The health of cities depends on place-based development more than big projects

Source: The WalkUP Wake-Up Call: Atlanta

Witold Rybczynski, architect and author, delivered a of the New Urbanism last week.

While starting off his blog sounding generous, praising the movement’s impressive growth and the town of Seaside, Florida, he writes:

But while new urbanists have attempted to shed their small town/suburban/Truman Show image, they have had no similarly successful and exemplary big-city project. No High Line. No Disney Hall. No Fifteen Central Park West. What are the important ideas that have affected American cities in the last 20 years? The development of waterfronts. The renaissance in constructing urban parks. The move of genXers and retirees into downtowns. High-rise urban living and Vancouverism. The popularity of urban bicycling and bike-rental programs. Ditto for Zipcars. Urban farmers markets and community gardens. Urban charter schools. The dramatic expansion in attendance of urban cultural institutions, especially art museums. Urban tourism. Downtown trophy buildings. The emergence of influential big-city mayors. Have any of these been the result of the new urbanism movement?

To start with, I don't think the New Urbanism movement needs defending. A major goal of New Urbanism has been the revitalization of cities. Rybczynski offers a long list of ways that cities have succeeded in the last two decades and argues that new urbanists have failed because they can’t take any of the credit. I can live with that kind of failure.

I take issue, however, with a list of important ideas that have affected America’s cities that is focused only on big architectural projects and demographic and social trends. Where, on Rybczynski's list, are streets, and placemaking, place-based development, and the human scale?

Rybczynski is under the impression that New Urbanism is mostly about big projects like Seaside or Kentlands. Instead, this movement set its sights on something bigger than individual projects — bigger even than cities themselves. The goal was and is the reform of the government-sponsored land-use development and planning system — including the streets, the zoning, the way transportation is connected to land use.

The areas most desperately in need of place-based planning tend to be outside of big cities, where metro areas are dominated by drive-only, single-use development. Yet those suburban doctrines invaded cities as well. The departments of transportation, for example, have done great damage to city streets. The default design for urban main streets in recent decades imposed lane widths appropriate for 70 mile-an-hour expressways and and treated street trees as fixed-and-hazardous objects to be removed from the right of way. This approach created many urban streets that were harsh and uncomfortable for people.

This attitude has begun to change. As Janette Sadik-Khan, then-director of New York City’s DOT, wrote in 2011: 
"Once you realize that you can use your streets to improve the quality of life, the economics and the environmental health of your city, I think that's a transformative moment.”

Walled-off no longer

Go back 20 years — near the beginning of New Urbanism — and it was common for cities to be developed in ways that separated themselves from the public realm. Examples of this approach include buildings that turned their backs on the street, apartments walled off by gates and shrubbery, and retail retreating behind large parking lots or enclosed in malls. As one urbanist commented on a listserve, in response to Rybczynski’s critique:

“Surely it's ... now completely taken for granted that most infill development will be of the city, not apart from it. Though there are unpleasant compromises everywhere, new projects and the folks who approve them now simply take it for granted that the retail will be organized as 'streets' rather than interior shopping malls; that the residential units will front the sidewalk rather than be hidden away in courtyards or atop a parking base; that the forms will be immediately recognizable as townhouses or small apartment buildings and as individual stores.”

The multifamily industry — more than one-third of the US housing industry — is particularly transformed by new urbanist ideas. “While New Urbanist developments are not the only types of multi-housing projects that are being built today, the movement’s precepts have swept the industry over the past 20 years or more, and become common wisdom among multifamily developers, big and small alike,” Keat Foong, executive editor of Multi-Housing News, just a few weeks ago.

Big cities all across America are reforming their zoning codes. Many of them, like Miami, Denver, and Buffalo, are adopting form-based codes that were created by new urbanists. But even cities like New York City and Philadelphia that didn’t specifically adopt form-based codes are still extensively incorporating elements pioneered by form-based coders.

Los Angeles is now embarking on the largest form-based code rewrite in history. Rybczynski mentions Disney Hall, but what will have more of an impact on the city: A concert hall or the city’s future zoning that will influence tens of thousands of future buildings?

Public housing has been profoundly influenced by urbanists in recent decades — many of the superblocks are gone, replaced by city streets and houses that blend in with surrounding neighborhoods. Similarly, transit-oriented developments were rare as recently as the early 2000s. Now transit agencies widely recognize the need, and pursue plans, to imbed stations within lively mixed-use settings. I need not point out that it was urbanists who promoted and refined the ideas for TOD.

Going back to Rybczynski’s list, key items are completely dependent on place-based urban design. Where would the urban bicycle trend be without designs for complete streets? How would urban tourism be faring without placemaking? Millennials, Boomers, and others moving into cities – many of whom don’t own cars or want to drive less — need walkable places to live, work, and play. Zipcar only operates in walkable neighborhoods.

Maybe Rybczynski takes the physical aspects of big cities for granted, yet it is surprising how quickly an engaging public realm can disappear — especially if poor planning decisions hold sway. Downtowns all across America had active and lively streets in the 1950s. Many were dead 40 years later, but now are coming back with the help of good placemaking and place-based development that is attracting new residents and businesses. We've got a long way to go to reverse the damage of the last half of the 20th Century.

Cities are more just than a few signature projects. They are more than demographic and social trends. Cities are shaped by the day-to-day decisions on streets, buildings, codes, and public spaces. In the last 20 years, new urbanists have been among the strongest advocates for a public realm that supports people. Many other individuals and groups, not associated with New Urbanism, have also promoted this approach. Now many public officials and ordinary citizens are taking up this cause. 

If that means that new urbanists don't get credit for these ideas, that's fine. But let's not forget the ideas themselves or the critical role they play in the health of cities.

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