The City As Ideal

This image was taken from local blog Naked Philly, and is of über-narrow Kenilworth St. The houses are modernist in style--yet the charm is Old World. This is the type of street and community Nathan Lewis talks about...

Which brings us to traditional urbanism's preeminent problem. It's an ideal. Nathan Lewis treats the city as Form. He prescribes and dictates. While his ideas are good, his style of presentation is harshly Mumfordian. The problem is still the idea of "the city as problem" (rooted in the unlivability of the Victorian industrial city), only this time transposed to suburbia (where social isolation and transportation inefficiencies become driving problems) and a critique of New Urbanism based on its practice. But New Urbanism itself is rooted in a like critique; the whole history of the problem of the city is a succession of like critiques. Could it be that the so-called problem of the city is rooted in a discontinuity between the way the city is and the perception of what it ought to be? that the problem of the city is one of ideal vs. reality? In other words: that when urban theorists have gotten to work on the problem of the city, the solutions are prescriptive rather than descriptive? It occurs to me that such an impulse behind urban theory, the formulation of idealization as solution, leads inevitably to the utopian dream, the idea that we can create a perfect society. But the critique is obvious: one man's utopia is another man's dystopia. All utopias are also dystopias--yes, even More's--because this pursuit of perfection always impinges upon freedom; and conversely, all lived dystopias must also be utopias--yes, even Zamyatin's, Orwell's, and Huxley's--because the utopian impulse is a desire for perfection, and someone must have thought that such a situation would be the ideal situation of humanity.

Where am I going with this? That suburbia as we know it is a dystopia precisely because it is a utopia. It is a problem precisely because it is a solution (to the urban problems of the early 20th century)...but a solution to the problem of suburbia rooted in the same framework that gave rise to suburbia as a solution to the problem of the city will inevitably lead to a new problem of the city and another solution. In fact, so long as this neoplatonic essence rules theory, the problem becomes endless: the solution, once fait accompli, gives rise to its own undoing. So too the "traditional city" of Lewis' terms. There are multiple ways to build for people, and although the traditional city is one of them, it is hardly the only one. Let me demonstrate what I mean:

This image looks like suburbia, no? Long, meandering curvilinear roads, surfeit of green space, shot internal connectivity. Let me let you in on a great secret: this is Bath, England, and it was built in the mid-1800s, long before the introduction of the automobile. When you zoom into street level what you see are scenes such as this:

Terraced housing (British rowhomes), narrow streets, terminated vistas, and when you turn around, jaw-dropping vistas of the surrounding Somerset downs. From the street, it looks like city; the sky, suburbia. In Bath one sees the culmination of British Georgian taste and some of the earliest representatives of later elaborations--leading eventually to the ones seeking to do away with the city altogether. In one lens, Bath is a city; in another, a suburb. In one lens, Bath is even a traditional city!

While we can all agree that the intense autocentrism of the built form present in modern suburbia is a bad thing for a variety of reasons, we have to also recognize that there is no single perfect way to house humanity, but rather a variety of good ways. The urbanism of Bath is comparable, for example, with the prewar airlite in its effort to meld urban and rural and attempt to accommodate new technologies. To claim there is one perfect way (as Mr. Lewis does, or seems to), is frankly a fallacy of the very worst sort. To attempt to promote one's
"perfect" way in the face of a policy régime geared towards its antithesis while at the same time failing to ask how that régime is to be changed to allow different building traditions--questions Mr. Lewis has never asked--has little chance to be successfully emplaced. In this regard, Charlie Gardner is asking the right questions, because he is asking after a solution rather than just selling an idea.

Quick Note on the History of Urban Planning

Nostalgia* has been behind almost every movement in urban planning.

1. City Beautiful. Nostalgia for the imperial center, as established in Mesopotamian, Greek, and Roman precedent, and retranslated in the Baroque period.
2. Decongestion (for lack of a better word). Nostalgia for the idealized medieval free city. We can see this in Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow and especially in Lewis Mumford's The Culture of Cities.
3. New Urbanism. Nostalgia for the settlement pattern nebulously called "Small Town America". Resultant reduplication of features common to this settlement pattern, with the sole exception of abandonment of the strong grid. Outgrowth of urban theory of Andrés Duany and James Howard Kunstler; informed greatly by Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language.
4. Landscape Urbanism. Nostalgia for Modernism, primarily as an interbellum movement. Led by Charles Waldheim and James Corner. Nostalgia for Frederick Law Olmsted and Le Corbusier.
5. Traditional Urbanism. (Why is it even on here? Because it's the most cogent response to New Urbanism there is, despite its lack of attention in intellectual circles.) Nostalgia for castle towns (for lack of a better term). Nostalgia for density. Articulated best by Charles Gardner and Nathan Lewis. Informed by Jane Jacobs. Desire to harness urban forces operative in e.g. informal settlements.

There are only three major urban theorists who I can think of who are members of no movement--two of whom are Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander--and it's precisely their work that has stayed most relevant through the years. This is frankly because both of their work starts by correctly identifying the problem of the city (a precious rarity in urban theory) and works from there. The third theorist is, of course, Le Corbusier, whose ideas (the Radiant City) have been, by and large, discredited.
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* By nostalgia I mean the idea of a historical urban form as the ideal urban form. There's nothing wrong with that--humanity has experimented with a variety of urbanisms throughout its history, and relatively few have failed. Charlie Gardner pointed out that he's trying not to romanticize, and a laissez-faire approach to urbanism should theoretically lead to a variety of urbanisms; one of my larger points, both in agreement and in contrast with him, is that there are a variety of good urbanisms. Of the schools I pointed out, traditional urbanism comes closest to reflecting this--possibly due to its youth.

Thoughts on Old Urbanism

The first thought I have on Old Urbanism is about street width. Old Urbanists--particularly Nathan Lewis and Charlie Gardner--argue that our streets should be narrower. A lot narrower.

I have no quarrel with this, in principle. There really can't be much of an argument that postwar streets are excessively wide. When I learned in Land Use Planning 101 that the 1960 Philadelphia Subdivision Code mandated streets of at least fifty feet wide, I was shocked; in the lived environment of urban Philadelphia, 50 feet (three traffic lanes and two sidewalks) is the widest a street feels comfortable at.With the exception of the grand boulevards or proto-grand-boulevards (for example, Broad, Market, JFK, Washington, Spring Garden, Girard, Delaware, the Ben Franklin Parkway), no street in Philadelphia's urban core is ever historically* more than 50 feet wide, and the traditional driving of alleyways through the middle of blocks results in a network of ever-narrower streets and mews. Even so, since Philadelphia's primary grid is built up of 50-foot-wide streets (arterial streets, to the Old Urbanists), the mix here is closer to 49-49-2, in terms of narrow streets, arterial streets, and grand boulevards. This hasn't impinged Philadelphia's urbanism a bit.

Secondly, traffic density can also be a determinant of walkability or human-centrism. The primary Chestnut and Walnut Street shopping core is aligned along a pair of 50-foot-wide streets with two ten-foot sidewalks, two traffic lanes, and a parking lane**, but pedestrians and automobiles are segregated due to no more than the sheer force of traffic. Midcentury planners attempted to pedestrianize such streets--Chestnut was pedestrianized for a while--to disastrous results.

That said, I think that no more than the barest handful of streets need be more than 50 (or at the very outside, a very dense 60, like Ridge Avenue here) feet in width. Beyond this, they split rather than knit. Different neighborhoods also require different street widths to feel comfortable. Neighborhoods built on the picturesque-suburban model*** (such as Wynnefield) feel most comfortable with 50-foot roads; more urban neighborhoods are more comfortable with roads that run between 15-20 ft. and 50 ft., with each city having its own idiosyncratic alchemy of the two: this subtle alchemy helps creates a sense of macro-place: we are here and nowhere else.

The second thought I have--since streets are so wide and setbacks so deep--is that we can narrow our streets, and cities with excessively wide streets can make a pile of money by literally selling off excessive street width, in addition to other densification strategies--granny flats along the alley, carving excessively-deep front yards into new buildable parcels, and flat-out per-parcel redevelopment. In places like Detroit, where, for example, the widest streets can reach 200 ft., you can get whole new blocks.****

There are other ways to ameliorate excessively wide streets. Transforming their centers into various types of green space (hedges, swales, and even alamedas) is a good way to make them less excessively autocentric; an alameda is--additionally--a good way to provide bike facilities in underutilized street space. In a handful of instances, going farther is also an option: a trolleyway down the center of this greened space in the center of the street, maybe?
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* Some streets have been widened since. Some the numbered streets accessing the postwar office core of Market West have been widened to 60 or as much as 80(!) feet.
** I do dispute on-street parking a bit...although not by much. The occasional on-street parked car helps control speeding and defines the carriageway, for autos, and effectively becomes a piece of street furniture presenting a lived feeling in the neighborhood for pedestrians: good examples are this narrow (30 ft., I think) street in Manayunk and this street in Wynnefield.
*** Picturesque suburbia is heavenly. Post-picturesque-suburbia becomes ever more hellish.
**** This is not to say that Detroit has a market that can take this additional density, however.