The New Urbanism, the Newer and the Old [Dispatches]

The The New Urbanism, Newer, and the Old The following comments are excerpted from the transcript of a panel discussion, The Nerr Urbanism: What Does it Mean for (.'enter Cities? held May 25 in Xeir York City at the Municipal An Society. Susaihi Torre: The New Urbanists, with all of their different stripes, share on the one hand a reliance on and admira­ tion of precedent and on the other an emphasis on an urbanism of the center — not the. center, but of centers. The precedents thev cite are small­ er-scale, pedestrian-oriented places, both in suburbs and in center cities. What does not get asked is to what extent those precedents involve ideas about society that have changed. Some ol the neighborhoods the New Urban- ists look to as exemplars were, in fact, exclusive places and segregated, wheth­ er thev were black villages in the south or exclusively upper-class residential neighborhoods in London or Paris. Although America already happens to he the most multicultural society in the world, we know that the world is moving in a direction in which people will be, at least bicultural and bilingual, perhaps even poly-cultural. Therefore, the way people live and the question of separate identity, which are crucial to the formation of: the neighborhoods, are not really accounted for in that a body of precedents. An important chal­ lenge is to design without the prece­ dents, try to really envision how one needs to invent, not the new urbanism, but the newer urbanism. In regard to centers, they are where communities come together to feel P L A C E S comfortable about themselves. The}' are where celebrations o( who we are take place. I suggest the newer urban­ ism should look not only at centers but also at edges, critical places of Iriction in our society. Ron Shiffman: 1 welcome the New Urbanism because it is reintroducing into the debate on cities throughout the country a sense of place and a sense of design that: has been missing. I am a bit concerned, however, because when you look beyond the surface ol New Urban­ ism, it begins to look purely physical and architectural. It tends to ignore a lot of determinants that shape cities, such as the race, gender and class dis­ crimination that permeates our society. When we talk about rebuilding and reheating our cities we must realize that one of the biggest problems we ha\e is the destruction of civic life. People don't know each other. They don't interact anymore because they have been alienated from each other. Much of this comes about because of the way we ha\e allowed cities to form — the way we've allowed middle-class, white and upwardly mobile families to move out to suburban areas but have not offered low-income and single-headed households and minority groups the same mobility. A lot of what we are hearing about is not new urbanism because it is a direct outgrowth of the participatory movement that began in the l°60s. One tends to think that when people are engaged in participator}' planning or advocacy architecture, they will for­ get about design. That isn't the case. Consider the preservation move­ ment. It wasn't started by the architec­ ture or planning professions. It started from the preservationists and commu­ nity people who set out to preserve buildings and places to which thev could connect. W h o has protected inner-city neighborhoods from being- destroyed, from allowing the Anthony Downs and Roger Starrs to plan them out of existence? It was the communi­ ties that knew the fabric that existed there and knew what could be built. I t was communities that began to light and create the entities that would pre­ serve and rebuild those neighborhoods and the larger society. Recently, a raging debate has taken place in New York City about a plan i n the South Bronx that emerged from an extensive dialogue among designers, planners and neighborhood residents. Out of that dialogue came a very good plan that identified elements of urban design, quality materials and interac­ tions that could rebuild a civil society as well as the physical environment. The design standards rejected the inferior quality of housing that has been built in our cities, as well as the suburbaniza­ tion of our urban fabric, which doesn't build on the qualities of either urban life or suburban life. That plan made its way all the way up to the City Planning Commission, but then was pronounced not fundable by the new city administration. The new administration tried to unravel what many people had carefully worked out. It tried to bring the plan back to a lowest common denominator.