The Death of Urbanism E-Book

Marcus White

• Herausgeber: Spurbuchverlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: The Practice of Theory and the Theory of Practice
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 200

Beschreibung

Koolhaas pronounced urbanism dead in 1995. Since then, urban design has struggled to come to terms with this and other losses including environmental stability, af- fordable housing, design control, and urban amenity. This book explores urban design paradigms transitioning through a misappropriation of Kübler-Ross' "five stages of grief" – from pro-sprawl 'denial', NIMBY 'anger', revisionist NewUrban, 'bargaining', 'depressed' starchitects, through to an optimistic manifesto of 'acceptance'.

Leseprobe

The Deathof Urbanism

Transitions through five stages of grief

Marcus White

Nano Langenheim

Contents

On death and dying urbanism

First stage: Denial‘this can’t really be happening’

Second stage: Anger‘it’s not fair… why me?’

Third stage: Bargaining‘a vain hope that the bad news is reversible’

Fourth stage: Depression‘I’m so sad, why bother?’

Fifth stage: Acceptance‘make the most of the time left’

Hope

Figure 1: ‘Great Guitar Street in 3D! – perspective view’, detailed 3D streetscape point-cloud of Nguyễn Thiện Thuật, Phường 2, Quận 3, Hồ Chí Minh, Vietnam, 2019. HCMC produces 1/100th the CO2 per capita of Atlanta (Kenworthy 2003).

Preface

In this book we examine key historical city design approaches and ‘procedures’, along with recent urban design paradigms and some of their pitfalls. We conclude with more optimistic suggestions for advancing design responses for more equitable, healthy, sustainable and beautiful future cities. We balance this serious urban design research with a little dry and slightly black humour to help us light the way as we work through some dark and challenging, but critical urban issues.

The book is written for students and practitioners in architecture and urban design and related disciplines, as well as academics and non-academics with a keen interest in the built environment and the future of cities.

We would like to acknowledge the help of Tianyi Yang for her tireless contributions to image sourcing and production; Professor Mark Burry for his ongoing encouragement; Francis and Aster, for their sympathetic understanding whilst enduring ‘half-parenting’ for the past few months, who instead of acting out, put their energies into reading, practicing complex origami and creating truly spectacular craft projects, and finally, the AARD Curatorial Editor, Professor Rochus Urban Hinkel, who has been incredibly supportive of the authors.

Both authors have recently experienced the death of close family members. We have ourselves both gone through the various stages of grief. We have found the researching and writing of this book therapeutic and have both come to understand the importance of maintaining both hope and humour through difficult times – be they due to the loss of a loved one, the declining quality of the built environment, or the fears associated with bringing children into a pretty scary world where our politicians march towards the far right, and after decades of corruption, greed, and complacent inaction, climate change now threatens their future.

We would like to dedicate this book to the recently departed:

Mary Burke

and

Peter White

On death and dyingurbanism

Back in black

Why do architects wear black? Is it because they are trying to disguise sedentary life-styles, where black is used for its slimming properties just as they would use black to ‘paint out’ elements of buildings they wish were slimmer or weren’t there? Probably not. Though most architects may have ‘AutoCAD arms’, they do seem to come in all shapes and sizes, including those who are as slender as Sejima columns.

Is it because of the architect’s inner bogan*? Are architects secretly fans of heavy metal, the musical movement synonymous with wearing black, but due to a desire to maintain a professional appearance, are unable to proudly sport their favourite black band t-shirts? This may be true for some, (including the authors of this book) but the abysmal sales of our ‘Architecture – not just for wankers’ T-Shirt series would suggest otherwise [Figure 2 and Figure 3].

Is it because architects are all-powerful ‘urban puppeteers’ looming behind the scenes controlling the built environment and dictating people’s lives? Hardly. Quantity surveyors and traffic engineers now have far more control over shaping the built environment than any architect. If anything, the black clothing is more likely to represent mourning over a complete loss of control over the urban environment and the decline of cities. In Rem Koolhaas’s book with Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL, he pronounced that “urbanism is dead” (1995) and that the uncontrollable generic city has taken over.

[…] The role of the architect in thisphenomenon (manipulation of the urbanlandscape) is almost negligible. The onlything architects can do from time to time isto create within those circumstances, moreor less masterful buildings (Koolhaas & Mau,1995).

Koolhaas describes the unfettered development within cities throughout the world with low-quality buildings designed in generic, non-descript architectural styles, built with little thought given to overall urban cohesion, connections, place, composition or much of anything other than to respond to market forces.

Cities are becoming or already have become manifestations of globalisation and ‘genericness’ like shopping malls or airports. In almost every international airport, one can either stare out onto the desolate expanse of tarmac covered in fossil fuel-guzzling vehicles, just like the endlessly sprawling car-dominated landscapes of the suburbs, or wade through the anonymous no-placeness of the airport shopping mall with its H&M, Zara, and Gap, Duty-free perfume, cigarettes and liquor stores, Starbucks and Gloria Jean’s coffee shops, Subway and McDonalds fast-food restaurants. If not paying attention to subtle differences, it is difficult to discern where you are in the world. If not for the receipt from the over-priced burger you just ordered saying AUD and that the Burger King logo subtly swapped out for Hungry Jacks†, it would be very easy to believe yourself to be anywhere, Mexico, Brazil, Hong Kong, Germany or North America.

Figure 2: ‘ArchitectyA : None More Black’ from the ‘Architecture – not just for wankers’ T-Shirt series shows what architects are wearing on the inside, a modified Metallica t-shirt from the ‘Black Album’ (1991) replacing Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett and Newsted with Hadid, Gehry, Koolhaas and Nouvel. www.zazzle.com.au/architectya

Figure 3: ‘ArchitectyA : Plaster of Muppets’ from the ‘Architecture – not just for wankers’ T-Shirt series, a modified Metallica from the ‘Master of Puppets’ album (1986) replacing field of military cross headstones with Le Corbusier’s 1964 Ville Radieuse cruciform towers (note master of puppets pulling strings replaced with collaged hands from the famous photo of Le Corbusier pointing to the physical model of said scheme).

Even older cities, once beyond the tightly controlled ‘historic quarter’ or old ‘down-town’ inner area, begin to blur into one another, with a scaled-up version of the airport’s retail, topped with monotonous curtain walled commercial office towers or tightly packed housing towers with façade articulated by balconies sized to fit split system air conditioner condenser units.

As you travel beyond the central business district, the denser urban form fades towards lower density, single-use zoned suburbia. Again, the repetitive urban fabric is almost indistinguishable to the non-discerning eye – are you in Altadena on the outskirts of Los Angeles? Are you in Rueil-Malmaison on the edge of Paris? Or Tarneit in Melbourne’s outer west? If you have ever travelled to Tarneit, it can be hard to not at least question the health of urbanism. For those readers who are not familiar with the term urbanism, it is both an abstract and concrete noun used to describe the conceptual and physical characteristics of a town or city. It is derived from urban which in turn comes from the Latin origin urbanus, from urbs ‘city’. Ildefons Cerdà coined the term urbanism in his 1867 manifesto Teoría General de la Urbanización [General Theory of Urbanization] (Rippon, 2005) referring to the focus of the work done by an urban designer, who in terms of scale, works somewhere between that of a regional planner and that of an architect.

In 1859 Ildefons Cerdà produced plans for the extension ‘Eixample’ to Barcelona. Cerdà proscribed building heights, a carefully considered spatial structure and urban character with a direct relationship between streets and buildings, delicately balanced pedestrian and vehicular movement systems with in-ground and above ground services, and rigorous rules to ensure the protection of urban amenities such as light and air.

We will come back to Cerdà later, but for now, it is worth contemplating the level of careful consideration employed by Cerdà in the 1800s in contrast to the kind of globalised urban chaos described by Koolhaas or the monotonous, treeless, sidewalkless urban wasteland of Tarneit in Melbourne.

Urban decomposition

The death of urbanism is manifested in the slow death of many cities that are occurring around the world. We can find apparent evidence of the death of cities if we take an anthropomorphic approach and compare the human body to the city – a popular analogy with architects from Vitruvius, da Vinci, through to Le Corbusier. The death of urbanism might be confirmed if we think about the posthumous human body decomposition. The decomposition of the human body occurs in three phases. Firstly, autolysis (self-digestion), which begins immediately after death and involves circulatory systems consisting of cardiovascular (heart), pulmonary (lungs), systemic (arteries, veins, and vessels). The human body begins to eat itself – membranes in cells rupture and release enzymes that begin eating the cells from the inside out. If urbanism is indeed dead, we might think about the way many cities’ transport systems have ground to a halt. Despite having undergone numerous ‘urban surgery’ attempts to prolong the life of most major cities via procedures such as freeway bypasses (coronary bypass) and road widenings (stents), commute times in many cities have increased well beyond the ‘inflection point’ of a 45 minute commute time limit.

The next phase of decay is bloat. Leaked enzymes from the first phase produce gasses that de-densifies the corpse leading to the body to double in size. Clear examples of cities that are very much in the bloat phase of decomposition can be found in North America including Atlanta, Boston, St Louis, Orlando and Houston, and in Australia Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne spring to mind.

Finally, active decay and skeletonisation, where the liquefied internal organs are released from the body as it begins skeletal decomposition. For examples of how this plays out in urban form, see post-industrial European cities such as Turin and Frankfurt, more extreme cases in the rust belt cities in North America such as Detroit or, even more extreme, Katamatite in Australia which has about as much life-blood flowing through it as Guillermo del Toro’s portrayal of Karl Ruprecht Kroenen in the movie Hell Boy.

Good grief

Urban design and urbanism have struggled to come to terms with the aforementioned losses, while also struggling with a myriad of other perceived or impending losses including the loss of environmental stability, loss of affordable housing options, loss of design control or influence, and a loss of urban amenity.

In this book, we will explore various key urban design paradigms transitioning through a (mis)appropriation of Swiss-born psychiatrist, Kübler-Ross’ ‘five stages of grief’ from her seminal book, On Death and Dying – What the dying have to teach doctors, nurses, clergy & their own families (1973). The book is based on her research with terminal patients, dealing with loss in the post-modern world. In her book, Kübler-Ross explores multiple different types of emotional state, complex and dynamic types of grief, and coping mechanisms of people with incurable conditions. She touches on patients grieving past losses of health, mobility and independence, past losses of family members who had died, whilst also looking at losses and worries for their families, as well as the future loss and fear of death. She also traverses various emotional responses from patient’s families as they try to make sense of and cope with their imminent loss. Kübler-Ross’ book tackles these complex and mixed elements of past, present and future losses and a multitude of players by formulating the well-known concept of ‘five stages of grief’. In our book, we will use these five stages as a loosely fitting construct to traverse recent urban design paradigms and responses to the aforementioned urban losses.

Our analogy of applying the ‘stages of grief’ to urban design paradigms, is used in part as a narrative device, structuring our review of paradigms and design approaches, and partially as an attempt to give a new insight into the complex, pessimistic world of post-optimistic urban design.

The topic of urbanism cannot be tackled in a traditional ‘pure research’ manner, is not necessarily singular or elegant and needs to take on board many facets and juxtapose many seemingly ill-fitting ideas. Just as Kübler-Ross’ stages were not supposed to represent a formulaic linear progression, as Ira Byock M.D points out in the 2013 anniversary edition preface, our five stages are not strictly chronological nor mutually exclusive. And we will not strictly adhere to the death metaphor and will at

times foray into pseudoscience and philosophy, design technology analysis, and popular culture.

Of course, this is not the first book that uses the themes surrounding death and grief to explore cities. In the early 1960s Jane Jacobs, (or ‘gentrification Jane’ as she is known in many unaffordable inner-urban suburbs where historic neighbourhood preservation quickly translated into pricing out low-income populations), wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), in which she critiques the planning and architecture of the 1950s leading to the ‘death’ of traditional North American cities. This book was highly influential throughout the 60s and 70s being treated with bible-like reverence and in some places, still haunts university syllabus presented as a contemporary theory even today. There are quite a few critical themes, including densification and land-use diversity in Jacob’s book related to urban grief that we will be returning to throughout the latter chapters of this book.

The five stages of grief are: ‘denial’; ‘anger’; ‘bargaining’; ‘depression’ and ‘acceptance’. These five stages are used as chapter headings, under which we symptomatically categorise design paradigms into the particular stages of grief. We will discuss key concepts of urban ‘loss’ that inform each of these paradigms and the design approaches and procedures used by each.

On urbanism (that is not dead or dying)

Before we launch into the five stages of grief, we feel it is useful to give a little bit of historical context discussing key themes of ‘healthy’ urbanism – connectivity, aesthetics and urban liveability to help frame the different urban design paradigms. We will talk a little about the birth of urbanism and the relationship between a population’s needs and human aspirations or ‘desires’, the urban design paradigms, and the methods and procedures used by architects, urban designers and policymakers.

The city is not the manifestation of someiron law [but rather] the result of changinghuman aspirations (Lynch, 1981).

The connected city: pack-donkey versus the 2D grid

Pre-Renaissance cities are generally described as either having grown organically – ‘the pack donkey’s way’ or having derived from a two-dimensional grid plan.

The pack-donkey meanders along, mediatesa little in his scatter-brained and distractedfashion, he zigzags in order to avoid largerstones, or ease the climb, or gain a littleshade; he takes the line of least resistance(Le Corbusier, 1929).

Le Corbusier’s concept of civilised humans planning cities with a 2D orthogonal grid in contrast to the unplanned, pack-donkey-organic layout echoed the thoughts of the British historian, Francis Haverfield, whose paper ‘Ancient Town Planning’ (1913) suggested the orthogonally planned grid distinguished the civilised from the ‘moral inconsistency’ of the barbarian. He argued that Rome’s greatest gift to Europe was the definitive form of the town’s rectangular grid. According to Haverfield ‘The savage, inconsistent in his moral life, is equally inconsistent, equally unable to “keep straight”, in his house-building and his road-making’.

The Roman design approach of ordered, gridded street layouts (aspects of the design paradigm), expressed the Empire’s urban desire to reflect their accomplishments as a civilisation, with the physical form of cities appearing ordered and therefore ‘civilised’. Another urban desire that influenced the orthogonal grid approach relates to efficient movement and city defence. The grid was believed to be useful for military access for defence from attacks and protect the city from uprisings from within, to keep under watch a restless population for surveillance, control and even repression (Kostof, 1991).

The layout of the Roman grid was possible because of technological advancements in design procedures, the understanding of scaled drawings and implementation (set out tools) such as the ‘road measurer’ or hodometer conceived of by Vitruvius, and the groma‡ which allowed the setting out of straight lines and right angles for gridded streets found in military camps and Roman settlements.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe reverted to the irregular, unplanned growth around the spiritual and physical focus of the Church reflecting the social milieu. Gridded cities appeared again in the new towns in France and England (around 1100 AD) due to another change in society’s prominent urban desires - the rekindled need for protection, fortified communities designed to counter each other’s ceaseless raids. The revived interest in the grid plan was continued into the Renaissance, particularly after the rediscovery of the work of Vitruvius. Designers adopted the grid to create a new paradigm in the treatment of public spaces and amenity while maintaining political and military prerequisites.

The 2D grid would continue to be used for colonial settlements throughout the world. With the rise of the commerce agenda, 2D grid plans became speculative, used in part due to the ease in which real estate could be divided up and sold.

Each lot, being of uniform shape, became aunit, like a coin, capable of ready appraisaland exchange (Mumford, 1940).

The 2D grid method of planning was adopted all over the world. It was sometimes applied over sites regardless of topography resulting in areas of street grid too steep for a car to drive up. Notable examples are San Francisco California (the home of the movie car chase)§ and Wellington, New Zealand which was designed in England using 2D site plans without topographical information by a designer who had never visited the site.

‘A city made for speed is made for success’(Le Corbusier, 1929).

The rational nature of the grid and illustration of universal reason and human equality was appreciated by the Modernists who adopted the grid but began to give some streets prominence over others (Taylor, 2001). The idea of street hierarchy was elaborated on by German Modernist architect and urban designer, Ludwig Hilberseimer (1927) who argued that the hierarchy of major (wide) roads and narrow (minor) roads would satisfy the urban desire for safer streets for children, whilst increasing the overall speed of circulation of vehicles. This system was adopted by the Modern masters – Lucio Costa with Oscar Niemeyer in their built city, the capital of Brazil, Brasilia, as well as Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh in India. The grid also reflected the classical tendencies of Le Corbusier’s town planning (Laurence, 1993). A mutated version of Hilberseimer’s street hierarchy occurred through the 1960s almost putting an end to the grid with serpentine street layouts for residential subdivisions. This proliferation of the highway, feeder and cul-de-sac system will be discussed later in the book.

The pretty city: a new perspective on the city

Though the gridded city resurfaced in some areas in Europe during the medieval period, organic town growth continued in other areas. Towards the end of this period, advancements in the artistic representation technique by Giotto (Giotto Di Bondone), and Masaccio (Tommaso Cassai) began to have an effect on the representation of cities. ‘Bird’s eye view’ drawings of cities in a pseudo perspective (somewhere between 2D and 3D) allowed for an overview of cities (Rowland, 1966). Though there was some idea of depth, the buildings shown in these drawings were not proportional, complying with the gothic tradition of using scale to set up a hierarchy of importance of figures and themes, not depth [Figure 4 and Figure 5].

Figure 4: ‘Eunuchus’, an early 2D / 3D drawn representation of urban setting, (Ulm, 1486).

Figure 5: Lithograph reproduction of Marco Polo’s departure from Venice on his journey to China (CEA+, 1344).

In the early 1400s, prominent architect of the Italian Renaissance, Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated the geometrical method of perspective by using a painting of the baptistry with a hole in it, standing in front of the building facing away from it holding a mirror [Figure 6]. The understanding of perspective was later formalised by the author, artist, architect, poet, linguist, and philosopher, Leon Battista Alberti in Della Pittura, a document that explained the procedure. This is noteworthy for two reasons. Firstly this is a clear example of the advantage of an architect being directly involved in developing their own design and representation procedures, a concept that we pursue in later chapters, and secondly, the new technique would lead to a new understanding of cities as potentially an urban composition, in turn, influencing society’s urban desires.

Figure 6: Sketch of Brunelleschi’s verification of geometric perspective technique, by White, M. based on illustration by Jim Anderson in II Duomo: Brunelleschi, a Man of Many Talents (Atkins, 2008).

The new understanding of the perspective procedure led to the city being represented with more accuracy as a whole, which helped to affect the public’s understanding and informed urban aspirations for the city. These new desires, in turn, affected the urban design paradigm.

In the second half of the 16th century, theurban setting became a collective concern…a large number of perspective city viewsin which a great deal of information wascombined in a realistic rendering. For thefirst time the entire heritage of the Europeancities was precisely represented accordingto the tenets of Renaissance visual cultureand given general circulation. The populationbecame accustomed to the syntheticperception of parts of the urban organismand the relationship between the city andthe geographical setting. Perspective,the tool used to create these images wassubsequently and continuously employed forthe rectification of urban settings. The newrectilinear avenues became more frequentand longer, and better emphasised the viewof the vanishing point (Benevolo & Ipsen,1993).

This application of perspective as an urban design technique impacted city design through the Renaissance and into the Baroque periods. During the 1400s the urban aspirations of the inhabitants of Rome varied from their predecessors. A new desire for an emphasis on the Church and the path of pilgrims was reflected with urban interventions – straight axial streets terminating in vistas marked by ‘wayfinding’ obelisks and religious buildings (Bacon, 1974). This urban design paradigm reflected the melding of the current urban aspirations and the new design technique – perspective.

Figure 7: Photogrammetry point-cloud aerial view of the Michelangelo plan for the Capitoline Hill (Piazza del Campidoglio), map data: Google, LandsatICopernicus.

A prime example of urban design paradigms taking into account a city’s urban desires as well as expressing technological achievements (design procedures), is Michelangelo’s Campidoglio (1546) which remodelled the Capitoline Hill to reflect Pope Paul III’s vision for the new Rome, turning away from the Roman Forum towards the civic centre – St Peter’s Basilica. The design involved ‘tidying up’ the space giving ‘clarity and formal order’ by adding a veneer of Renaissance façade creating a trapezoidal plaza space to achieve the desired perspectival effect [Figure 7 and Figure 8] (Mumford, 1940).

The potential of perspectival composition of urban form illustrated in the Campidoglio was explored further by French landscape architect to King Louis XIV of France, André Le Nôtre (1613 – 1700) who’s design for the Palace of Versailles [Figure 9], emphasises axial composition and terminating vistas on a large scale. This bisecting axis created inspiring vistas that would influence many other designers internationally including Pierre L’Enfant in his design of Washington DC in 1791.

Figure 8: Photogrammetry point-cloud aerial view of the Capitoline Hill (Piazza del Campidoglio), map data: Google, Landsat/Copernicus.

Figure 9: Photogrammetry point-cloud aerial view of Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles (built 1668–74) gardens by André le Notre, map data: Google, Landsat/Copernicus.