5
 
The Demand-Side of Urbanism

Postwar suburban growth was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright and Broadacre City, but suburbanization was accelerated by the urban riots of the “long hot summers” of the mid-1960s. Los Angeles, Cleveland, San Francisco, Newark, Detroit, Boston, as well as Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York, suffered arson, looting, and civil unrest. In the decade that followed, urban crime rates soared, businesses moved out of downtown, and city populations continued to shrink. The old cities of the Northeast were also affected by a major national demographic move to the Sunbelt. As political analyst Michael Barone notes, “In the 1970s, every southern state, including even West Virginia, grew faster than the national average, as did every state in the West. No Midwestern states and no states in the Northeast, except three small New England states, did so.”1 All this added up to, as one urban historian has put it, an Age of Urban Crisis.² New York City, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Cincinnati either defaulted on their financial obligations or came perilously close to fiscal collapse. Not only did wholesale urban renewal fail to revive cities, it seemed to have had exactly the opposite effect.

The planner Alexander Garvin, author of The American City, a comprehensive overview of city planning in the postwar period, begins his book with the following disclaimer: “One thing most people share . . . is disillusionment with urban planning as a way of fixing the American city.”3 While he stoutly argues that this disillusionment is not justified, he admits that “despite many remarkable successes, American city planning has been plagued with continuing mistakes.”⁴ Garvin is not referring to the City Beautiful movement or to the Garden City suburbs, which both remained popular—and successful—until the 1930s, when the Depression, and later the Second World War, put a stop to all construction and planning projects. He is describing the period 1950–70. The list of planning “mistakes” is long and includes urban renewal that failed to revive faltering downtowns; wholesale slum clearance that displaced more people than it housed; high-rise public housing that ill served the poor; cultural, sports, and government “centers” that were isolated from the rest of the city; and urban expressways that severed and blighted entire neighborhoods. All in all, a dismal record.

That the failure was so consistent and so widespread was the result of several factors. The postwar euphoria of the 1950s put a high premium on the notion of “newness,” and any new idea, no matter how raw and untested, seemed worth trying. Public housing, for example, changed radically. The public housing that had been built immediately after the Housing Act of 1937 was similar to the urban housing being built by the private sector—unassuming row houses, each with a front door and a private backyard. The assumption was that poor people wanted to live like everyone else. By the 1950s, well-meaning social reformers promoted a new type of Radiant City housing, in which high-rise apartments replaced houses, balconies replaced backyards, and open space replaced streets and sidewalks.

The problem, as Mumford caustically observed, was that the promised City in a Park usually turned out to be a City in a Parking Lot.5 Municipal housing agencies lacked the funds to provide landscaping, proper maintenance, and adequate policing, and when federal laws were passed forbidding the screening of tenants, The Projects soon turned into socially dysfunctional concentrations of poverty. Lobbies and corridors were vandalized, elevators broke down, staircases became garbage dumps, roofs leaked, and broken windows remained unreplaced. Without babysitters, single mothers were stranded in their apartments, and teenagers roamed unsupervised sixteen floors below.⁶ As repairs were indefinitely deferred, many of the dilapidated apartments became unoccupiable. After only two decades, desperate municipal housing agencies often gave up. The first major housing project to be demolished —in 1972—was Pruitt-Igoe, a large housing complex in Saint Louis.

The dynamiting of Pruitt-Igoe was an iconic moment since the project had won a design award for its architect, Minoru Yamasaki (who later designed the World Trade Center towers in New York), but the demolition was to be repeated scores of time. Over the next two decades, public housing units in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Detroit suffered similar fates, as did the 4,321 units of Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. That was the other aspect of the failure: it was widespread. The uniform education received by architects and planners ensured that similar ideas were promoted from city to city. Since American cities compete for residents as well as employers, they tend “to keep up with the Joneses.” If Los Angeles got rid of its streetcars, then streetcars instantly became old-fashioned; if Chicago built an urban expressway, that became the model; if New York built a cultural center, smaller cities followed. Lincoln Center turned out as overblown and bombastic as Jacobs and others had predicted. Boston’s new government center was an unpopular, windswept nine-acre plaza around City Hall and resisted all efforts to introduce human activity. Chicago’s Civic Center (now Daley) Plaza fared somewhat better, although it never quite managed to achieve the status of a great public place.

Vertical living, cultural complexes, and large plazas were integral to Le Corbusier’s urban ideal; so was separating cars from pedestrians. Traffic separation had been introduced to American downtowns by the Viennese-born architect and planner Victor Gruen in his 1956 plan for Fort Worth, Texas, which provided raised decks for pedestrians. Although the proposal was not implemented because of public opposition to its cost, it was widely admired by city planners, and many cities built weather-protected downtown pedestrian-only systems. Streets in the air, or skyways, were built in Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and Calgary, Alberta; underground concourses appeared in Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, and Montreal. In cities with climatic extremes, the heated and air-conditioned spaces were popular, but it was unclear that the convenience of weather protection was worth the high cost. Advocates said yes, but critics pointed out that dividing pedestrians between indoor walkways and outdoor sidewalks only diluted activity in both areas and had an adverse effect on the vitality of city streets.7

A less expensive pedestrianization strategy was to close selected streets to traffic and add benches, landscaping, and fountains. There were three options: semi-malls, in which sidewalks were widened and traffic lanes narrowed (usually to two, without parking); transit malls, which had a single bus lane and were closed to other vehicles; and full-fledged pedestrian malls, which were closed to all traffic. In 1957, the first pedestrian mall was built in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Over the following two decades, more than two hundred North American cities undertook similar pedestrianization measures. The problem with malls, as Jane Jacobs wrote at the time, was that “planned pedestrian street schemes, if they throw formidable borders for moving and parked cars around inherently weak and fragmentary preserves, can introduce more problems than they solve [emphasis in original].”⁸ In short, once the novelty wore off, people—that is, shoppers—found that they didn’t like pedestrian malls, preferring traditional streets with sidewalks. Businesses along malls suffered, stores relocated, and the deserted pedestrian malls soon became magnets for vagrants. Only about thirty pedestrian malls remain in operation today. Most are in college towns, such as Boulder, Colorado, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Burlington, Vermont, where large populations of students, living in proximity to downtown, have free time to populate the mall’s cafés and bars. Some tourist-oriented Sunbelt cities, such as Santa Monica, Miami Beach, and Las Vegas, also have successful pedestrian malls. But malls elsewhere remain moribund or have been done away with altogether. The Kalamazoo mall has been reopened to limited vehicular traffic; Main Street Mall in Poughkeepsie has become a street again, as has Chicago’s State Street. A transit mall on Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street also reopened to traffic, although only after the previously thriving shopping street had suffered a marked decline, another victim of the Radiant City.

During the postwar era, modernist architects and critics attacked the City Beautiful movement for its Frenchified neoclassical taste and its elite aesthetic aspirations and championed the “city practical” instead. Yet civic art made a comeback in an unexpected guise. The 1965 demolition of McKim, Mead & White’s Pennsylvania Station in New York spurred the formation of the historic preservation movement, which was motivated as much by an admiration for beauty as by an interest in history. Not coincidentally, most of the cherished civic landmarks date from the same era, and in most cities historic preservation really means City Beautiful preservation. The great train stations, for example —Union Station in Washington, D.C., 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, Grand Central Station in New York, and Union Station in Los Angeles—have been restored to their former eminence.

Buildings such as Washington’s Union Station remind us that the City Beautiful era represents the benchmark for successful urban architecture. In a 2007 national poll that asked people to name their favorite buildings in the United States, the leading choices include the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Supreme Court of the United States, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Chicago Tribune Tower—all built between 1925 and 1943. In the top fifty favorites are the Empire State Building, the Woolworth Building, and the Chrysler Building, as well as the St. Regis Hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Grand Central Station, and the New York Public Library—and that’s just in New York City. In all, architecture from the four decades between 1900 and 1940 comprises more than half of the top fifty buildings on the list, a remarkable statistic given the amount of construction that has taken place since 1940.9

How has Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City idea fared? The last garden suburbs were built in the decade preceding the Great Depression, but they remain alive in the public consciousness for one simple reason: almost all the garden suburbs that were built between 1900 and 1930, such as Forest Hills Gardens and Palos Verdes Estates, have survived and prospered.¹⁰ Hence, contemporary home buyers do not associate garden suburbs with a musty planning theory but rather with desirable real estate. In the 1980s, the planning ideas of Raymond Unwin and John Nolen resurfaced as what came to be called New Urbanism. New Urbanism started in the 1980s with Seaside, not a garden suburb but a tiny resort village on the Florida Panhandle. Seaside had an influence far beyond its small size. American home buyers were attracted by the picturesque, traditional architecture; developers, who generally paid little attention to design, took note of the financial success. The chief lessons of New Urbanism were that home buyers value planning and design and will accept higher densities when these are associated with a sense of community.

The garden suburb returns as New Urbanism in a planned community in Orlando, Florida.

The resulting new generation of planned communities, such as Kentlands in Maryland, Stapleton in Colorado, I’On in South Carolina, and Baldwin Park and Celebration in Florida, adapt the old garden suburb model to present realities of higher land prices, greater car ownership, and a more competitive housing market. The resulting communities lack some of the nuance of the originals—vinyl siding and snap-on shutters have replaced solid masonry and craftsmanship—and tend to be larger than their small-scale predecessors. Celebration will have twenty thousand residents, Stapleton, thirty thousand. However, the basic tenets established by Unwin remain: compactness and variety in design, heterogeneity in house types, walkability, and a compact appearance of neighborliness. Above all, there is his chief lesson that in planning new communities much can be learned from the past, from the “individuality of towns.” The new generation of garden suburbs draws from early-twentieth-century models, as well as from Colonial examples such as Charleston and Savannah. Detractors deride these historical influences as “neotraditional” and “nostalgic,” but a sense of continuity with the past is precisely what appeals to home buyers.

Le Corbusier’s urban theories proved largely unsuccessful, but they were not a complete failure. Towers-in-a-park were a resounding flop as a model for social housing, but high-rise urban living has succeeded for a different clientele. Apartment living in American cities predates the Radiant City, although the influence is definitely Parisian—the first, late-nineteenth-century New York apartments, patterned on Parisian models, were called French flats.11 By the 1920s, with buildings such as the Ritz Tower, at forty-one stories the first residential skyscraper in the city; the twenty-seven-story San Remo; and its Art Deco cousin the El Dorado, all designed by Emory Roth, apartment living in New York was in full swing.¹² Roth was a proponent of the so-called Italian skyscraper—the twin San Remo towers are capped by classical temples; the top of the Beresford, another Roth design, has three cupolas. The apartments in these striking buildings were large, with salons and drawing rooms, roof gardens and solariums, servants’ rooms and butlers’ pantries. Eighteen-room suites, as well as duplex, or two-story, apartments, were not uncommon. Thus roof terraces, two-story apartments, and “villas in the sky” were well established in New York City years before Le Corbusier proposed them in the Radiant City. Nevertheless, that the most desirable New York apartments look out over Central Park to some extent validates his vision of towers surrounded by greenery.* So does the recent fashion for living in all-glass, distinctly modernist apartment towers. The big difference is that this is luxury housing, with doormen and janitors, in-house services and domestics, opulent kitchens, and marble bathrooms—all bourgeois amenities that Le Corbusier would have detested.

Jane Jacobs’s rediscovery of the pleasures of downtown living seems, at first glance, to have been a runaway success. At the time she died, in 2006, she was widely recognized as the most influential urban thinker of her time. The Death and Life of Great American Cities has become the dominant book about city planning of the second half of the twentieth century—perhaps of the entire century. Few people read Unwin or Nolen anymore, and while Mumford’s essays have preserved their crackling intelligence, The City in History now seems ponderous and dated. Jacobs’s book, on the other hand, has changed the way succeeding generations of architects and planners think about cities, and it had an effect on cities themselves. “Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration,” she wrote, “with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”¹³ The second half of her statement never quite came true. The suburbanization of America, which she chose largely to ignore, was too advanced and too popular. But the revivals of many American downtowns, the industrial lofts converted into residences, the restored historic districts, and the downtown residential real estate booms in cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco are a testament to her vision.

Yet that vision is playing out differently than what she expected. Jacobs’s description of the urban good life has wide appeal, but the supply of dense urban neighborhoods with the requisite mix of street life, old architecture, diversity—and employment—is limited. Not many cities have downtown residential neighborhoods with the character of Greenwich Village. Strong demand and a small supply has produced the inevitable result: real estate values in Jacobite neighborhoods have gone through the roof, and the lively working-class districts that she championed have turned into exclusive enclaves, closed to all but the wealthy. Jacobs believed that the everyday amenities of city life should be available to everyone; little did she imagine that they would become exclusive luxuries instead.

Or maybe she did imagine it. Despite that Death and Life has become a canonic planning text, the book is intensely suspicious of centralized planning and champions individual choice and free markets. A decade ago, Roger Montgomery, a noted city planner, pointed out that the arguments put forward in Death and Life reflect an active distrust of government, an endorsement of small business, and an almost total lack of attention to the role of corporations in American cities. He described the book as an “early neo-conservative tract,” whose themes “look mighty like the core belief system of libertarian conservatism.”14 Jacobs a libertarian conservative? I asked Nathan Glazer, who was her editor in the 1960s, whether he agreed. “Certainly somewhat libertarian, definitely not conservative,” he replied. “In a sense, anarchistic would be a better term than libertarian—people making their own decisions, with less or no guidance or control from above, will make a better city.”

Jacobs’s “better city” is a curiously classless place. Death and Life had little to say about social and economic differences, and even less about race, and reflected the author’s values as a middle-class, young woman from an industrial city living in a working-class neighborhood, and in love with the hustle and bustle of New York.15 Perhaps that is why she appeared perplexed by the massive movement to the suburbs that was taking place even as she was writing her book. The perceptions that some people might prefer suburban quiet to urban bustle, and that Greenwich Village might not appeal to everyone, eluded her.

They did not elude Herbert J. Gans, a sociologist who had guided Jacobs around Boston’s North End when she was writing her book. In a 1962 review of Death and Life, Gans pointed out that neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village and Chicago’s Back-of-the-Yards, which are described as models of urbanism in Death and Life, are actually highly unusual. Gans, who studied Boston’s West End closely for his own book The Urban Villagers, argued that such downtown, working-class, ethnic enclaves, with their collections of small stores and quaint buildings, were very different not only from middle-class neighborhoods but also from most other urban working-class neighborhoods. Moreover, they were anachronisms, with small houses, no private gardens, and no space for parking and “built for a style of life which is going out of fashion with the large majority of Americans who are free to choose their place of residence,” he wrote.¹⁶ Gans also observed that vitality and liveliness were not necessarily universally desired. He’d found no evidence that middle-class people, who were the majority of the urban population, valued such attributes. “They do not want the visible vitality of a North End,” he pointed out, “but rather the quiet and the privacy obtainable in low-density neighborhoods and elevator apartment houses.”17

The revitalization of some downtowns has not proved Gans wrong. The downtown neighborhoods that have become popular have also been transformed—“gentrified”—into upper-middle-class places that bear little resemblance to Jacobs’s Greenwich Village. “Visible vitality” has proved attractive, but chiefly to young professionals, childless couples, and retirees, and except in New York City, the suburbs remain the preferred location for families with children.

Gans, who had taught in a city-planning department, took issue with Jacobs’s critique of city planning. Not because he was particularly sympathetic to planners—although he pointed out that most city planners probably agreed with her proposals—but because he felt that she exaggerated the power of planning in American society. “The truth is that the new forms of residential building—in suburb as well as city—are not products of orthodox planning theory,” he wrote, “but expressions of middle-class culture which guides the housing market, and which planners also serve.”¹⁸ In an entrepreneurial society where people are free to choose how, and where, to live, they will ultimately get what they want, not what planners think they need.

Gans’s insight underlines that while planners and architects propose concepts such as the City Beautiful or garden suburbs, the public ultimately decides what it likes and dislikes. Instead of one big idea, the city is formed by many little ideas, “the freedom of countless numbers of people to make and carry out countless plans,” as Jacobs put it.19 The results can be unexpected, and often not what planners anticipated. While City Beautiful advocates wanted to beautify the entire city, the public liked downtown monumental buildings. Le Corbusier saw towers in the park as worker housing, but high-rise living turned out to be most popular among the wealthy. Wright imagined Broadacre City as a place for independent yeomen farmers, but decentralized development attracts independent software developers, and Walmart, instead. The New Urbanism movement has grand ambitions to remake the center of cities, but its greatest successes have been in the suburbs, so much so that Vincent Scully, an admirer, once wrote, “The New Suburban-ism might be a truer label.”²⁰

In 1968, the eminent city planner Martin Meyerson described the challenges facing American cities: “The greatest need in our cities is not so much for a giant rebuilding program as for a giant upsurge of popular concern for and pride in the urban environment.”²¹ Meyerson meant that in a representative democracy the expenditure of public funds on urban renewal, public housing, and highway construction requires a political constituency. Forty years later, that constituency expresses itself in the form of individual choices, and individual demands, channeled through the marketplace. Or, as my old schoolmate Andrejs Skaburskis, a city planner at Queen’s University in Canada, pithily put it, echoing Gans, “In the long run, it is the demand-side pressures that forge the shape of cities.”²² That might just be the next big planning idea: the public actually knows what it wants or, at least, recognizes it when it sees it.

^*The same combination of luxury high-rise living and open space happens in other cities: in Philadelphia the most exclusive apartments overlook Rittenhouse Square, in Chicago they look out over Lake Michigan, in San Francisco they have views of the Bay.