There’s a sign on the wall
But she wants to be sure
‘Cause you know sometimes words have
Two meanings
–Stairway to Heaven
Arguably, there is nowhere better than a bazaar to capture the essence or ambiance of an urban place.
In cities and towns across the globe, pedestrian access remains central to this age-old form of market expression.
in contrast, in the American holiday bazaar, hoop and converted gymnasium define a not-so urban experience of temporary tables and seasonal vending. A cynical view? Inadvertent walkability amid the commerce of the car.
Same word, different story, all in Led Zepplin’s signature song.
Often, to evoke the vision of an urbanist future, we reflect on images of public spaces borne of a sociocultural tradition from another place or time.
But with such indiscriminate references to walkable and compact, mixed use experiences, are we asking too much to bring the presumed richness of an evolved, world city to every American urbanist’s back yard?
A 2009 myurbanist entry contained video walks through Rome’s Piazza Navona and Campo di Fiori at night. Here’s another video of Campo di Fiori, and a link to the story of the place:
A former field, the location of gallows for minor offenses, a juncture of streets devoted to trades, a market by day and a haven of night life: do we do injustice to rich history by assuming we can recreate the physical form produced by this “back story”?
Six years ago, while on sabbatical from my law firm, I made a presentation that asked Cornell University students studying in Rome to reflect on the context of what they had learned.
The issue of context graced the handout, just as it graces the dilemma of imposing patterns from another history on an American urban pattern.
As noted, this dilemma may yield more questions than certainty in changing times, and a salient portion of the handout asked the students to consider the dilemma, described as follows.
Rome contains some of the world’s most successful “public spaces”. Assume you are an American planning director who receives a request from a city council member who has just returned from a trip to Rome. The council member wants to pressure local mall redevelopers to create a space reminiscent of Campo di Fiori at the center of a 1960’s era shopping mall which is subject to pending development approvals for a multi-million dollar renovation. What features can you insert in the development agreement draft to attempt such ambiance? Can successful public spaces be successfully legislated?
How would you respond to this question today?
A summary of the referenced handout appears below.
myurbanist correspondent Fiona Cox (@coxlaw on Twitter) reports from the United Arab Emirates with first-hand perspectives on an evolving cityscape:
City centers, thriving urban regions and cultural hubs were far from the Abu Dhabi of a century ago–the dominant features of the place were tents or huts in a desert. But six decades later, shortly after the United Arab Emirates declared itself a nation, there was an opportunity to emerge as a new place, and embrace the best of everything worldwide: culturally, architecturally, environmentally and aesthetically.
On close inspection, today’s Abu Dhabi reveals a melting pot, with most of the population consisting of expatriates and immigrant workers, and the majority of architecture reflecting a purposeful intent to be seen as an indisputable business center.
Each skyscraper has a function: the ground floor is made up of small businesses, such as restaurants, hardware stores, clothing shops and dry-cleaners. The ensuing floors are made up of either corporate businesses or residential living. Perhaps even more notably, mosques abound.
Ironically, the most striking element of the city is that buildings which one might consider “traditional” are absolutely exceptional. The Sheikh Zayed Mosque, for example, is unlike anything else. It is vast and beautiful.
Although each element of the mosque was made elsewhere (marble from Brazil, glass from Italy, clocks from England, carpets made from New Zealand’s wool and crafted in Iran), each such part merges into something quite extraordinary.
As a whole, this mosque leaves the observer yearning for more examples of traditional architecture.
With the imminent building of new international renditions of the Guggenheim and the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, the questions of form and function remain.
Will the urban design of the city continue to parlay a functional business center? Or will Abu Dhabi realize its potential to become a place of truly comprehensive aesthetic value?
Here, updated, is an embedded link to a selection of the top 12 posts in myurbanist, beginning last March. Please click “continue on” to review below, and, at the bottom of the first page, click “previous” for a second array.
Today’s efforts to recreate elements of the city, of whatever prescription of urbanism (e.g. “new”, “landscape” or “ecological”) often turn on issues once considered in design competitions long forgotten.
Central to such efforts, new or old, is the relationship of a city segment to the surrounding urban area and the role of public streets in the integration process between neighborhood and city.
A sometimes overlooked legacy can be rediscovered in the Chicago of 100 years ago, where a still-relevant competition once summarized by Lewis Mumford centered on integrating neighborhood housing with “markets, schools, churches, and other institutions that serve the local area rather than the city as a whole”.
In December 1912, the City Club of Chicago staged a competition for the design of a quarter-section of the Chicago grid. The effort was later documented by Alfred B. Yeomans, a Chicago landscape architect who edited the competition’s publication in 1916. He acknowledged new attention to the planned development of the local area premised on the increasingly comprehensive role of the street. He noted that the “purely mechanical extension of existing street systems is giving way to scientific methods of development based on a careful study of the probable economic, social and aesthetic needs of prospective inhabitants”.
The various entries stressed the fundamental role of the street in integrating city and neighborhood.
Several of the entries emphasized the role of the local street system and public open spaces. The first prize entry, by Chicago architect Wilhelm Bernhard, contained a community center and stressed deterrence of through traffic from surrounding Chicago. Arthur C. Comey, the second-prize winner, employed the English allotment garden within blocks, with houses facing inward, an intermediate street system for local use, recreation spaces, and buildings grouped about small parks.
Other entries took up more directly the question of integration with the surrounding city, thereby starting a debate on the worth of isolated communities at variance with the surrounding grid. This debate has never fully resolved, especially as modes of transportation expand, while contemporary thinking increasingly emphasizes the relationship and proximity of home to work.
G.B. Cone's Chicago competition entry. (Source: Yeomans 1916: 34)
In particular, landscape architect G.B. Cone noted that the proposed neighborhood was not destined to exist independent of Chicago’s entirety. He argued for retention of the gridiron throughout, foreshadowing today’s defenders of continuity within the grid and implying that the imposition of a curvilinear scheme would negatively isolate the community from the prevailing pattern of development. Nonetheless, he emphasized the use of interior-block open space and the community center.
W. Drummond's Chicago competition entry shows a bird's-eye view and a typical city block. (Source: Yeomans 1916: 37,41)
Similarly, William Drummond, a Prairie School architect and disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, proposed grid-based “neighborhood units” (well prior to large-scale adoption of the concept by Clarence Perry and others) with allotment gardens and interior courts.
These designs were but a fraction of the Chicago competition’s entries. Yet they exhibited best the perceptive synthesis of reform ideals and site planning sensitive to the uses of the street within the new arena of the urban neighborhood.
In response to such efforts, the competition provided a “Sociological Review of the Plans” by Dr. Carol Aronovici, then director of the Bureau of Social Research of Philadelphia, and a lecturer on housing and town planning at the University of Pennsylvania. Aronovici cautioned that the new, local street plans within specific areas should not proceed without determination of “the relationship that this area is intended to bear to the whole”.
Aronovici, like many of today’s urbanists, saw virtue in the grid. He viewed the abandonment of the gridiron street system as a possible symptom of an “artificial and radical” attempt to set the planned community off from its surroundings. He urged the location of public and semi-public buildings on the
community’s periphery rather than grouped about local community centers, so as to preserve contacts with adjacent neighborhoods. Finally, he perceptively identified problems inherent in public regulation and ownership of inner block open spaces and saw the necessity of assuming community maintenance of public areas:
The whole question of “shut-in spaces,” whether they be parks, playgrounds or allotment gardens, is one that should be carefully weighed. The line of cleavage between public and private ownership, between public and private maintenance, should be sharply drawn. While I am heartily in favor of extending the bounds of public ownership, I am opposed to common ownership that is not coupled with common responsibility.
In the spirit of both deja vu and amnesia (concepts combined by American actor/writer Stephen Wright), the debates of the legacy Chicago competition continue, 100 years later, as the dialogue on streets and neighborhood-urban area integration lives on.
For more on the precedential Chicago Competion, see Yeomans, A.B., ed. 1916. City Residential Land Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
This entry was adapted from Wolfe, C.R. “Streets Regulating Neighborhood Form”. Ch. 7. in Moudon, A.V., 1987,1991. Public Streets for Public Use. Columbia University Press. It was also republished in SustainableCitiesCollective on November 21, here.
