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Problems for Modern Urban Design

Problems for Modern Urban Design

Allan Jacobs

Professor Emeritus of City & Regional Planning, College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley

 

Keywords: Place, East-west comparison, Sense of community, Urban practices, Urban design tasks

 

Poor living environments

While housing conditions in most advanced countries have improved in terms of such fundamentals as light, air, and space, the surroundings of homes are still frequently dangerous, polluted, noisy, anonymous wastelands. Travel around such cities has become more and more fatiguing and stressful.

Giantism and loss of control

The urban environment is increasingly in the hands of large-scale developers and public agencies. The elements of the city grow inexorably in size, massive transportation systems are segregated for single travel modes, and vast districts and complexes are created that make people feel irrelevant.

People, therefore, have less sense of control over their homes, neighborhoods, and cities than when they lived in slower-growing locally based communities. Such giantism can be found as readily in the housing projects of socialist cities as in the office buildings and commercial developments of capitalist cities.

Large-scale privatization and the loss of public life

Cities, especially American cities, have become privatized, partly because of the consumer society’s emphasis on the individual and the private sector, creating Galbraiths “private affluence and public squalor, “but escalated greatly by the spread of the automobile. Crime in the streets is both a cause and a consequence of this trend, which has resulted in a new form of the city: one of the closed defended islands with blank and windowless facades surrounded by wastelands of parking lots and fast-moving traffic. As public transit systems have declined, the number of places in American cities where people of different social groups actually meet each other has dwindled. The public environment of many American cities has become an empty desert, leaving public life dependent for its survival solely on planned formal occasions, mostly in protected internal locations.

Centrifugal fragmentation

Advanced industrial societies took work out of the home, and then out of the neighborhood, while the automobile and the growing scale of commerce have taken shopping out of the local community. Fear has led social groups to flee from each other into homogeneous social enclaves. Communities themselves have become lower in density and increasingly homogeneous. Thus, the city has spread out and separated to form extensive monocultures and specialized destinations reachable often only by long journey suffrage and extravagant urban system dependent on cheap, available gasoline, and an effective contributor to the isolation of social groups from each other.

Destruction of valued places. The quest for profit and prestige and the relentless exploitation of places that attract the public have led to the destruction of much of our heritage, of historic places that no longer tum a profit, of natural amenities that become overused. In many cases, as in San Francisco, the very value of the place threatens its destruction as hungry tourists and entrepreneurs flock to see and profit from it.

Placelessness

Cities are becoming meaningless places beyond their citizens’ grasp. We no longer know the origins of the world around us. We rarely know where the materials and products come from, who owns what, who is behind what, what was intended. We live in cities where things happen without warning and without our participation. It is an alien world for most people. It is little surprise that most withdraw from community involvement to enjoy their own private and limited worlds.

Injustice

Cities are symbols of inequality. In most cities the discrepancy between the environments of the rich and the environments of the poor is striking. In many instances the environments of the rich, by occupying and dominating the prevailing patterns of transportation and access, make the environments of the poor relatively worse. This discrepancy may be less visible in the low- density modem city, where the display of affluence is more hidden than in the old city; but the discrepancy remains.

Rootless professionalism

Finally, design professionals today are often part of the problem. In too many cases, we design for places and people we do not know and grant them very little power or acknowledgment. Too many professionals are more part of a universal professional culture that part of the local cultures for whom we produce our plans and products. We carry our” bag of tricks” around the world and bring them out wherever we land. This floating professional culture has only the most superficial conception of a particular place. Rootless, it is more susceptible to changes in professional fashion and theory than to local events. There is too little inquiry, too much proposing. Quick surveys are made, instant solutions devised, and the rest of the time is spent persuading the clients. Limits on time and budgets drive us on, but so do lack of understanding and the placeless culture. Moreover, we designers are often unconscious of our own roots, which influence our preferences in hidden ways.

At the same time, the planning profession’s retreat into trends, under the positivist influence of social science, has left it virtually unable to resist the social pressures of the capitalist economy and consumer sovereignty. Planners have lost their beliefs. Although we believe citizen participation is essential to urban planning, professionals also must have a sense of what we believe is right, even though we may be vetoed.

 

(Source: Journal of the American Planning Association, 53:1, 112-120 excerpted