Book(s) of the Month: City Life
In my last post, I began reviewing two of my favorite books from Witold Rybczynski, someone I consider one of the best authors in architecture and urban studies. The first post covered Last Harvest (2007) . Contrast that to City Life (1995), where Rybczynski theorizes:
“…the American city has been a stage for the ideas of ordinary people: the small business man on Main Street, the franchisee along the commercial strip, the family in the suburbs. It all adds up to a disparate vision of the city. Perhaps the American urban stage is best described as cinematic rather than theatrical. A jumbled back lot with cheek-by-jowl assortment of different sets for different productions….”
Like Last Harvest, there are many digressions along the way. In this case into:
- Etymology
- Overviews of works by Lynch, Mumford, Sitte, and others
- Design impacts of Burnham and Olmsted
- Paradigmatic urban forms
- Expansion of Fernand Braudel’s theory of stages in city development to include industrial, post-industrial, and information-age cities
- The Laws of the Indies
- De Tocqueville’s visit to the States
- The Land Ordinance of 1785
- Immigration
- Real estate speculation
- The Columbian Exposition and the Civic Art (City Beautiful) movement
The interesting contrasts Rybczynski describes between North American and European cities have a lot to do with the fact that the New World was basically (to the colonists) a blank slate. But there were important differences between Hispanic, French, and English colonial urbanization that resulted in patterns that last into the 21st century.
St. Augustine
Annapolis
Savannah
Wonderful brief histories and analysis are provided on cities as diverse as Saint Augustine, Quebec, Montreal, New Orleans, New York, Boston, New Haven, Charleston, Annapolis (a high-point in early planning thanks to our early governor, Francis Nicholson), Williamsburg, Philadelphia, Savannah, Woodstock, and Chicago. From these precedents, Rybczynski draws several generalities that distinguish North American cities dating back to their roots. Because land was cheap, “empty” and populations were sparse, people spread out. Open space was treasured, resulting in broad streets and public squares – the desire for spaciousness was built into our psyche in the infancy of our republic. Also, grids established an easy form of real estate development and the commodification of land. The imprint of religious tolerance and democratic governance can be found in the patterns of open spaces, relationships of civic and institutional buildings, and the focus on individual lots for houses.
A large impact on the form of our cities is, of course, functional zoning that separates uses and robs places of variety and vitality. Thus, a good many pages are devoted to early zoning ordinances (Los Angeles – 1907 and New York – 1916), building heights, and uses. In large part, as a reaction to the Civic Art ideals, the First National Conference on City Planning in 1909 deemed attempts to beautify cities “as exercises in ‘civic vanity’ and ‘external adornment.’ The bureaucrats and engineers felt that city planning should be concerned with engineering, economic efficiency, and social reform, not aesthetics. They asserted that whatever functioned well would automatically produce a beautiful, or at least acceptable, urban environment.” Sigh, we still suffer from the results of such thinking.
A large portion of the second half of the book details the tensions between competing theories, governmental policies, and the flight of the population to the suburbs. All of these intertwined ideas are told, of course, through a wandering history with anecdotes, observations, and citations from numerous practitioners, government acts, and examples. These ideas are fleshed out in more detail in Rybczynski’s latest book, Makeshift Metropolis.
The final two chapters address the revitalization of downtowns and an approach Rybczynski calls “The Best of Both Worlds.” His paradigm is his home in Chestnut Hill in northwest Philadelphia. Chestnut Hill has several attributes:
- A diverse housing stock including multi-family, townhouse, and detached houses
- A population of about 10,000 people within less than 3 square miles (about 5 people per acre)
- A commercial main street
- Strong connections to Philadelphia’s cultural and business core and the greater metropolitan area
Chestnut Hill
These attributes point to a networked system of mid-size centers within greater regions, but will require connections – electronic and physical – to each other with multi-modal transit, smart power grids, and numerous other more sustainable infrastructure upgrades that we need to begin planning for now.
Building a successful and attractive transit system takes more than drawing lines on a map and buying snazzy vehicles. In addition to the many technical issues, one of the most important factors is values. Who is the system for, and why will they use it?
International transportation consultant Jarrett Walker, who writes the blog Human Transit, has a new book by the same title about the values behind transit, transit’s limits and opportunities, and why people do and don’t ride.
On Tuesday, February 7, the Planning Commission is hosting Jarrett as a part of our speaker series. The talk will start at 7:30 pm in the Planning Board auditorium at 8787 Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring.
If you can’t make it to Silver Spring on the 7th, there are other chances to see Jarrett.
Several local organizations are cosponsoring an informal chat and question/answer session with Jarrett next Thursday, February 9th, at 6:30 pm.
That event will be at the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) offices at 1666 K Street NW, Suite 1100, starting at 6:30. Young Professionals in Transportation, Women’s Transportation Seminar, the American Planning Association, APTA, and Greater Greater Washington are cosponsoring the event.
To go to the evening event at APTA, you do need to RSVP. Additionally, there are a limited number of books available at a discounted rate. You can reserve one when you RSVP.
Also on the 9th, Jarrett will speak at the National Building Museum from 12:30 to 1:30 pm. The National Building Museum is located downtown at 401 F Street NW. It may fill up so RSVP to reserve your space.
For those of you who live or work in the Baltimore area, Jarrett has also announced a lunchtime talk at Penn Station. It will run from noon until 1 pm on Tuesday the 7th.
All of the events are free.
Jarrett’s book, like his blog, is full of insightful commentary. I was particularly interested in his discussion of the relationship between connections and frequency in enabling transit to be a more feasible mode. It was especially poignant for me, since the Metrobus and Prince George’s County bus routes in Greenbelt were restructured around these principles just last year.
Prior to the change, we basically had a “direct service everywhere” design, which meant either long waits for the right bus or long rides on the wrong bus. Jarrett talks about how good design (both frequency and connections between routes) can mean that transferring might get you there more quickly and more reliably at the same cost to the agency. My experience on the ground backs that up, and the book explains why transit works that way.
Anyone who has ridden transit on a regular basis will appreciate the points Jarrett makes. Especially his matrix showing the seven demands of useful transit service. Transit designers must take these demands into consideration if they hope to compete for riders.
I won’t get too in depth, here. But I will strongly encourage you to buy Jarrett’s book. And hopefully I’ll see you at one of his events in the area.
Food Trucks Roll On
guest post: Scott Whipple
Last Wednesday, the National Trust for Historic Preservation released a report demonstrating something some will find counterintuitive or even dubious, but which many of us in the historic preservation field have thought for years: reusing existing buildings almost always offers more environmental savings than demolition and new construction.
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A new, high-performance building needs between 10-80 years, depending on the building type and where it is built, to offset the environmental impact of its construction.
- In comparing new and retrofitted buildings ofsimilar size, function, and performance, energy savings in retrofitted buildings ranged from 4-46 percent higher than new construction.
- The benefits of retrofitting and reusing existing buildings are even more pronounced in regions powered by coal and that experience wider climate variations.
old is eco-friendly
As you might expect, the preservation community is excited by these findings. But urbanists, environmentalists, the mainstream media, and government are taking notice as well. The buzz is palpable.
The marketplace has responded too. The United States Green Building Council, the organization behind the LEED environmental certification program, recently announced that LEED certification of existing buildings has surpassed that for new building construction.
The US government estimates that each year approximately 1 billion square feet of existing building stock is demolished and replaced, while the Brookings Institution suggests that one-quarter of existing building stock–fully 82 billion square feet–will be demolished and replaced between 2005 and 2030. That is a lot of construction debris going into landfills. But even if all of these new buildings are high-performing, we will not be able to build our way out of our carbon dependency.
save me and save the earth
As the Trust’s study demonstrates, taking advantage of our existing building stock must be central to our efforts to meet carbon reduction targets and address climate change. In addition to considering the cultural and economic arguments for preserving old or historic buildings, environmental factors should be considered.
Maybe, just maybe, these findings may broaden the circle of people who see value in our existing building stock.
The BRT Experience
does this bus have empathy?
While the Planning Board, staff, and County are facing down the challenges of retro-fitting bus rapid transit into the suburbs, some transit planners are thinking about the soulfulness of mass transit.
Beyond the engineering and economic calculations, the languge used to describe the service, its frequency and legibility, whether you can eat on a train car or check your email all contribute to how you feel about transit and whether you’re likely to use it.
I am not a frequent Metro user, but when I think about a local trip I consider it an alternative. I usually find it timely and convenient, but am always stymied by figuring the fare. Am I in the peak or peak of the peak? And when will I be coming back? And why do I have to do math while I’m standing there? Quick, how much is $3.65 and $2.85, what bills do I have in my wallet to pay, and is it any wonder I have fare cards tucked into books and coat pockets worth a nickel a piece?
I know, get a smartcard. But here’s where our funny thinking about transit kicks in. I’m willing to carry $25.00 on my EZPass for the rare occasions I travel north of Baltimore, but not on a smartcard for a transit system in my own backyard. Why?
That’s the kind of human factor explored in this article about transit and that’s something to remember about transportation planning. No matter how perfect the system, it’s still used by human beings.
Book(s) of the Month: Last Harvest
To keep up with emerging ideas, highlight especially important works, and provide diverse views on issues in planning and design, I will be highlighting some of my past and current readings over the next year.
To begin, I’d like to feature a pair of books from one of the best authors in architecture and urban studies: Witold Rybczynski. Two of his books contrast the extremes of development: Last Harvest (2007) and City Life (1995). (For now, I will forgo his wonderful biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, A Clearing in the Distance, and his latest, Makeshift Metropolis.)
Last Harvest
The subtitle of Last Harvest is a summary of its theme: “How a Cornfield Became New Daleville: Real Estate Development in America from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-first Century, and Why We Live in Houses Anyway”. It covers a lot of ground in 300 pages, but, it’s a fast, pleasant, informative read. My only real gripe is the lack of illustrations and maps.
Londonderry Township, from Breou's Official Series of Farm Maps, Chester County, 1883
The narrative of Last Harvest is not linear – it weaves history into a story about the development of New Daleville in Londonderry Township in Chester County, PA. While focusing on creating a “new urbanist” suburb from a cornfield and the various decisions and perspectives of the developer, the municipal representative, citizens, and designers, Rybczynski provides an overview of several precedents and important general factors of such development. These include a brief history of:
- Seaside;
- Unwin’s seminal work, Town Planning in Practice;
- Zoning history;
- Real estate transactions by the first settlers;
- Kentlands (here in Montgomery County);
- Sprawl and suburbanization, which Rybczynski describes under the heading of “scatteration”;
- Housing patterns and typologies; and
- Consumer preferences and lifestyles.
The bulk of the book, believe it or not, focuses on the minutiae of the meetings, proposals, redesigns, meetings, pricing and marketing concerns, compromises, and more meetings required to obtain the support and, ultimately, the approvals to create New Daleville. It’s a fascinating – really, I promise – description that will sound familiar to those who are active in zoning and planning discussions in Montgomery County, but it provides a view into many aspects of the process that aren’t typically seen. This is an important contribution to the understanding of the whole picture of land development, zoning decisions, and planning that should allow us all to come to the table with a wider perspective.
New Daleville Illustrative Plan
New Daleville was ultimately built out by Ryan Homes with homes ranging from the low to high $200,000s. Alas, if you really like this style of home (and lifestyle), it is sold out – models such as the Savoy, the Melville, and the Austin (most named after authors … not sure where the Savoy came from) apparently lived up to the developer’s description, “Reminiscent of old-time neighborhoods, this lovely neo-traditional community has a central boulevard lined with picket fences leading you into tree-lined streets and alley ways. The lush landscape is laced with bench-lined paths and winding walkways to pocket parks and recreation areas where neighbors and friends can gather and have fun.” Of course, there is not a store or office within walking distance….
A complete contrast to this history is provided in City Life. Here, Rybczynski sets out to analyze why our cities developed into the form(s) they did. Specifically, why aren’t our cities like European cities?
More, next post.
Public Space is People Space
We can extol the New England Common and the midwestern town square, but let’s be honest, America’s real public spaces are parking lots. We have turned our landscape over to the car. In his forthcoming book, “ReThinking a Lot,” MIT urban planning professor Eran Ben-Joseph estimates that there are 500 million parking spaces in the US, covering about 3,500 square miles, about the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Other estimates are higher–up to 2 billion spaces; throw in Connecticut and Vermont.
That comparison is a sad statistic on our willingness to turn over civic life to the car; parking lots are an investment in space that seems to be paying out negative social, environmental, and economic impacts. So what to do with all this pavement?
We’ve been looking into zoning and planning opportunities to recreate crossroads and Metro area lots into livable rather than strictly drivable places. In some case, the CR Zones reduce parking requirements significantlycases and also set maximum limits. The zones’ parking standards vary on a sliding scale based on proximity to transit services.
We even participated in Parking Day.
streets are for people as well as cars, and they can be green as well as gray
Parking lots really have to serve us twice–as drivers and as walkers–and they have an aesthetic. Landscaping is the most obvious way to create a more nuanced environment.
landscaping in the Dia Beacon art museum parking lot in New York's Hudson Valley
Do only art museums warrant landscaped parking lots? Thanks to Elza Hisel-McCoy for the pictures
But this article looks at even looser and more interesting approaches to civic re-use of pavement, including summer theater under the department store port cochere, sports leagues, and the ever-popular food trucks.
To make parking lots more meaningful and attractive public spaces, whether a formal landscaped design or an organic outgrowth of community activity, we have think like people rather than drivers.
Here are more pictures of parking lot re-use, and send us your photos of interesting lots–good and bad.
Superblocks in Palm Beach
On a busman’s holiday, I had a chance to bicyle around Palm Beach and noticed that, not surprisingly, the one percent get some pretty nice urban design.
But what is surprising is that whether you’re in the one percent or the 99 percent, the bones are the same. Palm Beach’s Worth Avenue was created very much the way Federal Realty does a Bethesda Avenue or Foulger Pratt does an Ellsworth Avenue.
Worth Avenue, Bethesda Avenue, and Ellsworth Avenue are all parallel or perpendicular to the main traffic artery. You get onto Palm Beach island via Royal Palm Way, a spectacularly landscaped boulevard with green median and four travel lanes. But make no mistake, shopping and strolling are a few blocks to the south on the much more intimately scaled Worth Avenue. The same bones are in Bethesda and Silver Spring; the car traffic is out on Wisconsin and on Georgia.
And it points out a lost opportunity in Friendship Heights (which has the bones and the money). Friendship Boulevard and Jennifer Avenue run parallel to busy Wisconsin Avenue, but are lined with parking lots and loading docks instead of using them to create a retail enclave conducive to strolling and cafe lingering.
Furthermore, Worth Avenue’s little piazzas and mid-block connections seem to be the accreted decisions of varied builders over time.
let's see where this leads!
It is, in fact, a real estate development created out of assembled properties, just the way our CBD zoning encourages assembly by offering optional method density increases for sites over 20,000 square feet.
note the easy mix of office, residential, and retail. In fact, Mizner lived above the shop
It’s what you do with your superblock that makes the difference. Worth Avenue and much of Palm Beach’s (and South Florida’s) Spanish-Mediterranean architectural character was created by Addison Mizner. He didn’t go to architecture school, but did attend university in Salamanca, Spain and apprenticed with a Beaux Arts practice.
In the Beaux Arts, God truly is in the details. From “An American Country House,” a 1925 monograph on the work of Mellor, Meigs, and Howe, this column capital is carefully drawn, scaled, and constructed.
pastiche or perfection?
Sure it’s easy if you’re doing a luxurious country house, but these details come from the Bush Terminal Building on 42nd Street and Broadway in New York City as recorded in the 1925 ”Architectural Construction, An Analysis of the Design and Construction of American Buildings.”
included for its "conspicuous orginality," though "using letters from the Gothic alphabet"
and it was not only decorating the building, but knowing how to put it together using the proper scale and materials. No dry-vit here
And one more thing. At the time, Palm Beachers used to clapboard cottages objected to Mizner’s “ugly, foreign-looking buildings.”
…imagine if hundreds of thousands of people didn’t take Metro everyday. That trip to Tyson’s Corner malls would be a Christmas time nightmare everyday.
A recent WMATA study modeled the region without transit to measure economic benefits–property values increased, jobs in a regional economy, freeway lanes and parking garages not built.
It’s clear that quality of life comes from a complex set public and private investments and variety in housing, transportation, recreation can feed that complexity.
Modernism in Massachusetts
This article in the New York Times points out the Montgomery County is not alone in recognizing its heritage of modern architecture.
That bastion of Colonialism, New England loves its saltboxes but is moving to preserve, through easements, a legacy of modern residential architecture that includes work by Walter Gropius.
Montgomery Modern explores mid-century modern buildings and communities that reflect the optimistic spirit of the post-war era in Montgomery County, Maryland. From International Style office towers to Googie style stores and contemporary tract houses, Montgomery Modern celebrates the buildings, technology, and materials of the Atomic Age, from the late 1940s through the 1960s. A half century later, we now have perspective to appreciate these resources as a product of their time.
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