Putting the Pieces Together
The World Trade Center site is an example of an abrupt and unanticipated need for urban redevelopment, but cities are always building and rebuilding to accommodate growing populations and technological and cultural changes. Perhaps the most common urban change is densification. Densification has many advantages: more people on the street (which usually offers a safer environment), more shops, more amenities, more choices, more efficient mass transit, higher property values. Densification also produces a larger municipal tax base, which is important for those cities that lost population when they deindustrialized during the postwar years. Thanks to deindustrialization, smaller households, and larger residential units, current population densities in cities, even in the densest cities, are still far below what they were a hundred years ago.1 So, talk of “vertical sprawl,” an alarmist term used by opponents of urban densification, is premature.2
Urban densification is not evenly spread across the city, however, but tends to occur in proximity to amenities such as downtowns, cultural districts, parks, and waterfronts. It is precisely density that allows these amenities to achieve their full potential. The success of a shopping street, a city park, or a waterfront esplanade depends on the presence of large numbers of people. An uninhabited street, a deserted park, or an empty esplanade are not only unattractive, they may even appear threatening and dangerous. So, in densification, which comes first, the amenities or the people?
“Build it and they will come” is one answer. Large mixed-use projects can prime the pump by attracting many residents in a relatively short time. Since sufficient amenities must be in place from the beginning to attract buyers and tenants, the success of such projects depends on developers who have the financial resources to fund the considerable up-front investment, the proverbial deep pockets. The project must have a large enough critical mass to warrant such investments, and the developer must have the experience and resources to deal with a variety of uses. The role of city government is important, particularly in land assembly and in facilitating community acceptance. Design is critical, too, since the project must quickly establish that elusive quality, a sense of place. To effectively prime a pump there must be water in the well, however; it is essential that the city be part of a growing and economically healthy metropolitan region. Downtown densification is not a recipe for saving declining cities.
The challenge for planners is how to jump-start development without falling into the pitfalls that plagued the large urban-renewal projects of the 1950s. This can be difficult, as the checkered history of Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia demonstrates. The seventy-five-acre site on the Delaware River was created in the early 1960s with landfill from the construction of a sunken crosstown expressway. Penn’s Landing, at the foot of Market Street and adjacent to downtown, was seen as a potentially lucrative development opportunity by the city, which owned the site, and the city department of commerce commissioned a master plan for the area. In the prevailing spirit of urban renewal, the development was conceived as a superblock, consisting of a landmark office tower housing the port authority, additional office space, a science park, and a boat basin. As part of a strategy to revitalize Philadelphia’s role as a port, the plan included an embarcadero that could berth two thirty-thousand-ton cruise ships. The goal was to complete the project in time for a planned 1976 Philadelphia world’s fair to coincide with the bicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The Penn’s Landing plan, which captured the imagination of public officials, notably Edmund N. Bacon, executive director of the city’s planning commission, contained a number of flaws. It was described as a logical extension of William Penn’s original plan, but a little thought might have raised questions about the wisdom of locating office buildings two miles away from the existing business district. Moreover, access to the site was problematic. A major interstate highway, I-95, as yet unbuilt but in its final planning stages, would necessitate a four-hundred-foot-long overpass, making for a tenuous connection between Penn’s Landing and the rest of the city.
Thanks to intensive lobbying by the city and the state, federal highway planners agreed to depress I-95 for the seven blocks opposite Penn’s Landing, which at least allowed street-level access to the site. In 1970, a quasi-public body, the Penn’s Landing Corporation, was founded, and three years later it announced a developer competition for a mixed-use project on the site. The winning entry consisted of three high-rise buildings containing offices, apartments, and a hotel, all sitting on top of a fourteen-hundred-foot-long parking structure (proximity to the river meant that parking had to be above-ground). The parking structure was required since most people were expected to come to Penn’s Landing by car, and the developer requested that new ramps be added to I-95, which was then under construction. This produced vocal opposition from neighborhood groups, who feared increased local street traffic, and after several years of hearings, the ramp was voted down. As a consequence, the developer withdrew from the project.
The bicentennial was looming, and although the city had lost its bid to host a world’s fair, $13 million was spent landscaping part of Penn’s Landing to serve for special events such as fireworks and concerts, the first public uses on the site. The next twenty years saw four different proposals to develop the area. In one case, the city commissioned a master plan but could not identify a developer to implement it; in another, a slowdown in the national economy scuttled a mixed-use project. The Rouse company, in the wake of its successful waterfront projects in Boston and Baltimore, unveiled an ambitious design for a festival marketplace, but after losing an anchor tenant, Disney, and facing a nationwide slump in retailing, it canceled the project.
It was now more than thirty years since the first master plan for Penn’s Landing, and all the proposals for complicated mixed-use projects had fallen through. Finally, in 1997, the city picked the Simon DeBartolo company to develop an entertainment and retail complex; in other words, a shopping mall. A new feature of the site was a federally funded aerial tram connecting Penn’s Landing to Camden, across the river. As the mall project developed over the next five years, construction costs spiraled from the original $130 million to $329 million. Then in 2002, as the economy weakened, Simon DeBartolo announced that it was withdrawing from the project. With the tram under construction, the city found itself in an embarrassing situation, and a new call for developer proposals was cobbled together. But after four unconvincing submissions, the project was shelved. All that remains are the pylons for the now defunct aerial tram.
It would be wrong to describe Penn’s Landing merely as a development failure, since a number of new uses are in the area: low-rise housing on two abandoned piers, a hotel, a maritime museum, a skating rink, and a landscaped plaza that is the site of regular concerts, fireworks, and assorted public festivities. Nevertheless, the millions of dollars that were spent over the years on plans, public hearings, infrastructure improvements, and public institutions have not borne fruit.
The story of Penn’s Landing shows the difficulties inherent in the wholesale development of large urban sites. Successful megaprojects, such as Rockefeller Center, are few and far between and are generally the result of unique circumstances (in that case, the Depression, which reduced construction costs, and an immensely wealthy client). The challenge for a site as large and isolated as Penn’s Landing was that it needed a critical mass, but because of its size it took so long to implement that it was particularly susceptible to market cycles. Over and over, the plans ran into the reality of falling demand, yet the need to make a grand architectural gesture—inherited from Bacon’s original master plan—prevented the city from scaling back the project to more realistic dimensions.
Penn’s Landing also shows the thorny problem of combining public and private spaces in the city. The project started as private commercial development, then assumed a more public face. This produced confusion about the appropriate character of the place. Was it a public amenity that deserved the support of public funds? Or was it a commercial site that should depend on private financing? But if it was the latter, as in the case of the shopping mall, why were public subsidies required? To say that the project had to be both public and private merely blurred the distinction, both functionally and politically. Unlike Brooklyn Bridge Park, Penn’s Landing never had a clear strategy for how to use private development to reinforce the public good.
The answer to large urban development has turned out to be big projects that are, at the same time, collections of little plans. Like Penn’s Landing, Battery Park City on the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan was built on landfill (produced by the excavations for the World Trade Center). The ninety-two-acre project was planned and coordinated by the Battery Park City Authority, a public-benefit corporation created by New York State in 1968, about the same time as the Penn’s Landing Corporation came into being. As in Philadelphia, the first designs for Battery Park City were ambitious megastructures on superblocks, and they suffered the same fate. The project took a different turn in 1979, when the Authority commissioned Alexander Cooper and Stanton Eckstut to create a plan that could be implemented by several different developers in successive phases. Cooper and Eckstut extended the uneven Lower Manhattan street grid into the site, creating small parcels of land that could be filled in with medium- and high-rise apartment blocks.* Like Reston Town Center, Battery Park City was designed to grow piecemeal, building by building, with individual projects financed and built by different developers, in response to changing market demand, but following the architectural guidelines of the master plan. This approach was successful, and with the exception of the World Financial Center—a single-developer office complex in which all the buildings were designed by a single architect, Cesar Pelli—the physical results are pleasantly heterogeneous and avoid the architectural uniformity that so bedeviled earlier urban-renewal projects.
Battery Park City includes a variety of shops, several public schools, restaurants, hotels, museums, a multiscreen movie theater, and a yacht basin. The development, which will ultimately house sixty thousand residents and office workers, demonstrates how a public body can successfully work with private developers.3 The mixed-use plan also shows that a return to a more traditional urbanism is not only feasible and financially viable, but also popular. The waterfront location of Battery Park City is a big part of this popularity. A mile-long public esplanade at the river’s edge—the first in Manhattan—attracts visitors from outside the development and provides the requisite sense of place.
One of the largest examples of urban densification is Stapleton, a forty-seven-hundred-acre development on the site of Denver’s old airport, about fifteen minutes from downtown. Begun in 2001 and developed by Forest City, a Cleveland-based developer that specializes in large urban projects, Stapleton will have thirty thousand residents and thirty-five thousand new jobs when it is complete. While consisting predominantly of single-family housing, it also includes apartments and condominiums and has a density of about twenty people per acre, compared to a typical suburban density of ten people per acre. Surrounded by existing urban neighborhoods, Stapleton has been able to support more extensive retail and commercial uses, as well as employment, than would have been possible in a suburban site.
The attraction of water at the esplanade in Battery Park City, New York.
Smaller (but denser) than Stapleton is Atlantic Station in midtown Atlanta, on a 138-acre site that once housed a steel mill. The project of local developer James F. Jacoby was begun in 1998 and will contain five thousand residential units (both high-rise apartments and single-family houses), 6 million square feet of office space, 2 million square feet of retail space, and one thousand hotel rooms, as well as a mixed-use town center—in all, employment for thirty thousand people.4 The commercial area, which consists mainly of four- and five-story buildings, apartments and offices above stores, with streets and sidewalks, is compact and walkable. The crisp modern design of the buildings, with restaurants and cafés spilling out onto the sidewalk, reminded me of a new shopping district in Holland or Germany.
In Stapleton, Denver, traditional main-street activities animate a new neighborhood center.
Equally modern is the architecture of a mixed-use development planned for downtown Washington, D.C., by developer Gerald Hines. Here, the old urban-renewal planning process will, in effect, be reversed. Starting with a superblock—which had been created in the 1970s to house a now demolished convention center—the planners, Foster + Partners, have reopened the old streets, carved the site up into six smaller blocks, and created an interior pedestrian shopping street where an alley historically existed. Integrated with its urban surroundings, the complex contains office buildings, condominiums, and apartment blocks, all with shopping at street level. A typical piece of downtown fabric, except that the buildings sit on top of a massive underground garage.
Denver, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., are metropolitan regions that have experienced vigorous population growth, but not all cities have a sufficiently dynamic real estate market to attract large investments of capital (more than $5 billion in the case of Stapleton), or sufficient vacant land for large downtown projects. That doesn’t mean that densification can’t happen, but it will be smaller in scale and slower. In older cities, densification often means the conversion of disused industrial and commercial buildings to residential use. The process generally begins with small developers, entrepreneurs, and individuals who are prepared to take risks. Eventually, new residents attract small-scale retail, which in turn attracts more residents, perhaps young professionals and empty nesters. The growing demand encourages larger, better-financed developers to undertake larger projects, which bring with them more retail and entertainment venues, and so on. Although, in most cases, the initial decision to densify a neighborhood is taken by the market, not by public officials, the role of government is key, especially in the early phases. Facilitating permitting allows redevelopment to start at a small scale; tax abatements and historic preservation credits can provide incentives in weak markets; and in later phases, streetscape and infrastructure improvements and parks will attract more residents. Finally, constructing new public buildings such as libraries and schools, while it is unlikely to jump-start the process, can be an important reinforcement in later stages of development.
The Yards in Washington, D.C., a large waterfront development that combines residential, commercial, shopping, and recreational uses with historic buildings, is a good example of what city officials, developers, planners, and architects have learned about successfully infilling, restoring, and densifying urban districts. The site is at the foot of Capitol Hill in the near Southeast district of the city and occupies land that once belonged to the Washington Navy Yard. The historic shipbuilding yard and ordnance plant, founded in 1898, occupied 127 acres on the Anacostia River. In 1962, as naval ship construction was relocated elsewhere, half of the yard was decommissioned, and the land and buildings were transferred to the General Services Administration, or GSA, the agency responsible for managing the federal government’s buildings and real estate. The GSA’s plan was to create a campus of federal office buildings, but due to lack of funds, and a lack of interest on the part of federal agencies, only the Department of Transportation headquarters was built. In 2000, Congress gave the GSA special authority to sell or lease the rest of the site, forty-two acres, or to undertake a joint development with the private sector. In an unusual decision, the GSA chose the last course and signed a seventeen-year agreement with developer Forest City Washington to create a $1.7 billion mixed-use waterfront project where eighteen thousand people will live and work.
New development restores old buildings, adds new ones, and creates waterside public parks at the Yards in Washington, D.C.
The first phase of the Yards will be finished by 2010, and the entire development will take another decade to complete. The master plan, designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects, Shalom Baranes Associates, and SMWM, reintroduces the original streets and alleys, some of which had been closed by the navy, and extends New Jersey Avenue, one of L’Enfant’s diagonals, into the site, terminating it by a new treed square. The lessons of Reston Town Center and Battery Park City are evident throughout: the streets cut the site up into relatively small parcels, allowing the developer to engage different architects for the thirty different buildings. Architectural diversity is further assured by the presence of a 1915 Beaux Arts–style city pumping station, and several historic Navy Yard buildings: a large 1919 boilermaker’s shop that will be reused for shopping and restaurants, and three industrial blocks that will be converted to residential use. In accordance with Washington’s height restriction, the new buildings at the Yards are roughly ten stories high, many with shops at street level. The style of the new construction could best be described as “industrial chic”: lots of glass, exposed concrete, and brick. Beside the river is a six-acre park, designed by the noted landscape architect Paul Friedberg, which incorporates a variety of activities: a boardwalk and a boat dock at the water’s edge, a large lawn for public events, intimate gardens, and waterfalls and fountains, as well as hard surfaces near a historic structure that is turned into a restaurant pavilion, and new retail buildings that create a small festival marketplace. While the pedestrian mall idea of the 1970s has not been resurrected, Water Street, immediately behind the park, can selectively be closed to traffic for community events such as street fairs and farmers’ markets.
The Yards demonstrates much of what has been learned about city building in the last three decades. The first lesson is that it is a mistake to ignore centuries of urban history. Old, well-tried planning solutions are often still the best: streets with sidewalks, street trees, individual buildings, a close mixture of different uses such as apartments above shops, and office buildings next to condominiums.
The second lesson is that while modern technology, whether it is the automobile or the Internet, can be a powerful force for change, new technology does not automatically require the city to be reinvented. In most cases, it is best simply to add another layer to the many layers of the past. Successful examples of urban interventions, such as Ghirardelli Square and Quincy Market, have involved adjustment rather than radical change—the conversion of old industrial buildings and the reconfiguration of obsolete waterfronts. Preserving history when it is possible and reinforcing the past are important. A further advantage of adjustment and preservation is that they help create a rich and distinctive sense of place.
The third lesson, derived from Jane Jacobs, is that urban amenities such as streets and parks work best when they are intensively used—one of the keys to urban vitality is density.* The residential population of the Yards will be nine thousand people, or more than two hundred people per acre; less than the three hundred people per acre at Battery Park City (which has apartment buildings as high as forty stories), but much denser than most urban neighborhoods outside Manhattan. Like Battery Park City, the Yards will also have a large number of office workers. Equally important is that the Yards is not conceived as an isolated “project,” but rather as an integral part of the surrounding city. It is sandwiched between Nationals Park, a new forty-one-thousand-seat baseball stadium, and a working naval facility and is connected to the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail, an important regional amenity. This pragmatic combination of uses flies in the face of traditional planning-by-zoning, yet it will undoubtedly make the Yards a lively neighborhood. Like Battery Park City, the Yards is not a tourist attraction, but Washingtonians will be drawn to the waterside park and its adjacent restaurants (a Metro station is nearby).
Mixing apartment and office buildings with ground-floor retail contributes to urban vitality.
One important way in which the Yards forms an integral part of the city is in its proximity to modestly priced homes. In the 1940s and 1950s, Arthur Capper and Carrollsburg Dwellings, a seven-hundred-unit public housing project, was built across the street from the Washington Navy Yard. Like many housing projects, this one suffered severe deterioration. The District of Columbia Housing Authority, working with Forest City Washington and Urban Atlantic, a developer specializing in social housing, demolished all the derelict housing on the thirty-five-acre site and replaced it with a much denser development of townhomes and apartment buildings, as well as a community center, three office buildings, and stores. The houses are on tree-lined streets; the low-rise apartment buildings face a park. Capper/Carrollsburg is a HOPE VI project, a federal housing assistance program to cities that was begun in 1992. The goal of the program, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is to “end the physical, social, and economic isolation of obsolete and severely distressed public housing by recreating and supporting sustainable communities and lifting residents from dependence and persistent poverty.”5 Unlike traditional public housing projects, HOPE VI developments are public-private partnerships in which social and market-rate housing are side by side.
Some HOPE VI projects have been criticized for substituting market housing for social housing, but the rebuilt Capper/Carrollsburg development replaces all the original housing units with rented public housing (including senior housing) and “workforce” housing, affordable for working families (restricted to households earning a stated percentage of the area’s median income). In addition, the development adds nine hundred units in apartments and townhomes that are rented or sold at market prices. To deinstitutionalize the public housing, all the units—social, workforce, and market-rate—are built and managed by the private sector, rather than by a municipal housing agency. To further remove the stigma traditionally associated with “the projects,” the social and market-rate units are indistinguishable.* Combining social and market-rate housing allowed the housing agency to leverage a $35 million federal grant into $200 million of new public housing, as well as half a billion dollars of private development. The financial cross-subsidy is the result of building commercial and retail buildings as well as housing on the same site.
The lesson of Capper/Carrollsburg is an implicit critique of earlier public housing policies. No more superblocks, no more high-rise apartment buildings (most of the social housing will be in town houses or low-rise walk-ups), no more islands of concentrated poverty. In Capper/Carrollsburg, as in many other HOPE VI developments, social and market-rate units are side by side. This approach acknowledges that the design of the urban environment, both buildings and neighborhoods, must meet the market test. People’s demands and desires, including those of poor people, must be taken into account.
The final lesson of the Yards is that the role of government in supporting urbanization remains important. The GSA as the client ensured the proper preservation and restoration of historic buildings, demanded the provision of well-designed public spaces, reviewed architectural guidelines, and oversaw the design and maintenance of public amenities. The HOPE VI project was similarly a collaboration of public and private interests. Such collaboration is complementary: developers are good at understanding what people want, but they tend to be focused on their own projects and are less interested in how these projects fit into—and affect—the surrounding city. Government, on the other hand, has not shown itself to be effective at city planning, often being more concerned with dictating what is “good for people” rather than discovering “what people want.” Burdened by entrenched bureaucracies, government is also not good at responding to changing consumer demands. But a municipal government has the resources and the responsibility to deal with citywide issues such as infrastructure, transportation, and community concerns. Large urban projects definitely need to be planned, and successful planning requires public participation as well as private entrepreneurship.
*Battery Park City was separated from Lower Manhattan by the West Side Highway. Plans to put the elevated highway underground were canceled in 1985, and although the elevated structure was dismantled, eight-lane West Street remains a formidable barrier to pedestrians.
*Conversely, even well-designed amenities will fail without sufficient users.
*The exteriors are identical; the interiors vary, since the market-rate units may have upgraded materials and finishes, depending on the buyers’ preferences.
