of-the-century architect who popularized the City Beautiful movement. If the choice of Burnham seems arbitrary (there are plenty of architect-planners to choose from), it is the lack of any concern for his work's connection to urban ills that truly sets Burnham apart. Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright all had visions of how their future societies would work, although they all shared the misconception that rebuilding was the path to social reform. Burnham was distinct from these others (if not completely unique) in the idea that it was the architecture and urban design itself  that was sure to cause the improvement in society. The battle, though, to be sure, is against the idea of design as planning, and not against Burnham specifically, or any of his contemporaries or the inheritors of the Burnham legacy. I am using Burnham as a makeshift metonym for this conception of planning.