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17

Splitsville, USA: Why the Practice and Teaching of Urban Design Is Coming Apart

I’ve just come back from an excellent conference—“The Physical Fitness of Cities”—in Salt Lake City, then in the throes of its final Olympics preparations. Salt Lake was a heightened version of its usual dull, beautiful, weird, fascinating, and scary self. Security, needless to say, was draconian: explosives sniffers in the airport, troops with rifles over their shoulders, elaborate credentials around everyone’s neck, Jersey barriers guiding traffic, the whole nine post–September 11 yards. Salt Lake has always been a well-disciplined city, with its rigid Mormon theocracy, its grid of wide streets numbered to reflect their distance from Temple Square, its rigorous proscriptions of daily life (no caffeine, tobacco, alcohol), and its cultural uniformity. And it has been a physically fit city, too. Mark Twain wrote in Roughing It that “Salt Lake City was healthy—an extremely healthy city. They declared that there was only one physician in the place and he was arrested every week regularly and held to answer under the vagrant act for ‘having no visible means of support’.”

Although the event sites were dispersed over a wide area, the Olympic Village—housing the athletes, presumably the fittest people on the planet—was designed as an autonomous town, located in a set of tacky new buildings on the grounds of Fort Douglas in the foothills of the Wasatch, overlooking the city below. The military camp was itself established in 1862, ostensibly to fight the Indians but also to keep an eye on the Mormons, cannons ready to quell any excessive behavior. The village remains highly defensible, ringed by three layers of security fencing, patrolled by armed guards, and completely self-sufficient, providing housing, meals, shopping, entertainment, and healthcare (including the hugely controversial free condoms offered to the athletes)—the ultimate gated community. However dull the new architecture or sinister the security, the village has much to say about the state of our urbanism—the good, the bad, and the ugly. To begin with the good: it’s well-scaled and the old military quarters nicely preserved; it’s walkable and wonderfully sited, right next to the university campus, another fine pedestrian ensemble. Moreover, the campus and the village are now served by a new light-rail line that runs down the hill to the center of town. For the athletes, the village represents an ethnic and national pluralism (if with a radically skewed median age) and a great place to party that’s the diametric opposite of the city below.

On the other hand, in its combination of Radburn, Blade Runner, and The Truman Show, the Olympic Village is a nice reflection of the troubled picture of urban design as a discipline. It’s a recombinant place that embodies many of the contending tendencies in contemporary American urbanism and the sometimes freakish results of their splicings. It’s also a most cautionary place, a clear marker of the ethical depths that are associated with particular formal preferences, and an object lesson in understanding that the place where strategies of organization meet form are where the urban rubber hits the road.

The field of urbanism has never been richer analytically, nor able to draw on more diverse intellectual positions. From Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner to Max Weber, the Chicago School, Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, Christine Boyer, Mike Davis, Peter Calthorpe, and Rem Koolhaas, the discipline teems with analysis. At this point, there is virtually no position without an extensive pedigree. Formal paradigms, however, are far fewer.

This split leaves urban design education in a parlous state. With no ideology enjoying the hegemonic sway of modernism, the field is contested and, in many ways, adrift. This reflects its own ambivalent origins. Arguments for the starting point of the discipline are both thick—José Luis Sert and Kevin Lynch, among others, are often cited as progenitors—and largely irrelevant. While the origin of urban design as an academic field cannot be clearly attributed, it is certainly the product of a particular moment in postwar American culture and reflects, in its emergence, other schisms that have characterized the practice of architecture.

The great originating rift in architectural education was the parting of the ways of architects and engineers in nineteenth-century France and the establishment of separate academies. This division of the artistic and the technical is one of the key operations of modernity, reflected both in the continuing clash between the two cultures and in various efforts to recuperate one side of the argument or the other.

A cause of the split lies in the origins of the discipline of planning. The central ambivalence here has long lain between the idea of physical planning and the set of anterior technical, social, and economic analyses that form the basis and shape the perspective of action. The conflict is not simply internal to planning, but is reflected in its fraught relationship to architecture, a product of planning’s dual origins in the social sciences and social work on the one hand and the formal disciplines of architecture and landscape design on the other.

This nexus of confusion is reflected in the academy by the migrations of the field of planning within the larger structures of university organization. The planning department at UCLA (in recent years the most progressive in the country) is now split off from the school of architecture with which it had long uneasily coexisted. At Harvard, a somewhat lackluster planning department was moved out of the design school into the school of government and, in effect, replaced by the urban design program, only to be moved back and joined to urban design under a bifurcated umbrella. At City University of New York, planning is at Hunter College, urban design is in the City College School of Architecture, and many of the powerhouse intellectuals—David Harvey, Neil Smith, Setha Low, and others—are rigged into the graduate anthropology department.

This bureaucratic discomfort reflects the historical circumstances of the emergence of the discipline of urban design in the attempt by architects to recover some influence over the physical design of cities from the planners who so dominated professional urbanism in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—the brains behind urban renewal, the interstates, suburbanization, and the paternalism of one-dimensional structures of social control. In this sense, urban design was itself oppositional; although, in another, its own position was nebulous, concerned both with questions of the rights of city dwellers (if in a crudely theorized way) and with traditional urban forms that constituted the vessel putatively necessary for the exercise of such rights.

These issues continue to run through the heart of the discipline. In many ways, this is salubrious: one thing we do not need right now is a single theory of urban form and a single style of urban practice. The best-organized candidate for such dominance—the practices clustered under the rubric of “new urbanism”—is far less influential in the schools than in the profession in general. And, happily, the internal contradictions within the group seem likely to produce more and more open schisms as the green faction seeks to free itself from the lugubrious Disneyfication-by-prescription of the historicist wing.

More influential as an academic model is the school of neo-quantification, an abstract version of functionalism that seeks to translate statistics directly to form. This group has far deeper affinities with intellectual postmodernity (as opposed to the architectural revivalism sometimes encompassed by the term), and its analysis has a good deal more bite. Unfortunately, any diagram is always at risk from the next diagram and from the pushy relativism of postmodernism, with its focus on constant shifts in perspective and the incessant interrogation of the origins of value.

Another strand in the braided taxonomy of urban design has its origins in the reformism of Jane Addams, Jacob Riis, tenement legislation, the activism of the New Deal, the oppositional practice of advocacy planning, early preservationism, and the larger movement for citizen involvement in the process of urban decision-making and design. Although I personally feel a deep affinity with this history, the problem with its current translation lies in a certain reticence about design. The emergent school of “everyday” urbanism, while distinct from the grim generic of the neo-quants and crucial for empowering citizenship, nevertheless is too suspicious of formal experiment and overly sanguine about the dispensability of architecture as an artistic practice.

Ironically, the area of urban investigation that seems to have the least influence in the architecture schools is environmentalism, the panoply of practices and investigations subsumed by questions of “green.” Part of the reason is political. Unlike the European greens, our domestic variety has tended to be more delimited in its analysis, more focused on the aesthetic, spiritual, and medical consequences of deleterious environmental policies than on issues of maldistributed resources and the political effects of globalization. And part of the reason is that green architecture is only beginning to make a sufficiently compelling and comprehensible formal case for itself in this country. The upshot is that sound environmental design practice is the most under-taught subject in American architectural schools.

Every second, three people are born on the planet, two of them in cities. Urbanism is in crisis: the condition for billions of people in our cities is wretched, and we need to rapidly refit our dysfunctional metropolises for justice and sustainability and to build new cities around the globe. Urban design is a discipline—however it sorts out its relations with its professional siblings—that must be the site of a merger between social, environmental, and formal practices. If we designers are to have relevance beyond that of stylists or critics, we must produce convincing forms—as many as possible—for this coming together. While many schools of this urban joinery might and should emerge, there is no way a satisfactory urbanism can be taught that slights any of these aspects. Let a thousand urbanisms bloom!

2002