Putting Pieces Together

This emerged as a comment to this Old Urbanist post, but was rejected because of its length:

So the conventional theory is dead wrong; the data show the actual catalyst occurred during WWII. (Interestingly, there seems to be a strong correlation with home ownership and car ownership between the 1920s and 1950s; secondly, car ownership rises abruptly after WWII and surpasses the home-ownership rate.)

This, of course, begs the second question which the automotive theory "solved": the postwar collapse of the American city. My guess is that it was a combination of factors--some still at work--including a desire to emulate lifestyles portrayed in entertainment media, race, inefficient/incompetent/oversized city government, and even the ability to "cash out".

Think about it for a moment: the initial homeownership boom occurred BEFORE the Levitt brothers started their tract community, BEFORE detached housing became regulated as the dominant and standard housing type in zoning codes. If the initial catalyst for the homeownership surge was owners taking their properties off the rental market to avoid wartime rent controls, then it also stands to reason that the following sequence of events could have taken place:

1. Some owners, owning a property that was converted from apartments to a family property, would add supplementary income by renting out unused portions of the property.

2. For other reasons, some of them related to the ease of acquiring FHA mortgages, households engaged in this activity would buy a new (suburban) property, while continuing to rent out the existing property for supplementary income.

3. The Great Migration's second wave began in force after WWII. While urban families were enjoying unprecedented prosperity, the Migration would begin to control the demographics of the rental market.

(By the way, the first major wave of the Great Migration, in the 1920s, was probably catalytic in the imposition of zoning codes in the first place.)

4. Urban neighborhoods at this stage are composed of an even interspersion of homeowned and rental properties. However, a knock-on effect of the Great Migration is an intense demographic change in the rental market. Demographic mixing begins to take place, due to the ownership matrix, in a wide variety of neighborhoods.

5. Sociological norms take over. This was the nadir of American race relations, after all. Owners who had previously primarily invested in the city purchase elsewhere; some may convert their existing property to rentals; others panic-sell, driving the total stock into the hands of a few larger landlords aiming to make money off of the rental market.

6. The Great Migration creates an intense rental demand. Sociologists analyze the patterns occurring in existing neighborhoods as another example of invasion and succession (which it is.)

At this point, we can see why the demographic changeover occurred, but not the urban collapse. But the major collapse didn't happen until twenty years after WWII, which implies a delayed effect. It also happened concomitant with an (generally unremarked) failure in the financial system at large--the stagflationary period--which was remedied not by any great change in structure, but by increasing leverage (i.e. debt). This, in turn, would be the ultimate causor of the 2007-8 meltdown, as the scope of leverage grew to a level too great to bear.

This financial system was rearranged, by the way, beginning in the late 1920s. It shifted from a bipolar system that largely existed in the form of B&Ls and other small institutions that funded small-scale improvements in local neighborhoods, with a handful of large investment banks whose financial structures had been built to proffer vast streams of capital to the likes of the Goulds, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, at the other end...The Great Depression was catastrophic on the smaller end of this market, and eventually produced regional- and national-tier institutions. Neighborhood finance had died by the end of the Great Depression. These new regional investors (a combination of larger neighborhood banks, smaller investment banks, and a few regional banks which had existed before), out for profit, in turn practiced a targeted investment strategy (which we today know as redlining).

The targeted investment strategy targeted investments which were focused around certain types of investments the Federal government heavily favored--FHA mortgages and the ancillary infrastructure--to the exclusion of all others. The system became efficient but fragile. The system failed--stagflation occurred--when Mother Nature presented Uncle Sam with the bill for maintaining that ancillary infrastructure (per Strong Towns).

But, because there were no local investment vehicles--the role traditionally performed by neighborhood banks, B&Ls, small-scale S&Ls, etc.--there was no capital available for areas disfavored by banks' targeted investment strategies. What had happened, if you think about Jane Jacobs' The Economy of Cities\, was that capital had become amazingly efficient, but it had ceased to be productive at developing a new middle class. With a dearth of capital, and an inability (due to Federal regulations) to develop neighborhood capital vehicles, the middle class that should have developed under traditional invasion and succession theory did not; urban tax bases began to erode, and cities found themselves in financial crisis. Collapse happened.

To recap: American race relations had created a demographic turnover structure called "invasion and succession" by sociologists. Like lived with like. Invasion and succession, by itself, explains why American cities became majority African-American during the Second Great Migration.

The Economy of Cities takes it from there, both by explaining how productive economic development happens within and without the invasion & succession framework, and how finance can be productive OR efficient (but not both): an economy can develop, adding new goods and new work, or it can stagnate, replicating existing work unendingly. After the Crash of 1929, the financial system shifted in favor of efficiency over productivity, which over time deprived the African American community of the ability to develop an internal middle class, which, by the 1970s, undermined cities' tax systems to the point of collapse. It is no accident that the highest level of population flight from cities was during those decades.

Subdued Christmas in Center City

It’s Christmastime in Center City! And you would hardly know that from looking at the papers. The city’s best light shows this year, declared the Metro last week, are in Franklin Square, Chestnut Hill, and Lower Moyamensing (so spectacular it merited its own article).

But what about, y’know, Walnut Street? Or Market? Aren’t the best Christmas decorations in the city supposed to be in its commercial core? Shouldn’t they? After all, is there any better way to encourage people to buy something than to be festive about it?

So I took my camera, and I observed ... Continue reading at Hidden City Philadelphia.

PLVI Drift

PLVI stands for Peak Land Value Intersection--that is, where, in the city, the rents are costliest. It is, for all intents and purposes, the "center" of the city.

And, like the magnetic North Pole, it drifts. It can drift obliquely slightly, but this drift tends to favor the direction of the favored quarter. If the favored quarter is the west, it drifts in a westerly direction; if it's southeast, southeasterly. Sometimes accidents of geography can really nail it down, but it seems to head a couple of blocks further every generation or two.

Because High--later Market--Street was cluttered with market sheds for most of Philadelphia's early history, the PLVI, "directed" as it is by the elite in their favoritism patterns, favored Chestnut. At the time of the Revolution, the best evidence suggests it was at 2nd and Chestnut. Philadelphia's early financial district grew up along the 400 block of Chestnut, placing the PLVI there. By the fin-de-siècle, the largest department stores clustered around 8th and Market (Strawbridge & Clothier, Gimbel Brothers, and Lit Brothers), making that the PLVI, and by the 1920s it had jumped west to the corner of Broad and South Penn Square (City Hall), and thence migrated south to Broad and Chestnut, which is where Jane Jacobs found it (in her critique of it being the home of banks and not much else). It moved to 15th and Market not long after her writing, and then to 17th and JFK by the 1980s, when the postmodern skyscrapers were built--most recently the Comcast Center.

Bacon predicted it would move to 30th Street Station, which it is doing (slowly). The PLVI sat around City Hall for the first half of the 20th century in part because it was the point of maximal transportation access: the Reading Terminal and the Pennsylvania's Broad Street Station, to varying degrees of literalness, abutted the building. When Suburban replaced Broad as the Pennsy's main commuter station, and 30th Street its main intercity station, this all but guaranteed a long term westward movement of the PLVI. Something similar happened in New York, where Midtown Manhattan developed between Grand Central and Penn Station.

So what kinds of examples can you find in your city of PLVI drift? Former PLVIs are etched into the architecture. Where was the financial district located when your city was founded? A hundred years later? Two? Philadelphia, being one of the oldest major cities in the U.S., has more history to draw on than most--but that does not necessarily mean its PLVI drifted the furtherest.

Development of Philadelphia

Philaphilia and Philly Bricks, with their love of historical images, give us two looks at the development of Philadelphia from more or less the same vantage point.

In 1707 the city had just been founded, and this view shows how it was still basically just a small country town, built entirely in an area that is easy to walk around: south of Arch, north of Spruce, and east of 4th. Most of it was on the Old City side of Dock Creek (thus explaining Elfreth's Alley's age). Notice the building placement: it is not random. Since time immemorial, blocks--especially planned blocks--have had their first buildings built in the middle of the block, and as time progressed, to the edges (which became the most valuable properties) and deep into the core, nested around a series of ever-narrower alleys. The residential parts of Wash West preserve this structure quite well.

Looking at this mid-nineteenth-century view of this same spot, the pattern of densification can clearly be seen, with most blocks bi- and trisected by alley networks of varying complexity. Furthermore, the first major intervention to the grid is visible: Dock Street, following the old Dock Creek, curves around, sweeping inland. The creek's headwaters were at what is today 4th and Market; Dock Street, however, terminates around 3rd and Sansom (about 1.5 blocks southeast). This is because the land value along Market and (especially) Chestnut* is so high that the expense of eliminating interventions can be borne by the landowners--typically banks and financiers--looking to locate at the center of the action.
__________
* Philadelphia's PLVI at this time was essentially the 400 block of Chestnut.

The Hidden Order of Urban Organization

I came across this excellent excerpt (p. 157 ff) from F. Donato and L.L. Basili's excellent 1996 text L'ordine nascosto dell'organizzazione urbana (see title), translated ad hoc by my professor, Chuck Dyke:

The urban organism auto-regulates*, in this way, its own development, tapping into a repertoire of solutions already experimented with that become adapted, when necessary, to new exigences. The role of the planner revolves, therefore, around the "collective memory"**, historical and cultural[,] of urban civilization that while renewing itself and evolving always maintains a strong relation of continuity with the past. In contrast to the planner, who checks the validity of the projected idea on the basis of rational analysis of how it responds to the context and to its impact on the future development of the urban organism, the organizing solutions of the collective memory are legitimated by their proven historical efficacy: they are the result of a selection protracted in time. This characteristic situation is at the same time a measure of the power and the limits of the organic city: if on one side it is capable of adapting itself with great flexibility to changing circumstances, on the other side its effective capacity to adapt depends essentially on one factor: the absence of traumatic discontinuity within the external conditions. ...In the presence of a context radically altered, and therefore with exigencies and problematics thoroughly new, which require a creative radical effort and therefore the search for organizing solutions entirely original, the capacity for self-organization of an organic city goes into crisis, and the danger of chaotic degeneration becomes concrete (emphasis mine).

I suggest any of you who can read Italian get this book: it deals expressly with a subject that urban theory has only implicitly dealt with in the Anglosphere.
_________
* He suggests replacing this translation with self-regulates.
** Cf. Carl Jung.

What Makes Up Walkability Anyway?

Yesterday, commenting on Strong Towns, I commented on how jogging paths and crosswalks don't make up "walkability" and the Walk Score showed that, giving the school a walk score of a cool 3. I contrasted the locally-highly-amenitized Kensington High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, on the border between Fishtown and Norris Square, with a Walk Score of 83, to demonstrate what a walkable school would actually look like.

And then I Walk Scored a commercial strip from my childhood. Here's what it looks like. It's pure sprawl, and an effort to traverse in anything that doesn't have four wheels and a motor. Yet it gets a Walk Score of 72. Why?

It occurs to me there are two aspects to "walkability" (or transit mobility in general): you have to have locational amenities--that is, somewhere to walk to, and traversal amenities--that is, what kind of effort it takes to get there. Locational amenities are places, and places such as stores, restaurants, parks, schools, churches, friends' houses/apartments/condos, while traversal amenities are the condition and quality of the trip. For pedestrians, this means wide sidewalks, good (and frequent and signalized) crosswalks, fairly narrow streets, and lots of interest and variety in one's surroundings, including variety in the built environment and of traversal paths; issues that decrease traversal amenity include poor sidewalks (if not no sidewalks), overly wide roads, poor crosswalks (if any at all), poorly set stoplights, overly deep setbacks (especially for commercial), highway boundaries (such as Bethlehem Pike in the example above or DeKalb Pike by King of Prussia; many suburban strips are, unfortunately, arrayed around these highway boundaries), lack of interest along path (few buildings, buildings too deeply set back, lack of usage distinctions, oversized parking, etc.), and so on.

Now, needless to say, locational amenities need to be weighted over traversal amenities. Locational amenity trumps traversal amenity when the area of traversal, from door to door, is relatively short (500 ft., say) and not blocked by some sort of boundary feature (fence, wall, waterway, cliff, highway, thicket, etc.) Desire lines in the suburbs routinely get etched through narrow hedgerows and woods, for example, for precisely this reason. However, there is also a horizon or sunset, beyond which traversal effort in the main trumps any kind of locational amenities whatsoever. Let's peg pedestrian sunset at 2000 ft. As the traversal effort increases, the need for locational amenities likewise increase, as a way to counteract the effort being expended and keep the pedestrian sunset from shrinking (to 1500 ft. or even 1000 ft., say). This shrink space indicates an increased importance of traversal amenity, meaning it now trumps location as the primary determinant in whether one will walk; beyond the sunset, this is in turn trumped by distance. The presence (or absence) of traversal amenity can be determined empirically, critically scaled, and then weighted against the scales of location (and location density) and distance.

The problem with Walk Score is frankly that it only measures and weights locational amenities, and then weights them by locational density as an address function. It in no way measures traversal amenity, or even traversal, for that matter; Walk Score perceives Airport Square and Montgomery Mall as being on opposite sides of the road and hence highly locationally dense; it does not register that to actually walk from the exit of Airport Square's Toys "R" Us to Montgomery Mall's entrance one has to traverse two goliath parking lots 500 feet each with a serious boundary feature (Bethlehem Pike) without any sort of safe crossing halfway between. It, in other words, fails to register that the built environment, with no pedestrian traversal amenities whatsoever perpendicular to the lay of the buildings, has effectively created a pedestrian sunset precisely as deep as the setbacks. Without pedestrian amenities, distance trumps location as soon as location ceases to be an independently viable draw.

Because of this, Walk Score is only a useful means of measuring pedestrian amenity when pedestrian amenity is there to begin with. We can see the contrast when we compare Montgomeryville's walk score with that of the closest Main Street, that in Lansdale. The implication is clear: either (a) Walk Score has to do a better job of measuring walkability viz. traversal amenities, or (b) a new walkability score is needed.

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.
_____________
* 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.

The Psychological Ramifications of the Radiant City

This essay grew out of my brief page description on the subject. Honestly, I had no idea the psychology would run so deep...I just kept following the causal chain. --S.M.S.

Okay. Space can be assigned in a passive or active manner. Structures, such as houses, apartments, offices, retail, and so forth, are active insofar as they respond to their context; the space between, whether it is used as streets, sidewalks, parks, gardens, courts, quads, or whatever, is, by contrast, passive. Passive space isn't built for a particular activity, and as a result, all sorts of activity may happen in it. Enclosure is the way surrounding active space responds to the passive space so as to certain kinds of activity in the passive space and not others--that is, it activates it. When this activization process fails, passive space goes unused.

But to activate a passive space, there must be a critical mass of activity surrounding it. Even large parks are activated in such a manner: witness Central Park, Fairmount Park, Hyde Park, or Balboa Park. Enclosure is thus an act of definition above all else: if the opposite process is attempted, the interspersion of active uses in parkland, there is not enough of a concentration of active uses to effectively define and enclose a space: it cannot be activated, and hence becomes a barrier, both physically and mentally. Worse, if this parkland ethos is implemented via public controls on private property (zoning), this is an effective privatization of what should be amenity space (parkland)...and when enforced on human habitat (where we put our houses) via these means, where we raise our kids, the barrier aspects of undefined, unenclosed, inactive parkland can inculcate themselves deep into our young, and express itself in a surprising, fractal, chaotic manner. Unchecked, it can even define culture.

The idea of this pseudo-rural landscape, of houses dotting sweeping parkland, can be powerful, aesthetically enthralling, and sinfully seductive--but it conceals a dark underside--barrier mentality yields a more domesticated culture, a culture that can actually be controlled from the top down. Rulers have ruled populations from the top down, yes, but no culture has ever been centralized in such a manner. Only recently has technology even emerged that makes it possible--the technology we call "zoning", the privatization of public space, which causes the proliferation of the barrier mentality, further enforced by the norms we vaguely call "autocentrism" but could just as equally call the fortress mentality--the cloistering away of nearly every active use behind blank walls and vast parking lots, eliminating any possibility of activation of the passive in-between space, furthering the perception of "danger" of any space not so protected, which morphs into a fear of the city, due not so much to its intermingling of uses but rather because properly "urban" buildings have no need of protective fortressing, since they reinforce one another and activate in-between spaces synergistically. Eventually the slum belt around the urban core is treated, psychologically, as barrier space (the same type of space as the flowing parkland enforced by suburban setback requirements), and, without proper fortressing of the core, the indefensible space is abandoned.

The fortress mentality is an essentially militaristic way of looking at the world: the car becomes the tank conveying us from sanctum to sanctum through wilderness, and those who do not, whether through inability or choice, use it become something other, and hence inferior. Autocentrism is thus an outgrowth, and symptomatic, of this larger problem.

Corbusier, when he codified this barrier vision, the ironically-named Radiant City, foresaw the inevitable rise of autocentrism his vision would entail, and of suburbanization, but it is extremely doubtful he understood the full psychological ramifications of his vision, and how treacherous it ultimately is. The barrier and fortress mentalities I just described--they destroy freedom. They destroy freedom by the destruction of choice through the illusion of choice, but much more insidiously, they destroy freedom by control over marketplaces of ideas. They create and abet a narrow range of narratives (ideologies) of the world, and, over the long term, dogmatize them by making even the conception of narratives outside of these narrow ranges exceedingly difficult--a feat worthy of Newspeak. It's unlikely anyone could have ever foresaw these consequences, and frankly these are viewpoints only noticeable after several generations' worth of data, with a means of communication and understanding which transcends the limitations of lived world of the barrier and fortress mentalities (and which, in another feat of irony, emerged from them), and with serious grounding in deep Western thought, such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (it has to be Western because this argument employs causal chains, empiricality, and falsifiability, all of which are a priori to the conduct of Western science, i.e. the intellectual tradition of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton).

It is perhaps a direct result of the rise of the Internet that the psychological problems with a world built on the sweeping-landscape vision became evident to the degree they have, to the point where the rejection of this world has become a generational moment. (The end of the Cold War probably has something to do with it, too.)  But with entire successive generations of Americans raised under this worldview, its effects will continue to echo in our culture generations from now. And it is our responsibility, as the meta-architects of our generation, to start the process of healing our built form, of fixing our shared psychology at its source.