Originally written for Professor Barnett’s class, Theory of Urban Design, in the spring of 2004.

____________

In a broad sense, urban design[1] is infinitely “possible”; any bureaucrat with a smidgen of training can apply the legal expression of a design principle (like a standard for setbacks) to a proposed development, thus manifesting one, albeit small, possibility for urban design. In a narrower, functional sense, the waters muddy. What is the purpose of urban design? Does it achieve that purpose? Do other solutions exist that can achieve that purpose in a superior fashion? What is necessary to make urban design work or what disables it from working? While successful urban design may improve the quality of life for some people, this paper contends that these improvements come at the cost of social equity. In some cases, the impact is direct: urban design in one neighborhood directly and negatively impacts the disenfranchised members of that community. In nearly all cases, an indirect effect also exists: instead of focusing resources on addressing issues of social equity, these resources are essentially wasted on design concerns that benefit only the elite. Since the failure of modernism is well-documented, I focus the majority of this paper on postmodernism’s design movement, “New Urbanism”, with a particular focus on the failure of its early incarnation in Vancouver and a critical assessment of the arguments regarding equity put forth by some of New Urbanism’s most avid proponents.

The negative impacts of modernist urban design are so well-documented that their rearticulation seems barely necessary. In Global City Blues, Solomon describes modern planning as a nearly megalomaniacal attempt on a societal level to impose the will of humanity on the environment. As the affluent flee to the suburbs and then these suburbs fall into decline as the affluent move to “edge” or “edgeless” cities, modern “planning” can be construed as neither equitable nor sustainable. In fact, one can even wonder if it is “planning” at all, or rather a seemingly inexorable unfolding of an impulse towards decentralization and genericism. Even in the inner city core, vestiges of wholly modern planning are clearly failures, as superblock housing tenements have bred violence and fallen into disrepair for decades. The question is therefore not whether urban design in general can be effective in addressing issues of equity—the modern experiment clearly dismisses such a conclusion—but rather whether any new form of urban design can step in and successfully address these concerns. Although the most coherent alternative to modernist design is the “New Urbanist” design movement, New Urbanism fails to address the equity problem.

Before proceeding with the critique of New Urbanism, it is important to place it within the overall context of postmodernism. The standard view on this point is that New Urbanism is a postmodern development because it reacts to the monolithic rational processes of modernism with a more discursive, neo-traditional approach. Where modernism dismisses form as a subsidiary (at most) of function, New Urbanism celebrates aesthetics, as long as they are human-scale, walkable, quaint, and so on. While modernism executes the same solution across all areas (gridded streets or cul de sacs designed solely for automobile traffic, for example), New Urbanism seeks eclectic, seemingly incoherent, solutions (overlayed and complex patterns of pedestrian and transit systems sensitive to the environment, for example). While modernism divides land by its function, New Urbanism promotes mixed use. Yet New Urbanism and postmodernism are not simply neo-traditional reactions to modernism, but rather “an attempt to balance traditionalism and modernism by intertwining ideas from each” [Schmandt, 352].[2]

The argument against New Urbanism is not new. Susan Fainstein summarily critiques the movement in her article “New Directions in Planning Theory”, presenting two clear reasons why New Urbanism fails to address the equity issue. First, new developments are generally impossible without substantial financial backing, and, in order to get that support, designers usually must eliminate schemes for low-income housing that were originally incorporated into their overall plan. Second, New Urbanist neighborhoods generally become homogeneous in their social character, despite attempts to incorporate diversity. Mitchell supports Fainstein’s latter contention in eTopia, as he warns against the possible propensity for new designed communities to become homogenized as residents, increasingly mobile, choose to live with people more similar than different from them.[3] Moreover, in cases where the design seeks to redevelop an area already used by the disenfranchised, it usually ends up failing to understand the underlying importance of the area to the disenfranchised and ultimately displaces them [Crawford].

Substantial empirical evidence against New Urbanism has existed for quite some time. One of the most formidable examples of failed New Urbanism comes not from recent plans but from Vancouver, before the movement even had a name. In the 1960’s, the residents of Vancouver voted into power a liberal political party by the name of TEAM, which had goals directly coinciding with New Urbanist principles, as Ley explains:

“The major purpose identified by its planning and development guideline was ‘To plan and develop Vancouver for people,’ a strategy in which participation, aesthetics, pollution control, more parks, neighborhood preservation, and mixed land use were to be major elements” [Ley, 250]

Having won political power on a platform of making Vancouver a “livable city”, TEAM could lay claim to a political mandate more powerful than what many New Urbanist contingents dream of. They were swift to take action, shutting down a freeway expansion in 1967, while most cities in North America were fighting to acquire one.

The exacerbation of social equity issues were not merely an overlooked side effect of the TEAM’s “livable city” movement—like many New Urbanists of today, they actively sought to address social equity, as shown by their stated goals for the False Creek redevelopment project.[4] Here, the TEAM plan was to redevelop an industrial area such that “small circular enclaves [were to be] constructed to shelter homogeneity within a broader development of heterogeneous enclaves. This strategy would also aid in creating a neighborhood character and a sense of resident identity and control, regarded as important features of livability” [Ley, 254]. Making this example an even more potent test of the possibilities of New Urbanism, TEAM bypassed Fainstein’s concerns about the necessity of private buy-in by publicly funding the entire redevelopment.

The results were far from what TEAM intended. Over the course of the next ten years, housing prices doubled. Not only were low and middle income residents forced to vacate their current homes, those of a similar socio-economic status in neighboring communities were forced to leave. Small shopkeepers were forced to vacate their stores because they were unable to comply with TEAM’s new design standards. Finally, TEAM made costly sacrifices to maintain their design principles. For example, they redeveloped an adjacent golf course as a park, rather than building new housing that could have at best served low or middle income residents and at worst provided more housing for the elites—and more taxes for the city.

Of course, for every Vancouver, another city may exist in which New Urbanist principles have succeeded in addressing equity concerns. In fact, Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton,[5] noted advocates of New Urbanism,[6] make this point repeatedly in The Regional City, stressing that equity issues cannot be addressed at all without “creating a vision for the physical design of the region” [Calthorpe & Fulton, 105]. However, despite nine examples to supposedly illustrate their point, Calthorpe and Fulton wholly fail to demonstrate that physical design can have any impact whatsoever on social equity concerns. The general structure of Calthorpe and Fulton’s argument for six of these examples (the superregions and the state-led regions) is to show that equity concerns had not been impacted by varying forms of regional plans that usually did not include clear visions for physical design. The absence of such visions is linked without any evidence to the presence of social equity problems:

“Policy-based efforts to manage growth that do not focus on regional form and inequity will likely fail because of local government competition and unintended consequences that may lead to more sprawl, not less. Sprawl is not a problem that can be overcome simply by bureaucratic processes; rather, it must be addressed through a conscious effort of regional and neighborhood design” [Calthorpe & Fulton, 188].

Calthorpe and Fulton’s conclusion about the necessity of “regional and neighborhood design” might be believable had they supported the notion that such design successfully addressed social equity issues with their other examples. However, the most that the successful designs (Portland) could claim was that housing prices did not increase any more than those in other Western cities like Denver, where design principles had not been implemented [Calthorpe & Fulton, 125]. This observation is hardly a ringing endorsement of New Urbanism’s ability to address social equity. In fact, based on this information alone, if a municipal government wanted to address social equity, its best move would be to save money by not performing any urban design at all and then use that money to assist low income residents keep pace with housing costs as they inevitably rise. Such a policy coincides with Foley’s viewpoint that income assistance is more important than design when addressing social equity.

In the end, despite its noble intentions otherwise, New Urbanism ultimately is nothing more than the most recent taste in upscale living for an emerging elite founded upon an information and service-oriented economy. Koolhaas’s “hyper-Paris” applies here: those who decry the genericism of big box retail in the periphery create little more with a Starbucks on every corner of their trendy New Urbanist development. Instead of stereos and CDs for sale, it’s coffee and sociability. New Urbanism underlines lackings in current sprawl—community, human scale, aesthetics, walkability, and sometimes social equity and diveristy—and then commodifies them. Put rather unmildly, Fainstein describes New Urbanism as creating a “New Suburbia” in which “the appeal of Victorian gingerbread and Cape Cod shingle would not override the fear or racial and social integration.”[7] Ley calls this type of development “consumption with style” and argues that even initial inroads in the social equity issue will likely disappear when the economy sours and the elites can no longer afford to pay for equity solutions. Thus, rather than providing a marked break from modern design, New Urbanism inevitably perpetuates it when examined from the viewpoint of social equity.

This critique of New Urbanism closely follows the critique of neo-traditional postmodernism lodged by deconstructivists. Advocates of deconstruction point to the underlying continuity in power structures from traditionalism to modernism to postmodernism and call for a radical break from the past by contesting the hegemonic relationships that pervade all aspects of our everyday lives. In architecture, we see mockeries of form in the work of Gehry, Behnish, and Shinohara, buildings that seek to “disorient the observer” [Tansey & Kleiner, 1149]. In urban design, similar mockeries (streets that lead nowhere, buildings with no purpose) can and should be conceived of as frivolous and vain, but the deconstructivist critique may best manifest itself in the implementation of Koolhaas’s offhanded closing suggestions in “Whatever Happened to Urbanism”:

“To survive, urbanism will have to imagine a new newness. Liberated from its atavistic duties, urbanism redefined as a way of operating on the inevitable will attack architecture, invade its trenches, drive it from its bastions, undermine its certainties, explode its limits, ridicule its preoccupations with matter and substance, destroy its traditions, smoke out its practitioners” [Koolhaas, 152].

While Koolhaas goes on to promote this “urbanism” as aspiring towards “frivolity” and “irony”, attempts at deconstruction in urban design need not be light-hearted. Community advocacy is a strong alternative movement in planning that places the burden of design on the communities themselves; Philadelphia’s own Village of Arts and Humanities might be examined as a successful example of this approach. However, Fainstein also critiques community advocacy as a planning theory, suggesting a superior approach exists in promoting “just cities”. Unfortunately, her description of “just cities” is too vague to merit discussion much less a recommendation, but it does at its heart place the planner in a pivotal in a revolution to thwart current modes of power.

To conclude, I must confess that I personally would prefer to live in a New Urbanist community and will probably spend money to do so. When designed properly, they provide an atmosphere that caters to the socio-economic group in which I undoubtedly if only regrettably fall. However, concerned as I am about issues of social equity, I cannot stop at New Urbanism as a solution to these concerns, despite its claims otherwise. Thus, to answer the question “Is urban design possible” for me, I answer with a hesitant “yes”. To the question “Is urban design possible” for everyone, the answer must be a resounding “no”.

Bibliography of Works Consulted

Amos, Ash & Stephen Graham. “The Ordinary City”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol 22, No4 (1997), pp 411-429.

Fainstein, Susan. “New Directions in Planning Theory”, Urban Affairs Review (2000).

Fainstein, Norman & Susan Fainstein. “The Future of Community Control”, The American Political Science Review, Vol 70, No 3 (1976), 905-923.

Foley, Donald. “The Sociology of Housing”, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol 6 (1980), pp 457-478.

Gottdiener, M. “A Marx for Our Time: Henri Lefebvre & the Production of Space,” Sociological Space, Vol 11, No 1 (Mar 1993), 129-134.

Humphries, Stan. “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Firm: Impact of Economic Scale & Political Participation,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol 45, No 3 (Jul 2001), 678-699.

Ley, David. “Liberal Ideology & the Postindustrial City”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol 70, No 2 (Jun 1980), 238-258.

Merrifield, Andrew. “The Struggle over Place: Redeveloping American Can in Southeast Baltimore”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers,New Series, Vol 18, No 1 (1993), pp 102-121.

Merrifield, Andrew. “Place & Space: A Lefebrian Revolution”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol 18, No 4 (1993), pp 516-531.

Rubin, Barbara. “Aesthetic Ideology & Urban Design”, Annals of the Association of American Geography, Vol 69, No 3 (Sep 1979), pp 339-361.

Schmandt, Michael J. “Postmodern Phoenix”, Geographical Review, Vol 85, No 3 (Jul 1995), 349-363.

Tansey, Richard G & Fred S Kleiner, eds. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages (10th edition), Harcourt Brace College Publishers, Fort Worth, 1996.

[1] In this paper, I focus on urban design as the intentional manipulation of physical form on at least a neighborhood scale rather than take the broader interpretation of urban design as simply urban planning in general. Therefore, while I am aware of Hopkins’ discussion of the appropriateness of planning in certain situations, it is not necessary to discuss him.

[2] At first glance, Koolhaas’ description of the “generic city” provides an alternative view of postmodernism. In the “generic city”, formlessness replaces form (even form defined by function), decentralization replaces centralization, and thoughtful, stoic expressions of the modernist ideal (Le Corbusier) are replaced with bland and generic non-expressions repeated mindlessly across the landscape (KFC). However, we must wonder if we are not simply observing modernism taken to its end: it is function over form to the point of formlessess.

[3] On the flip side, Humphries presents an interesting argument for New Urbanist design and its positive impact on equity by pointing out that neighborhoods in which the majority of the residents commute for significant amount of time to work tend to be less politically engaged. Thus, to the extent that the disenfranchised commute lengthy distances to work, they would be helped by transit-oriented, mixed-use urban design.

[4] According to Ley: Here the liberal ideology could not have been more explicit: ‘Communities which offer little social and physical diversity are unhealthy…health in any form is invariably connected to diversity’” [Ley, 254].

[5] I fully realize that this reading has not yet been discussed in class. However, in reading ahead, I could not ignore the contradictions between their viewpoints and what I planned on writing in this paper, so I felt I needed to address them.

[6] Apart from mentioning in the text and providing numerous examples of New Urbanism in action, “The Charter of the New Urbanism” is the only appendix in their book.

[7] The quote comes from reading for Professor Birch’s class that is difficult to cite because she has distributed to us a paraphrased version of the original article in a word processing document that reflects in no way the published page layout.

Advertisement