I've talked about real
cities vs. the suburban disaster. The basic characteristic of real cities is
that it is easier to walk (or bike or take the subway/streetcar etc.) than it
is to drive. People have been living in dense cities since the beginnings of
recorded history. Only in the recent period -- after World War II -- have
people begun to make cities which are near-impossible to walk in, essentially
making everyone a handicap case requiring motorized wheelchairs to get
around, and thus leading to a number of problems that won't be solved until
this form of construction is abandoned.
Other posts in this
series:
December 2, 2007: Let's Take a
Trip to Tokyo
October 7, 2007: Let's Take a Trip
to Venice
June 17, 2007: Recipe for Florence
July 9, 2007: No Growth Economics
March 26, 2006: The Eco-Metropolis
But what are the
alternatives? There are two basic templates for "dense urban
design" today. One is what I call the Traditional City. The other is the
"Radiant City." The differences are:
The Traditional City: Many small streets,
suitable for walking but hard to drive. Buildings usually built right at the
edge of the street/sidewalk. Streets are plentiful and "blocks" --
the area between the streets -- are small (though there are typically some
big ones too.) Buildings usually side-by-side, almost touching. Building
height traditionally at the limits of stair-climbing, about seven stories
maximum. Many parks, some stand-alone plazas, but no "landscaping."
Little to no parking for cars. Streets are often crooked and non-rectilinear.
The "Radiant
City": Very large streets, suitable for several lanes of automobile traffic.
Very large buildings, typically glass-walled high rises of ten to one-hundred
stories tall. Buildings are widely spaced. Buildings typically not built to
the edge of the sidewalk/roadway, but rather surrounded by some sort of
"landscaping," either grass or a paved "plaza." Streets
are widely spaced, and "blocks" are large. Streets are often on a
rigid grid design, or if not a grid, at least a pattern that looks very
well-thought-out when observed in a scale model.
Remember my First Law of
urban design:
Really Narrow Streets
It should be clear that I
prefer the Traditional City to the "Radiant City." The Traditional
City can be a cesspool, but it can also be a center of great life, art and
excitement. "You can't keep them on the farm once they've seen
Paris." The "Radiant City" may have some life, art and
excitement going on, but the city design itself does not contribute to this,
but rather prevents it. Whatever happens is in spite of the "Radiant City" design, which is
contrary to such activities by its construction. It is vaguely tolerable. I
do think it is possible to build tall buildings within the context of the
Traditional City, with the New York City skyscraper construction of the 1920s
and 1930s a pretty good example of this. The Empire State Building is a very
tall building, but at street level, it fits right in. You'd have to lean back
and look up to even know that you're looking at the tallest building in the
city. Rockefeller Center also works quite well. Compare this to the typical
"glass pyramid" construction of today -- surrounded by landscaping,
parking, and large roadways.
Also, I think the
"Radiant City" is better than the Suburban Disaster. But not good
enough to bother with, really.
The "Radiant
City" idea got started in the 1920s, as a response to the newfound
ability to make very tall buildings, combined with a general discontinuity in
civilization (in so many ways) in Europe following World War I. Also, there
is a strong flavor of the rising influence of the United States in world
affairs -- combined with a more "American" influence on urban
ideals, which meant Small Town America. The "Radiant City" is basically
"Skyscraper Suburbs." Just look at the list. Easy to drive. Free
standing, surrounded by grass. Lots of parking. Big Big Big everything. If
you take a suburb, and swap out the McMansions for glass high-rises, you
pretty much have the "Radiant City."
I think the "Radiant
City" ideal was sort of floating in the ether in the 1920s, but one guy
who had his cultural antenna particularly attuned to this trend was a French
guy who called himself "Le Corbusier" (born Charles-Edouard
Jeanneret-Gris).
Wikipedia entry on Le Corbusier including his
plan for the "Radiant City."
"Technological
historian and architecture critic Lewis Mumford wrote in Yesterday's City of
Tomorrow, the extravagant heights of Le Corbusier's skyscrapers had no reason
for existence apart from the fact that they had become technological
possibilities; the open spaces in his central areas had no reason for
existence either, since on the scale he imagined there was no motive during
the business day for pedestrian circulation in the office quarter. By mating
utilitarian and financial image of the skyscraper city to the romantic image
of the organic environment, Le Corbusier had, in fact, produced a sterile
hybrid.
James Howard Kunstler, a
member of the New Urbanism movement, has criticized Le Corbusier's approach
to urban planning as destructive and wasteful: Le Corbusier [was] ... the
leading architectural hoodoo-meister of Early High Modernism, whose 1925 Plan
Voisin for Paris proposed to knock down the entire Marais district on the
Right Bank and replace it with rows of identical towers set between freeways.
Luckily for Paris, the city officials laughed at him every time he came back
with the scheme over the next forty years and Corb was nothing if not a
relentless self-promoter. Ironically and tragically, though, the Plan Voisin
model was later adopted gleefully by post-World War Two American planners,
and resulted in such urban monstrosities as the infamous Cabrini Green
housing projects of Chicago and scores of things similar to it around the
country. [12]"
"Identical towers
set between freeways." Hmmmm. Five words -- that about sums it up! Which
just goes to show that the failings of the "Radiant City" are well
known. Today, we recognize Le Corbusier's "Radiant City" signature
in all of the crapulous housing for the poor created during the 1950s and
1960s. And yet, people still keep building this garbage everywhere.
Okay, let's look at some
Traditional Cities:
This is Paris. Buildings up against the
sidewalk: check. Narrow streets, hard to drive, not much parking: check.
Buildings under 10 stories, adjacent to each other: check. Parks and plazas,
but no "landscaping": check.
I'll take the "City
of Light" over the "Radiant City," thanks.
Rome.
Rome.
Rome.
Amsterdam. Nice!
More Amsterdam.
Innsbruck, Austria.
An older part of Shanghai,
China.
Traditional Shanghai small street.
Shanghai.
Holy shit! That is some architecture.
Shanghai. Look at those
buildings! Wow. And where are the CARS?
Prague, Czech Republic.
Hanoi, Vietnam
Hanoi.
Marrakesh, Morocco.
Well, you get the idea.
But, it's important to have this little exercise, to consciously recognize
what a Traditional City looks like, especially in the United States where it
is almost nonexistent. Do you see that, whether Paris or Hanoi or Prague or
(the older parts of ) Shanghai, they all have the same basic characteristic?
Really Narrow Streets.
And, of course,
everything that goes along with that in the design of the Traditional City.
You can sense, just from the photos, that if there is a reasonably good
transportation system (subway, etc.), then you can get around and live there
without a car, and even without a desire for a car.
OK, take a deep breath.
It's time for the "Radiant City," if we can stand it.
The First Wave of the
"Radiant City" ideal, public housing projects in New York. Notice,
first, the tall buildings (in the lower left corner, not the office
skyscrapers of Midtown.) Notice the Big Streets, the fact that the buildings
don't abut the street, but are surrounded by greenery which is not really a
park ... sort of a no-man's land. (Don't go there after dark!) Giantism
everywhere. Architecture that tends toward simple boxes. From here on, you'll
notice that we tend to get a "helicopter's eye view" of things,
rather than a street-level, human size view. That's because all of this is
designed from the helicopter view in mind, and the scale-model, rather than
as real things in real life size. The result is that everything is
giant-size. We've been trained to like this stuff for the last fifty years,
so it may take a moment to overcome the "yes, I like that better"
feeling that has been implanted in you by decades of condo salesmen.
New condo developments in
Beijing. Once again, not only are the buildings tall and monolithic (no
street level detail), but we have BIG streets with LOTS of cars, parking, and
that landscaping everywhere which isn't really a park, but rather a sort of
aesthetic buffer against the endless traffic and the Great Pyramid buildings
everywhere.
Recent development in
Shanghai. BIG BIG BIG everywhere. See all the weird greenery, serving as a
sort of buffer between the CARS CARS CARS and the Great Pyramid buildings?
Lots of cookie-cutter condo developments, which look just like ... housing
for poor people in the U.S., or maybe army barracks.
Despite its apparent
density, the "Radiant City" is designed for CARS CARS CARS, not
people.
Singapore. Sort of a
model for "Radiant City" development over the last twenty years.
BIG BIG BIG. Giant streets. Mondo traffic. That funny landscaping crap
everywhere. Imagine trying to walk
to this place from your apartment!
More Singapore. OK, I
know you're supposed to be impressed by the "skyline" -- woo!
flashing lights!
Now, don't get me wrong.
I like Singapore. I like it in spite of the "Radiant City" crap everywhere.
We've all seen enough of
this stuff that I don't think I need to go on. It's everywhere!
One thing you will notice
is that the Traditional City is vastly more sophisticated from an aesthetic
standpoint. Just compare the photos above to the "concrete box with
blinking lights" style below. Oddly enough, the "Radiant City"
isn't even more dense than the traditional city, although it might seem that
way because of the tall buildings. So much of the surface area is taken by
that weird landscaping, and the giant roadways, that even though the
buildings are tall they are spaced quite far apart. The small streets and
3-10 story buildings of the Traditional City are at least as dense, maybe
denser.
Now, like I said, I am
not necessarily against very tall
buildings. They can be integrated into a Traditional City format with some
success. Try Lower Manhattan for example. Another interesting example is
Raffles Place in Singapore, the heart of the Financial District.
Raffles Place, Singapore
Here we have a real plaza
-- it's a place you can sit and eat lunch, sunbathe etc. and many people do
-- surrounded by high-rises. (Instead of a high rise surrounded by useless
"landscaping", further surrounded by ten lanes of traffic.) This is
a very traditional -- and successful -- format. The high rises are set very
close to each other, and you can see that each one has a more traditional"shop
front" on the ground floor, instead of just a glass wall. There are no
streets between the buildings -- this is a pedestrian only zone.
Piazza del Campo, Siena,
Italy
See the resemblance? Actually, once you get over twenty stories or
so, the height of the building becomes very hypothetical. From ground level,
a twenty story building and a hundred story building (the Empire State
Building for example) are almost the same, except for the gloominess that
results due to the blocking of sunlight.
Please, let's not build
any more of this "Radiant City" crap. They laughed at Le Corbusier
for forty years. Tear down the City of Light to build the City of Shit? Ha Ha
Ha! Maybe only the French got the joke. As for the rest of the world -- the
joke's on them!
Suckers!
Nathan
Lewis
Nathan Lewis was formerly the chief international economist
of a leading economic forecasting firm. He now works in asset management.
Lewis has written for the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal Asia, the
Japan Times, Pravda, and other publications. He has appeared on financial
television in the United States,
Japan, and the Middle East. About the Book: Gold: The Once and Future
Money (Wiley, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-470-04766-8, $27.95) is available at
bookstores nationwide, from all major online booksellers, and direct from the
publisher at www.wileyfinance.com or 800-225-5945. In Canada,
call 800-567-4797.
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