NYTimes.com Article: What Should a City Be? Redesigning an Ideal

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What Should a City Be? Redesigning an Ideal

January 24, 2004
 By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN



 

What is the most pressing issue facing urban life? Debates
over welfare, crime, arts financing and urban development
have been relatively quiet of late. But when plans for the
World Trade Center memorial were unveiled last week, a more
fundamental tension was revealed: an unsteadiness and
uncertainty about the nature of the public realm.

Those memorial plans may even provide a perfect
illustration of a fault line that has been getting more
obvious after a century of efforts to understand and
redesign the American city. The terrorist attacks, after
all, were aimed at the city's public fabric. The mourning
that followed was public mourning, binding citizens in
vulnerability, anger and sadness. And the most heroic acts
were those of public servants who sacrificed themselves out
of public duty.

Yet the memorial's design is peculiarly focused not on the
public but on the private and the personal. The idea of
inscribing the name of every person killed echoes Maya
Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. But those
engravings marked the deaths of soldiers - a sacrifice
demanded by the public in its own name.

Here, at first, there were no plans to make distinctions
between those who died in public service and the attack's
other victims. The initial proposal would have even allowed
private decisions about how names were to be listed. There
have also been discussions about a private underground
mourning area, something almost contrary to the function of
a public memorial.

Perhaps not much should be made of this seeming
contradiction. After all, the memorial is the result of
months of lobbying by various groups wishing to ensure that
their interests are represented. The development of the
surrounding downtown area will surely be even more riven by
such debate.

But now this kind of debate is typical of urban life. The
city is a terrain wrestled over by competing private
interests. The city's greatest achievement, it often seems,
is the protection of the private realm and competing
private interests; about the public realm there is no clear
understanding.

This is far different from the perspective enshrined by
much urban planning and design of the last century, a
succession of utopian visions of an ideal public in its
ideal home. In the early part of the century, the City
Beautiful movement imagined an almost pastoral city where
aesthetics and planning would help resolve the most
grievous social problems. Another view, which fell in and
out of favor, was that commerce alone could provide the
engine that would eliminate crime, poverty and the slums
that had developed after decades of industrialization and
immigration. And finally there was the mid-century dream of
urban renewal, in which federally financed housing, the
destruction of slums and the careful management of zoning
would end the poverty and racial tensions that had scarred
the American cities of the middle decades of the century.

The failures of these movements - and there seems to be
widespread agreement that they were failures - have led to
new forms of discussion. But many of these efforts reveal
new uncertainties about the nature of public life, some of
them similar to the hesitations that haunt the World Trade
Center memorial.

One new book, "Story and Sustainability" (The MIT Press),
edited by Barbara Eckstein and James A. Throgmorton, argues
that a successful American city should offer "stories" to
its citizens that would accommodate competing claims and
cultures. These could literally be narratives about city
life but could also be figuratively embodied in buildings
and designs that seem connected to a particular group's
identity. But as some of the book's contributors
acknowledge, such urban "stories" do not in themselves
create a wider public, and may in fact do just the
opposite.

In more utopian fashion, William J. Mitchell, in "Me++: The
Cyborg Self and the Networked City" (The MIT Press), argues
that information technology is bound to affect the
landscape of the city, liberating its inhabitants, turning
the city into a node within a worldwide web, creating a new
kind of public.

Mr. Mitchell, a professor of architecture at M.I.T.,
celebrates the populism and protest that might grow out of
this connectedness, pointing, for example, to the worldwide
protests against the United States's invasion of Iraq,
which were coordinated using the Internet and cellphones.
But such networks, however geographically broad, are not
necessarily broadly conceived nor do they necessarily
represent a public interest. They can even be inspired by
narrow-minded concerns.

The real consequence for the fate of the city, as the
book's title implies, may be an almost privatized sense of
citizenship. Each person chooses individual allegiances and
alliances. There are no other claims to be answered or
wider perspectives offered. No other public emerges.

Is there a vision of the city that might offer different
prospects? In Jane Jacobs's 1961 classic, "The Death and
Life of Great American Cities," the very texture of daily
life and social interaction creates a sense of the
"public." How is that sense to be cultivated on a daily
basis today?

In "City: Urbanism and Its End" (Yale University Press),
Douglas W. Rae, a professor of political science at Yale,
offers some sense of what might be possible and how
difficult it might be to sustain.

The book is an extraordinarily detailed study of New Haven,
tracing the city's rise in the early part of the 20th
century and its fall in the second half - an almost
archetypal tale of the American city. Mr. Rae has gone back
to company payrolls, city property records and private
correspondence, trying to illustrate the city's history in
the movements and activities of a wide range of its
citizens. Mr. Rae also has firsthand experience: he took an
18-month leave from Yale in 1990 to serve as New Haven's
chief administrative officer.

Mr. Rae finds the very qualities of urbanism so often
celebrated: close-knit neighborhoods of mixed populations
and businesses, flourishing factories, communal and
religious organizations, all of which helped create a sense
of public affiliation. But that urbanism, he stresses,
should not be idealized; it was accompanied poverty and
filth and social ills and was the result of forces that
cannot be replicated.

During the second half of the 19th century, Mr. Rae points
out, there were "accidents of urban creation," forces that
favored high-density, centralized growth in particular
locations: the rise of steam-driven manufacturing, the
development of a rail system and a national marketplace,
sustained waves of immigration. But then came the
disruptive centrifugal forces created by the introduction
of the automobile and the AC electric grid, which
ultimately helped bring urbanism to its end.

The crisis of the American cities in the 1960's and 1970's
is often ascribed to racial tensions, which did indeed play
a part. But Mr. Rae suggests that the problems were
broader, that what was later called "white flight" actually
began in the 1920's with the weakening of the city center.
The tragedy, in his account, is that the great migration of
blacks to Northern cities in the 1930's and 40's began at
the very moment when the jobs and factories they were
seeking were becoming less stable.

At the same time - sometimes with the best of intentions,
sometimes not - the federal government began a series of
initiatives, including the New Deal's Home Owners Loan
Corporation, which surveyed urban housing stock to
guarantee loans to owners who could not obtain them. The
lowest grade of housing, rated with highest risk, was, of
course, the oldest housing in the center of urban areas
that were also losing their manufacturing base - condemning
them to further disrepair and disrepute. After the war,
redevelopment demolished whole neighborhoods generally with
still less success. Urbanism had come to an end.

Mr. Rae points out that since the 1980's there have been
efforts to recreate it in the architectural movement known
as New Urbanism. "The Urban Design Handbook" (W.W. Norton)
by Urban Design Associates, an architectural firm, explains
the strategy as an effort to to create neighborhoods that
imitate the traditional urbanism of the early 20th century:
Walking becomes more important than driving, blocks are
designed for mixed use and diverse inhabitants, emphasis is
placed on public consensus. It is a form of artifice, of
course, trying to recreate a world that never really
existed in such a pristine, principle-driven form. It also
does not guarantee the development of a public sensibility,
just neighborhood loyalty.

New forms of urban life have to develop. But in the
meantime, the public seems to exist only in the midst of
cataclysm, and a public memorial is now fated to be
saturated with private sentiments.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/24/arts/24CITY.html?ex=1076137900&ei=1&en=c72806ac2eace726


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