Subdivisions. Industrial Parks. Strip Malls. Gridlock. Sprawl is socially unequal, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically
ugly. Right? In this hour of To the Best Of Our Knowledge, we'll look at the costs and – YES – the benefits of suburban sprawl. Because maybe, just maybe, sprawl is a good thing.
SEGMENT 1: Joel Hirschhorn
is the author of "Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs. Steal Your Time, Health and Money." He obviously thinks urban sprawl is a terrible idea and tells Steve Paulson all the reasons why.
SEGMENT 2: Robert Bruegmann makes the case for the opposite point of view in his book "Sprawl: A History." He says societies have always grown and
ours looks the way it does because suburbs represent the way Americans like to live. Also, urban sprawl is a staggering problem in China as
a result of the on-going Chinese industrial revolution. PhotographerEdward Burtynsky traveled to China to document its "Manufactured Landscapes," and film-maker Jennifer Baichwal documented
his trip in her film of the same name. Baichwal talks with Steve Paulson
about the scale of China's ecological problems and the beauty of Burtynsky's
images.
SEGMENT 3: Novelist
Tom Perrotta reads from "Little Children" and "The Abstinence Teacher," and talks with Anne Strainchamps about life
in the suburbs, where everything is nice, and nobody wants a pedophile to move into the neighborhood.
I'll definitely need to check out some of those books.
i don't know if google is way too cool, or if it's the new Absolut vodka, but I found out that today is Walter Gropius' 125th birthday by seeing this googlogo (above).
I associate Gropius with all my atlas(t)y stuff, because the first time I learned about him was when I was a bus tour guide in Berlin and had to mention the Bauhaus Museum as we passed it near the canal bordering the Tiergarten--which building was, itself, designed by Gropius.
(Only a short stretch away was the site where Rosa Luxembourg's body was found in the canal months after her assassination, and in another direction the site in the Tiergarten where Karl Liebknecht was shot as well. I love that these were all contemporaries whose significance is siloed. And Berlin is just chockablock full of historically charged sites.)
via Zuky, an interactive map showing 83 immigrant detainees whose deaths in detention might be due to neglect or abuse. Click here to engage with the interactive map and read the names.
the effective breaking down of residential discrimination outside a slum, and the less dramatic self-diversification within an unslumming slum, proceed concurrently. If America has now, in the case of Negroes, reached an effective halt in this process and in general entered a stage of arrested development -- a thought I find both highly improbable and quite intolerable -- then it may be that Negro slums cannot effectively
unslum in the fashion demonstrated by slums formed by other ethnic populations and population mixtures. In this case, the damage to our cities might be the least of our worries; unslumming is a by-product of other kinds of vigor and other forms of economic and social change.
When an area has unslummed, it is easy to forget how bad it once was and how helpless both the area and its population were thought to be. ... As in the case of other slums, overcoming of discrimination outside the slum, and unslumming within the slum, must proceed concurrently. Neither can wait for the accomplishment of the other. Every relaxation of discrimination outside can help unslumming within. Progress in unslumming within helps outside. The two go together.
The inherent resources necessary for unslumming -- advancement and self-diversification in a population -- demonstrably exist among colored people, including the colored people who are in slums or who have passed through slums, as strikingly as these resources exist among white people. In a way the proved and obvious possession of these resources is more striking among the colored, because they emerge in spite of disproportionate obstacles against their emergence. Indeed, because of the very facts that colored populations advance, self-diversify, and have too much spirit to like ghettos, our inner cities have already lost far more of the Negro middle class than they can afford to lose.
I think inner cities will go on losing too much of the Negro middle class almost as fast as it forms until, in actual fact, the choice of remaining there no longer means, for a colored person, an implied acceptance of ghetto citizenship and status. In short, unslumming is at the very least directly -- as well as indirectly -- inhibited by discrimination.
--- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)
since I read this NYT article (via Pruned) it has gone behind a firewall, but the upshot is that a new movement is seeing architects assisting communities in building low-cost "living room" furniture in public spaces, if for no other reason, to offer people a place to sit.
These tend to congregate around bus stops.
The idea began several years ago in Oakland, where community
organizers and residents got together to improve places where neighbors
tended to congregate — the corner store, outside the barbershop — amid
a decidedly downtrodden environment.
“The idea was to enable
low-income communities to create their own social spaces and improve
their neighborhoods without bringing on gentrification,” said Steve
Rasmussen Cancian, the landscape architect who helped introduce the
living rooms.
With the help of residents, simple pieces of
furniture were erected here and there around Oakland, giving bits of
cheerful life to corners where there was little to look at. Mr.
Rasmussen Cancian then imported the idea to Los Angeles, on a corner
where drug dealers and prostitutes did business near a Y.M.C.A. used by families.
At
the same time, Central City Neighborhood Partners, a nonprofit group
that focuses on low-income families here, surveyed residents in the
city’s center about their transportation needs. At the top of the list
was a well-maintained place to wait for buses, which, according to the
Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, are boarded
citywide an average of 1.2 million times a week. Thus the marriage of
community living rooms and bus stops.
One advantage of doing it this way is cutting through red tape, and another is the cost: “A simple pocket park takes a half-million dollars and takes two to
three years to build, while a living room takes as little as a month
and between $5,000 and $15,000.”
And WWJJD? She might say that this is an interesting experiment in creating community street surveillance. You give people a place to congregate and suddenly, there are people outside to people-watch. You give people a place to sit down, and suddenly, there's a place from which to people watch, in neighborhoods where there aren't many good vantage points to view the street.
I don't imagine that this one effort will solve all of L.A.'s--or Oakland's--problems, but in conversation with efforts to build more street-friendly residences and mixed-use zoning, this could be good.
It's not the same as park-building, but it's closer to effective park-building than street-building. Or maybe you could say it's half-way between the two: creating small spaces on streets that function somewhat like small parks and integrate into street diversity.
It's not surprising that this movement arose in Oakland. Oakland has a number of parks like the one above near my house, shoved into strange unbuilt little triangles of intersections. The one above is what Jacobs would call a successful transient park, a good gathering place for the homeless or jobless, but not pleasant for nearby residents, who never use it. This is because, as you can sort of tell from the photo, there are no buildings at all near it, much less mixed-use residences and shops.
Behind the viewer in this view is a Greyhound station, that bringer of blight; and the center of the park is not merely shaded, but obscured by trees, making any rational person want to avoid it. And further, the park is relatively large, making you feel like you have a distance to traverse to get through it. I always have to think whether I'd prefer to walk through or around it.
On the other hand, there's this one, a mere ten blocks away, near my friend's house:
I visited my friend last weekend during the hot weather, and this park seemed to be bristling with naked arms and legs. Mostly teens and young people, but also some older people were hanging out in tank tops and shorts, drawn together although there wasn't enough shade to cover all of them. The younger people, particularly the men, spilled out into the street to the left, hanging out there, and crossing back and forth frequently between the park and the convenience store that is just outside of our view on the left.
As you can see this park is tiny, just the triangle created by the intersection of two grid streets and a larger avenue that cuts diagonally across the grid. Mixed-use residences overlook the park on two sides: on the left, where your view is cut off, and before you to the left. On the right, across the big blvd (San Pablo) is a higher project which, though farther away, also can see farther and also overlooks the park.
I was late to a party but I really wanted to stop (at a "safe" distance, of course) and watch the goings on in the park because it was so interesting. It's the first such park I've seen in Oakland, although there are fairly frequent triangles in the streets, and many filled with parks.
They need both the mixed-use surroundings, the small, overseeable size, and, as pointed out above, furniture for people to sit on.
i posted nearly two years ago about an article by Brooklynite Jonathan Lethem
protesting the planned development Atlantic Yards, which requires the clearing of existing residences using eminent domain. A court fifth amendment challenge to the developer was not upheld and building is underway.
At the
time I couldn't figure out the rights and wrongs of the
situation--although later that summer I visited my cousin who lives in
Park Slope, and she told me that the same developer had created a less
ambitious project in a nearby part of Brooklyn which had degraded the
neighborhood and gotten no business, and ended up costing the city a
great deal.
But after reading Death and Life I now have the framework to definitively hate Atlantic Yards.
Apparently, I'm not the only one who thought this way.
I don’t know whether Jacobs, circa 1959, would approve or disapprove of
Ratner, circa 2006, but her take on the project would likely be a bit
more nuanced than the simple declaration “too big.” In certain ways the
Ratner plan, with its arena, density, and mixture of residential and
office uses is influenced—albeit indirectly—by her thinking. The
project’s substantial number of “affordable” housing units adds to its
overall heterogeneity. On the other hand, a huge project by one
developer and one architect cannot be diverse, and it’s possible that
Jacobs would have reacted to Gehry’s irregular forms much as she
reacted to Googie-style coffee shops: “virtual sameness trying, by dint
of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different.”
The biggest drawback to Atlantic Yards, according to my reading of The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
is that it will be constructed atop a rail yard that currently
separates the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. The
new development is unlikely to knit together those two neighborhoods;
instead, lacking the cross-streets that Jacobs thought were key to
urban vitality, it will exacerbate the division, generating more of
what she termed “border vacuums.”
But she goes on to point out, quite rationally, that
Admittedly I could be the one misreading Jacobs—cherry-picking her book
for the ideas that support my own penchant for density, diversity, and
complexity—but it’s clear from the book’s final chapter, “The Kind of
Problem a City Is,” that she was arguing above all against reductive
thinking.
... The mistake made by Jacobs’s detractors and acolytes alike is to regard
her as a champion of stasis—to believe she was advocating the world’s
cities be built as simulacra of the West Village circa 1960. Admirers
and opponents have routinely taken her arguments for complexity and
turned them into formulas. But the book I just read was an inspiration
to move forward without losing sight that cities are powerful, dynamic,
ever-changing entities made up of myriad gestures big and small.
I'll be visiting the area next week and intend to go check out the site. Stay tuned.
jane Jacobs may be a genius, but I mistrust genius, especially where it relates to architecture and city planning ... probably because my sister sent me, without irony, a copy of The Fountainhead when I was a freshman in college (she a sophomore) and, although I threw it across the room every fifty pages or so, I felt that I had to finish it, and therefore read all the way through the part where Roark 'sploded up a housing project because they changed the pipes or something and then justified it on account of his genius, even though he was a rapist. Jane Jacobs gives me a whole new set of ammo against Howard Roark that I never thought I'd get--or need--namely the simple fact that housing projects are bad, and for that, I forgive her her genius.
Jane Jacobs is, in fact, the anti-Howard Roark: because she was real whereas Roark was fictional; because she stood for the collective using principles to guide minimal interference in community long-term, "natural" building and development processes that brought aesthetic diversity and diversity of use, while Roark was all about the monolithic, single-use project designed by an individual and forced upon a disempowered mass; because she was a woman and Roark, a man--a very important difference; because she was married, a parent, and lived in urban neighborhoods and Roark was perennially single, fatally paternalistic, and residentially nomadic, through urban, exurban, and privileged rural spaces.
I'm shocked that I remember this much about a book I threw across the room twenty years ago. Let this be the last time I ever write about Rand.
the self-destruction of diversity can happen in streets, at small node of vitality, in groupings of streets, or in whole districts. The last case is the most serious.
Whichever form the self-destruction takes, this, in broad strokes, is what happens: A diversified mixture of uses at some place in the city becomes outstandingly popular and successful as a whole. Because of the location's success, which is invariably based on flourishing and magnetic diversity, ardent competition for space in this locality develops. It is taken up in what amounts to the economic equivalent of a fad.
The winners in the competition for space will represent only a narrow segment of the many uses that together created success.
Whichever one or few uses have emerged as the most profitable in the locality will be repeated and repeated, crowding out and overwhelming less profitable forms of use. If tremendous numbers of people, attracted by convenience and interest, or charmed by vigor and excitement, choose to live or work in the area, again the winners of the competition will form a narrow segment of the population of users. Since so many want to get in, those who get in or stay in will be self-sorted by the expense.
... Thus, from this process, one or few dominating uses finally emerge triumphant. But the triumph is hollow. A most intricate and successful organism of economic mutual support and social mutual support has been destroyed by the process.
... [gentrifying forces] were making the same mistake as a family I know who bought an acre in the country on which to build a house.For many years, while they lacked the money to build, they visited the site regularly and picnicked on a knoll, the site's most attractive feature. They liked so much to visualize themselves as always there, that when they finally built they put the house on the knoll. But then the knoll was gone. somehow they had not realized they would destroy it and lose it by supplanting it with themselves.
... so many people want to live in the locality that it becomes profitable to build, in excessive and devastating quantity, for those who can pay the most. These are usually childless people, and today they are not simply people who can pay the most in general, but people who can or will pay the most for the smallest space. Accommodations for this narrow, profitable segment of population multiply, at the expense of all other tissue and all other population. Families are crowded out, variety of scene is crowded out, enterprises unable to support their share of the new construction costs are crowded out. ... The admired and magnetic knoll is destroyed by its own new occupants, by the act of occupation.
... It is more fruitful, I think, to approach this as a problem of malfunction in cities themselves.
First, we must undertsand that self-destruction of diversity is caused by success, not by failure.
Second, we must understand the the process is a continuation of the same economic processes that led to the success itself, and were indispensable to it. Diversity grows in a city areas because of economic opportunity and economic attraction. During the process of diversity growth, rival users of space are crowded out. All City diversity grows, in part at least, at the expense of some other tissue. ...
During the growth period, much of the new diversity occurs not merely at the expense of uniquely low-value tissue, but also at the expense of already existing duplications of use. This result of economic competition for space is net increase in diversity.
At some point the diversity growth has proceeded so far that the addition of new diversity is mainly in competition with already existing diversity. Relatively little sameness is being subtracted, perhaps none. This is the case when a center of activity and diversity has reached a peak. If the addition is really something different ... there is still no net loss in diversity.
Here is a process, then, that operates for a time as a healthy and salutary function, but by failing to modify itself at a critical point, becomes a malfunction. The analogy that comes to mind is faulty feedback.
The presence of an end product in the milieu of a cell causes the machinery that produces the end product to slow down or to stop. This form of cell behavior Dr. Potter characterized as "intelligent." In contrast, a cell that has changed or mutated behaves like and "idiot" in that it continues without feedback regulation to produce even materials that it does not require.
... Suppose we think of successful city areas, for all their extraordinary and intricate economic and social order, as faulty in this fashion. In creating city success, we human beings have created marvels, but we left out feedback.
--- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
the above image is from the opening titles for the Fox TV show New Amsterdam, which I've been watching with slightly but steadily decreasing interest in its usual TViness, but increasing interest in its geographical sensibilities. The opening titles show a quick animation of New York City getting built up from its original shape as a village at the lower end of Manhattan.
The premise is that a Dutchman from the seventeenth century goes to the New World and is killed there saving an Indian woman. She turns out to be a shaman who brings him back to life and keeps him alive until he finds his one true love.
So he lives through nearly four centuries, marrying many times and fathering sixty-three children, only to become an NYPD homicide cop in the present. One day, in the pilot, he has a heart attack and dies on a subway platform. When he revives later, he realizes that this means that his one true love was on that subway platform, and that this is the beginning of the end. Now all he has to do is find her.
Here's a trailer that sums up the show's premise:
It's not a very good show, although Lasse Hallstrom directed the first episode. The acting is not strong (the Danish lead actor's accent isn't convincing, and affects his affect), there's no chemistry between the lead and the woman who might be the one true love (she gets the boot at the end of this first short season), and there's nothing particularly unusual or standout about the show.
Except for the use of the city in history.
This is something that was done to a lesser extent with the showAngel, which took place in Los Angeles and featured a 250-year-old vampire who had lived in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Angel
frequently took us back to earlier eras--in other places as well as
LA--showing us the protagonist's involvement in historical moments.
But it was never done as quite such a love song to a particular city.
In New Amsterdam the protagonist, who names himself
alternately "Amsterdam" and "York," stays in New York throughout his
immortality, and possesses both generalized and personal knowledge of
the history and happenstances of each place. What Amsterdam knows about
the city is layered, often subtle, and broad in the field. The amount
of research they must do for this show is awesome.
The immortality conceit allows a very intimate, and story-driven, view of history which is satisfying to the narrative-obsessed on every level. What's even more satisfying is that this intimate and story-driven view of history is utterly tied not just to place, or to city as imaginative construct, but to geography, in all its weird and complex splendor.
By "geography" here I mean it all; all of it: social history, metonyms, reputations of people and places, the strange continuities that remain in a place even after the public stops going there, architecture and arts, physical transformations and how to track them, land use, recreation, the replacement of one population by another, the way people in a place are always doomed to repeat that place's history, as if geography were destiny, which, as we all know, it is.
The makers of the show eschew the cheap, shallow history of time-travel shows like "Quantum Leap" or "Dr. Who," which understand a historical era in terms of costuming and a single zeitgeist. Instead, they make choices which are often as interesting and complex as they are TV-awkward and clueless. For example, in the present, Amsterdam's sidekick/confidant is his sixty-year-old son, Omar. Omar is a biracial (black and Dutch) former trumpet player who now owns a club where Amsterdam hangs out. Amsterdam married Omar's mother in the late forties, against the desires of her wealthy, conservative, black father.
All of which is kind of amazing. Amsterdam may well be the first major TV protagonist (of a non-ensemble show) to have a biracial child. BUT, the jazz from the relationship comes from the role-reversal: Omar is now old enough to be Amsterdam's father, and acts like it. This role-reversal only enables Omar to be the magical negro, while giving Amsterdam a kind of racial cred he couldn't get any other way. And Omar seems also to be tied to New York in a way inexplicable for someone who was once a musician and presumably traveled a great deal. His ownership of the bar is a device that keeps him in place, available at every moment to serve Amsterdam. So, that line of inquiry is ambivalent about racial issues.
Or another example in a recent episode: Amsterdam is a painter during the era immediately preceding WWI. He's a cheesy representational painter (of course) during modernism; and they stupidly have him altering his own personality to become tempestuous and to have him cheatin' on his wife. Gah, moronic stereotypes.
But what that episode is actually about is the origins of ... you guessed it ... organized crime. Amsterdam is investigating a mob hit on the school-teacher scion of a (strangely) Dutch-named crime family who happens to look exactly like Amsterdam-the-pre-war-painter's son. Throughout the episode the usual flashbacks are to a time when Amsterdam--whose wife was starting to age (he himself remains perpetually 35) while his son, Rosie, was becoming a man--had an affair with an artist's model (gah! moronic stereotypes!)
Amsterdam confirms that the murdered boy is actually his great great grandson through his son Rosie, and tortures himself throughout the episode that his home-breakin' ways were what drove Rosie to crime. Then, once he's solved the murder, he sits down in the last few minutes of the show with his aging grandson--the murdered boy's grandfather--to find out why Rosie became a criminal. Well, guess what? It wasn't Rosie at all. Rosie was a schoolteacher in the teens and twenties, and it was the grandson who turned to crime during the great depression. "I made some choices" the old man says, and that's that.
I'm not sure how much of this was intentional--because after all, the acting and direction and even writing in the show is muddy--but in this one episode they've layered a number of factors and influences guiding the outcomes of individuals within movements of history. This crime family comes from a cultured, but presumably economically unstable artist's family. As is very realistic with such families, the son becomes a teacher, another culturally, but not economically, capitaled sector. So during a time of severe economic downturn, the grandson--who presumably has access to his parents' cultural and social capital, but not to any sort of economic safety net; and who lives in a city vast enough to support minor crime networks within neighborhoods--turns to organized crime.
Two generations later, the family's wealth is assured and the family returns to the cultural and social luxury of a low-paying, high-ideals job like teaching. It's all in there: the class and economics issues; Americans' strange love/hate relationship with high culture and learning, and violence; our contempt and reverence for the arts; our need to relate the great movements of history to our small, personal faults and triumphs, only to discover that the great movements were caused by great movements instead, and our individual choices were as drops in the ocean.
And there's even a lovely throwaway in there: the son's name, "Rosie," is short for "Roosevelt," which suggests that he was named after Teddy, but also suggests much more subtly that Amsterdam has a history with the New York Dutch Roosevelt family.
Every episode has stuff like this.
So I'm torn about this show. I'd love for it to get better, for it to become a conduit for this kind of thinking, and a quality drama as well, but I'm not hopeful. I haven't heard much buzz about the show and it doesn't seem to have legs. Oh well.
Geography and space are always gendered, always raced, always economical and always sexual. The textures that bind them together are daily re-written through a word, a gaze, a gesture.
-- Irit Rogoff
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.
-- George Orwell
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