The Continuous City

　　Paul Whalen

　　Partner, Robert A.M. Stern Architects, AIA

　　Keywords: Context, Density, Master Planning, Urban Design, Urban Habitat

　　Walking Matters

　　As cities grow ever denser, governments, developers, architects, and planners must keep in the forefront of their mind the vitality of the human experience that leads people to gather in cities in the first place. As our urban habitat evolves, it must continue to engage the public with walkable settings that unfold as coherent but multifaceted experiences. We cannot forget that the successful planning of an urban community depends upon attention to the fine-grain pedestrian experience: the creation of lively streets that encourage walking and human interaction.

　　Jeff Speck, in his excellent Walkable City (Speck, 2012), breaks down the requirements of walkability into four components: communities must be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting. People in cities need a high level of interest to engage the eye at walking pace; a sense of order to help way finding without signs; and variety to engage the mind and to make every part of the city memorable in its uniqueness. As Jane Jacobs said, “Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical e ort required is trivial” (Jacobs, 1961).

　　While Jane Jacobs’s argument for active, human-scaled, mixed-use streets is now conventional wisdom, those responsible for building today’s cities remain too often seduced by sweeping formal gestures that are compelling at the scale of a printed page but lifeless at full scale. Careful study of the world’s most admired places – both those that have been planned all at once and those that have evolved serendipitously over time – can teach us a lot about how to design new urban environments to meet society’s needs for today and tomorrow.

　　Learning from Manhattan

　　One of the great urban settings that we have studied extensively is our own home city of New York. New York was one of the few cities to incorporate significant high-rise development into a dense urban fabric in the years before World War II. On the gridiron plan first mapped across Manhattan Island in 1811 – itself a direct descendant of the classical Roman town plan, though at a vastly larger scale – early experiments in buildings of great height were promptly balanced with regulations aimed at preserving the essential qualities of the city: the 1916 Zoning Resolution, conceived to ensure that the new skyscrapers would not prevent light and air from reaching the street, guided the location and shaped the forms of the city’s first generation of towers. This led to the juxtaposition of tall buildings along Manhattan’s broad avenues alongside mid-rise buildings and townhouse rows lining the city’s narrower side-streets.

　　Building Blocks

　　In 2009, our firm was asked to design a new community with 200,000 square meters of residential development on a peninsula jutting into a lake on Huxindao Island in Xiamen, China. The program for Heart of Lake, as it originally came to us, called for freestanding villas and high-rise towers – two residential types at vastly different scales that are di cult to reconcile into a coherent neighborhood. Bringing to the assignment the lessons learned in our study of New York’s pre-War urbanism, we advocated for a hierarchy of building scales, adding a mix of mid-rise apartment houses, low-rise residential buildings, and townhouse rows that mediate between the scale of the single-family villas and that of the towers. We organized these types not by segregating them into zones but as a kit-of-parts that we combined into blocks formed by a hierarchy of streets, taller buildings on broader north– south boulevards and lower buildings along narrower streets, an adaptation of the pre-War New York block model (Figure 7).

　　A Continuous Urbanism

　　For an even higher-density development in Dalian, China, which includes significant office and retail components along with residential towers, we drew lessons from another New York model: Rockefeller Center. Conceived and realized as a single endeavor, Rockefeller Center occupies four Manhattan blocks in the heart of the island, creating a new urban core. Incorporating mid-rise office buildings and a single high-rise office tower that together de ne a variety of public spaces wrapped with shops,

　　Conclusion

　　Walkable streets and neighborhoods that encourage engagement and community are just as fundamental to the continuous urbanism of high-density 21st century cities as they are to historical villages. We are fortunate to have in front of us paradigms of cities such as New York and Shanghai that in the years before World War II saw the development of a heterogeneous urbanism that carried forward time-honored human scale at the street, creating dense, walkable neighborhoods of proven, lasting value. We have done our best to sequence the DNA that made it all work, not to clone it but to cross-breed it with other traditional and new patterns of development and to apply its lessons to high-density neighborhoods with a high proportion of tall buildings, which we believe represent the future of urbanism worldwide. We advocate for the continuous urbanism of the world’s best cities, but we also propose a continuity of urbanism across time, so that the lessons of the past continue to support our cities into the future.

　　References

　　1 Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House. New York.

　　2 Speck, J. (2012). Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York.

　　（文章来源：Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat Research Paper excerpts）