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SHAPINGTHE TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITY

Most Americans live in some sort of settlement. Thesesettlements vary in size from hamlets to metropolises.Some commentators say that no human settlement isdesigned e.g.,Kostof 1991), ut the position akenhere sdifferent. All settlementsare designed. irre, few are self-consciouslydesigned as a unit by a single design team,but they all have a design, or three-dimensional pattern,whose development, particularly its public realms, hasbeen governed by a set of rules, or nonns of behavior,These rules constitute an inaisibk anb that forms a peo-ple'scultural ethos (Lai 1988;Schultz 1989).The nonnsreflect the actual culture rather than the idealized imageof itselfheld by a society-its normative model of itself. nmany cases,he rules were establishedby customand areunencoded,butencoded rules,suchas hosecommon in*re United States or how components of settlementsshould relate to each othel go back thousands of years.For instance, he origins of the ShilpaShastras,he ancientcanons or town and building design based on the Vedicwritings of Hinduism (Rax f 832; Acharaya7927;Lynch1984;Maharishi SttrapatyaVed Institute 1991),are argelylost in antiquity. Howeve4 in parts of India today thedesign principles they contain are handed down fiommason to mason through the apprenticeship systemasunencoded rules for good design based on spiritualexplanations. ndeed, the unencoded rules are oftenmore rigidly enforced than the encoded ones oday.Theyare n the hands of the creatorratherthan the bureaucrat.The present work of urban designers, heir aspirationsand obligations,and their potential contribution to soci-ety have o be understood within the context of the forcesthat shape and might shapethe public realm of cities.This observation is also true of any statementabout theirfuture role.During the last wo hundred years, ince he time theIndustrial Revolution began to have an impact on cities,more and more encoded rules have been established

specifring how cities should be laid out and how builingsshould be built. Cities n the United States ave bevery much shaped by the legal doctrines that have bedevelopedsince 1800 Schultz 1989).As the goal of trules was primarily to create a salubrious and efticiecity, hey are basedon an organismic,biological modelpeople.The rules havebeen encoded nto zoning ordnancesand building bylawsthrough the concerted aindividual actionsof sanitationengineers, ocial eformemodel housing activists,philanthropists, politicians, afor the lasthundred years,city planners (Benevolo 19J. Peterson1976Lai 1988;Schultz1989).Only during tpast thirty years have people calling themselvesurDfustgnenbeen actively nvolved.American cities may appear to be chaotic and tresult of totally irrational decisions. They are not. Thare products of the many decisionsmade by many peopin terms of their own self-interestswithin a market andlegalsystemand, often,a fi'agmentedpolitical and admistrative framework. Much has been positive about tresults, but opportunities have also been lost. As otechnological abilities have developed, so the varietypossible waysof shaping the city and its componentdistricts,buildings, and infi:astructure-has increased.Vually, the present American city and its suburbs mappear to be more haphazard than their predecessbut individual freedoms and the quality of life for mostheir inhabitants has increased.

The physical layout of all cities is a function of degree to which individuals and groups of people hsought to adapt the biogenic and sociogenic enviroments to their purposes or have had to adapt their pposes o the afficrdancesof the biogenic and sociogeenvironments. No list of hctors shaping the city cancomplete, but the hctors are those that have to do wthe terrestrial nature of the place and the nature ofculture in which it has evolved.

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CREATING HE BTIIXTEIMRONMENTChristopher Alexander (19&) distinguished between wotypes of design processes: nselfcoruciow nd self-coruciow.The adaptations to the environment of human settle-ments have been and still are largely unselfconsciousthroughout most of the world, but American cities todayare a mixture of the two processes. t the scaleof individ-ual decisions there are many self-consciousacts,but theoverall design s algely an unselfconsciousmixture. Someof these ndividual decisionshave agreater mpact on thewhole than others. The decision to build the interstatehighway network in the United Statesafter World War II,for instance, has more of an impact than an individualhouseholder's decision to plant flowers in a flowerbox.

Unselfconsciousdesign, n a pure sense,s charac-teristic of societieswhere there is a low division of labolfew building types, and a narrorv range of materials andbuilding techniques. People design for themselves andthe processof design is largely preprogrammed. Thereare few, if any, specialist designers designing for otherpeople. In such societies, lmost everybody s a designe4and there is a consistencyof appearance ofbuildings thatis much admired by architecs today(seeRudoftky 1964).There are ndeed rules for siting and constructing buildings,but these are largely unencoded in writing although theyare encoded in people's minds and traditional practices.Broadbent has called this process of design pragmaticdzsign1973)because t has evolved over a long period oftime in response to the problems hced by a group ofpeople. The nature of the solutions generated changeslowly because he problems they solve change slowly. naddition, using traditional methods was not seen as aproblem-novelty wasnot a motivating frctor in design asit is in self-consciousdesign in many cultures today.Theterm "unselfconsciousdesign" s used here in wayakin toBroadbenfs definition of infonnalplanning (1990). t stillstands n contrast o self-consciousdesignbut in a slightlydifferent way than Alexander intended. The city as awhole is the product of many designers,some of whomare professionals.

Self-conscious esignprocessesnvolve making designdecisions before acting. They are characteristic of socie-ties n which there is a high division of labor and peoplewho specialize in designing for others. The division oflabor occurs because of the technological and socialcomplexities of modern society. In the United Statesthere is a further division of labor among those con-cerned with designing the layout of settlements.Therearecivil engineers, ransportation engineers,city plannen,landscape architects, architects,signwriters. . . The list isalmost endless. Each profession has its own specialty,each sees the problems of the world in terms of theproblems it is capable of solving or gets paid to address.They are often in competition with each other (Gutman1977: Larson 1979: Blau 1984:Cuff 1991).There are

indeed a number ofself-consciously esigned,or planned,whole cities n the world if not the United States.Unlessthese cities and their citizens are strongly controlledadministratively, they will tend to turn into unselfcon-sciously esignedones-they will change rombeingplanrudcitizs o cressiue nes-ones formed by rnany individualdecisions (Gottschalk l975)-although the basic pattemof their infiastructures may remain laqgelyunchanged.

In U.S.cities as n mostaround the world a seemingly,but not really, paradoxical situation exists. As entities,they are the result of unselfconsciousdesign,even houghtheir parts-roads, building-s, and plazas-may each behighly self-consciouslyplanned. This otrservation is astrue historically as t is today.The implementation of thedesign, ultimately under Pope Sixtus V's direction, link-ing the important churches of Rome was a self-consciousact cutting through a largely unselfconsciouslydesignedmedievalcity (Bacon1974;Benevolo 1980).Haussmann'splan for Paris under Napoleon III's direction is similar incharacterasa designact o PopeSixtusV's eadership rolein Rome(Couperie 1968;Evenson1979;Benevolo 1980;Olsen 1986).Even hough their actswere m{or onesandgivethose wo cities much of the characterweknow today,many smaller self-consciously ut autonomously designedplaces contribute much to Paris's and Rome's overallnatures. Autocratic power has had an impact on thedesign of the public realm of cities until the present.President Ceausescucaused not only a political revolu-tion in coming to power in Romaniabut also an architec-tural and urban design revolution in Bucharest (Stamp1988).The power of people such as Governor NelsonRockefeller n the development of the Empire StatePlazalater named after him in Albany, New York, wasconsider-ably less.

Public authoritiesdo much self-consc ious lanningin most countries today. n the United Stateshe nature ofsuch authorities and agencies ariesconsiderably.Duringthe period fiom the 1930s o the 1950s,Robert Moses,through a web of personaland political connections, hadconsiderable power to shape New York City in his ownview (Caro 1974).He wasable to integrate he planning ofhighways,bridges, and public beaches,but much of thepublic realm remained fragmented an d stil l is. InScandinavia,public authorities have had much greaterpower than in the United States o coordinate and setpolicies for the design of the public realm becauseciti-zenshavegiventhem that power. n the United States, hepower is fragmented into a network of jurisdictions incompetition with each other.

All kinds of people are nvolved n designingcities:lawyers,developers, ndividual households, and profes-sional designers of various types. Much is designed bypeople who do not rega.rd hemselvesas designers,butwhoseactionsnevertheless hange he builtworld. Whileprofessionaldesignersare nvolved in making many deci-sions about the future of the city, many design acts are

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made by the citizens of cities on their own behalf' Thet rrrtti.tg interlocking setsof social and physical systemsare whaiurban designerssee'participate in' and strivetoimprove todaY.

T]NSELFCONSCIOUS ITY DESIGNThe American city is "designed"within a set of cultural,rot*r, even though 'o*t Jf th" norns may be formallyr"*ta.a as illegal' These norms have to do with the;;T;; ; th.'-u'k'tplace and t.t':: that govern t'and with a broad set of cultural values'The ourcome ofafoJop..u,ion, the three-dimensional physical layout of.i,i..,'.un be described in many ways: n terms of thedistributionoflandusesandactivit iesinspace,intermsof its architecture, or in terms of is behavior settings-activities in a physical milieu (seealso Chapter 9)' The;;; "". looks at it depends on who one

is and one'sownmotivations. Whatever one'sbias' it is the biogenic andsociogenic environment of cities that shapesthem andgives hem their character'Biogenic Factors

As noted already, he nature of the biogenic environ-ment was a much more important hctor in establishingthe character of the preiniustrial city than that of theA*..i.un city today'Wnile the climate and native lora ofa place havebecome less mportant-predictors of a city's.tiu*.*, topography sstill am{or factor n.the aestheticef[ect of all cities, self-consciouslyor unselfconsciouslya"ttg""a. SanFrancisco,Seattle'and WashingtonHeighs'NeriYork City, all get much of their character from thebroken and often rugged terrain on which they lie' asdoa;;"g", Philadelphll, and New orleans fiom the flat-n.r, oldreir landscapesseeFig' l-2)'The nature of tire terrain on which cities are builtand the nature of availablebuilding materials nfluencethe way buildings are structured and their appearance'There are many examples of this impact in the past'Baltimore, Maryland, *i'tt io brick rowhousesdiffersvis-,rutfy fo- the cities whose houses are built of timber'nu.., tt orrgttbuilding materialsare Tit"ll" internation-uily 1..g., iarble rro'irtaty is found in builrlings through-out the world), local materials still shapethe chamcterofcitiesand certainly villages n resource-poorareasand' tosome extent' in the m"{or metropolises of the UnitedStates.A number of critils arguefor the continued use ofIocal materialsasa way of establishing he regional iden-ti ! of ptu.., (NorbergSchulz 1980; eealsoChapter 13)'' Although the U'uitt environment' because of theavailabilityolcHmate control mechanisms'may notreflectthe climatic diftbrencesof citiesasmuch as n the past' heclimate is still a major hctor in shaping urban form andcertainly in shaping the lifestylesof a city's nhabitans'The climate-tlte ttit"t" of the seasons'he diurnal cycle

36 URBANDESIGNN CONTEXT

of night and day, the temperature' precipitation' andnr*iiiry f.".ls-affect the whole rangeand cycle, f human".iJi,i.t. n-nomistJohn Kenneth Galbraith

(1985)oncenoted that the difference between Vermont in summer""J*t"r.t is greater han the differences

among Rio dej".*t.., Syanly, u"d Cape Town' Recognizing such differences, there are strong advocates or a-much moreself-consciousconcernfo-rdesigningwithbiogenicftorsinmindinordertoreduceenergycosts,foraesthe;;;r;"r, and to givea designa senseof place in the worliolgyt 1963;S'pirn 1984;Hough 1984'1990b;GordoiSg"0;Cto*ther 1992; eealsoChapter ll)'-- fn preindustrial, unselfconsciouslydesigned citiethe distrlbution of buildings in space is very much;;;;;t. to the comfort needsof their inhabitants'Therur.t*4ot aif.rences betweenunselfconsciouslydesigncities ocated n hot and or hot humid areasand' say' oJ"*p ot.r. Our ability to air condition and'/or centraheat buildings and to enclose open spacehas reducett. ,r...rriry"to design with the climate in mind' rath,lrun ugui.rri it, but the expense nvolved i.shigh'The character of a tity it also derived from tnature of the flora-the typesof treesand vegetation hthrive in that place-a"i-tnt consequent nature of tfruna.Atttreextremesofclimatethisissti l lam{orhctin the appearanceand nature of cities' but people hacarr iedthei rcul tura l landscapeswi ththem,planttrees n the desert(and thus changing the climate)' cho;;; ,lt."t down in forested areasand planting flowfrom home (Rapoport 197?)' as well as bringing thanimals and birds (and parasites)with them' Althoughmight seem to be a trivial factor in the experiencingolaces, he appearanceof nondomesticatedfiuna difintiut , orr. .i,y and another' Sparrows

and pigeonsmseem to be ubiquitous, but thi types of songbirds'such things as he presenceof squirrels' raccoons'anddeer diffelrentiateiities asdoes the presenceof mostoesand butterflies (Spirn 1984)'The cultural landscape is inextricably linked wthe affordances of the biogenic environment (ExP.r.rr, and Larkin 1982)' The presence of the semountains affilrds many activities hat a flat' undiffereated andscapedoesnot, but there are many other hcinvolved too:wind, rain, sunshine'We' associeties's""t.iti.t to provide for ourwelfire on many

dimensof fif.. Wnuiwe do is determined by cultural fictorsoperation of the economic and legal systems'andli.*il tn*"* of values within which people devtheir settlements'

Sociogenic FactorsAs Platonoted, "the ciry s the people'" It is a

behavior settingscomprised of people andtheir actwithin a physicil toame Bechtel 1977;Wcker 1979fo.m must be seen within a cultural frame if it is

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l. Jaisalme4Rajasthan, ndia 2. The Sklvay System,Minneapolisc

O

understood (Rapoport 1977, 1984;Agr.*, Merce4,andSopher1984). omepolitical entities,Japan,or example,mayconsistof a highly homogeneouspopulation-thatis,a population that hasa setof behaviorsand values hataresimilar acrossmany, f not all, of the dimensions ofhuman experience.Such a societywill havea commonreligion and styleof life and valuesaswell asasetof mythsabout itself. The built environment in such societiestends o be more homogeneous in "character" even f it isunified through diversity) because ts members share acommon culture. Individuals may,howevel well belongtodifferent socialgroupings and havedifferent personali-ties that are expressed n the "frbric" of the city unlessthere are strong social taboos against the display ofindividualism.Many countries-for example, ndia, Nigeria,South

Africa, the former Soviet Union, as well as the UnitedStates-consist f heterogeneous opulations with manysubcultures.Even in these places, howeve4 if politicalunity is to survive there must be some shared values.Wthin such entities he subculturesmay be distributedon aregional,city,or neighborhood basis,or they may bespatially ntegrated.Each area inhabited by a particularpopulation takeson the patina of its residents,values vertime because the nature and distribution of behaviorsettings, nd the degree to which people participate in

Figure 2-l: Climate and DesignHistorically, here have been m{or differencesamong citiesbasedon their climares.Jaisalme4 ndia (l), with it s flat roo6and narrow streets,clearly amelioratesthe harsh conditions ofthe Thar Desert.Dealing with the climate s still an rmporanrfactor in urban design,as he skywaysystemof Minneapolis (2)shows, ut technological evelopments nd designing or otherendsoften blun the effectsof climate on the physical characterof cities.The effectof climateon the natureand useof outdoorspaces s still a m4jor factor in the quality of life affirrded by aplace (3).

them, give a place and a city its character, So does theprocessby which the environment becomes personalizedpiece by piece over time.Cultures differ on many dimensions that affect urbanform (Rapoport 1977, 1984). There are differences inattitudes toward gender roles, the nature of children, thenature of school, the nature of privacy, and territoriality.More generally, there are differences in what is regardedas appropriate and inappropriate behavio4 the degree oftolerance for inappropriate and even antisocial behavio4and differences in approaches to dealing with them. De_fense against outside forces was once a m{or factor in thelocation and design of cities; in the United States aselsewhere it is now much more a defense aEa.instcrimefiom fellow citizens rather rhan outside foices that isshaping cities on the micro level of the block and house

(see Chapter 12). All these fr.ctors are reflected in thephysical layout of a place, the settings rhat exist, and thepeople who participate in them.American society is not static and the norms ofbehavior change over time, due to the changes that takeplace as the result of the entrepreneurial spirit, techno-logical innovation, and the result of ,,changes in heart,',particularly in the concepts of individual and communalrights and of frirness. The marketplace is supposed todistribute goods frirly given the ability of the individual

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2. SouthwestCenter City, Philadelphia1. Chinatown,Chicago

members and their families in a society. Self-consciousplanning eficrts assume that the market does not do itwell enough and that it cannot possibly deal with publicgoods such as air quality, public facilities, and even theaesthetic appearzlnce of communities. Self-conscious plan-ning intenenes in the market system'sway of allocatingresources. The frilure to recognize the way planning andurban design distort the market has resulted in unex-pected and unintended side effects of many planningdecisions (P Hall 1988). f "urban design" is simply a newterm for a professional activity that learns nothing fiomthe past-for businessas usual-it will have achieved noth-ing (MacKay 1990).

The Economic Base of Settlement PatternsUrbandesigns a purposeful ct.AII humansettle-ments were created for a purpose, or function, or a set offunctions. The fundamental reason for settlements toexist is economic (see also Chapter 8, The Functions ofCities and Urban Places). Economic factors affect thechoice of a settlement's location, its internal characteristics,and also its ambience. Its key industries give a city muchof its character. University cities such as lthaca, New York,and East Lansing and Ann Arbor in Michigan differ fiom

38 URBAN DESIGN IN CONTEXT

Fignrc 2-2: Ethnic Identity and Neighborhood PerconaliWhatever its original design, any area of a city starts o dthe values of its inhabitants over time as they personalenvironment o bettermeet their needs.The ChinatownUnited States re obvious examplesof this phenomenLessobviously, but neverthelessvery clearly,other groupa patina of their values on the urban landscape. Veryrowhouse neighborhoods in Philadelphia, for instancbeen tmnsformed in noticeably different ways by IrisItalian immigrants (2,3).The nature of design controls oprocessof penonalization affectsdifferent groups in diways.

centers of commerce and resort towns. Manufactcities, for instance, are "gritty" and often much lovtheir inhabitants (Proctor and Matuszeski 1978)'Alththey have a rugged char rn of their own, they arfavored as a rype by plannen and architects, mawhom saw and see either the Radiant City (Le Corb1934) or the Garden City (Howard 1902; C. Stein 19the ideal (White and White 1964; P Rowe 1991)nomic factors continue to shape attitudes in gearchitectural attitudes (Kiernan 1987),and attitudes tthe qualities of the public realm.

The list of purposes for the existence of ciendless, but purpose and location go hand in handlocation and character go hand in hand. Few citiesworld are located without reference to waten Almom{or cities are or were ports, or located at forbridgeable points in rivers, or they are resorts in water plays a major role. Even cities such as Indianathe capital of Indiana, located at the center of thehave only been able to grow into major industrialcommercial cities because of a sufficient if not an abuwater supply to complement their locations wiregional hinterland.

The economic and technological bases of citintertwined. The nature of the technology available

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enelgy resources and transportation costs and conse-quently the economics of the distribution of people andgoods and the location of manuhcturing and serviceindustries.The era in which a city is founded and them{or meansof transportationat that time have had m4joreffects on is land-use distribution and character.Themeansof transportation dictatessuch characteristicsof acity as ts hierarchy of streetsand street widths aspart ofthe transportation system,and the location and nature ofneighborhoodsand suburbs(Sternand Massenple l98l).The differences n the street grids of American cities arethe basis or the unique characterof each.The civic build-ingrs nd spaces-the civic designs-as well as he buildingtypes and architecture of the m4jor eras of a city's eco-nomic prosperity and development give it much of itscharacte4, oth visually and in terms of the symbols ofidentity that are important to differentiate it fiom othercities seeChapter 12,MeetingAffliation Needs).Anotherhctor in establishinga city'scharacter s whether or not itsstreet lan wasself-consciouslyaid out beforesettlement.Much of the difference between New York City's WallStreetarea and midtown Manhattan is simply due to thedifferences n the pattern of the streets. talso dependsontheir building types, the functions they serve, and thepeople who inhabit and/or use them.The distribution of people by income and activity na citydepends not only on individual actionsbut on thecollective actions of all the people involved operatingwithin their budget constraints. The process can andoften is seen as a social classstruggle (Castells1977).lnthe United Statesand other capitalist societies, he cityevolves ut of the competition between ndividuals,house-holds, usinesses,nd institutions o maximize heirben-efitswithin legally set imis. These limits and the degreeof governmentparticipation in urban and regional plan-ning and design policy formation vary considerably fiomcountry to country depending on the governmental sys-tems hat exist and the values they represent (van Vlietand van Weesep 1990).The distribution of people, and uses, nd activitiesiscomplementedby the attributesof the built environmenlActivitydensities,all other things being equal, are highestat the center of the settlement because transportationcosts re ower and people's disposable ncomesavailablefor purposes other ttran transportation are higher. Thusmost f not all cities havean urban core in the form of acentralbusiness district ("there is a there there"), rein-forced by decisions of the public sector to locate civicbuildings at a place that is convenient to all. Land at theperipheryof cities s lessexpensive o householderscanbuymore space n a tradeofffor other goods and qualitiesof urban life that are less mportant to them than conve-nientaccesso public institutions.Atthe peripheryofthecity, and becomesurbanized when the financial return toih owners is greater than or the same as the cost ofconverting and from agricultural use o urban uses.Some

cities are radially constrained by natural features, butothers are radially consn'ainedby effirrtsofplanners seek-ing self-consciously o define a settlement with a greenbelt (Thrall 1987).Such policiesare politically determined.Opm and clased,iies are two opposite types ofjuris-dictional forms.Open cities arepart of a regional politicalsystem. n a closed ciry the urban area and the politicalcontrol are coterminous. Becauseof the distribution ofwealth and the ability to use it in a closed city, the poorreside n the inner city surrounded by the rich. This is thegeneralmodel in the United States.n an open city,whereincome and welfrre differentialsare very high, the richerpeople live in the center and the poor on the peripheryas in many Latin American countries. More generally,howeve4 the poor are at the periphery in cities wheretransportation systemsor the middle classare poor andbuilding codes are neither strict nor strictly enforced.This situation occurs, for instance, in cities with highimmigration rates. If income differentials are high andwelfrre differentials are small, the population tends to bemore mixed and is distribution is due to the sequence nwhich settlement took place (Exline, Peters,and Larkin1982;Thrall 1987).The twentieth-century city has been shaped by acombination of hctors-increased wealth due to adlancesin the technology of transportation and manuficturing,and social and legislative changes. Possibly more thananything, the patternsofdistribution ofpeople and activ-ities n aregion or city within it depend on the transporta-tion systemsbuilt (Attoe 1988a;Cudahy 1988;Cervero1989). n the nineteenth century the development of thesuburban railroad systemsand later the subwaysystemsgave opportunities for the middle class o move to theurban periphery. The two decades ollowing World War IIsaw the full impact of the automobile and the truckingindustry on many citiesof the world. It is,howeve4espe-cially noticeable in the United States, alticularly in LosAngeles (Bottles 1987). n ttre United Statesafter WorldWar II, the interstatehighway system hat transectedcities,followed by the construction of ring roads, changed thewhole pattern of accessibility n regions and thus theirland values. t led to quick commuting of suburbanites tocitiesby automobile, but also o the location of industrieson the periphery of the cities.The postwarhighwayshaveallowed the suburbs to develop into more than the dor-mitory towns that they were when the primary mode oftransportation was the railway. Suburbs in the UnitedStates avebecome more like citieswith their own down-townsand employmentbases(Masotti and Hadden 1973;Muller 1981;Varva 1987;Lang 1987b;Cervero 1989). tcan be argued that such new downtowns are developingsimply due to population growth, but accessibilitybyhighway and/or a mass ransit sptem isessential Leinbergerand Lockwood 1986;Garreau 1991).American metropol-itan areas today often consist of multiple centers. Thecentral businessdistrict of the inner city may still be the

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l. Glendale,Califurnia

preeminent one psychologically, but its economic pre-eminence is being challenged by individual suburbancenters and has been long surpassed by the set ofsubur-ban ones.Many cities have rapid transit systems. In Londonand New York the systemsare of long standing but in citiessuch as Miami, Florida, and Washington, DC, they aremore recent. Los Angeles, in contrast, has abandonedover 2,500 kilometers of light rail system since the 1940s,although portions have been and are beingreestablished.These systems create nodes of low transportation costsand a density of flow of people at each station. Each nodedevelops into a surrog"ate central business district unlesscontrolled through legislation. Bethesda, Maryland, andWalnut Creek, California, are examples of traditionallow-scale neighborhood centers that have been built intonew suburban high-rise downtowns located with refer-ence to a new transit system stop. American urbanizedareas thus have a series of nodal points of high-densitycommercial development. The pattern is of an urbanstructure with a high peak at the center and smaller peaksat the other points where access s cheaper due to trans-portation links (see Fig. 2-3(3)).

If a low-cost transportation network is introducedinto a closed ciry the downtown declines (counterintui-tively) in rent and population, the population everywhere

40 URBAN DESIGN IN CONTEXT

2. Bethesda. Marvland

Figure 2-3: The "New" Suburban DowntownsGlendale 1)hasbecomea m4jor center n the Los Angelesarbased on its location in the highway network of Los AngelCounty and the initiative of its political leaders.The transformtion of Bethesda, Maryland (2), fiom a low-density to a higdensity core has followed its development as a transportatiohub on the Washington, DC, Metro system.Walnut Creek (California's Golden Triangle area, is related to Walnut Crebeing a stop on the (San Francisco)Bay Area Rapid Tiansystem.

declines in density, rents near thc nodes increase, anthere are strings of nodes along the transportation linePopulation densities around the nodes will decrease incomes rise. Government policies to reinforce the ceters of U.S. cities have tried to fly in the hce of this realitwithout much success. f low-cost transportation systemare introduced into open-interactive cities, the inner corremains unaffected by the new nodes so created, land renand population densities increase along the lines of tranportation, the urban radius of the city will be extendedand the overall population of the urban region will increase at the expensive of other regions, all other thingbeing equal.

The marketplace, it must be remembered in anurban planning or design effort, is highly deterministic shaping the city (Dear and Scott 1981). Without enomous welhre subsidies by local governments in the formof improvements to people's quality of life, the standaroperation of the marketplace cannotbe changed. Indeedsuch subsidies simply change the nature ofttre marketplaceThe qualities of new building complexes change thopportunities in the marketplace and the ability of onplace to compete with others, but quality has to be basein terms of the welfrre itbrings to people inthzirterrns,nota designer's aesthetic terms. To get m4jor changes in thdistribution of people and activities in a city or region

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meetsomepublic interestobjective equirespolicies hatchange he whole sociophysical nvironmenL The changeshave o be institutionalized.The Institutional Base of Settlement Forrn

One of MahatmaGandhi'snoblestmessagess thata"change of heart on the part of men is of more vitalimportance than mere outward changes n social struc-ture or the political setup."Changing people's hears andvalues is not easy.There are two types of institutionalmechanisms fcr doing so: social and, lzgislatiae Thrall1987).Both are concernedwith changingpeople s welhre,including tastesand preferences; he former by modifi-ing their values and the latter through encoded laws.Social Tbols

People make decisions basedon the information attheir disposaland their values.They makeand will alwaysmakedecisionsbasedon incomplete, and thus biased,information. It is biased by their own experiences and bydirect or indirect manipulation of information by otherpeople. All institutions make decisionsabout what infor-mation they will bring to the attention of the public o4 iftheyarespecificallyeducational nstitutions, heir students.Commercial and professionaloqganizationsattemptto gain a market through direct or indirect advertisingoftheir services n much the same way as manuhcturers ofproducts.They are trying to convince people that partic-ular activities should be carried out in particular ways.Retailstoresattempt to changepeople's tastepreferencesthrough advertising. Sellers of security equipment wantpeople to see the world as a fearful place and providepeople with the information necessary or them to per-ceive t that way,even when such sellers know that peo-plesown experiencesof it differ fiom what they arebeingtold. Architects vie for recognition in the professionalworld,and for the sale of services n the marketplace,bythe recognizability and quality of work they perfirrm.Urban designers believe that specific design goals are inthe public interest and try to penuade people of this(Gutrnan1977).

This book, like any text, is a social tool. Is goal is tobringpeople s,particularly architects',attention to certainaspects f the world and to the opportunities for them touse heir skills gainfully, as well as o their responsibilitiestowardsociety.The objective of any book on theory is toguide society in making better decisions by enhancingthepredictability of the resultsof action. In this book, theconcern s primarily with urban designers and the workwe do in reshaping cities. Its goal is to assist he designprofessions reatecities and urban places hat are rich inexperiences, y bringing their members attention to whatresearch as informed us of the way people attend (andmightattend) o and use he world around them. Another

goal is also to bring attention to the mechanisms hat areavailable, and might be available, or urban designers oservepeople by helping them in their quest or enrichingyet efficient cities while recognizing the cultural fi:ame nwhich a city operates.LegislatizreTbols

The marketplace n ttre United States s governedbyasetof lega.l odesaswe l asunencoded normsof behavionThe establishmentof legalmechanisms s a self-consciousact to shape the city in particular directions, although thefinal product depends on individual decisions argely n-dependentof eachothe4, utwithin the code.These eplcodes oday are the result of "decadesof tug-o'-warbattlesand short term collusionsbetweenspecial nterestgroups'(Thrall 1987). hey havebeenestablishedo alterthe wel-hre patterns establishedby the marketplaceby changingthe balanceof economic power betweenpeople. They areestablished in various ways, autocratic and democraticaction being the polar-oppositemethods of approach.There are few if any, places in the United Stateswithout some formal legal base or governing how indi-viduals and organizationsmake locational decisionsandfor controlling the nature ofbuildings theyd,esign. umal,in the way it is used here, means a clear and acceptedlegal code. t may not result in aesthetically irrmal designs(i.e.,where the geometryof the design s tself the focusofconcern).Rather he pattern, or design, esuls from payingattention to other concerns: health, prestige, and so on.The typesof laws hat affect he shapeand nature oftwentieth-century American cities include land taxationlaws, awsgoverning income redistribution, deed restric-tions, zoning laws(except Houston, Texas,which has itsown peculiar characteristics nd problems but doesshowthe limited constructive use of zoning elsewhere; seeGhirardo 1987), nd building codes. n countrieswhereland value is the only basis for assessment f propertytaxes, the incentive is to build on vacant sites,perhapsprematurely. In countries where property taxesare basedon a combination of land value and improvements, theincentive to build well is lowered, and one finds moresurhce parking lots and low-scaledevelopment until thedemand for land makes hoseuseseconomicallyunfeasible,as t has n Manhattan or as t is becoming in central LosAngeles.The levelat which it loses easibility s higher insuch places than where only the unimproved value ofland is taxed.Many kinds of land-use egislationhavebeen enactedto shapecities and regions,but often the shaping legisla-tion has had purposes other than a clear physical mageof the city n mind. Citiessuch asBoulde4 Colorado,andmore commonly, many European cities, have enacted"greenbelt" legislation to stop radial growth taking placeas a result of market forces that havenot considered thefull consequences o the city'soverall form. The goal has

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been to give easyaccess o the countryside for the city'sinhabitantsand to give dentity to a placeby preservingorestablishingclear boundaries. Such a policy in Ontario,Canada, has, counterintuitively, led to high-rise apart-ment development on the periphery of cities. In manyCanadian cities this type of development was the mostprofitable forthe developerswho held land on the urbanfringe. This type of developmentwas not the intention oflegislators. Similarly, the policy in the United States obuild highway networks and, after World War II, to pro-vide low-interestmortgages o former military personnelin order to assist hem reestablishthemselves n civilianlife (and to benefit the building industry) has had theindirect effect of encouraging suburban growth. To beeligible for the mortgage subsidiesthe buildings had tobe detached units and, because ittle pre-1945 housingqualified, the bill encouragednewconstruction on arailableopen land. This land was almost entirely in the suburbs,accessible y the new roads but requiring automobiles asa means of transportation. It has had a negative effectonthe old cities of the United Statesby draining them ofmuch of their middle class and potential middle-classpeople. This wasnot the intention either,The full impactof the legislation on the marketplacewasnot understood(Thrall 1987;seealso Bottles 1987and Monkkonen 1988).

In the United States, oning laws have been widelyused by central authorities, usually city governments, orestrict specificuses n particular areasofcities, to specifthe distribution ofbuildingdensities, and to require suchthings as the amount of on-site parking that must besupplied. For better and for worse, zoning laws haveproven to be highly susceptibleto abrop.tion or change.When the demand for a particular land use changesso,almost inevitably, does the zoning.

Zoning laws are based on cultural attitudes aboutwhat is n the public interest. Originally, zoning lawsweredeveloped to promote public health (Baumeister 1895;Benevolo 1967;J.Peterson1979;Lai 1988;Schultz1989).The goal was to create a salubrious environment fcrhuman life. The zoning laws hat have been enacted endto segregateareasof a city into homogeneous land andbuilding uses.They are basedon an organismicmodel ofpeople and often clash with behavior patterns that areregarded by people asculturally appropriate, particularlywhere the lawshave been copied cross-culturallyby onenation from those of another.

Zoning isnow often seenasa vehicle for maintainingproperty values by preventing what are perceived to benoxious hcilities locating near one'sproperty.During thesecond half of the twentieth century there has been anincreasing use of urban design guidelines as an instru-ment of public policy to restrict somebuilding configo*-tions and usesand to promote others in order to shapethe quality of the public realm in the public interest(Barnett I97 4, 1982,1987;Deurksen I 986;C. Ellis 1987;J.Ellis 1987;Fisher 1988;Getzels1988;Lai 1988;Durgin

42 URBAN DESIGN N CONTEXT

1989 Schultz 1989).Often this aspect of city designing isseenas he central component of urban design today(seeChapter 3). It has certainly had, for good and ill, an effecton the distribution of plazas n New York City (Barnett1974;Whyte 1980).The public sector ntervenesself-consciously n cit-ies in othe4 more direct ways.Legislation usually existsgiving governments the power to build infrastructuresystems-roads,pedestrian ways,plazas,parks, water andsewagesystems-individual buildings such as city halls,police stations,and museums, and public frcilities suchasparks and playgrounds-the capitalwebof cities(Crane1960). The public sector has built much housing forIow-income hmilies. Each one of these activitieschangesthe potential uses of the surrounding land by indirectlychanging the rent structure of the city. Building publicficilities or improving the existing infrastructure has amultiplier effect. These actions cause both direct andindirectchanges (Attoe and Logan 1989).Forinstance, bybuilding an attractive rcility higher-income people maybe attracted to an area to live, but lower-income peoplemay be displaced.Population change s the primary effecrSecondary effects esult from the serviceshat are built byor for that new population and the impact the displacedpopulations will have on other areas. Such actions allcausechanges n the city by changing land values andthus the attractiveness fland forvarious uses.The publicsector s continuously involved in efficrs to enhance thecity's mageand to change nferior circumstances o supe-rior onesthrough public programs. Often such programsare viewed as culminations and people are disappointedwith each program because thas notsolved all problems.These programsneed to be seenas an ongoing processofadapting to change.The twentieth-century unselfconsciously designedcity and is partsare fragmented.There is much that endsup being highly desirable, but many problems are associ-ated with the give and take of competition among busi-nesses nd amonghouseholders. Ithas proven difficulttoprovide the servicesneeded to maintain the quality oflifeof its inhabitants in competition with more recendy self-consciously developed areas with newer infi:astructuresystems.At the same time there is a vitality of life thatself-consciouslydesignedcities and/or their precincs donot possess.This result is not because they are self-consciouslydesigned but howthey are designed. Urbandesigncan and should add to a city'svigor! Unfortunately,this outcome has not always een the case J.Jacobs196l;Wolfe 1980;Goldbeqger1989).

SELF.CONSCIOUS ITY DESIGNSelf-consciouslydesigned placesare those in which thethree-dimensional geometry of the layout is specified byprofessionalsor quasi-professionals i.e., people operat-ing in a professionalcapacity but not trained as such) in

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l. Foxhall Crescent,Washington, DC

order to meet specific ends. These ends have a higharchitectural ontent, and the self_consciouslyesignedcity has a governing idza behind its development. AllAmerican cities have bits and pieces of seliconsciousdesignof this type at the supra-building scale.They have,at least,a basic road infiastructure designed as units al_though ncrementallyextendedovertime-.Many haveseliconsciously esignedprecincs.Self-consciouslydesigned cities differ fiom unself:consciouslydesigned cities in a number of ways. n theforme4 the road pattern is preordained and coordinatedwith and usesand hcilities planning. The buildingtypesare ordered geometrically and the land uses end to besegregated.he overall layout follows a hierarchical geo_metric order in physicalform and in land uses.The basicdifferences etweenself-consciously nd unselfconsciouslydesignedcities is in the consistency(uniformity) of thedesign n the former that results lom the intervention nthemarketplaceby the conscious ocation offrcilities andthe mposition ofan intellectual designaesthetic o fulfillsomesocial agenda. Essentiallywhat happens is that acentralauthority determines land rent. lfnis is the basictheme n centrally planned nonmarket economies suchas hoseof socialistor Marxist nations.Costs, nsteadofbeingborneby the ndividual or rhosepeople who bene_fit from them, are spread throughout tie community. In

Figure2-4: Self-Conscious rban DesignMost Americancitieshavegrown in a piecemealway withportionsdesigned sunirs.Theseunitsare distinguishableytheuniformityof theirdesigns,itherbecauseheywere esignedbyasinglearchitect ) or controlledbydesign uidelines1i;. nthe United Stateshe scaleof such desigirsseldomextendsbeyond hatof a housingproject,but therearealsomanynewtownsaround heworld thatapproximateotntdesignsBjevenlrough theircomponentsave eendesignedydifferent ands.Thiskindof designwill becalled. il_of_a-piccedesignater n thisbook.

the United States,private entrepreneurs have built newtowns such as Columbia, Maryland, which is nearingcompletion, and Las Colinas, Texas,which has beenunderway for a decade. They are not, however, totallvself-conscious esignsbecausemuch is left for buildersand householders o decide. ndividualism is mportantin ttre United States seealso Chapter l4).Govemments everywhere have bought land, oftenthrough the power of eminent domain,L aggregate rinto largeparcels n a manner that the fiee marketwouldnot allowbecause f vestednterests.Christopher Wrensplan for London after the GreatFire of 1666hiled to beimplemented because he governmentwasnot preparedto intervene in the marketplace to accumulate land insuch a way that the public realm could be redesigned.Once accumulated the govemment can change and_usepatterns iom thosethat would prevail under fiee_marketconditions o thatwhich will benefitsomepublic interest.Throughout ttre United States, here are examples ofgovernment-sponsoredconstruction of housing units inmedium- and high-rise slab buildings on a vasterscalethan that the free marketwould allow.Suchprojectshavechanged the urban landscape.The planned citiesand planned pars ofcities ofthetwentieth century have seldom lived up to the expecta_tions arousedby their proponents. Few are total frilures.

2. Battery Park City, New york

3. Las Colinas, fbxas

SHAPING THE TWENTIETH.CENTURY CITY 43

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Izp9

Lake Michigan

3. ViewWest iom Peristyle

although there are some rapidly deteriorating intouninhabitability not only in ttre United States but else-where (Montgomery 1966; Marmot 1982; Singh 1984).Too much was promised. They were not built in accor-dance with the behavioral predispositions of their intendedinhabitants, and the limitations of planning were neverunderstood. The well-ordered geometric world in a plan-ner's head did not necessarily work in the real world ofreal people (Gottschalk 1975). To varying degrees thischaracterization of the problem designers face is true ofthe three m{or movements in planning that have specif-ically had an impact on the physical layout of citiesduring this century (Benevolo 1980; Barnett 1986).Theirdescendants are with us today. An understanding of theseideologies enables their impact on the twentieth-centurycity to be analyzed, with some clarity.

TWENTIETH,CENTURYRBAIIDESIGNIDEOLOGIES ND GENERIC YPESThe three m{or twentieth-century urban design move-ments are the CityBeautifulmovement, and two branchesof the Moderrr movement, which are generallycalled theGardtn Ci4r movement and rhe Intemational movement,but may more appropriately be called the Empiricists rP,egressizntopi.ansndthe Ratiomlistsor ProgresiueUtopfurns,respectively. ach abel conjures up a setof design mages.4 URBANDESIGN N CONTEXT

2. Court ofHonor

Figure 2-5: The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893' ChicagoThe basic axial plan (l) and classical architecture of the World'sColumbian Exposition made a mqjor impression on the peoplewho visited it. The goal of the Renaissance-style complex was toimpart a sense of dignity and beaury as well as convenience to itsusers. The Court of Honor (2) was everything the contemporaryurban environmentwas not-clean, bold, a unified composition,and functional. The exposition demonstrated the characteris-tics of what was to become the City Beautiful movemenf wideboulevards, vistas, terminal views, and monumental, neoclassi-cal architecture (3).

rypes, r genericsolutions.Empiricist design deasembracconsiderablymore than the Garden City,Rationalist deamore than the International Style.All three movementcame to fruition during the first quarter of this centuryThe City Beautiful movement captured the attention oplanners,politicians, and architects during the first threedecadesof the century but Modernist ideas were onlimplemented on a large scale rom 1945 o 1980.Nonetheless, ew will challenge the observation that they formthe basis for much urban design work today, perhapsomewhat eclipsed by the recent Neo-Tiaditionalmovements (Duany 1989;Broadbent 1990).Current architetural ideologies (e.g.,Post-Modem.ism, eoTiaditionalisDecorutru.ctionism,nd DiscreteArchitecnne)have only jusbegun to affect he urban design of cities.Their ultimateimpactwill depend on how much they capture the imagination of planners and public ofticials.

The City Beautiful MovementThe CityBeautifulmovementdevelopedn the Unite

States t he turn of the century Newton 1971;J.Peterso1976; W. Wilson 1989; Schultz 1989; Gilbert 1990). mightwell be called the last exampleofbaroque planningfor while its immediate antecedentswere the MunicipaArts movement and the World's Columbian Expositioin Chicago n 1893 Mayer and Wade 1969;J. Peteno

-..9.F.E9.28.(-)EO

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9"\)E

$QI

:qca

l. Th e Burnham and Benneu plan fo r Chicago 1g09)

3. Univenity of Washington, Seattle (1915)

Figure2-6: The City BeautifulThe City Beautifulmovement'sdeasareexemplifiedn theplan or Chicago. he axialplanwith radiaringoads ocusingon specificmonuments ndbuildingsscharaiteristicf planiimplementedn new owns nd on a smaller cale lsewhere(seeFigs. -17,2-20,and 2-21).The buildingsproposed yBurnhamwereclassicalndmonumentaln characte4howingtheir relationshipo their antecedentsn the World,s airof1893 ndearlierbaroque lanning.Oneof themajorapplica_tionsof theCityBeautiful deaswasn theproposalsor univer_sitycampuses;or example,he University f Washington lanby Charles . BebbandCarlE Gould 3).through the grandeur of the built environment. .I.hegenericCity Beautiful schemehas he basicelementsofits baroque antecedents-axial avenues terminating atfocal points, grand plazas,wide streets,and large_sialeclassical uildings enclosingspaces. he inspiration camevia the Ecole des Beaux Arts in paris, which was theleading school of architecture and city design at thebeginning of the twentieth century and the inspirationfor architects throughout the Western world. plans forcities had to be large scale,bold and classical n layoutand in architecture (Burnham and Bennett i90g; Wrigley1960;Brownlee 1989;Schultz 9g9; W. Wilson l9g9)-The chief propagator of the City Beautiful wasDan_iel Burnham himself. Bumham prepared a number ofplans, including one for Manila and another for SanFranciscoafter the fire of 1906,but his best_knownplan isfor Chicago tself (Wrigley 1960;Burnham and Bennett1909).The plan is a regional one, but attention waslavishedon the developmentofa symmen-ical lan aroundthe city hall. The scheme was grand, embodying thebelie8 encapsulated n Burnham's renowned epigram,"Make no small plans; they haveno power to seizemen,sminds." In al l senses, umham's plan for Chicago s anapplication of the genericCity Beautiful ideas (seeFig.2-6). Although many other suchcity plansexist e.g.,SanFrancisco;Columbus, Ohio; and philadelphia_see Fig.2-19), ew havebeen implemented. They were,however,

2. The Civic Center Plaza,Chicago 90g)

1976),tsancesfty ncludes he Baroquecity:pope SixtusV's Rome (Bacon 1974;Benevolo 19g0;Schulz l9g9),LTnfint's designfor Washington,DC (peers 92Z; GallionandEisner1986;Reps 99l), and Haussmann,saterworkin Paris(Couperie 1965; Evenson 1g79;Olsen 19g6).Indeed, he Columbia Exposition might be regarded astheend of a line of city planning thought asmuch as hebeginningof a new one (Schultz19g9).The Columbian Exposition was a m4jor planninganddesignsuccesshat captured he imaginationofAmeri_cans nd particularly of civic leaders,who saw t as proto_typeofwhat the American citycould be. twassponsoredbyChicagobusinessesas a symbol of the city'scommer-cial and, they hoped, cultural grearness. he planner ofthe exposition was Frederick Law Olmsted with DanielBurnham as the architect. The exposition design was adeparture fiom the mainstream of the work of both.

Olmstedwasbetter known for his suburban designworkin the English Landscape architectural tradition (e.g.,Rivenide, Illinois), while Burnham,s architectural work(e.g., he Rand McNally Building in Chicago, and theJohnWanamakerBuilding in philadelphia, both withJ. W.Root)wasa precursor to Modernism.The City Beautiful movement wasan urban designand architecture of display but it also sought a moreefficient,hygienic city.The term ,,civicdesign;could cer_tainlybe applied to it. The goal was o instill civic prideSHAPING THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY CITY 45

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the inspiration for two m{or capital cities: Canberra inAustralia designed by Chicagoan Walter Burley Griffin(National Capital Development Commission 1965;Bacon1974)and, late4 New Delhi in India (Iwing l98l) aswell asa number of smaller schemes seealsoFigs'2-16, 2-19,and 2-20).The Modern Movements

In much of this book the Modern movementwill bereferred to as f it werean entity becauseof the number ofshared theoretical assumptionson which various lines ofthinking were based. In Europe and North America, atleast, these assumptions were both based on particularinterpretations of the concepts of Christian compassionand the Enlightenment tradition-the belieft that peopleand environments are perfectible and that making theworld free of war and hunger were attainable goalsworthachieving. Such ends could be attained by reform orrevolution-'Architecture or revolutiorf' according to LeCorbusier.

While there were many shared values among thevarious schools of thought that comprise the Modernists,there are also,howeve4m{or and significant differences.The Modemists canbe categorized into two broad streamsof thought about city design that are exemplified, but notuniquely, by the GardenCityas a type, or model, and theRndiant Ci.tyas a type. Both types have had much tocommend them but have also been found to be limitedapproaches to city design (Lesnikowski 1982; Fishman1987;Broadbent 1990).The two represent very differentcity design deologiesbasedon two very differentintellec-tual attitudes. Much of what has been built since WorldWar II is an amalp.m of the two in application, and thelines between them are often blurred, but they will betreated aspure typeshere for such purity abounds.The Empi.ricist ranch of the Modern movement isprimarily, butby no meansuniquely, Anglo-American incultural heritage. Is design proposalswere basedon theassumption that actions should be based on learningfrom observation of the world. The Rntionalislbranch ispredominantly Continental European with its ancestry nthe former SovietUnion, Germany,France,and Holland,but has strong adherents in Great Britain, the Americas,and in Asia. In urban design its concern has been withdesigning idealized future socialsystemso be housed inan idealized geometricalworld. There were bold versionsof the Rationalist thinking in Latin America, particularlyin Brazil and Venezuela, but the connections to Euro-pean thinking are clear (Gastal 1982). The ideas andapplications of both groups went back and firrth acrossthe Atlantic and were carried into colonial empires byexpatriate architects and through the return of nativearchitects to their own lands after their education inEurope or the United States.

Despite the visionary work of Americans such asHugh Ferriss(Ferriss 1929; Leich 1980),Rationalist de-46 URBAN DESIGN N CONTEXT

sign ideals were largely brought to the United StatesbyEuropeans.The fint m4ior example of a Rationalistarchi-tectural application at the building level is the Philadel-'phia Savings und Society PSFS) uildingin Philadelphiaby La Casseand Howe in 1932 shortly after La Cassear-rived from Europe. The m4ior impact ofRationalist thoughton urban design n the United States, oweveq, amewiththe arrival of expatriate architects and artists from NaziGermany. Walter Gropius came to Harvard via BlackMountain. North Carolina,Albers to Yale,Hans Peterhausto Chicago's Art Institute, Mies van der Rohe to theArmour Institute, and Ludwig Hilbersheimer to Chicagoto practice (Wingler 1969). Indeed, some of the morepragmatic Rationalist solutions emerged in the UnitedStatesbefore they filtered back to the countries of theirintellectual origins.

The EmpiricistsEmpiricism, in its pure form, argues or knowledge

basedon evidence. n proposing future cities and urbanprecincts the Empiricists looked at life as ived, but theywerehighly selectiveabout the experiences hey chose olook at It has been casualEmpiricism. When it came toturning observation into design, they hvored the pictur-esque.The label Regresshntnpiansometimes applied tothe group is unfortunate for the goal of the Empiricistswas o createa new world. It is, howeve4, lso an accuratelabel because he groups of people who mightbe assem-bled under this rubric looked for solutions to the prob-lems resultingfum the Industrial Revolution in imaginedidealized pasts ather than in the systematicobservationof life. human needs, and human values.The Empiriciss canbe divided into nuo m4jorgroups-those concerned with the concept of urbanity, the Urbanita,and those concerned with new town design, the GardmCi4rmovement. The former group is exemplified by theobsewations and prescriptions of Camillo Sitte (1889)and more recently by thoseof people such asPaul Zucker(1959),JaneJacobs '1961),Gordon Cullen (1961),Law-rence Halprin (1963, 1965, 1969, 1974),Philip Thiel(1961, orthcoming), Christopher Alexander (Alexande4Isikawa,and Silverstein 1977), Charles Moore (Johnson1986),and the recent work of Leon Krier (Broadbent1990).The latter group is exemplified by the writings andideology of Ebenezer Howard (1902), Lewis Mumford(1938,1961),and ClarenceStein(1952).

The urbanists' concern has been with the structureand detailing of the open spaces of cities and urbanplaces, heir built fi:ame, and the sequential experiencethey offer as one moves through them. The street andplazaare their elemens of urban design (R. Ikier 1979)'Their ideal city is, on an aestheticdimension, the medi-eval one, the Venicesof Europe.This ideal is also eflectedin the current proposals of the "city livable" advocates(Lennard and Lennard 1987, 1988, 1990). The grouprecognizeshat many people enjoy citiesand urban places

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E

l. GenericGarden City Model (1g96)

3. Verona, taly

Figure 2-7: The Empiricist CiryThe generic plan for a Garden City developed by EbenezerHoward (1) llustrates the attitudesand some Lasicdesignprin_ciples of the Decentralistsamong Empiricists. The rural imag_ery with its regressive rchitectural imagery is clearly illustratedin many places.The plan for Welwyn Garden City (Louis deSoisson, rchirect) hows he translationof the genericmodel toa particular site.(2)Incontrast, he Urbanites among Empiriciststended to look back at the dense, often medieval urban fibricfor inspiration (3).

mq-or figure in the movement on the American side ofthe Atlantic, even called the group the Decmtralists.Their attitudes and goalscan clearly be seen n thewritings ofEbenezer Howard, whose deaswere irstpub_lished in Tbmonow: peacefut ath tn ReatReform lbgg),which is better known in its reprinted form, -GardenCitizsof Tbmonow1902).The other m{or idea, the neighbor_hood unig came fiom the work of Clarence perrv. asociologistof the Chicagoschool,and the planning andarchitectural work of Clarence Stein and Henry Wright(C. Stein 1957;Birch l9g0; parsons1990;p Rowe l99l).The line of thinking they represent was taken to its ulti_mate developmenr in the BroadacreCity of Frank LloydWright (1958).

Thc Gard.enCityThe ideal city promulgated by the architects andtown planners associatedwith the Garden City Move_ment consistedof about 40,000people. At its core werethe central institutional buildings, surrounded by resi_dential areasand, at the periphery the industries encir_cled by a greenbelt (seeFig. 2-7(l)). It wasro have thecharacteristicsof a "greencountry town" and in the earlynew towns of Letchworth (1g03 onwards) and Welwyn(1920),developed n England by limited dividend com_

and hat theseenjoyablecharacteristicshould be retainedin new designs.At the core of the second, and more influential,streamof Empiricist design deology in ttre United Statesliesa distaste or urban life and foi urbanity. This bias isreflected n a long line of Anglo_American thought ftomThomasJeffenon o FrankLloyd Wright(Whire and White1964) nd in the suburban design olth. lut nineteenthcentury Darley lg78; Sternwith Massenga.le9g1; Kostof1985; tilgoe1988;p Rowe 1991).The bias s also oftencharacteristicof Rationalist thinking of the nineteenthcentury.Similarly,no true Communist could be an urban_ist seeMarx and Engels l84g)., The Regressive topians,within the Empiricistintel_lectual radition in design,had as heir ideaimodel for ahuman settlement the small green country town, theVermontvillage, the Salisburysof England. Fir them thesolution to the problems of the m{oi industrial cities oftheworld was o decentralizethem, reduce their popula_tiondensities,and createmore park land and more spacefor each household. The vehiile for achieving this endw1s he creation of magnets or people, new tovJns,whichafforded the best of country and urban life (Howard1902).Ultimately they were proposing a regional distri_butionof settlements.CatherineBa.r.. Wrrr.tia who alongwith Lewis Mumford (193g, 196l; Miiler 19g9) was a

!=_e.Dtrcnrr olry.

2. Part of Welwyn Garden City plan (1920)

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t3za

p

l. The Neighborhood UnitConcePt 2. Radbum, NewJeney, Plan (1929)

4. The School

6. A Main Road Underpass

elementary school (4) was o be its heart For children' the walkto school was through ttre central Sreen area (5) and'necessaryunderpasseswere built to segregate edestriansbusy vehicular traffic (6). Developed in the 1930s'remains a place well loved by its residents. Howevef itbecame a model for property developersand builden'

cuwilinear sometimes rllowing contour lines and so

5. The CentralParkFigure 2-8: Radburn, NewJerseYThe generic plan for a neighborhood unit developed by ClarencePerry, a sociologist of the Chicago school, was perceived to bea solution to the design of residential areas n the motor age(1,2)'The application of the generic plan to a particular situationis best exemplified by its fint example-Radburn, NewJersey'The plan by Clarence Stein and architecture by Henry Wrightclearly show the basic design principles of a bounded, safe,

panies, the architecture tends to be symbolic of the smallvillage. The roads also followed rural imagery being

48 URBAN DESIGN IN CONTEXT

green residential area.A view up one of the cul-de-sacsshowsthe pleasant,Picturesque environment thatwas created 3)'The

3. A View of a Cul-de-Sac

times not. The pattern wasasmuch a symbolic gesture

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4. E3

. E3r

'E3v

l. Plan of the Downtown Area

an ecological necessity and built on the early workOlmsted and the even earlier Picturesque movementlandscape architecture.The Garden City, asbuilt afterWorld War II in manypartsof the world, also ncorporated the neighborhood,unitconceptGolany 1976).ClarencePerryproposeda genericneighborhoodunit type in the 7929 ugionalSuruqofNalYmk nd ltsErwirons.He proposed that cities should bedivided into residential areasof about 160 acres eachcenteredon an elementary school so that a child wouldnot have o walk more than a mile to school. Three suchareaswould form a district large enough to havea highschool.About 10 percent of the total area would beallocatedto open recreational space; the m4ior roadswouldbe on the periphery with minor roadsserving thehouses.t is a conceptuallyneatmodel of a well-orderedenvironmentbasedon a number of middle-classBritishand American values: ndividuality and communality,automobileownership yet acknowledging the worth ofwalking,safety or children, efficiency in circulation yetopennessn spirit, and the schoolasa community,sheart(C.Stein1957;Gallion and Eisner 1986; Rowe 99l). Insymbolicaesthetics, he referent was the English land-scape ardenof the manor.All of thesecharacteristics anbeseen n the designof Radburn, NewJersey,he originalimplementationof the idea (Birch 1980).

Figure 2-9: Broadacre CityBroadacrecity is the logical extension of the Garden City ideal.A fundamental difference between Frank Lloyd Wright's viewsand thoseof the British and Australian branch ofthe rnovementwashis strongbelief in individual rather than cooperativeaction.The plan isconsiderablymore spacious l) than thoseproposedby his contemporaries, and the illustrations show the degree towhich eachelement of the designstandsasan obiect n space.In the caseof residentialareas 2) he open .pu.. *u. for small_scale agriculture. For the major buildings (3) the open spaceacted as a visual setting. The street was seen as a channel ofmovement and as a boundary. not a seam.

Frank Lloyd Wright's generic city plan, BroadacreCi4r, stands in strong contrast to the more compact Gar-den City and even more so to Le Corbusier,s Rad,innt City(see below). His conceptual plan clearly represenm apolitical philosophy reflecring his belief in Jeffersoniandemocracy as well as the importance of land and theautomobile in Americans'lives. He wrote: ,,Ruralism asdistinguished from urbanism is American and trulydemocratic." Also: "When every man, woman and childmay be born to put his feet on his own acres, thendemocracy will have been realized,'(Wright l95g; see alsoWhite and White 1964). It is clear from his drawings thatWright expected a revolution never achieved in transpor_tation technology (in this sense he was a progressivist).Broadacre City is of linear form with industry, com_merce, housing and social hcilities, and asriculturalholdings in a spacious distr ibut ion along a railroad an dhighway arterial. It contains every building type designedby Frank Lloyd Wright. Each family has a minimumof one acre of land so that basic agricultural activitiescan take place. Although there are neighborhood hcil_ities, no attempt is made to create a neighborhood unit.In many ways, the proposal is the ultimate Anglo-Amer_ican dream. lr provides for a high level of individu-aliry much open space,and high mobility-all importantAmerican values (Zelinsky 1973;Fallows 1989).Stern and

ofin

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Massengale(1981) note that Wright's "characteristicallyAmerican pragmatismwent with the grain of the Anglo-American n-adition'and with the market economy.TheRo;tia.no,lisn

Rationalism is the belief that truth and beautycan bedivined from reality by means of pure human reason.The Rationalist, rom Ren6Descartes1596-1650)onward,"argued for a unity of thinking and for a fundamentalbelief in the hcts of existence,without the necessityofconfirmation. . . . " (Sharp f978b).Rationalityand Ration-alism in architecture are not necessarily allied terms.Rationalism has become a synonym for Functionalism inarchitecture and the definition of function is seen to berational (Broadbent 1978).Rationalist urban design hasstood fcr an a priori commitment to Cartesiangeometry,monumental simplicity,and deliberate control. Rational-ists saw he Garden City and the medieval city as repre-senting a possibly rational past but not the future.Procedurally, Rationalist design relied on a deductiveprocessof establishing a model society,socially andphysically.This does not mean that their ideas had noprecedents, but rather that they wished to break com-pletely from the present.Rationalistswere(and are) ntol-erant of pluralism, of historic forms, and even of thehistoric origins of their own forms (Lai 1988).Rationalist urban design ideas combine a concernwith progressive f poorly reasoned political ideas forthe social oqganizationof the city with Platonic geometri-cal shapes for its physical form (L. Krier 1978; Sharp1978a; esnikowski1982;Boyer 1983).n commentingonthe medieval city-the city forms loved by Sitte-LeCorbusier noted: "it is the way of a donkey" (RoweandKoetter 1979). In rationalizing Albert Mayer's plan forChandiprh, he turned the curving roads into straightoneswithout changing the basic ormat of the city layout(i.e., ts neighborhoodunitbasis).By doingsohe achieveda bold, orthogonal, zonal scheme. The idea in urbanrenewal was o clear the slateand to startapin' As SantElia(1973;Carameland Longatti 1988)noted: "Demolish with-out pity the venerated city." Taken to its extreme, theRationalist position on urban planning was expressedbyBenito Mussolini in the 1920s:

Monumentsareone thing, uins areanother: et anotheris quaintnessor so called local color. All such sordidquaintnesss sworn o the ax . . destined o hll in thenameof decency,ygiene nd, f youwill, thebeauty f theCapital quoted n Frampton1983).

Mussolini's own line of thought is exemplified in theplans and preliminary construction of the E42 area ofRome. which wasdue to house the Universal Exhibitionof 1941(Mariani 1990).Later it was developed into theEUR, an office and convention complex. The scheme smonumental in scalewith broad boulevards, argebuild-inp, and a City Beautiful-like overall organization.

50 URBANDESIGN N CONTEXT

The Rationalistsconsistedof a more divene set ofpeople and ideas han the Empiricisa because hey weredealing with models of an unobservable but imagined,idealized future world more illusory than imagesof theexistingsmall town life or the medieval city.The Rational-ists subsume groups such as the Futuriss of Italy (seeCaramel and Longatti 1988 on Sant'Elia;Zevi 1978), tal-ian Rationalistssuch as Grupp 7 under the leadership ofGiuseppe Terragni, the de Stijl group in Holland, archi-tectsassociatedwith the Bauhaus n Germany, he Cubissof France, and the Rationalist and Constructivist schools ofSovietarchitecture in the period 1917 to 1932. t is alsopossiblethat Rationalism subsumedan intemational move-ment to incorporate occult, theosophy,geomancy,andesoteric magery asa spiritual heirophany in urban design,but there are alsoEmpiricists who did the same possiblythe architects of the Prairie school in Chicago at thebeginning of the twentieth century who were influencedby the Ho-o-den exhibition of the Imperial Japanesegovernmentat the 1893hir). These deas were perceivedto be an alternativeto late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Empiricism as the generator of ideas(Proudfcot 1991). They were highly influential in theUnited Statesas they were around the world.The m{or proponent of the Rationalistapproachtourban design was C.I.A.M., the Congrds Internationauxd'Architecture Moderne (Sert and C.I.A.M. 1944; LeCorbusier 1973;Bakema1982)and its descendent,Team10 (Smithson 1968;Smithsonand Smithson 1970,1972)'They werehighly influential in the United States.Also inthe United States,Louis Kahn's proposals for Philadel-phia (Ronner and Jhavari 1987) and the work of theBauhaus mastersWalter Gropius (e.g.,New Kensington,Pennsylvania),Mies van der Rohe (e.9., llinois Instituteof Technology ITT] campus),and Ludwig Hilbershemier(1940; Pomme4,Spaeth, and Harrington 1988) hll intothe Rationalist school.Although all thesedifferent streamsof thought existthere are a number of philosophical positions that thegroups have in common. They were unafraid of lalgecities,of proposing the alteration of the piecemeal own-enhip of land into lalge holdings, of radical politicaltheories, of harnessingmodern technology, or of devel-oping a new aesthetic.Their designsconsist of tall build'ings set in open green spacesconnected by, but turningtheir backs on, roads and highways in as orthogonal apattern aspossible.Not only were they simply unafi-aid odepart from the past, hey stronglyadvocateda newarchi-tecture or anew age.They convinced somem{or patronsthat this direction was he colrect one for the future (e.g.,PresidentJuscelino Kubitschek of Brazil, patron of Bra-silia, and Prime Minister Jawarharlal Nehru, patron ofChandigarh). Of all the architects associatedwith Pro-gressivist deas, Le Corbusier was probably more con'cerned about the changingworld and urbanism than anyof the others,and his models of the future city have been

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OI

3

zpit

a

c(-)

3v

l. La Cit6 Industrielle Plan(1904-1917)

3. Los Angeles,Rush City Refomed (1923-1928)

Brasilia

Figure 2-10: The Rationalist CityThe Rationalistsamong modern architectswere unified by theirapplication of reason o the problems of the day.Their thinkingwas largely unfettered by the realities of life. Rather it wasguided by a distrust of information obtained by the senses.Their focus of attention was on the development of possiblefuture social and physical structures or cities and the buildingswithin them based on their own imaginations. The schemesinclude Toni Garnier's Citi Indnutriellz 1,2),developed duringthe irst decade of the century with its forward-looking architec-

2. The Railway Station, La Cit6 Industrielle

ture and the work derived fiom the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus ineof thinking, with its bold rational geometry as exemplified inRush City Reformed designed by Richard Neutra, has beenparticularly influential (3).The same thought process,but withconsiderably richer designs, s shown in Le Corbusier's 1922proposal for Une \4llz Conkmpmaine 4) alrd the 1933proposalLa VillcRadieue-ilte Ra.d,i.antiifr.Their influence is bestexem-plified in Brasilia (5) and in campus and public housing designin the United States. Although many American cities haveRationalistgridiron plans, they are hardly Rationalist cities (6).

ep

I

6. New York City

SHAPING THE TWENTIETH.CENTURY CITY 5I

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the most nfluential (Le Corbusier 1934,1948,1960,1973;Evenson1970;Curtis l9U6;H. Brook 1987).The Corbusian City

Le Corbusier presented two sets of similar ideasabout what the city should be. The fi rst was he Contzmpo-raryCigfor ThreeMillion developed or exhibition in 1922,and the secondwas he more fully developedextensionof these deas n La VillzRadiewe Le Corbusier 1934). nboth he wasconcerned with the geometric order of thecity. The ordering systemhe chose was he straight ineand the right angle-a Cartesianorder-on a largescale(Eslami 1985, 1988).He was fundamentally concernedwith movement through the city at speed. He saw thestreetas simply a placefor moving cars.The fiame of the city would be a large-scale ridironhighwaysystemwith superimposeddiagonal oadsmeet-ing at the centenAccess o buildings would be fiom exitson this grid system ut pedestrian outeswould be separate.At the center was a railway station and a platform forairplanes aswell as he intersectionof the highwaysystem.Surrounding the center would be a large park withinwhich sixty-story cross-shapedoffice skyscraperswere tobe located at 250-meter ntervals.They would be inter-spersedwith two- and three-storybuildings in the form ofsteppedterracescontaining restaurants, afes, nd luxuryshops.The civic centerwould be on one side of the citycenter. t wou ld house the city hall, museums,and otherpublic facilities.The whole city would be within a park.The residential areaswould be of two types near thecenter: six-story maisonettes crossing the park lands inribbons with recreational frcilities between them andapartmentblocks;and frrther out, villas.The maisonetteswould be two stories with a balcony so that they would beopen to the sunlight and ai4 and the balconiesbe largeenough for a person to carry out daily calisthenics. heapartment slabs would be in a continuous U-shapedCartesian configuration with courtyards. His plan for theUniti d'habitahonwasa logical extension of this idea.

The Uniti d'habitationLe Corbusier developed the Unit6 d'habitation as aconcept for neighborhood, which stands n strongcon-trast to Perry'sneighborhoodnit. The two models can berega.rdedasexemplars of the contrasting attitudesof theEmpiricists and Rationaliss.The Unit6 is another con-ceptual scheme that has had a powerful influence onarchitects' hinking about the form of cities,especiallyas twas actually implemented in a number of places, hebest-knownof which is n Marseilles Le Corbusier1954).The Unit6 is a vertical neighborhood-a neighbor-hood in a building. The building is set on pilotes andconsistsof shopping on a central floor and areas or anurseryschooland othercommunal frciliti eson the roof.The apartments are each two floors high, with a balcony

52 URBANDESIGN N CONTEXT

l. The Unit6 dlhabitation, Marseilles

L Inlcm.l thoroutffe2. Gymnrstum3. Crfa nd uo t.rrrsa. C.fct.rarJ. Childrcn'! plryro$d5. Hqlt e&.7. ctirbt. Nurq9. Oub

r.:\- |i.'.i:..1\.\10. Youth club rnd *ortihoDtll. Commun.l l.und.t rnd d.yiq tod12. Entnnemd FrE t ldt13. GrnFl{. Sffidtweto.ht

.));'i\ . . ; . i' : ' \.\

2. CrossSection

Figure 2-ll: The Unit6 d'habitationThe Unit6 d'habitation developed by Le Corbusier during andimmediately after World War II (1) stands n strong contrast oClarence Perry'sneighborhood unit scheme and Radbum, NewJeney (see Fig. 2-8). It is a vertical neighborhood. The crosssection (2) shows the vadous components of the scheme: hecommunity frcilities on the roof, the shopping strip in thecente4 the layout of the apartment units, and the skip-stopelevator systememployed by ir I ts influence has been enornous(seeFigs.4-l(l), 5-3, and 6-6).

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{

l. Arcosanti 1969-1970).PaoloSoleri,Architect

to provide access o fresh air and sunlight-a primaryconcernofl-e Corbusier.The amangementofapartmentsallows or a skip-stop elevatorsystemwith elevatorsstop_pingon each hird floor The ground floor would be fieedfor the parking of cars, or circulation, and for recreation.A number of such buildings in a parklike seuing wouldconstitute he residential area of a city.ThcMegastructure

If Broadacre City is the logical extension of Empiri_cist hought, the logical exrensionof the line of thinkingof the Rationalists within the Modernist fold was themega.structureBanham lg76; Barneu igg6). Its forerun_nerswere ttre City of the Future of Hugh Ferris (Leich1980), ant'Elia'sFuturist designs Caramel and Longatti1988),he Unit6, and Le Corbusier'sschemes or AlgiersandRio deJaneiro(Le Corbusier 1960). he basic dea sstill the "city in a building" as proposed, for instance, nttreArcologies of Paolo Soleri (Soleri 1969, ggl; Walll97l), the neighborhood in a building, and the universityin a building. While many mega.structure roposalshavebeengenerated Dahinden 1972;Banham 1926;SkyandStone 976),ittle has eallybeenbuilt at this scale.Someofthe proposalshavebecomeverywell known becauseoftheir boldnessof design and because hey represent thetypeof thinking very well. One example is the proposal

2. Mega-Roadtown1970).Paul Rudolf, Architect

Figure 2-12: MegastructuresThere havebeen many proposalsfor a city as a building. Whileno city of this rype hasbeen built, paolo Soleri is making a slowprogresson an Arcosanti near Scottsdale,Arizona. It is one ofthe smallestof his generic desigrs (population 1,500 o 3,000,with 215 to 400 people per acre).Many of his proposalsare overtwice the height of the Empire StareBuilding in New york. LeCorbusier's Unit is a neighborhood in a building (see Fig.2-11). Paul Rudolph's plan for Manhatran,New york (2),andthe Archigram group's magesof the future city (3) take he ideafurthen

for Tokyo Bay by Kenzo Tange (Kultermann 1970)-a citybuilt on the Bay.Another is the concept of the plug-in cityof the Archigram group (Barnett 1986; Cook et al. l99l).Its basic notion was that the city changes rapidly, so buildthe infrastructure and then plugin the disposable elements.

Post-Modern MovementsA greatdeal ofrecent and current work owesmuchto the Modernist design principles if less o the spirit ofModernism developed during the first quarter of thiscentury (Portoghesi1979,1982).M{or projectssuchasLaD6fense n Parisor KenzoTange's esigrr or a new centralbusinessdistrict now under construction in Naples ollowthe urban designprinciples of the Moderniss, althoughthe individual buildings are clearly more in line withPost-Modernist esthetic rinciples,havinga higher degreeof decoration and historical referents.post-Modernism ofthis type is principally European and American in nature.It hashardly penetraredSingapore,Hong Kong,orJakartaand only barely made an impression on Japan. At best,schemes uch as he monumental Neo-Classical ork atAntigone, Montpellie4, by Ricardo Bofill and the Dlle4and the new townsof Marne-la-Valle6and Cergy-pontoisehavemoved French urban designaway iom boredom ofthe Le Corbusiannew ownsbecause f theirfocuson thespace-makingqualities of buildings (Torchinsky l9g9).

SHAPING THE TWENTIETH.CENTURYCI'TY 53

3. WalkingCiry ( 19il). Ro n Herron, Architecr

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l. Renaissance entel Detroit

Sometimes, he referentsseizeon idiosyncrasies f pastsfyles o prcduce an mitation that mocla,or parodies, heoriginal; at others, the referentsare used in a somewhatschizophrenicmanner asa pastiche.They representeffofisto respond to the criticism of Modernistdesignand therebydevelop new approaches o design, or rather adaptationsof traditional approaches. Much of the work, howeveqmisses the point of the cr iticism. It fails to elevate itsresidentsdespite striving for grandeur.The criticism of the applicationof Modernist urbandesign deas,both Rationalistand Empiricist, has beenextensive J.Jacobs 1961;Gans 1962, 968, 1975;Brolin1974; Blake 1977; Newman 1980b;Wiedenhoeft 1981;Wolfe 1981;Herdeg 1983; eealso Goslingand Maitland1984a,1984b).The responseof the design communityhasbeen n a number of directions, ometimes imultan-eously,and sometimes ndependently.One attitude hassimply been to let the market dictate-what can be soldshould be designed.This attitude has seen architectureand urban designbecome a "commodification'of fash-ionable images or use by the middle class.

The label "Post-Modernism," ike Modernism, gen-erally coversmany schools of thought. There havebeen anumber of new movements hat can be classified nderthe general rubric of Post-Modemism Portoghesi1979;Bruegmann 1981;Jencks1986;Davey 1987;Klotz 1989).These movements nclude those that can be groupedunder the titles of Neo-Rationalismnd l,leo-Embiricism s54 URBAN DESIGN N CONTEXT

2. Patemoster Souare Redevelopment. London

Figune2-13: Post-Modern Urban DesignWith the rejection of the Modern movements' generic typescame a new set of urban design approaches. During the 1970sand 1980sschemes anged fiom the economic pragmatic (l) toexplorations of various historic antecedents n adapted form, asin the work of Hammond, Bebe, and Babka and othen atPaternosterSquare adjacent to St.Paul'sCathedral, London (2).Someschemes re purely classical, thersexplore newgeometries,such as Harlequin Plazain Denver (3) by George Haqgreaves fthe SWA Group. Yet others hll into the mainstream of Neo-Rationalismor Neo-Empiricism seeFig.2-14).well as a small Neo-Cosmol,ogicalor, perhaps, a Cosmolog-ical Rniaal movement and a D'kcrete, or Weah, Archittc-htral movement and a Classical Rniual movement. Post-Modernism, in a broad sense, also includes the MetabolistsofJapan, with their new urban forms consisting of seriesof towers linking by highways, and their British counter-parts, the Archigram group of the 1960s, the strict Classi-cism ofJohn Blatteau and Alan Greenbelg (Stern wi*rGastil 1988), and the Expressionists such as Terry Farrellin the United Kingdom (Gosling and Maitland 1984a,1984b; Farrell 1985; Broadbent 1990).

Two m{or current philosophies are attracting theattention of both architects and laypeople: (1) Neo-Tiaditionalbm, as exemplified by the work of Andres Duanyand Elizabeth Plater Zyberk at Seaside, Florida (Duany1989), ttre Laguna West Master PIan by Calthorpe Associ-ates (Fromm 1991), in a different vein, Quinlan Terry'swork in Richmond in England, and even more startlingly,perhaps, the planning decisions to revive the downtownsof cities by locating facilities (such as Oriole Park-iselfa Neo-Tizditional structure-at Camden Yards in Balti-more) there; and (2) Deconstntctionism, as represented byBernard Tschumi's Parc de la Villette and Corona Parkproposal for Flushing, New York (Tschumi 1987, 1988a;Broadbent 1990). Much is being built within the formerphilosophy, but little in the latter, Most of these Post-Modern movements, howeve4 represent a continuationof the two m{or philosoph ical streams of thinking that

o

3. Harlequin Plaza.Denver

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3

2. Irvine Town Cente4,CalifomiaL Solana,Westlake,Southlake, Texas

3. KresgeCollege, University of Califomia at Santa Cruzdominate hinking about urban design:Empiricism andRationalism.

The Neo-Rationalists ike their forbearscontinue tohavea m4ior interest in geometries and in what theylegard

asprogressivepolitics (Broadbent 1990).The basicdesignprinciples involves the layering of grids both inplanand in architecture. Much .....ri*o.I is primarilyurban architecture rather than urban design (e.g., theKarlsruhe ibrary by MattiasUngers n Eu.opl, tn. f.iAuyMosque chemeby DerekWalkerand Associates,nd peterEisenman's isual Arts Center at Ohio StateUniversitv)butincludes uchbuilding complexes s h. nau.hst assehousingscheme n Berlin under the direction of RobIkie4, he cemeteryat Moderno by Aldo Rossi,and hous_ingschemes y Carlo Anymonimo. InJapan, proposalssuchas he Nakonshimapoint projecg a so_calledwenty_fint-centurypark by Todao Ando, are a mixture of Neo_Rationalistand Deconsfructionist ideas.Deconstructionitself epresentsa radically different attitude toward the

Figure2-14:Neo-Rationalism nd Neo-EmpiricismThe Rationalist pirit n post-Modernarchite-ctures exempli_fied in the desigrrof the Solanaofficecampusnear Dallas,Texas, yMitchell/Giurgolal). The concernswith the designof theenvironment sgeometric rt form.Much the sameineof thinking but with differentgeometriess characteristicfrecentDeconstructionistork.Neo_Empiricismendsnot onlyto haveadifferentgeometry ut relieson observationsfexpe_riences f theenvironment s hebasisordesign2,3). ecenttyit hasshownashiftawayiom thereliance n p"ersonalbserva_tion to theapplication, onsciouslyr rrnconsciously,f empiri-cal researchn design.

Neuve, n Belgium, and, as aqge-scalerban designprojecs,BatteryParkCity in New york City and MissionBay n SanFrancisco.These designs are on the periphery of theNeo-Tizditionalist movement. Architects aie looking to*re pastagain o identi$ pattems of the environment thatare pleasingand havesome meaning to people (seeR.Krier 1979).One m4ior change n urban dlsign ideologyhearkensback to the work of Sitte. t is the Uiban Consoti_dationmovement.The argument is for a retum to high_density, relatively low-rise living to promote the use ofmass ransit and to saveagricultural land. It is based onconsiderableEmpiricalevidence hatsuchenvironmentscan be highly livable but in countries such as Australiaand Canada, as well as the United States,people arehabituated to regard the suburban environrnent as theideal (P Rowe1991).^- The Neo-Empiricistsalso include people such asClrristopherAlexanderandhiscolleague llSiZl,CharlesMoore in the United StaresLinlejohn l9g4;Johnson19g6),and Europeanssuch as Ralph Erskine (Egelius l9g0a,1980b),Herman Herrzberger(lgg0), and Lucien Kroll(1972,1980)aswell as he Neo-Tizditionalists. heir im_plemented urban designwork is at the building_complexand small town scale.During the late 1980sand early 1990s, here hasbeen a reaction againstdesigningeachnew urban designschemeso that it loudly drawsattention to itself.A num_ber of architects elieve hat cities osemuch if eachnew

geometrical rders used (Johnson and Wigley 19gg;Ben_jamin 1988;Norris 1988;see also Fig. 4-6;. 'The Neo-Empiricist stream s comprised of a diverseof people who haveshown a concern with the detailslife in their work (Broadbent 1990).They have beenled he New Humanists Fitzhardinge SgO;.probably'th-e ostsignificantdesigns hat haveemerged n this lineof thought as a response to ttre frilures o1 th. Mod.rnmovementare the new university town of Louvain_L