The Virtues of Cities

　　Alex Krieger

　　Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design

　　Density

　　An essential ingredient of a town is its density, measured not in square feet but in the juxtaposition of artifice with human activity. "I have three chairs in my house:" Thoreau wrote, "one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society." He may have preferred solitude but understood the civilizing force of aggregation. Density, as distinct from congestion, promotes engagement. Interaction, made possible by proximity, is crucial and far more difficult to sustain where things are spread out across great distance, e-mail notwithstanding. The photographer, Alfred Steiglitz, urged his students to move in a little closer, to crop their scene a little tighter, after they composed a shot. Similar advice would benefit those who build the American City. Outside of a few pockets of genuine congestion, greater proximity among buildings and activities would benefit sociability.

　　Propinquity

　　In an age promising ever more instant communication it is easy, but wrongheaded, to assume that physical proximity in no longer important. Each day some 75,000 people visit the Mall of America, located in Bloomington, Minnesota, conveniently outside both Minneapolis and St. Paul. Are they there merely to shop, or does the popularity of the place (in which retail sales have actually lagged behind industry standards) lie partially in enabling a primitive kind of propinquity to occur? Some do shop, while more seem to be riding the indoor roller coaster, posing with the giant Snoopy, building Lego castles and enjoying the crowd. Our need for contact with others is such that we will commute great distances to places like mall concourses, forgetting that they are but simulations of environments traditionally found in cities such as Minneapolis and in St. Paul. The popularity of recreational shopping, tourism, theme parks, sporting events, specialized museums, trade shows, movie theaters (despite five hundred cable channels), even charity walk-a-thons, express a subliminal need for social contact -- for the sheer pleasure of it.

　　Heterogeneity within an Ordered Fabric

　　This is a corollary to locating many things and activities close together. The beauty of Boston's Back Bay lies in the tension between the similarities and differences among the facades along a block, and the repetition of such blocks along streets which themselves subtely differ in dimension, landscaping, edge definition and principal use. Buildings, like citizens, warrant their idiosyncrasies so long as each behaves civilly toward neighbors. Spaced at intervals of a half-an-acre or more the need for civility decreases. Indeed, there is a kind of illusion of autonomy about buildings spread over a vast landscape. You can presume an indifference toward neighbors when not arrayed cheek-by-jowl.

　　Juxtaposed Realms

　　Lewis Mumford once defined a town as the place where the greatest number of choices are available in the smallest geographical area. Nodding approval, we go so far as to label "Central Business District" on our zoning maps and mix offices with shops. The demise of vital downtowns generally parallels the rise in the use of the term Central Business District. Why would anyone want to live, shop, dine, relax, meet a friend, cruise in a convertible, attend a concert, see a movie, go to school, take a walk with a sweetheart, or simply choose to hang-out in a place called the central business district? Because our downtowns have become mere business districts their appeal diminishes even for businesses who eventually leave in search of environments which offer their employees a wider array of amenities. Instead of pining for the return of business interests to the downtown we should turn our attention to overcoming the absence of all other interests.

　　Neighbors Unlike Ourselves

　　We have a notion that the ideal suburb was a place solely of quarter- acre house lots and a homogenous population. Actually, some of the most charming early suburbs, like Forest Hill Gardens in Queens or Roland Park in Baltimore, contained a rich mixture of dwelling sizes and clusters. Forest Hill Gardens was actually an experiment in providing wider housing choices for a diverse middle class. Diversity in house types is more likely to accommodate diversity of social, economic and age groups. This is not particularly popular among contemporary suburban developers, many of whom cater their subdivisions to increasingly narrow segments of the population. A growing concern about such environments is that they breed indifference, or worse intolerance, towards social groups beyond their gates. Such indifference is unlikely to enhance democracy. While towns were always made up of defined neighborhoods, and even enclaves, proximity among them, along with a shared streets and public spaces assured regular interaction. Such interaction, or the mere promise of it, remains one of the advantages of town life.

　　Social Landmarks

　　A statue of President McKinley graces and organizes traffic in an otherwise graceless rotary in North Adams, Massachusetts. The center of Riverside, Illinois, one of the nation's earliest planned suburbs, is marked by a modest train depot and a beautiful water tower. Landmarks confer coherence and legibility, not status. They highlight things that are dear to a community -- like remembering a president or the storage of water. They are not produced by labeling, or through form alone. This is apparently beyond the comprehension of those who name their shopping strip "Center Place," their office park "Landmark Square," and mark each with a faux campanile.

　　Texture, Detail and Narrative

　　The many buffalo gargoyles on the face of the city hall in Buffalo, New York are not only endearing, but relate a place-name to an entire epoch of frontier urbanization. An old storefront in New Bedford, Massachusetts may carry reminders of ships, whaling and trade, not unlike a street in modern Tokyo which exhibits the near-cacophony of a culture obsessed with digital technology. Public environments benefit from such excesses. Robert Browning's "less is more," was not intended to describe a town's public realm. The aphorism's principal modern proponent, Mies van der Rohe, could also be heard to say that "God rests in the details." A preponderance of detail invested with qualites characteristic of a place was for Kevin Lynch essential to good city form. These are what Italo Calvino's Marco Polo describes to Kubla Kahn in order to make him see the cities of his travels.

　　Connectivity

　　Some of today's most frustrating rush hour snarls occur on the perimeter highways which pass through the uncrowded suburbs. Arterial highways channel traffic and, therefore, limit choice. A network of streets, narrow, crooked and even redundant, provides actual choice and, more importantly, the promise of choice. On a congested highway relief is no closer than the next set of exit ramps, assuming one knows where they lead. By taking a quick left followed by a right while negotiating an urban street grid, a less busy parallel street is found, a traffic back-up may be avoided, a "short-cut" is imagined, a sense of control or freedom is maintained. This is an advantage that every city cabbie understands, but few highway engineers ever acknowledge.

　　Street Fronts

　　In a typical contemporary subdivision the elements furthest away from the street right-of-way seem to receive the greatest design attention. Unfortunately, this leaves much of what influences the experience of the public realm under-designed. On the inside of the fence in a Phoenix subdivision there are beautiful homes, immaculate lawns, wonderful terraces, decks and gardens. On the public side there is simply a road for circulation assumed to require no character. In 1904 an anonymous photographer produced a view of a suburban street which he labeled "the perfect street section." Everything that is in the public eye is carefully designed -- hedges, berms, drainage swails, sidewalks, tree alignments stoops, porches and facades. -- all of the pleasures provided by fronting on a street, instead of an artery.

　　Immediacy of Experience

　　Americans are known for their dislike of walking. Yet they actually walk hundreds of yards each day through parking lots, through shopping malls, through corridors of large buildings, through airport terminals. It is ironic how much of this walking is caused by providing for the convenience of the automobile, and how much of it is forgettable. In a car, or on foot, we commute to a destination. The suburban landscape seems to only offer destinations. But it is the seductions along an interesting path that make (pedestrian urbanism) walking -- and cities -- enjoyable.

　　Sustainability, Persistence and Adaptability

　　While few parts of any city warrant strict preservation, virtually all have potential for reuse. Unfortunately this is often overlooked in the zeal to build a new, usually somewhere else, under the dubious supposition that rebuilding will enable us to get it right the next time. The town of Southfield, a few miles north of Detroit, now boasts a daily commuter population greater than Detroit's. Largely made up of office parks strung along a highway, Southfield's chief advantage seems to be that it is new and not Detroit. And so with each new Southfield a Detroit withers, but one suspects, only temporarily. Long after the single-function office towers of Southfield become outmoded (or simply less new and less profitable) enough of the infrastructure, street grid, building stock, cultural institutions, historic monuments, and neighborhood domains of Detroit will have survived to initiate, perhaps even inspire, reuse. The persistence of a city's morphology and institutions strengthens people's connections to a place. The archetypal suburban landscape, with its coarse grain of development, relative absence of history, and single-use zoning has yet to prove as adaptable to changing social habits or needs.

　　Overlapping Boundaries

　　A city is like a stacking of translucent quilts; with layers of social, architectural, geographical strata sometimes carefully, sometimes imperfectly registered. Subtle or precise, such overlapping of precincts is crucial to place-making. An environment without perceivable boundaries is amorphous, indistinguishable from its surroundings and generally place- less. This is sadly characteristic of much of the modern metropolitan landscape. With apologies to Robert Frost, good fences may not insure good neighbors but neither does their absence foster connectivity or communality.

　　Public Life

　　A large downtown shopping mall like Toronto's Eaton Centre is a marvel of design and a magnet for activity. But a careful observer will note the limited range of activities that take place inside. You will be ushered out onto the street for behavior deemed inappropriate by the management. On that street, lowly or grand, you have rejoined the town. In a city the sense of proximity to a public realm remains palpable, with standards of acceptable public behavior discreetly reinforced. An urban environment cherishes this relative openness and, therefore, yields to privatization only with considerable reluctance.

　　The Potential for a Centered Life

　　Against most planners' predictions, Los Angeles -- the proverbial score of suburbs in search of a town -- has recently grown a visible downtown. It is really mostly a collection of corporate office towers, the product of speculative land economics at work. Yet perhaps there is something in human nature that seeks comfort in centering, and such vertical outcroppings of commerce satisfy that impulse, at least scenographically. While there may be fewer economic and technological reasons for concentration, the new Los Angeles downtown or, for that matter, the continuing reinvestment in Boston's much older center, are expressions of support for centering -- concentration as a matter of choice rather than as an historic imperative.

　　（文章来源：PLACES JOURNAL 1995#9 excerpts）