Author Archives: admin

Conclusion

Posted on by
Reply

Getting There: Building Healthy Cities

[Excerpt From Chapter Nine]

Of all the public decisions that go into place-making, the most important is what type of transportation systems to use. They will determine the character of the city and much of its economy. Do we pave roads or lay down tracks? Do we fund buses or subsidize cars? Do we lay down bike paths or more highway lanes? Do we build airports or high-speed train lines?

What is transportation for? That’s the essential question Lewis Mumford asked forty years ago.

In the first place, it’s for building the economy of a city. A city’s external links to the outside world, its freeways, train lines, airports, ports, and others, will determine the potential of its industry and people. The big links a city has to the outside world determine its economic potential, something most people do not grasp. Thus, people should think hard about, and usually be ready to fund, the new airport, the new train lines, the new port, and even the new Interstate if it actually travels somewhere new, though this is not likely these days.

As these external links are established, attention can be paid to the internal transportation network. We should recognize that the internal transportation serves a different purpose than the external transportation systems of a city. The layout of a region’s internal transportation will determine how people get to work, how they shop, how they recreate, how they live. The standard choice today of lacing a metropolitan area with big freeways for purely internal travel means we will have a sprawling, formless environment. Simply getting rid of the freeways–forget mass transit–would establish a more neighborhood-centered economy and dynamic. But we don’t have to forget mass transit. Laying out train lines, streetcar tracks, bus lanes, bike paths, and sidewalks–and forgoing freeways and big roads–will mean a more place-oriented form of living. Both the drawbacks and the benefits of such a style dwell in its more communal, group-oriented form of living. You will have the option of not using a car. But to get this option, you have to accept that using a car will be more difficult.

Transportation is not the only public decision. Policies on growth and development can help implement a transportation policy. Such policies are far less important than usually thought, however. The major transportation systems dictate the pattern and style of developments. Once those are established, ways will be found over and around zoning and land-use laws to build the type of development that fits with a big highway or train line.

But zoning and other land-use laws can be used to facilitate or support the type of development that goes along with a particular style of transportation. The best way to do this would be to move away from zoning and go back to actually designing cities. Governments would actually lay out street systems on paper, and then private or public developers could build them as needed. This would give a coherent structure to a metropolitan area. It would also mean better coordinating the relationship among states, metropolitan areas, and smaller localities.

Growth control laws and boundaries are a wonderful tool for shaping development. Conceptually they are great because they help the public and the planners focus on where they want growth to occur. But growth boundaries are misleading because they give rise to the perception that without them, houses and shopping centers would magically pop up like mushrooms after a good rain. They would not. In reality, development only occurs after the public has made a decision about where to lay out roads, train lines, sewers, and other public infrastructure. Growth boundaries are as much about inhibiting public development as private. They are lines that tell government, beyond this point, go no farther with your services. A better way to think about growth boundaries is that they are lines that demarcate to what point the public is going to extend its blessings, both in the form of transportation and in things like educating children, police services, and libraries.

But growth boundaries are not possible usually without addressing the tangled political structures of our cities. Which leads us to our third rule of thumb.

No Place Called Home

Posted on by
Reply

Community at the Millennium

[Excerpt From Chapter Eight]

“Another question: what is a community at the end of the 20th century? A focus group, a concentration camp, a chat room on the Internet, an address book, a dance club, all those afflicted with a particular incurable disease, a gender, an age bracket, a waiting room, owners of silver BMW’s, organized crime, everyone who swears by a particular brand of painkiller and a two-block stretch of Manhattan on any weekday at lunch hour.”
–Herbert Muschamp, from “The Miracle in Bilbao,” New York Times Magazine, September 7, 1997.

Coming Home

It’s a Saturday night and my house is filling with people. Some carry musical instruments. Some have sheets of poetry or fiction by their sides. Some carry nothing, but are prepared to stand up before a crowd of people and dance, perform theater, or tell a story.

We call it the Coffeehouse. We’ve been doing it now for seven years. The first Saturday of every month, friends and friends of friends come to our house to entertain and be entertained. Usually about fifty people show up. It’s a great time.

This coffeehouse is the highlight of the month, both for me and many of the people who attend. It’s not just the music, poetry, and other acts that bring people back, although these are good. It’s the chance to meet, connect, and talk with other people during the breaks. Through it, my wife and I have met many of our now good friends, and other people have made similar friendships and bonds. In a city where people come and go, it provides us a mechanism to make new friends as older ones leave town.

Why do I mention it? Because our coffeehouse is a replacement for what does not exist in the outer world. And the fact that it does not exist says a lot about our society at this stage in its history. I would prefer that a corner tavern or bar be down the street, where I could magically meet my friends and make new ones. I would prefer to be held up in a naturally emerging web of friends and family, growing out of the physical place where I live and the work that goes on there.

Our situation is ironic, because if anyone should have community “naturally,” it’s my wife and I. We live in Norfolk, Virginia, a port city on the Elizabeth River, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. Huge carriers make their home here, as do huge cargo ships that freight millions of tons of coal all over the world.

It’s been the home of my family on my father’s side for five generations. My great-grandfather came here before the Civil War. He was the first publisher of the newspaper where I started my career in journalism, The Virginian-Pilot. My father grew up one block from where I write this. My wife is a native of the area as well. My newest niece lives down the street.

Looking at my background, one might think that I live a life rich in contacts with the past and the world that molded me, a place where an intricate and perhaps suffocating web of family and friends who have centuries of combined experience support, argue with, and love each other. Which is not the case. I have no close friends from my childhood or high school years that still live in this town, or even the state. Most of my siblings have scattered themselves around the country, as is the wont of professional people these days. Various relatives–second cousins once removed and so forth–do live near me. I know none of them well. As one commentator remarked about Europeans in contrast to Americans, “They still have cousins.” Americans do not.

Various forces operating in the country and world today have pulled apart my “natural” community and scattered it to the winds. My own more cosmopolitan bent figures into this. I lived in Europe for a few years, attended college and graduate school in Pittsburgh and New York City. I am not able, nor do I desire, to sink back into the old-boy culture that does still exist here to a degree. I have a community around me, but it is one that I created or sought out, more than one I was born into. My community is in my coffeehouse, in the arts organizations I belong to, and in the civic work I do.

Community–the network of formal and informal relationships that binds people together–is a thin, tepid brew in this country. It has declined to the point where improving it, saving it, nurturing it have become slogans of a variety of movements in different, seemingly unrelated fields. In urban planning, New Urbanism promises to revive community through building subdivisions more cohesively. In political theory, Amiti Etzioni hopes to reduce crime and improve social health through his philosophy of Communitarianism. In journalism, the philosophy of Public Journalism, sometimes labeled Community Journalism, promises to rebuild community and a newspaper’s circulation base by having the press foster public dialogue and political participation. Our politics, our places, our press–all of these things run across power lines that jolt us with the message that something is missing in too many of our lives, some sense of cohesion and togetherness.

This desire many people have for richer, more connected lives is a valid one. I believe that a society grows out of its social, religious, and political compacts, on which ultimately even market relationships depend. But like the construction of coherent physical places, the construction of coherent communities is not something to be attempted directly. Rather, one has to understand what produces both places and communities, and what weakens them, and address those forces.

Most of what we call community in the past has been produced as a byproduct of other things: making a living, shopping for food, keeping ourselves and our families well, protecting them and our society from physical harm, educating them. We shopped for groceries, served in the military, and went to a doctor and along the way got to know the butcher, the fellow soldier, and the local doctor. All of these actions have become less communal, and so our society has become less community-minded. We buy our food at the warehouse-style supermarket, do not serve in the military unless we volunteer, and go to the impersonal HMO to get our cholesterol checked. If we want to revive community, then we should look at the trade-offs involved in making some of our decisions more communal again.

Place has something to do with all this as well. Walking to a neighborhood cafe for breakfast is a more communal thing than using the drive-through at a McDonald’s for an Egg McMuffin, although relationships can occur at either place. Driving on the freeway is less likely to generate relationships than riding a streetcar. Living in an older neighborhood fashioned around the foot is more communal than living in a contemporary one fashioned around the car. But the physical makeup of our places is just one factor in this trend.

John Perry Barlow, computer sage and former Grateful Dead lyricist, commented once that community is largely generated by shared adversity. This gets at the notion, true I believe, that our social ties, while beneficial, are not necessarily produced by situations we would choose. Although many of us miss community, we don’t miss poverty, disease, and war, things that produce community with some regularity. The problem for contemporary Americans is that enhancing social cohesion may mean giving up some things we really like, like personal mobility, low taxes, and a footloose economic structure. We have not figured out yet that creating wealth is not the same as creating community.

I speak without any sentimentality or nostalgia for the past. I believe, however, that the generally fragmented lives so many of us lead break up marriages, disturb childhoods, isolate people when they most need help, and make life not as much fun. We live, to speak frankly, in one of the loneliest societies on earth. If we are to change that, then we should look more closely at the various relationships in our society–political, social, economic, and others–and attempt to construct them in more communal ways. Deciding how to structure these relationships comes back to what I increasingly believe is our most fundamental relationship–politics.

Portland and Oregon

Posted on by
Reply

Taming the Forces That Create the Modern Metropolitan Area

[Excerpt From Chapter Seven ]

Let’s take a drive out of Portland, past the suburbs and the highways and the new homes, out past the growth boundary. You’ll find your journey a pleasant one. You’ll drive over rolling hills of farms and forests, until you come to small towns, sitting compactly in the countryside. These small towns, like Yamhill, Dundee, or Forest Grove, will be surrounded by new development that hugs the existing town. You will not be greeted by the usual display of scattered subdivisions, Pizza Huts, and strip centers that now rings most smaller towns in the country. Because of this, the downtowns of these smaller towns are more viable and alive than most.

This landscape is as much a part of Portland, and its success, as its bustling downtown. Because these small towns are limited in their outward growth, there is no way they can pluck the growth off the metro Portland area, by standing just outside of it and feeding off of it, like parasites. A newcomer to Portland cannot buy a house outside a small town in a new development within easy driving distance of Portland, a development that would doubtless be followed by other developments until a sea of sprawl was built up.

This landscape shows that growth can no longer be controlled by a city itself, or even a metropolitan area. It must be done by an entity larger than the city or metro area itself, likely the state. A metropolitan area cannot effectively limit its own growth, because there is no way to get outside of itself. It’s a Zen thing. A tongue cannot taste itself; a metro area cannot limit itself. Wherever it draws a growth boundary, a developer can always go just on the other side and build houses that siphon off the growth pressure. Only a state can limit this kind of parasitic development.

Legally, it makes growth control both more difficult and more simple. If effective growth control must usually come from a state level, then activists have the sometimes more difficult, but conceptually easier, task of persuading the state to manage growth. It’s ironic that states have generally shown little interest in urban management. It’s ironic because legally, states have the rights and powers to do so, if they choose. Legally, towns and cities are creatures of our states. They have their existence only by authority of the state constitution, which usually grants the legislators the right to pass charters which delegate some of the powers of the state to a municipality. Theoretically, the state could revoke these charters and control the actions of cities directly, from school boards to cops.

In Europe, the more controlled nature of growth is due in part to the more clearly subordinate status of cities. Their growth is controlled and ordered by a larger entity, usually the nation-state itself. It seems odd that the states in the United States do not exercise powers that are available to them.

It’s important to realize that the forces that shaped Portland and Oregon were both progressive and reactionary in nature. That is, policy makers did not set out to create great urban places, although some were interested in that. They set out to stop certain things. Mostly, they set out to stop the hills, farms, and forests they love from being turned into shopping malls and freeways.

That, to me, is the ultimate irony of Portland and Oregon. We urbanists from all over the country turn to the area to see how we, too, can fashion great urban places. But those places are largely an afterthought, almost an unintended byproduct. The leaders and people of Oregon set out to protect the streams, rivers, farms, and mountains that they loved.

“They [growth boundaries] were means to an end,” said Ethan Seltzer, director of the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies at Portland State University, who often explains the area to visiting journalists. “The point was to call an end to farmland development. The kind of press we’re getting is mostly about what we’re doing, not why. The why is the incredible landscape of the Willamette Valley.

“This is not a city that stands back and looks at its skyline and says, ‘What a great city!’ It’s a city that stands back and says, ‘Look at those mountains!'”

As Seltzer and others explained to me, it was a coalition of farmers and tree huggers that got the state growth control laws passed and have kept them in place. Governor Tom McCall, the progressive Republican governor who led the fight for the statewide planning law in the early 1970s, was a nature lover first and a city lover a distant second. The group that has been so influential, 1,000 Friends of Oregon, is bound together by its members’ deep love of nature. The Friends have become true lovers of urbanism as they have seen how that is a means to their end. They have come to love urbanism, I believe, but it was a discovery, not a goal.

Robert Caldwell, editor of the editorial page for the Portland Oregonian and a native, talks of often seeing “a cowboy” or a blue-collar worker stooping to pick up a piece of litter, or sharply telling someone else to do the same.

To me, this trait is cheering, but it is also saddening, for it suggests Americans are unlikely to unite around an urban vision. Cities are still too misunderstood, still too prone to inspire suspicion, for people to unite around a goal of streetcars, walking streets, and the diverse milieu of urbanism. They may like it once they get there, and even come to love it, but it is unlikely to be a strong enough goal to inspire the necessary work.

It also suggests that place, in the urbanistic sense, cannot be built from scratch, but only preserved, enhanced, or rebuilt. A Greenwich Village or an East Side or even a midtown can evolve, change, building on its essential form of streets and buildings. A Portland can come back, resprouting and reinvigorating its old homes, and building new ones again. But I’m not sure such a place can be built again. Cities may be a dead art form, or a limited one. It may be possible, but I’ve never seen it. I haven’t seen any collection of streets and buildings built after World War II that has a coherent sense of place.

Jackson Heights

Posted on by
Reply

An Anachronism Finds Its Way

[Excerpt From Chapter Five]

The Star restaurant it was called. It sold “Chops, Steaks and Seafood.” It was the kind of small Greek coffee shop that used to abound in Manhattan, but has been dwindling even there. Here, it stood out as a leftover from a bygone world.

The shop sat on Thirty-seventh Avenue, the principal shopping street of Jackson Heights. The street was a swirl of color and activity. Colombians on their way to Ecuadorean restaurants to eat yucca or ropa vieja. Koreans and other Asians came out of small stores selling herbs and spices. Indian women walked by wearing scarfs and other components of traditional dress. The street was a river of life, bustling with people and commerce.

In this flowing river, the Star restaurant sat like an island or an alley, part of this world but not of it. It somehow signaled that it was of another era, and might not be long for the present one.

The restaurant was filled, appropriately enough, with elderly Jewish women. They seemed like refugees from a storm, huddled in this sheltered place while the passions of color, language, and dress swirled and stormed outside on the street. They sat in black-vinyl booths and at square-topped tables, drinking coffee and discussing events. They eagerly surrounded me when I asked them about the neighborhood, eager to have a visitor, and a relatively young man at that. Most had lived in this neighborhood for their entire adult life, some fifty years. The stores they walked to, the candy shops, the movie theaters, the five-and-dimes, were largely gone now. They were widows, their husbands passing before them. They did not like being minorities now in ethnicity, custom, and style in a neighborhood they helped build.

“These people are so dirty, they are filthy,” said a woman with big glasses who had just finished showing photos of her trip to Italy. “They throw their trash in the street. There is crime.”

“They change the child’s diapers in the car, and throw it out on the street, just like they do in India,” said another woman.

“And let the child diddle in the curb,” said still another.

“I even saw a man stand up against a wall and do it,” said the first woman.

This account of the immigrants’ bathroom habits seemed unfair, but probably true. Having lived in Spain for two years, I’m aware that Americans’ bathroom habits are unusually fastidious compared to most. It was common in Spain for a mother to help a child urinate into the street. Men would routinely pee against a wall on a downtown street. I became accustomed to doing so myself.

One woman, less angry than the others, said she still liked it here, but that things had changed.

“There used to be so much to do here. There were the movie theaters. There was a candy store.”

“There was the bingo hall down the street,” said another woman.

“Even the Woolworth’s is closing,” said one woman. The national chain had just closed all Woolworth’s in the country, but to these women it was just one more familiar friend departing.

The women’s complaints were ironic, because while they noticed how much things had changed, I noticed how much things had stayed the same in Jackson Heights. Even if the color, religions, and languages of the people on the street changed, Jackson Heights was still a neighborhood that took working-class immigrants not long off the boat and lifted them into the middle class by providing them the opportunity for hard work. What makes Jackson Heights a rarity is that it is an urban neighborhood, based around the subway and elevated train line. Unlike most urban neighborhoods, Jackson Heights had not become either a slum or a giant fern bar.

Working in the City

As the suburbs have become ubiquitous, the urban neighborhood like Jackson Heights has become a specialized place, for the artist, the junkie, the rich, the homeless, the gay, the intellectually curious. What it isn’t, generally speaking, is home to the police officer with two kids, the assistant hotel manager, the school teacher, and, of course, the factory worker. In other words, the working and middle classes. The classic working-class urban neighborhood, where a guy with a lunch pail walked to work or to a streetcar, subway, or bus, has become a rarity as the systems that produced it become a rarity.

The same goes for the classic ethnic, immigrant neighborhood. For many immigrants today, the town-house complex near the freeway ramp–in other words, the suburbs–has become the destination after getting off the boat. Only in a few cities, or parts of cities, are the walkable street, the walk-up apartment, still the first stop. The inner-city areas are either too expensive or too much of a slum.

But one urban area that is still home to the emerging middle class and the immigrant is New York City. In most cities, urban neighborhoods have become vestigial organs, either kept alive as luxury items for the well off, or abandoned to decay. In New York, urban neighborhoods still create the middle class, taking poor or less well-off people and providing them the environment by which they can make their way to a more established position economically.

One of those neighborhoods in the city is Jackson Heights in Queens. It’s been a ladder for an emerging middle class for most of its existence, and it still is. Latin Americans, Koreans, and Indians have replaced or merged with Italians, Jews, Germans, and Greeks. These changes have often been wrenching sociologically. But the bottom line is that Jackson Heights is still where new immigrants come, get their first jobs, and move up.

Why does it still exist? Why has it become neither a slum nor a gentrified boutique neighborhood? What keeps its inhabitants living, with jobs, in a neighborhood where the car is still an uncommon element? In answering these questions, we see several things:

One, is the uniqueness of New York City, which, after a destructive flirtation with the highway midcentury, has in the last generation become more and more dependent on mass transit. This makes it unique among America’s cities. It has not been easy. It has managed to revive and enhance and build on a seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century street pattern. Grids of streets where factory workers walked to jobs are now inhabited by stockbrokers or fashion executives who use limousine service. Neighborhoods like Jackson Heights still revolve around the central star of Manhattan, whose economy warms all the outer boroughs and gives life to their streets. Two, we see how transportation determines form and thus lifestyle. People live differently in Jackson Heights, and most of New York, because they get around differently. Three, we see the uniqueness of the street-based life that non-car-centered transportation produces. There is a closeness, an intimacy to life, in Jackson Heights that must at times be suffocating but which I often yearn for. We gave up something when most of our cities opted to build highways and Interstates, rather than train lines or subways.