City life and new urbanism.

• Author: Gindroz, Ray

1. URBANISM AND CIVILITY

   Imagine places of civility in which people with nothing in common share the public realm. That's urbanism. As described by Richard Sennet in The Uses of Disorder, these places enable us to come into contact with "others"--people different from ourselves. And this contact, however brief, has the capacity to change us, teach us new things about ourselves, and enable us to grow as human beings.

   Urbanity is inherently associated with courtesy, refinement, polish, civilities, courtesies, and amenities. But urbanity is a quality many American cities lost in the second half of the twentieth century.

   Yet we still yearn for urban places where we have the opportunity for chance encounters that spark new ideas and opportunities: on the walk to school or as we ride a bus to the other side of the city. In urban neighborhoods, we can sit by our window and participate in the life of the city. In her waning years, when she was mostly housebound with crippling arthritis, Colette's view from her apartment window overlooking the garden of the Palais Royal in Paris frequently stimulated her final memoirs The Blue Lantern and The Evening Star: Recollections.

   These books are filled with reminiscences of her life and the life of the street she could observe from that window on the world. The American front porch is another example of urbanism - indeed, one of the richest - with its close relationship between the private world of the house and the larger public realm. James Agee described this relationship:

   It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and standing up into their sphere of possession of trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt; a loud auto; a quite auto; people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling.... (1) Then there are the great, large-scale civic spaces that bring people together: Rockefeller Center, Times Square, Fifth Avenue, the Champs Elysees, the Piazza San Marco. These remain fixed in the memories of millions of people as important places in their lives, even if visited only once. Such places become a shared focus of many people's lives; they are places in which many of us are at ease with ourselves and with each other.

   The most effective urban spaces, the ones that make us feel the most comfortable, have an almost room-like quality. They are "whole" places. The street does not merely carry large volumes of traffic. Rather, the street harmonizes with the facades of the buildings along it. Rather than shout for attention as individual objects, the buildings work with one another to create a unified whole. There are people and activities in the space and the presence of windows, doorways, balconies, and porches provides places for people to observe and create a safe and secure public space.

   Paris provides one excellent model of urbanism in which the cross section is the key. Taken from a perch in a balloon, an aerial photograph of Paris in the nineteenth century clearly shows the boulevards under construction and the cross section. This system was applied broadly across the city. A substantial part of the city's greatness derives from the fact that the upper floors of the buildings in all districts are residential and that each structure has a mixed-income population.

   Before elevators, the most expensive apartments were one or two stories above ground. They had the highest ceilings and the most elaborate ornamentation. The next floors, with more steps to climb and slightly lower ceilings, housed the middle class. On the top were the garrets for storage and servants. With the introduction of elevators, the hierarchy became altered, but a wide mix still existed in each building. All of these residential spaces sit on top of public uses. The approach offers an abiding principle for contemporary development of urban spaces.

   The painting, "Man at the Window," by the impressionist Gustav Caillebotte helps us understand still further the importance of this. As spectators, we are inside a room--and along with the man in the painting--we gaze out at another room, an urban room. The young man has leapt up from his chair. A young woman is crossing the street. The man is clearly connected to both the interior and the exterior spaces, by his physicality and his gaze. The window is vertically proportioned; through it we see the same proportion of windows on the facades that create the urban room of the streets. There is a unity created in the visual fabric of this streetscape. From the streets, we see these windows that mark the spaces as places of human habitation. We are not in an anonymous place. We are in a neighborhood or quarter that is looked after by the many people who live there.

   These spaces and qualities are essential for the continuing development and health, not only of our cities, but of civilization itself.

2. ANTI-URBAN URBANISM FRACTURES THE FABRIC OF CITIES

   After World War II, the drive towards rapid development of U.S. cities and regions spawned methods of building towns and cities that were profoundly "anti-urban." Instead of building whole places, the new system produced an endless series of isolated fragments which pull apart and isolate the city.

   The then-present attitude of architecture separated individual buildings from their inherited contexts and failed to relate them to their adjacent buildings to create a congenial urban space. A central theme of the Modernist Movement encouraged this behavior. The theme was a break with history and the traditions of architecture. At the time, it was considered shameful to work in anything but a modernist vocabulary. The insistence that every work be an "original invention," rather than part of the ongoing architectural evolution, led to the creation of placeless urban environments.

   Once such fragmentation began, it spread into the segregation of building use through zoning ordinances and the emergence of the suburban form. It did not take long for this to have negative impacts on the social fabric of society, segregating populations by social class and undermining the mixed-use, mixed-income characteristics of cities that had not only defined them, but that had been the wellspring of their vibrancy and economic vitality. Mixed-use, mixed income neighborhoods turned into single-use, single-income enclaves connected by roads for vehicles, not pedestrians.

   The impulse towards efficiency brought about bureaucratic separation of all the parts and pieces of a city that need to be assembled to create wholeness. While this may have been useful for rapid redevelopment in the post World War II era, this intentional separation of the agencies responsible for roads, traffic, buildings, trees, parks, etc., became institutionalized, eventually creating self-protective fiefdoms in local governmental structures.

   In our cities, the impulse to rebuild did great damage. By the end of the...