Defining "Urban"

The question of what exactly is urban America has come up in several recent readings, including Witold Rybczynski's City Life. In his book, Rybczynski leads us through the history of urbanism in America to try to imagine what our future cities will look like. He proposes that American urbanism is based in change and restlessness. From the very beginning, this vast, open continent we live in has spurred the idea that we as a country and society can always grow and reach better horizons. Our definition of "urban," therefore, keeps changing. From the industrial age when the typical city came with access to power sources, overcrowding, pollution, and other qualities we traditionally associate with cities, to the decentralized city in which a condensed urban area is served by a series of less dense, or suburban, areas, our idea of what landscapes compose a city has changed with our changing desires as a society. 

The decentralized city itself is very much an American fabrication and my old stomping grounds, Chicago, acts as a perfect model for this type of urbanism. Chicago is a city of largely residential neighborhoods that surround and serve a downtown area (the word "downtown" originated in America). The idea behind this configuration was the idea that people want to work, shop and play in one location but live elsewhere as long as these two were closely linked by (public or private) transit. The question then becomes, does this elsewhere become part of the urban definition? 

Perhaps, to define urban as it applies to this country, we must also define suburban. Just the term, suburban has become a stereotype, where as the actual suburbs include many different types of landscapes. The only defining difference we have between urban and suburban is political: what politically lies within the boundaries of a city. The earliest planned suburbs were thought of as urban entities by their designers and often included urban elements belonging to big cities, just at a smaller scale.

 All of these images can be defined as "suburban" landscapes, is one considered more suburban than the other? 

(Sources: fp.images.autos.msn.com, www.newyork.com, www.homesandproperty.co.uk) 

As our definition of urban begins to change once again, there is a chance that these formerly "suburban" landscapes will become our new urban forms, or something close to them. After all, our definition of urban has always been a reflection of our changing desires for the type of environment we want to live in. With the current dissolution of the traditional nuclear family and a changing political landscape in America comes a desire for a more mixed experience in our physical environment-one that allows for a variety of services, interactions and a level of convenience not felt in traditional suburban locations. Indeed, our suburban areas stand to become much more pro-urban than ever before.

Global City

While Spike Jonze's new movie. "Her" provides a chilling outlook on our relationship with technology, it also paints a frightening image of our future cities. It is suggested that Theodore, the movie's main character, lives in Los Angeles, however, in image, this future Los Angeles is composed quite literally of pieces from two different cities across the globe from each other: L.A. and Shanghai. The pieces themselves are not images we would immediately associate with either city, and so the effect is a city that we as humans can at once all relate to, but are unable to pinpoint to a specific place. To reinforce this idea, the composition of the general public is a happy mixture of all sexes, cultures, and races-lending to its familiarity and lack of "there-ness." The suggestion is, perhaps, that we are standardizing ourselves into a corner.

A scene from the movie, Her, supposedly set in Los Angeles.
 Source: whatdidnatthinkofit.com. 

The Lujiazui skyline in Pudong, Shanghai. Look familiar?
Source: wikipedia.org

With the ability of technology to collapse time and space comes an ability to standardize on a global scale and the lack of uniqueness that our cities are facing. Think of the ubiquity of Starbucks, bike share programs, and infrastructure turned parks in cities around the world. Even the elements that try to set cities apart are quickly copied by cities everywhere in a hope to reap the same benefits. The Highline in New York is a poster child for this idea. While the base infrastructure of the Highline park is unique to New York, the idea of an elevated park on an old train line was quickly reproduced in cities across the world, hoping to capture the same economic, cultural and social benefits.

The public in "Her" is a heterogeneous mix of people from across backgrounds.
Source: screenrant.com 

To say something about the movie's main message, Jonze captured the essence of technology's ability to change how we interact (or don't) with the world as well as how we interact (or don't) with each other. TV shows like Catfish, on MTV, and the love stories featured in the New York Time's Modern Love column show a growing trend among us to live further apart but use technology to bring us emotionally, if not physically, together. In this there is an irony-with a growing urban population word-wide, we are living closer to others than ever before. So, why do we need technology to close the time/space gap and feel intimate with other humans when there are humans all around us? In "Her," Theodore is constantly surrounded by other people-on the street, in the office, at the beach, and yet he feels completely alone. This feeling seems to be spurred on by the lack of "uniqueness," of being a small fish in a big pond, and an inability to see any impact that he has on the world around him. Perhaps, we humans and our cities face the same crisis: an identity crisis occurring on drastically different scales.

The In-Between: Dead City

Riding the train to work, I regularly stare half-caffeinated at the New York City subway map and wonder about the beige spaces between subway lines-what's there? This prompted a series of investigations of what might be called the "in-between" spaces. Armed with camera and curiosity, I set out to a snowy Sunnyside, Queens for the first of the in-between investigations.

What I found was Calvary cemetery, a sprawling cemetery hemmed in on its sides by expressways and other large pieces of infrastructure. This created an island of stillness among the constant flow of traffic; a stark contrast between the permanence of death and the constantly changing and moving city. Some of the photos I took are below.

UrbMAN Spaces: Designing With Humans in Mind

On Februrary 5th, the New York chapter of the AIA hosted, perhaps, one of the most highly regarded purveyors of public space, Jan Gehl. While his observations of the public realm are very revealing, his wit in delivering the information should not be overlooked.

Amid a brief history of urban space and its design, Jan managed to drop in such quotable phrases as " bird s*** architecture" to describe the modernist buildings seemingly dropped from the sky into empty public plazas. This urban planning method is particularly apparent in Brasilia, which was planned from above, as if from a helicopter, only for it to be realized that, "most Brazilians don't own helicopters."

The urban plan for Brasilia: planned from a birds-eye view and shaped like a bird in flight. Source: www.zonu.com

Aside from Gehl's fascinating and often side-splitting history of urban design, he had several interesting points to make about the direction of the profession. First, was the impact, or perhaps, lack thereof that technology is having on urban space. While technology increasingly allows us to collect data on the who, what, where, and why of people using space, often times this data is not distilled into any meaningful conclusion. The best tools to observe and make conclusions about public space, argues Gehl, are the rudimentary: our eyes, ears, etc. He cites a website produced in a world city that shows minute-by-minute updates of where most people are congregating in that city. In Manhattan, this information would look something like the image below: with huge spikes of people in midtown and lower Manhattan.

Source: www.allenschool.edu

This is basically a diagram of where Manhattan's tallest buildings are located, and so an increase in density would be expected. Aside from that, what does this diagram tell us? Avoid Times Square at all costs? Any Manhattanite could tell you that. As a collector of massive amounts of data, the internet is very successful, however, translating that data into a meaningful tool takes more than the hard data itself.

Lastly, a question by a starry-eyed young designer prompted the question of who's job it is to design for people in urban environments and whether a new profession was being born. Jan's answer emphasized collaboration between the design professions, namely architects, landscape architects, urban designers and planners. All of these people should be thinking about the design of public space at a human scale in their individual approaches, but it is the interaction between the professions that will create truly human, urban spaces. Or, shall we say urbMAN spaces. 

Happy City

Few books will spur me to write just out of the blue, but a recent read, Happy City, by Charles Montgomery, provided me with insights into how we view the city that altered my own preconceived notions of city living.

In his book, Charles Montgomery looks at the relationship between urban design and human psychology and discovers something astonishing: the elements we as Americans believe to make us happy in an urban environment and the elements that actually do are completely different! Whoa! How have generations of Americans been getting something as simple as their own happiness so wrong? I mean, most people have visited the doctor's office and successfully answered the Wong-Baker pain chart question fairly successfully. Why can't we do the same for our happiness in the built environment?

A simple enough chart. Now, replace "pain" with "happiness in built environment" and it becomes much more difficult to answer.

Perhaps, Montgomery suggests, it is the shallowness of the images of happiness we have been sold on for so long. Everyone is familiar with the idea of the American Dream: the separated family home with front lawn, white picket fence, and 2.5 kids (sold separately). This dream, while appealing in its guarantee of safe, secure family living is as thin as the stucco facades applied to shops at Disneyland. It is an image completely separated from the realities of the systems of transportation, economy, and environment that allow it to exist. Anyone who has sat in traffic for hours during their daily commute, or has to drive several miles just to pick up some milk knows what I'm talking about. The idea that larger distances between our homes equates to independence could not be further from the truth. Our decisions about how we live affect others no matter how far apart our houses are-in the systems they impact, such as the taxes to maintain roads, the quality of air we breathe, and, now, our use of universal healthcare. 

Disneyland's Main Street. The two-story facades give the perfect human scale but the second story is completely fake. 

Now, you try telling the average American to give up their house in the suburbs for a dense American city. Probably not gonna happen. Not today, not tomorrow. And who can blame them? As humans, Montgomery points out, we have a natural inclination to retreat from strangers and seek space that is truly "ours." Our social anxiety is hard-wired into our very being. However, what we don't recognize is that we also instinctively need interaction with other people to be happy. That guy who creepily tries to buy you a wheat grass shot at your juice bar, while seemingly annoying and uncalled for, is actually contributing to your happiness simply through social interaction. So, what we believe to make us happy and what actually does are separate entities. 

In short, we don't and cannot live completely in a vacuum as much as we may think we want to. We rely on other human beings for help, support, and basic happiness. Our ideas about ownership-of land, of space, of knowledge, of tools, just to name a few-must change. Just as the internet has changed the way we share ideas, music, markets, and constant updates about our cute cat's lives, so too must we look for ways to share resources in the physical world. This will allow for many of us to live in the physical environments of our choosing without straining the systems that sustain them. Through these shared systems, our empathy might be able to reach the high levels required to tackle some of the global-scale problems we are facing, such as climate change, dwindling natural resources, and the enlarging gap between the rich and poor. 

To close, a quote from Aristotle's Politics, "He who is unable to live in society or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god."