The City After the Automobile

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T h e C i t yf t e r t h e u t o m o b i l e



LSO BY O S m SAFDIE

Beyond Habitat

For Everyone a Garden

Form and Purpose

The Haward JerusalemStudia

UPban Designs for the Holy ity

Beyond Habitat y 20 Years

The Language and Medium of Architecturn

Jerusalem: The Future of the Past



A n A r c h i t e c t s Vi s i o n

M O S H E S A F Dw i t h We n d y K o h n

We s ~ i e w resse d e r of the erseus ooks roup

T h e C i t yf t e r t h e u t o m o b i l e



ll ri ts resmed. Prhted in the United k t a of Amwia. Ha part of this publia onmay be rqmduced Or tranamiPIed in any form or by any mans, dectronic or me-c b i d k d & g photowpy* egarding, or any nformarion stomge md r d d s-

ion n writing from the publisher,

T a nd i l i m a ~ o m m s t @ 1997 by Moshe Saf e

W m q i orba (1873-39%), La ViIiefufum.We sel tbm bar& du p d k e la cimhhion ( m e City oftfie mm, An innovatiw satutixln to the trars fic pretzkm.) printed m . h-

can, swmrd by GollwtianCent= Canadicn A itectu h;tdian Ccntre fat M i

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LRCorbusia, Cite cantemporaine pour tmis millions habitants - 1922 K 97 t 2 Q FIX X997A ~ S Bigha icQ [AM), New YorWmKP, RrislW.

LxtdwigKm1 Hiberseimtlr <;ernan, 1885-1967, Iio baul~stadt Mighrbise cit P e t s p d w V =k t- W es t Street, ink snd m e z o l o r on paper, 1924,96.5 X I48 an Gilt of Gear@ E, Dmk1383.991.

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1996, Thehrt

Institute of Ctti-q At8 Righ

This e d i ~ i n ubgshed in 1998 in the United Statca of America by leshrim Press,af C en td A ~ n u e , oulder, Colorado 80301 2877

First pubbhed n hardcover in 1997 by BasicBooks

Page design ryh d r e w S .P q e composition by foseph GishUbdrew Smith Gratphics Inc.

A CIF cataiog recard for this book is available from the Libraryof Gongress.ISBN 0-8333-3545-0

The p p c r used in this pubtica~on meets the requirements af the h e r i m n PJationafStandard for Permanenm of Paper for Printed, Ubrary Materials Z39A8-1981,



Contents

cknowledgments v11

rologue

PART I: VISIONS OF TH E CITY

CHAPTER The Ailing City

CHAPTER The Evolving City 1HAPTER 3 The End o f the Gtfr 27

PART IT FACING m LIm

CHAPTER The Making of Public Space 9

CHAPTER Working in the City

CHAPTER 6 Living in the City 69

CHAPTER 7 ConfrontingMega Scale 8 5PART 111: TOWARD TH FUTURE:

CHAPTER 8 Planning the Region 1 3

CHAPTER 9 Traveling the Region 123CHAPTER 1 The Utility Car 37

CHAPTER I 1 The City Afterthe Automobile 151

Epilogue:Urbana 169

nd Notes 75Index 8



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This book has been enriched by the advice and criticism ogeredby several friends and colleagues. In particular I want to thankNat Glazer Joseph Koerner Marty Peretz Peter G. RoweWitold Rybczynski Michael Sorkin and Leon Wieseltier whoread the manuscript and made invaluable suggestions. Mythanks also to Jack Stoddart Angel Guerra and Lynne Missenour editor all at Stoddirt Publishing for their encouragementand support; to everyone at Basic Books; to Linda Kahn; and toElsa Franklin whose belief in the book led to its joint publi-cation in the United States and Canada.

Wendy Kohn began working with me on this book in 993

as a researcher and editor. As time went by it became apparent

that her contribution extendedwell

beyond thatof

editor. I amparticularly grateful for her insistence that no urban propos-als relevant to North America can overlook the power of theAmerican dream of dispersal and openness and that con-temporary concepts must therefore reconcile the forces of

concentration and dispersal.

M o s w ~FDIE

RIDGE M SS CHUSETTS

M RCH 997

vii



n 1959 as a graduating student from McGill architectureschool in Montreal, set out on a study trip sponsored by theCanadian Central Mortgage and Housing corporation. Five stu-dents, one from each of the five architecture schools in thecountry, we traveled through the suburbs and downtowns ofAmerican and Canadian cities at the height of the suburbanexplosion. Having moved to Montreal from Israel only a few

years earlier, relished this eight-week voyage as my first trueexposure to the North American pattern of urbanization thatseemed to be leading the way for the rest of the world.

Traveling from the dense Northeast to the Midwest andWest coast, found myself repeatedly and profoundly impressed

by the force of suburbanization he desire for dispersal out-ward from city after city, and the ubiquitous dream ofindividually owning one s house and garden. Yet all fiv of uswere particularly charmed by our visits to downtown SanFrancisco, Georgetown in Washington, DC and RittenhouseSquare in Philadelphia. The attached, compact buildings step-ping up the hius in San Francisco, the brick houses lining the

streets of Georgetown, and the elegant, well-defined urbansquare in Philadelphia were all reminders of the vit lity o placeswhere people of diverse backgrounds mingled, of the ideal-ized image of cities we each carried in our mind s eye. These



P R O L O G U E

places convinced us of the merits of traditional urbanity, and

the necessity for its revitalization.In contrast was the inhuman and monotonous stacking ofpeople in high-rise buildings ostly public housing projects

in and around central cities. And even then, you couldalready see the emerging replacements for our once grand andvital urbanity: the great malls in the suburbs, the endless high-way strips, and the winding streets of identical single-family

houses. It seemed to me that urbanism's darkest hour was uponus: with the atnuent escaping to the suburbs, poverty and dilap-idation were coming to dominate most of downtown.

At the time, I was coming to realize the paradox of con-temporary urbanim: the dream of a home and garden that aredistant from the ills of the city alongside a desire for the vitalivof downtown. I translated this paradox into an architecturalchallenge: to invent a building type that provided the lifestyleof a house with a garden, but that was compact enough to beconstructed in the central city This way, you could have yourcake and eat it too, I thought live within reach of the vitalcenter and enjoy the amenities of a suburban house.

For everyone a garden was the w y I phrased this god for

myself, the inspiration for a new type of urban living Returningto McGiU, I canceled my earlier plan to design the Israeli Knessetas my thesis project and instead proposed a project to develop anew concept for urban housing. I began constructing large mod-els out of Lego, stacking plastic blocks representing houses oneon top of the other, each one forming a roof garden for the unitabove. Experimenting with various patterns, I built frames in

which the houses were suspended, and sketched out traditionalshop-lined streets both on the ground and in the air. This wasto lead two years later to Habitat 67, a project I designed andconstructed as part of the 1967 world's fair in Montreal.



PROLOGUE

Habitat, as built, focused on the tension between single-f a ~ l youses and high-rise apartment buildings:if people couldhave a house with a garden in the city center, I thought, theymight no longer feel compelled to leave the city for the sub-urbs. The project was as dense as traditional apartmentbuildings, yet provided gardens, privacy, and individual identity.I believed this design strategy might becomea model as remedy for the inhuman conditions o f high rise public housing

complexes, as well as for "luxury" housing in the city.Three decades later, I realize that by reducing it to purely

architectural terms, I had misunderstood the paradox of the con-temporary city. During the 1960s, we architects felt w couldmake a digereace: vve could influence the character o f urbandevelopment, revitalize downtowns, and stabilize suburbansprawl. We continued to think of the city in traditional histor-ical terms, with a cohesive center surrounded by suburbsradiating pattern of density and intensiv set within a ruralregion nd focused primarily on the meaning of and theneed for, the aaditional downtown. Could the aauttnt who had.left over the previous two decades be convinced to live thereagain Could civic insdtutions be revitalized and strengthened

Could the slums be rehabilitated, or should they be replacedThese interests were not primarily altruistic on the part ofarchitects. Rather, the business and intellectual communitiesunderstood t the h e hat the whole urban ewirorrment. couldnot function with a rotten core. It was simply assumed that thefunctioning of contemporary society depended on what I havecome to term "interactive centers," consolidated places for urban

life. Yet while architects, intellectuals, and politicians discussedthese issues, suburbanization only intensified.

We now recognize that the fundamental problems of thepast decades represent complex economic and technological



P R O L O G U

trends that have ushered in a way of life. And that desire to

escape the city involved the social as well as the physical. It wasloaded with the implicit wish for the comfort of living with"your own kind" insulated &om the poverty, dirt, and diversepopulations associated with urban life. Therefore, clearly, pre-serving the richness of the city center alongside the heedom ofthe suburbs cannot be accomplished by "merely" inventing newbuilding types. To "have our cake and eat it too" means recog-

nizing not only what our urban landscape has come to looklike, but what forces shape it and how they operate.

If we look at cities over the past century, we can see thateach transformation in. urban form has been linked with sometype of transportation revolution: electric streetcars spawnedthe early suburban towns; elevators begat tall buildings. And theautomobile, of course, burst ll boundaries, scattering new, low-density development across the countryside. Like manyrevolutions, the causes and certainly the eEects of this trans-formation have been poorly understood.

Today, ideas about the relationship of transportadon systemsto cities and suburbs, urban form, organization, and buildingtypes remain vague and outdated. We continue to formulate

policy and generate technology based on lifestyles and conceptsof the built environment that are already many decades old,never to be regained. s we continue to build and shape ourcities, the question must be asked What might the next trans-portation revolution be, and how will it affect our lives Whatabout the city after the automobile



P R T

V I S I O N S

O F T H E

C I T Y



n i v e r s a l i spersalThere is a consensus today that our cities are not well. Towardthe end of the twentieth century, they are inundated withproblems physical, social, and economic. Urban &ansportationis deftcienc; inner city problems have deepened; violent crimeremains a serious threat in vast areas of the historic city centers.

1s there common denominator to the ailments of citiesof the industrialized West and of the populous Third World, inthe North and in the Tropics of e w York nd MeGco CityJakarta and Hong Kong, Toronto and Copenhagen Despite dis-tinct differences of scale and resources, of climate and history,there is, indeed, universal pattern. Everywhere in the world

we find examples of expanded regional cities ities that inrecent decades have burst out of their traditional boundaries,urbanizing and suburbanizing entire regions, and housing closeto a third of the world's population.'

The initial explosion of the traditional ity was primarilygenerated by industrial-era population growth due to pmsper-icy better me&cine, gration, and the shrinking of traditional

agricultural economies, which sent workers streaming intocities. Movement to suburbs surrounding the urban core wasthen facilitated by extended transit and rail lines, and finally,most decisively, by the automobile. In the United States, the



V I S I O N S O F T H I T Y

most intensive growth occurred after the Second World War

and was enhanced by the construction of the interstate high-way system, funded by federal legislation in 1956. In 1940 carswere owned by about one person in five2; today, we are fastapproaching an equal population of cars and people.

Automobiles and their road systems have completely rede-fined the old boundaries of cities. Today's regional city ofseventy or eighty d e s across encompasses the old downtown

(or in some cases, several old downtowns), as well as industrial,ercial, and residential sprawl. s seen from the air, urban-

ization extends for miles beyond the old centers, clusteringhaphazardly along the freeway system and thickening aroundits cloverleaf intersections, From this distance, in, fact, the carand the keeway have become the essence of the regional city.

n f r a s t r u c t u r e M i s f i t

There are many connicting views as to the impact and mean-ing of the exploded city in our lives. But without exception, allagree on one issue: a fundamental conflict misfit xistsbetween the scale of cities and the transportation systems thatserve them. Dispersed around the region, we can no longer con-

form our individual paths of travel to the fixed lines of masstransit. And the more highways and expressways we buifd, thesooner they become overburdened with trafic; no investmentin highways seems great enough to sadsfy our voracious neces-s t y to travel by car.

The automobile has devastated the physical fabric of botholder and younger cities. Older cities have had to adapt their

downtowns to trafic volumes u agined at the time they werebuilt. n these cities, which were originally served by streetcars,streets evolved with buildings lining the sidewalks, providingelaborate window shopping and ceremonious entrances for the



T H E I L I N G CITY

pedestrian; together, buildings defined streets and public spaces.

Neither the scale of traditional. streets, nor the size of indi-vidual building parcels, anticipated the growing volume oftraffic or the need for off-street parking. Common solutionsto making older cities accessible to cars have been wideningstreets (Montreal s Boulevard Renk Lkesque); displacingpedestrians to underground districts (Montreal; Toronto) oroverhead walkways (Minneapolis); cutting new traffic arteries

between neighboring urban districts (Seattle s waterfront;Boston s North End; downtown Hartford, CT or through themiddle of cohesive neighborhoods (eve here); and replacingfine old urban buildings with parking lots ll over the world. Asthe highways have taken over, the tightly woven fabric of urbanstreets has been progressively destroyed.

In newer North American cities, the patterns of develop-ment, land-use, and land coverage were aU determined by therequirements and presumptions of car-dominated transporta-tion from the beginning of their major growth. Each new actof city building required appropriate parking to be includedat the outset, and wide urban streets were laid out and con-structed with the specific go l of assuring car access. Buildings,

the distances between them, and the sequences of entering andexiting them all deferred to the demands of the car. The resultw s an unprecedented scale and pattern: large amounts of pavedopen space devoted primarily to roadways and parking, withstructures interspersed at distances. Every physical premise ofthe traditional city disappeared: continuous pedestrian circu-lation; a well-defined and habitable public domain; and the

entire array of architectural details on buildings and streetsdoor frames, entry moldings, window sills, stoops, lamps,benches, trees, and all. The new form addressed the issue ofvehicular access and parking, but did not replace or reinvent



VISXONS O F T H E I T Y

other aspects of urban l i f that had been inscribed into the older

city grid over its history.The vast majority of development in cities such as LosAngeles, Dallas, and Houston, for example, is dispersed over aregion of four to six thousand square milesJ in a pattern notrelated to any type of pedestrian travel, but generated insteadby regional highways and their principal intersections, andextended by regional arterial and county roads. With this dis-

persal has emerged both new building types and entirely newurban forms: the "strip," an arterial road lined with readilyavailable parking and low-density, one-story commercialdevelopment; the mall or regional shopping center, a concen-tration of stores surrounded by a sea of parking and generallylocated on a freeway intersection; and the suburban oftice com-plex, one huge block or cluster of buildings set along a regionalhighway, served by a parking structure or enormous lots.

The highway has come to double as a new kind of urbanstreet. Along these vast thoroughfares, no order of principalurban streeu and public buildings exists like those that structurecities like Manhattan or Washington, DC Highways separateoffice parks from shopping centers, which are separated from

hotels and housing. Schools are isolated in residential suburbs,distant from. cultural and recreation facilities that remain in. thetraditional centers. The distinguishing pattern of dispersed landuses is not a composition, but an isolah on of different activities.

How have we reacted to this reign of the car City govern-ments have legislated requirements for ample parking in urbancenters only to giv up in despair, as more parking only attracts

more cars, and then requires even more parking. The alternativepolicy, to forbid the construction of parking, aims to send com-muters back to public transportation and carpooling. But whilebillions have been invested in subways and other urban mass



T H E A I L I N G CITY

transportation with some positive results (Toronto, Montreal,

San Francisco, and Washington, DC , the process is often long,ensely political. And attempts to do so in thenewer automobile-era cities os Angeles, Dallas, Houston,Denver hen fail or are stalled because of greatly dispersedand random travel patterns, few continuous preexisting rights-of-way and the absence of su ciently concentrated populations

Canada has struggled to keep its passenger train system

intact, while failing to improve t e c h n o l o ~ and speed) andmaking no attempt to address the heavily traveled, longer-distance routes like the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto corridor.Congestion at airports in such areas on the roads leading tothem and in the air itself as suggested to many planners thatrapid public transportation serving a region of three to fourhundred miles could help alleviate the congestion associatedwith air travel. Yet despite the example of heavily government-subsidized rail systems built in Japan, France, and several otherEuropean countries, until very recently there has been littleinvestment or hope of success for such rapid rail systems inNorth, America.

But if neither more highways and cars, nor more subway

lines and rapid rail as we know them today seem to fit our needs,then we either have to alter living habits that have matured overa century, or reconsider the transportation infrastructure soessential to supporting our mobile lives. In either case, we facea profound poverty of vision in planning for our cities.

h e i m e s o w

Today's indiscriminate dispersal the spatial separation ofalmost every type of new construction s the product of thebetter part of a century's policy of laissez-faire land-useplanning. In an era when market forces have been trusted to



V I S I O N S O F T H XTY

satis@ all worthwhile considerations, dispersed development has

appeared not merely inevitable, but eacient and responsive tosociety's will. Yet our current environment clearly fails to sat-is* many of our most urgent and basic needs. Never in recenthistory have we heard in the popular press so many calls torebuild community ; to create neighborh~ods n which wecan walk; to control car-related pollution; and to conserve ourdwindling stretches of natural landscape. But any proposal to

create sustained, vital urbanism today cannot be achieved forthe majority of urban dwellers without an understanding of,and a confrontation with, the real, complex, and competingforces that have for decades so universaay threatened our cities.

This book focuses on what these forces are, how they actdestructively, and how we might take control of current pat-terns. Forty-three percent of the world's 5 5 billion inhabitantslive in cities, many of them regional mega-cities, which aregrowing recklessly, increasing in congestion, and daily threat-ening their environment and its resources. f we are to progress,we must take lessons from the mega-city, not the Italian hilltown, nor the American pre-industrial village. We must studythe airport, the mega-mall, the convention centers, the enor-

mous parking lots and structures, the freeways and theirinterchanges even the sprawling strip developments alonghighways for an understanding of current needs, contem-porary behavior, and real economic necessities. We need notaccept, but we must undersand the powerful panerns that shapethe city today.

Some say that mild massaging can make today's city work-

able. But surely the moment has come to declare time outa pause, please, for reflection and assessment. Why have the

old programs and investment in the prevailing patterns notworked? Why has the new expanded city failed to satisfy many



T H E I L I N G CITY

of our needs for beauty, affiliation, or social commiment? How

can we as a society, begin to take responsibility not only forsolving the problems we have already created, but also for plan-ning to realize our dreams for the future?

In order to go fonvard and consider the city that might bewe must look at the many visions of our cities since the begin-ning of the massive urbanization tha t marks this century.What have the proposals been? Have they been tested, and if

sa, what have learned om them? m a t were the values thatguided their authon, and to what extent has society i .elfchangedin the unfolding of the saga of ~nt ie th-cent ury rbanism?



C H A P T E R 2

The Evo ving i

H i e r a r c h i c a l i t yAlexander the Great traveled the plains of Asia in the fourthcentury BC, determined to build a series of grand, new cities.As sites were selected, a generic plan was adapted to the par-ticular features he hills, rivers, waterfronts f each site.Two monumental streets, the Cardo and the Decrxmanus, werelaid out to cross each. town east-west and north-south, fromgate to gate. Major public buildings, theaters, palaces, gymnasia,markets, and temples were strategicauy placed along these prin-cipal routes. The royal administration saw to it that the mainstreets and public buildings along them were designed withenough formality and cohesion that altogether they formed a

harmonious assemblage befitting a royal city. Individuals, onthe other hand, were responsible for building the smaller-scaleresidential fabric of houses and workshops, extending out tothe city walls.

Through all Greek and Roman cities, this idea of a monu-mental spine forming the central lifeline of a city persisted.Byzantine Jerusalem, as described in the Madaba mosaic plan, is

a vivid iuustration of the principle. The walled city is punctu-ated by the city gates which are the points of principal entry,and the Cardo Maximus, a sixty-five-foot-wi e colonnadedstreet, stretches north-south, between two main gates The



V I S I O N S O F T H E I T Y

Mahba plan of yzanrine Jerusalem

Decumanus crosses at a ninety-degree angle from gate to tem-ple in the east-west direction. The Holy Sepulcher, the palaces,the markets, and places of culture are alf located along theCardo. o this day, even with layer after layer of the city rebuiltover seventeen centuries, the same organization remains.

In the centuries preceding our own, from Pope Sixtus V ssixteenth-century axial plan for Rome to the grand nineteenth-century schemes for Vienna and Paris, the public domain wasthe combination of principal streets or boulevards designated

as important ceremonial and commercial axes, and piazzas andpublic buildings as focal points or formal enclosures. This modelof a hierarchical city, in which the public domain and its pub-lic buildings form spines or districts through the general fabricof urban development, has produced vit l places with a clearsense of orientation and legibility.

Urban historian Spiro Kostof defines pre-automobile cities

as places where a certain energized crowding of people tookplace.' Historical cities provided intense and active meeting

erce, the exchange of ideas, worship, and recre-ation. Even dictatorships produced a wide variety of spaces



T X V O LV I N G CITY

Plan of e Old i p of erusalem tod y

for formal and informal public gathering. People of diversebackgrounds came to and lived in the city knowing that thisconglomeration of people and tbe interaction offered by itwould enrich their Jives

T h e M o d e r n i t y

At the turn of the twentieth century during a period of unpre-cedented urban population growth industrialization and then

crowding and filth now familiar faults of industrial citiesthere occurred a breakdown of many of the traditional urban



V X S O N S O F T H E I T Y

systems of hierarchy. and scale. At the moment, it seemed tothose contemplating the future that the advent of automobiles,highways, and high-rise construction would provide an escapefrom the limitations and some of the oppressions of the oldcompact city. Greater speeds and heights held out the promiseof breaking boundaries of all sorts, and, throughout the earlydecades of the century, inspired numerous explorations for anew kind of city

Turn-of-the-century visionaries offered divergent recipesfor the future city, and their attitudes toward density and urban-ity varied enormously. Ebenezer HowardS influential GardenCity proposal of 1898 suggested a city of dispersed low-density residential settlements. With parks at their center andagriculture at their periphery, the communities of Howayd'svision appealed to those in England who still associated urban

concentration with the dark Satanic mills in William BlakeSfamous words) of the Industrial Revolution. And for the manyAmericans who were troubled by the influx into cities ofunskilled labor from the South and new immigrants fromEurope, and thus eager to distance their family lives from thehub of economic activity, the idea of living in a distant houseset in nature was aUuring nd, in hindsight, was a clear, earlyspark to the later suburban explosion.

Three decades later, Frank Lloyd Wright also resisted theidea of dense and concentrated cities. In fact, t ddecentralize,'he believed, was one of several inherently just rights of man. 2His proposal for Broadacre City, a theoretical American subur-ban-regional city first exhibited in 1935, presented a uniform

scattering of buildings across the land to satisfy this inherentright. Small, decentralized commercial town centers eachone spatially distinct ould stand adjacent to every residen-tial neighbarhood. Like Ebenezer Howard before him, Wright



assumed that these suburban cities would generate primarily

local traffic, and would remain relatively autonomous and self-su6cient as communities,Yet at the level of realistic transportation solutions, Wright's

proposal broke down entirely, even at the time it was designed.In his vision, "every Broadacre cidzen has his own car. Multiple-lane highways make travel safe and enjoyable. The road systemand construction is such that no signals nor any lamp-posts need

be seen."3 In many ways Broadacre City anticipated the newautomobile cities that have emerged in the American West,Southwest, and around the older cities of the East, while totallyunderestimating the traffic volumes they would generate.

Like many other visions of the time, Broadacre City includesat least some form of high-rise tower. Its towers are dispersedaround the landscape in the manner of visual landmarks, asplaces of work, with no discernible parking lots or parkingstructures. While Broadacre C i v does include small parkingareas at the neighborhood shopping centers, could Wright havemeant his office workers to commute by foot

Wrightk underestimation of the traEc congesdon ultimatelycaused by a suburban lifestyle becomes more understandable

whenw

learn that his city3 intended populationw s

only seventhousand. Wright did not come close to anticipating ourregional populations of tens of millions, with residents travel-ing many miles each day to two jobs per household oschools, hospitals, recreation centers, cultural events, andmore. But Wright did imagine that with Broadacre City inplace, "the ghastly heritage left by overcrowding in overdone

ultra-capitalistic centers would be likely to disappear in threeor four generation^. ^ And after nearly five decades of subur-banization and years of declining city centers, we can onlylament that in this dream he was prophetic.



V f S X Q S O F T H E I T Y

In both North America and Europe, however, there were also

those who explored ways to adapt the exlsting intense, interac-tive, and dense city to the modern era. To this end, the multi-leveltransportation networks and stacked streets drawn by HarveyWiley Corbett ( 9131, the dramatic and elegant New Yorkcityscapes of Hugh Ferriss (1930s), as well as the many set designsfor Fritz LangS film,Metropolis (1927), remain even today vividlypersuasive. In a spirit and mood of radical restructuring, the

answer for the more socidy idealistic architects and planners wasa reinterpretation of urbanity itself. Many European urbanvisions, in particular, appreciated both the opportunity and thenecessity for concentration, from CamiUo Sitte s humane and

idiosyncratic cities in Der Stddtebau (Ci ty Building, 1889) toAntonio Sant Elia9s energetic, mixed-use city, the ittd NuovaNew City, 1914 ) ,and Le Corbusier s expansive, towering Vi e

Radierrse (Radiating City, 1930 . But each of these visions diEeredmer the form c;sncenf;lra~onmight take nd from

them we iheri ted theoriesof both low- and high-riseconcen~ation, nd law and

high-rise Aspersal.Le Corbusier, for exm-ple, imagined a i ty set freein greenery orderedtowers served by vast high-ways,but standing in a park.While seeking to erase the

iUs of the compact city, Leembusier valued the demivachieved by skyscrapers. His

View ofsucked streets by Corberr Cite e is Miller (1922)

6



T H E E V O W I N G CITY

and its adaptation to central Paris, the Plan Voisin 1925 , replace

the traditional seven-story urban fabric of Paris with a grid ofgiant towers that are deconcentrated across the open land-scape. On one side of his drawings for the lan Voisin standstraditional Paris with its medieval streets and grand boulevards;on the other, undigerentiated open space marked by identicalfreestandingoffice towers and mid rise apartment buildings.The high-rise, ordered sprawl in Le Corbusier's schemes wassuch a radical break from traditional urbanity, and differs sostrongly from the eventual dispersed low-rise suburbs, that itsuggests an environment it is tempting to call dis-urbanized.

By the time post-war reconstruction began, the concept of

an open city of towers set 6ee in the landscape had taken holdof the minds of planners, architects, and the public. But as theseearlier modernist, utopian visions were concretely realized, dis-appointment set in. Some, more cynical, considered the resultsas evidence of a grand deception: drawings and descriptionsof towers in the park had not adequately conveyed the void thatwould be created by the acres of parking, endless configurationsof highways, and undistinguished spaces that were beginningto appear on urban peripheries and centers alike. In realiq, the

green of the drawings became gray as the parks became asphalt.The result of this visionary concept was a flat connective fabric of highway and parking lot.

Perhaps the most surprising realization and shock about theshortcomings of the utopian models was that they defied anddefeated one of the original purposes of urbanity itself ofacilitate interaction among people. While individual buildings

had once combined to form outdoor collective spaces, in thenew models, there were no collective spaces planned or replacedby any other forum for interaction. Not only did Le Corbusierfail to reconcile the scale, mass, and concentrated activities



V S O N S O F T H E I T Y

represented by the tall buildings with any new idea of urban

connectivity, he did rtot v n try"The sneet wears us out. It is altogether msgusting " excl

Le Corbusier at the time. "Why, then, does it still e x i ~ t ? " ~ easked, evidently with the agreement of such figures as LudwigHilberseimer and the other major players in the CongrhsTnternationaux d9Architecture Moderne 61

throughout the 1930s and projected images of cities devoid ofany element to compose the parts into a whole ny com-pelling image of what the meeting places of a new city should be.

n the ity o omorrow 1929) Le Corbusier wrote, "Thecenter of the great city is like a funnel into which every streetshoots its tra6c , m concluded that "wide avenues must bedriven through the centers of our towns," presaging countless



THE E V O L V I N G ITY

downtown highway projects carved right out of the historic

meeting places of busy streets, co erce, and civic institutions.We must create vast and sheltered public parking places where

cars can be left during working hours:'6 he suggested, enthusi-astically describing one of the most widespread and drasticinfluences on the shape of cities for years to come.

It took the passing of a full generation before a new groupof younger architects, known as Team 10, came to appreci-

ate that the Modern movement had entirely overlooked whathad been a fundamental component of urban life: the pedes-trian precinct. As they took stock of the post-Second WorldWar cities, they saw scores of new developments in Europe andNorth America constructed under the influence of the pro-posals of the 1930s that bad been deprived of a public domain.

i w ofa contertzporary ity by Le orbusier



Indeed, for Team 10 the pedestrian was the most important

component of the city. Team 10 architects were also interestedin harmony and continuity between existing and new devel-opment. Whereas Le Corbusier had envisioned drastic rupturesbetween the historic fabric of Paris and his own freestandingtowers, Aldo Van Eyck, Giancarlo De Carlo, and other Team1 designers wove architectural tapestries that attempted toreinstate a place for the pedestrian in the city and to create

some consonance between the old and new.But wh3e Team 10 met and exchanged poledcs, major new

satellite towns, neighborhoods, and public housing projects inreconstructed Germany, France, and the outskirts of cities allover North America egectively realized the earlier dream oftowers in the park. By the 1960s, a flight over major Europeanand American cities already revealed long stretches of this newkind of place.

Le Corbusier? vision is commonplace in every contempo-rary city today. Yet, ironically, we can see that even Le Corbusierand his colleagues underestimated and misunderstood the impactthat the automobile would. have on urban form. Even with theoriginal modernist emphasis on grand networks of highways,

roads, parking lots, and parking structures, the eEect ofll

thisautomobile infrastructure was simply beyond anyone's frame ofvision at the time. It is as i the modernists altowed the city to bedesigned by the will of the car only to discover decades laterthat its w l l was rather different Gom what they had anticipated.

o n t e m p o r a r y C i t y

The enormous European reconstruction egort after the SecondWorld War large-scde development in the post-colonial world,and American afluerzce assured that modernist urbanism wasbuilt around the globe, and both architects and the public were



agected profoundly For their part, the public as well as politi-

cians) began to suspect the rave New mrl design solutionsthat had promised to improve the welfare of humanity. Not onlywere these places often disappointing, but their importanceseemed diminished by the reality of poverty, hunger, and lossaround them. In this context, it became only natural for thedesign professions to retreat from megalomaniaand recognizethe lirnirs on their own ability to influence and change the waypeople lived.

By the 1970s the role of architects in creating a vision forcities had entirely shifted, and the retreat in mainstream archi-tectural thinking became institutionalized in academia. AtHaward, following decades of close association between envi-ronmental, political, and architectural issues under WalterGropius and Josep Lluis Sert, the university decided that studyand training in architecture and urban policy did not belongtogether. City planning, now understood primarily as the mak-ing of policy, was incorporated into the Kennedy School ofGovernment. Architecture, landscape architecture, and urbandesign (now understood as the physical design of urban dis-tricts, with limited consideration of political, social, and

economic factors), remained in the Design School, purifiedof the mundane and demted to the status of Art.

Within a decade, the isolated pursuit of architectural formhad become both plausible and respectable in schools and inpractice. Archttects had withdrawn fmm the vision of the citybusiness and retreated to the simpler world of form-makingat the scale of the building alone. And a climate developed in

which the expression and comment of an individual architectbecame more important in the design of buildings than per-ceiving the city as a whole and architecture as collective,connective, or shared.



V S Q M S O T H E I T Y

The thrust of much. recent work has been to rekin from fullparticipation: to consider any area outside a given building lotas beyond the sphere of an architect's influence. With the citythus out of bounds, many architects have for the past fifteenyears concentrated only on single buildings or self-containedcomplexes. By emphasizing primarify the personal and the indi-vidual, architectural ideas can thus be developed without anyparticular acknowledgment of the confiicting and constraining

forces of the economy, social policy, and what often appear tobe overwhelming related transportation problems.

This is not to say that architects have stopped acknowledg-ing the city completely. As always, there exist both conservativeand radical schools of thought on the subject. The conservativesckoaX has come ts be associated with neo-tra&&on&sm, NewUrbanism, as well as the architectural crusade of is RoyalHighness Prince Charles of England. For the past decade, thePrince has been an articulate critic of the ills of modernismnot so much of the modernist vision, but of the tangible resultsin the field. e has lamented the discontinuity between exist-ing historic cities and the new mega-buildings of today; thedevastation cased to tradEitiond cities by contemporary trans-portation; the congestion and density of high-rise centers; thehuge scale of places like Canary Wharf in comparison with thepedestrianized, and in the Prince's view, more dignified citiesof the nineteenth century. The Prince$ observations are supported by more specific architectural schemes intending toshow that the humanity, charm, and the good l i f eof nineteenth-century towns and cities can be recreated, and to this end, the

ideas of the architect and adviser to the Prince of Wales, LeonKrier, and his brother Rob Krier, have been compelling.

In the United States, an interest in turning back the urban-istic clock began to gather particular momentum in the early



T H E E V O LV I N G C I T Y

1990s, as the end of the 1980s' economic boom halted years of

intense and widespread development. In a climate of scaled-backdevelopment aspirations, the firm Duany Plater-Zyberk ofMiami began working with land developers to counteract thedecades-old zoning laws of the automobile suburbs, which hadestablished easy vehicular circulation s the pr ee inen t concernin laying out new development. Their seashore resort of Seaside,Florida, is emblematic of their goals. The development was

designed amund a small town center, with streets and sidewalksscaled to the pedestrian, and the car largely confined to dley-ways. Built in a traditional vernacular style of shutteredclapboard houses with porches, the development echoes pre-automobile villages like colonial Williamsburg, Sturbridge, orthe port town of Nantucket.

This is no accident. The planners who subscribe to the val

ues of the self-named group of New Urbanists have expressedtheir goal as a return to the compact, close-knit communitythey present as a cherished American icon. 7 Delicate in theirscale, many of these projects constitute appealing designs for sub-urban enclaves, critiques of the typical 1960s suburban tractdevelopment. However, these schemes seem to deny the exis-

tence of conditions CO onplace to any city. They are visuallydescribed without any hint of the presence of the building typesw associate with industry, co erce, and business, ~ t h o u t venthe attempt to acknowledge the number of cars or the volumeof parking we realistically need (and want). At least visually, mostof these proposals remain suspiciously aloof from the primaryeconomic, social, and technological forces shaping urban life.

t the opposite end of the spectrum, and at times even dis-missed as science gction, are the radical visions of the city thatmight be In the 1960s these were manifested in proposals ofcomplex, three-dimensional high-rise arrangements served by a



network of connecting tubes, as in the work of the Archigram

group. More recently, there have been proposalsof

urbanisticlandscapes. Architect Michael Sorkin, for example, hasdeveloped intricate three-dimensional proposals in whichbuilding-like forms extend vertically and horizontdy inclinedand cantilevered, their shapes inspired by bridges or aqueducts.Transportation corridors at ground level and building massesin the air are generated by either multiple geometries, or no

perceptible order at aU. Inventive, exciting, and full of energy,these proposals in general completely displace the car as theprimary mode of transportation in f m r of a varieq of some-what mysterious system. Here we see not the rejection of densityand intensity, but its celebration ot exactly ignoring the exls-tence of the car but leaping fonuard to its obsolescence,envisioning a society whose interactive needs are amplified andexpanded as compared with today

Of all those speculating on the future of urban form, archi-tect Rem Koolhaas has emerged as a most acute observer andsupporter of cities, driven by his conviction that we are head-ing toward a definitive, global 'triumph' of the urbanc~ndition. ~n his writings, he indicts the Modern movement's

abstract architectural goals and repetitive, simplistic urbanismfor causing decades of urban destruction. Further, he recognizesthe depth of the public's distrust of these failed mechanisms forendowing cities with cohesiveness, order, and harmony.

Yet Koolhaas believes the chaotic assemblages of build-ing, infrastructure, transportation, unbuilt land, and landscapethat represent much of our current environment are inevitable

an expression of society's needs and desires. new urban-ism he believes, should abandon pretensions of harmony andoverall coherence entirely. Following his own advice,Koolhaas has described a set of his urban projects in general



T H E V O W I N C I T Y

as celebrat[ingj the end of sentimentality, and specifically, as

dealing with nothingness. gIn the spectrum of proposals for the city, there are thus the

humanists at one end, with a desire to preserve, or in mostcases to replicate, traditionally comfortable formal values inthe environment; a sense of personal identity; and the gentil-ity of life in a small town. At the other end, there are thosewho believe we face new kind of reality that requires archi-

tectural expression, precludes looking backward, or renderstraditional communities entirely obsolete and thus, irrelevantto sociev today

At both ends of this spectrum, there are thought-provok-ing answers to important problems. We must, with theconservatives, strive to reestablish qualities of scale and spacethat relate to the human body. With the more radical, we mustrecognize that we cannot solve today? challenges as we did yes-terday. But we cannot go with the flow. There is a wide gapbetween what we see when we look at our cities, and what weget when we try to accept any of the current proposals ascomprehensive solution.

As we move into the twenty-first century, we see changes in

the technology of communications and information transferthat threaten to replace the very necessity for personal con-tact, The shfi in jobs over several decades fforn m nuf cturingtoward service and the more recent growth of entrepreneurialcybernetics continue to lure workplaces from downtowns toregional locations accessible only by car. The deepening spa-tial segregation of the poor and the amuent has had drastic

consequences upon the opportunities and education availableto vast numbers of people. Our natural resources have been soburdened and damaged by the prevailing urban patterns that we

have witnessed a global cry of alarm.



V I S I O N S O F T H I T Y

The form and shape of the city and the quality of lif it oEers

is a synthesisof

all these economic technological demographicand environmental factors. They are so interdependent andintertwined that many claim the futility of attempting anyrestructuring at all. ut each of these shifts inevitably rever

berates through our daily physic l patterns of living. Whetherwe will guide their egects and satisfy new demands or simplyannounce chance successes and catastrophes as they happen the

choice is ours



C H P T E R

The End o

Why should we continue to think about vital, interactive: citiestoday? Why not accept the consequences of the evolving dis-persed city as desirable, simply on the logic that a millionindividual decisions have added up to one broad societal deci-sion to abandon intense urbanism?

To many, the dispened city s the future, fdf l ing the dreamof millions of people. Rising on the urban peripheries ofWashngton, DC Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, Los Angeles, andDallas, millions of square feet of ottice parks, high-tech indus-trial plants, shopping maUs, suburban housing tracts, and hotelsextend along America's highways. These places have beendescribed with excitement as a "New ~rontier"' by author Joel

Garreau, and as "multitudesof

experimental communities oftomorroww2 y theorist Edward Soja. f these new Edge Ciries:'as Garreau has argued, w l l soon be entirely sex-sufficient, andif, as Soja describes, these are the incubation places for tomor-row's environment, then striving to maintain and foster theinteractive downtown is of secondary importance. If jobs, cul-ture, education, medical care, and shopping are provided

eEectively and richly in these new Edge Cities, why then botherwith the center Congested, ohen dilapidated, a concentrationof economic pathologies, the historic core might best be aban-doned, or at least pushed to the sidelines as a priority.



V S O N S O F THE C I T Y

With great distances now built between us, some have elo-quently made the case that the era of the interactive city, whoseinherent purpose was face-to-face human contact, has cometo an end.

y b e r n e t i c i spe r sa lIn the Western world, the exchange of goods and informationis swiftly moving from the traditional web of streets to the

immaterial web of elecuonics. The function of the great, viralmarketplace will, in the next few decades, be challenged byinteractive home shopping and an array of other electronicmerchandising techniques. Concerts, operas, plays, and filmshave been appreciated televisually for decades. Collaborationamong multi-disciplinary groups in business, industry, and thesciences wig be handed by e-mail, the Worldwide Web, tele-conferencing, and telepresencem3 irtual presence by videotelephone. Served by almost unlimited venues for electronicinteraction, institutions and individuals could thus neatly spreadaround the globe.

In this new environment, we might have a universal scat-tering of millions of villages, giving individuals locally thecomforts of village-scale life and electronically the culturalrichness of great historic cities. In time trips might be under-taken for pleasure, recreation, and occasionally business, but theroutine, daily commute that burdens so many would disappearentirely. For creative exchange, we might emerge several timesa year from our own village to travel to a truly urban center.Like a modern-day conference center or theme park served by

hotels, the objective could be for example, profound o par-ticipate in medical research; pragmatic . o sell one's product;or entertaining o enjoy one's culture. In such a world, peo-ple might travel to highly specialized complexes, convention



T H E E N D U F T H ITY

centers, and trade marts for business exchanges. They might

attend conferences and think-tanks far brainstorming. For aweek at a time, they might participate in culturai and musicfestivals with the live presentation of plays, operas, and movies.To ageer children lessons in history, science, and civic involve-ment, there might even be special theme parks for bothenterbiment and education,

There is, however, a nagging question about this model.

When we go to the place of festivals to enjoy plays, operas, andconcerts, we might wonder how these creative products werecomposed and written and produced. As surgeons become ableto advise on operations remotely, as more teachers and man-agers are able to project their digital presence across the globe,and as writers, directors, artists, and musicians together gainen tv into the virtual practice halls of cyberspace, will each oneno longer rely on the energy, inspiration, and stimulation ofhuman cantact? Within a newark of electronic culture, wherewill the place for creative, face-to-face collaboration be

T h e a s e f o r I n t e r a c t i v e e n t e r s

Civilization has long been characterized by the ever-increasing

specialization of the roles people have played in society and thefields of knowledge they have pursued. Twenty centuries ago,ancient Rome offered a setting in which concentrations ofexpertise could be developed, and its citizens thrived on thefruits of specialization. Depth of knowledge was believed todepend upon breadth of exposure, and at its height around thesecond century BC, the Roman Forum functioned as the place

where groups of skilled craftspeople and scholars, politicians,and preparers of food could all congregate. The built form ofthe city (the processional routes, broad squares, and the Forumwith its monumental buildings) encouraged interaction among



all segments of sociey and supported a civic culture of public

games, festivals, and cyclical religious rituals.The origin of early cities and their later evolution was, infact, based on the need for places of interactive exchange: themarketplace, the government, and the spiritual and intellectualcenters. When people walked through the city, by necessity theyinteracted with others outside their own social and professionalspheres. Urban life broke down social barriers, as a wide range

of business, commercial, cultural, and educational exchangesoccurred within a single zone he downtown center, whichincluded formal public meedng places, as well s informal venueslike cafes and arcades, crowded streets and parks.

ow as our roles in society become ever more specialized(and thus more isolating), our basic need for interactionincreases. Major contemporary hospitals are concentrations intoa single complex of the hundreds of specialists who havebecome essential in providing the full array of medical services.The great research labs NASA the Superconducting SuperCollider Laboratory, cancer, AIDS and genetic research centers

re each examples of the new mode of super-mind madepossible by the collective interaction of many individual minds,

each highly skilled in an increasingly narrow spectrum ofknowledge. The disciplinary generalists he designers, writ-ers, artists, and philosophers hen remain as catalysts for thesemega-projects, synthesizing long-term objectives with theirown sense of perspective, yet totally dependent on the spe-cialists for their expertise.

As digital modes of communication expand, the need for

physical proximity appears to increase as well. Today mostprofessions seem to be continuously inventing new modes forpersonal interaction: annual, semi-annual, and even more frequent conferences, conventions, exhibits. Hotel complexes



T H E E N D O T H ITY

mushroom around major national airports, sustaining their busi-

ness not on the transfer passenger who has missed a connection,but primarily on the teams of people coming together forworking sessions in the same physical space, and dispersing again

uxlicate electrorricalIy until .the next meeting.In his recent book, ity Bits, William J Mitcheu describes

cyberspace as "a city unrooted to any definite spot on the sur-face of the earth, shaped by connectivity and bandwidth

constraints rather than by accessibility and land values. andinhabited by disembodied and fragmented subjects who existas collections of aliases and agentsews n the face of this vision,can anybody question the necessity for perpetuating and nour-ishing real, built cities of a human scale

Spontaneous, unplanned, physical interaction is the essentialstutT o ife it makes for a better and richer sociey; it is a health-ier sening for the education and maturing of young people; andit is the condition by which conflicts and suspicion are betterdissipated. These fundament2 beliefs inevitably lead to the con-clusion: we must do ll in our power to create an urban structurethat fosters stimulating and vital interactive centers.

In the manner of the Roman Forum, we have built insti-

tutions in societies around the world as specific catalysts forinteraction. Great universities were designed to draw togetherindividuals from every field of human endeavor from med-icine and science, the arts and social sciences nto onecommunity. With its graduate schools, academic departments,laboratories, and institutes, the university fosters specializedresearch and simultaneously constitutes an entire structure

devoted specifically to breaking down barriers to collaborationand interaction. Our cities once were, and could again, becomesuch structures,



V I S I O N S O T H E l T V

r b a n r agmen ta t ion

Even though excursions to the old downtown are less frequentthan they were a generation ago, many historic centers remainthe scientific, educational, financial, and cultural focus of theirregions. Manhattan, for example, remains the primary culturalprovider for the Greater New York area, and a similar concen-tration of inlportant cultural fachties with^ the traditional coreis found not only, as we would expect, in the older cities of

Europe and North America, but also in relatively new citiessuch as Dallas, Houston, Singapore, and Tel Aviv But while thetraditional city centers today may continue to signif) establishedculture, to many people, they also mean unsafe, dilapidated areas.

n almost every city, crucial sections of originally thrivingdowntowns are dying. Drained by white flight, most centercities have been left with concentrated lower-income popula-tions often more dependent on social services and therefo~substantially eroded tax bases. With the overall reduction of

industrial employment, and the relocation of remaining indus-try to cheaper land on the urban &inge, a needy labor pool hasbeen increasingly isolated from potential jobs. Therefore, socialpolicies, economic paaerns, and racial discord have ll combined

to create deteriorating and increasingly entrenched living con-ditions within significant portions of the urban centers.Repairing our ravaged inner cities is, in many ways, beyond

the power and responsibility of architects and planners. Nationaldebates over welfae, incentives for co ercid development, and

gration ltimate ate to the ill health ofour cities and of their inhabitants, U d k e the conservatives wha

tend to consme the entire problem as solvabling the economy, liberals often apply progrfrom encouraging economic investment in areas now nearly

erce, to tax incentives for the construction of



THE E N D QF T H E CITY

mixed-income housing and rent subsidies, to programs like the

Gau eaux Assisted Housing program in Chicago, which give upendrely on the rehabilitation of the most troubled neighborhoodsby moving unemployed and struggling residents, f a d y by f a -ily, out to healthy suburbs. Yet when it comes to the physicalenvironment, North America has by and large convinced itselfto be urzcarxcerned

Continuing suburbanization helps maintain this status quo, as

dispersed cities work to insulate their most politically and finan-cially powerful populations from the neighborhoods of poverty.In Los Angeles, it is easier to forget the desolation of Watts whenyou are surrounded by the splendor of Belair, than it is in NewYork to forget the streets of Harlem when surrounded by thestreet scene of midtown Manhatran. For those who have escapedto the outer suburbs, violence in the streets and urban housingprojects become distant, unthreatening phenomena.

T h e o w e r of es ignSeveral generations of planners and architects, however, havepondered what might be done physically to improve life in thedilapidated neighboxhoods of pover White there is a wide vari-

ety of f o r d panerns for poor neighborhoods across U S cities,kom low-density streets of two- or three-story detached build-ings to stark and isolated high-rise stretches, the areas ll consistof ravaged buildings and rotting infrastructure Some buildingsstand empty and boarded up. Others have not received even min-imal maintenance n thtrty years. Usually residents occupy rentedfacilities where there is little pride of ownership, and even basic

municipal services are substandard and neglected. Garbage accu-mulates, roads lie in disrepair, shops remain boarded up seasonafter season. The neighborhood is isolated physically and brandedvisually, ohen resembling nothing so much as a war zone.



V I SI O N S O F T H E I T Y

But how much good can physical intervention do Would

an attempt to dean up these places o apply fresh paint andplaster to crumbling walls to replace broken windows with newones, to plant trees, to remove the garbage have any sub-stantive effect on the neighborhood Or w ll such improvementbe short term, a brief facelift to carnounage the ailing soulwithin Two decades ago, the City of New York proposedpainting geraniums and white curtains in the boarded vvindows

of burnt-out buildings lining the freeway Can the most ideal-istic among us not judge such a project as naive

Yet in the urban realm, there is undeniably a connectionbetween appearances and reality. One of the best examples, andgreatest ironies, of recent decades has been the coeldstence neardowntown Boston of the Kennedy Memorial Library on apeninsula jutting into Boston Harbor, adjacent to ColumbiaPoint, once one of the most deteriorated and crime-infestedpublic housing projects in the United States. It was perhaps thesymbolic juxtaposition of the Kennedy administration, withall its social hope and compassion, and the desolated housingproject next door that finally led to the funding of a majorneighborhood rehabilitation project. Some building were gut-

ted and fixed up Some were reduced in height and newtownhouses built to define the streets. Pathways and thorough-fares replaced the anonymous open space between buildingsThe whole urban structure was changed.

But the operation was not purely physical. The i tyapproved a proposal to combine a new of residents othrenters and owners of digereat income brackets o live in

the variety of townhouse and mid-rise housing types. This pro-ject, including numerous social programs for communityrevitalization, proposed both policy and design as the solution.

The vacuum of the inner city today clearly demands solutions



T H E N O F T H E lTV

with both political and spatial components. On the sociopoliti-

cal front, we must consider tools such as job training, socialservices and education; incentive programs for home and busi-ness ownership; tax breaks and insurance program to mitllmizerisk-taking; and access to jobs outside the neighborhood, as wellas job-generating businesses within the neighborhood. On thephysical &ont, we must consider the building stock and its con-

y o problematic activities such as garbage

dumping and industry; the quality of housing, streets, parks, andihatructure; and the need for parking and public transportationthat are safk and widefy avajlable.

Much of the discussion of American social and economicstructures in recent decades has focused on upward mobilityas the ultimate goal. But physical mobility, increased interac-tion, and a newly accessible and versatile urban region arenecessary and powerful tools for helping to x the urgent prob-lems of our city centers. In imagining the future of cities, it is

time we recognize that the physical structure of our environ-ment daily and fundamentally affects our experiences, and thatthe current levels of social malaise and economic dysfunctioncannot persist within the inner city without seriously risking

the health of our regions at large.



P R T I

F C I N G

R E L I T Y



The MaItingi Space

e f i n i n g t h e P u b l i c e a l m

What makes a place feel public In pre-automobile cities,public funds were spent to build post offices, courthouses,libraries, and places of governance and to maintain streets,piazzas, markets, and parks. These were the places for spon-taneous interactiondistinct realm maintained bythe public. In the nineteenthcentury, when entrepreneursbuilt the great gallerias of

Italy, France, and Britain,no

effort was spared to declarethese places clearly in thepuMie &main, an extensionof the streets and piazzas ofthe city. Hence, Milan'sGaeria Victor Emanuel of1865 extended directly om alleria Vicwr manuel

one street to a public squarethrough the city block, its interior floored with masonry, itsglass roof flooding the space with light, and the shop facades



F C I N G R E L I T Y

defining the corridor as exterior in every respect: a smaller-scalecommercial street connecting two larger public spaces.

Architects supported the architectural rules of this arrange-ment. A tradition of the build-to line building right upto the sidewalk and joining each structure with its neighborsalong the street ave public outdoor space definition andcohesiveness, and these street facades were embellished andtreated with decorum. The principal streets and squares were

landscaped with gr nd trees and flowering gardens. The bestsites were selected and designated for major buildings, suchas Boston's public library facing Copley Place, or the NewYork Public Library o n Bryant Park. Weell-designed andwell-maintained public parks ew York's Central Park,Montreal's Mount Royal Park Boston's Emerald Necklacestood as urban amenities for d here was a consensus that the

public domain was worthy of attention, a justifiable and appro-priate investment of taxpayer dollars.

In the contemporary city, much of this has changed. As tra-ditional streets of shops nd local businesses were challengedand replaced by super-block commercial towers, parking, andinterior-oriented malls, they deteriorated. Streets empty ofpedestrians and of street-level entrances and windows becameincreasingly unsafe, and added to social polarization by makingthe public realm less attractive, comfortable, and commerciallydesirable. The growth of malls, country clubs, fitness centers,and atria of all kinds is a reaction to the absence of the old lundof public space, a retreat to a controlled and secured realm.

Today, primarily priv fe funds are invested in constructing

places for public congregation ven in cities that still possessthe traditional street and square network. Public spaces of thenineteenth century, such as Quincy Market in Boston, wereoriginally conceived as a continuous part of the city street



T H E M K I N G O PUBLIC S PA C E

network; yet in recent years even they have often been recycled

as privately run, operated, and maintained enterprises. Far moreon are new urban maHs that digerentiate themselves fmm

the street with rarely more than a display window as a con-nection to their urban surroundings,

The GalJteria Victor EmanueJ served citizens who were not

just shoppers, since it was the obvious and only connectionbetween two places in the city. The contemporary urban mall,in contrast, is rarely designed for anyone but the pedestrian withthe intention of spending money.

S TA M F O R D

I was invited to Stamhrd in 1972 by the F B Rich Company(which had been designated by the Stamford RedevelopmentAuthority to develop tbe downtwn center) to discuss thecity's growth patterns and planning. By the time of myarrival, a f w high-rise office towers had been built in thedowntown, including a headquarters for GTE and severalsmaller office buildings, and the urban renewaf plan calledfor adding a mega-shopping center, With Stamford groow-in population and business community, the mall appeared

ripe far construction.Asked to consider the design of this huge dotvntom pro-

ject, I was concerned that the mall s massive infusion of retailspace w u l d be stiff competition for the traditional street-fronting downtown shops. And so I considered ways toestablish as many visual and pedestrian links to the sur-rounding streets as possible, With a continuous flow of

pedestrian traffic, I believed the shopping center could bedesbned actually to contribute to the city% existing corn-rnercial vitality, In the tradhion o the day howevez, the majorfocus w s on building a modern megaenter for the area,



F CING R E A L I T Y

and a large commercial dweloper was invited to cornplete it.n

1982, the regiond shopping center opened with 900, 100square feet of retag space. Trapped b e ~ e e n a r b g stmctureson all f ur sides, the mall was effectively parachuted into thecity, a hermetic world unto itself. As budt, the mall w s alsosandwiched between several levels of p rking above andbelow, lifting its ground floar two stories above the sur-rounding streets, atop a virtual cliff o parking structures.

Instead of ptacing the shops at street level and connecting toexsting streets and palths, the S t m f o d Mall designer choseto d the opposite: to raise the entire mall onto a podiumabove the city. nd it has reinforced an urbm pawern: the CTEHeadquarters (buitt before the mall and poised, over a three-story p a r b g platform) and most other dwntawn carporatetowers also present to the few remaking pedestrians a per-petud, mute wall along the street.

At street Eevet, today's Stamkrd is both jarring ndalienating. Leaving the multi-leveled, skylit mall, yau areimmediately deposited into the garage or onto streets thatare themselves lined by the waUs o four and Eve-story park-ing structures serving both the mall and the many corporate

headquarters. f you persevere down the empty avenues,follovb-ing a si w constantly interrupted by curb cuts intogarages, trucking docks, and parking structures, you haveonly a disjointed street wall to guide you.

Nor does the mall attempt to relate to the corporateheadquarters that have chosen Starnhrd as their place ofbusiness. The mall itself might have functioned phy-sically

like a street to provide access to the offices, hotels, apart-ments, and other structures that make up the dawntown,offering goods and services demanded by large businesses.Yet the project was conceived from the beginning as



T H E M A K I N G O F P U B L I C SP CE

disconnected both programmatically and physically

from its environment inside and out. Pedestrians moveamong the various office complexes, the retail streets, andshopping center only with difficulty.

The central planning concept to place a major shop-ping mall with ample parking in the heart of downtown, butclose to the freeway -- was in itself probably not a mistake.Brit, as in the case of Copley Place in Bostan, the shoppingcenter developer strongly supported a self-contained, intro-verted mall set apart from the life of the city. Instead ofhelping to develop vitality in the modern city center, thedesign of the mall precludes any active street life around it

nd boldly and brashly destroys any remnants af pastvitality as well.

While Starnford has all the ingredients necessary to be avibrant center, including a museum a branch of New k r kCity's Whitney Museum) and a new local opera house, the

individual components of a healthy urbanity have beenlocated haphazardly; The urban design fails to spthesize pm

and post-automobile building types and to mesh the manymega-projects with a reasonable newark of connections and

circulation n short, ta create a whole city that is greaterthan its individual parts.,

P r i v a t i z i n g t h P u b l i c ealm

Shopping malls h ve become, as Witold Rybczynski describes,for most Americans, the chief place to meet feUow citizens '

today. With public subsidies falling and operating costs rising,

even traditionally independent civic institutions have begun to

succumb to the power of private developers. On the conditionthat they are adjacent to, and entered from the shopping mall,institut;ions such as Moatred's new Symphony Hall, as well as




its hockey arena, are offered better sites than they can often aEordindependently. Although these public/private marriagesconstitute survival tactics for vaiuable cultural orgdnizations, theyalso drastically impoverish the quality of the city out-of-doorsas the private interior more and more comprehensively consti-tutes the focus of public life.

In dispersed areas, the effect of this privatization is evenmore extreme. Here, where no previously existing street or

square must serve as a starting point, pure expediency governsthe exterior impact of a new shopping or entertainment cen-ter. Once the basic operating requirements of ample parking,

ercial square footage, and connections to the highway arefulfilled, private developers have little incentive to spend moneyand time on beautifiing the site, landscaping the vast asphaltlots, mitigating the damage to adjacent residential neighbor-

hoods and environments, or designing any aspect of thedevelopment's exterior but the signage. As privately ownedshops depended on the public street a century ago, so, too, aretoday's mall and its stores dependent on, and nourished by thehighway. In turn, the highway and the mall together becomethe major components of the public realm.

Why have public spaces been preempted by privately con-structed and controlled places? If suburban super-mds were theonly manifestationof this new phenomenon we mightsimplyassume that private construction of the public realm has beenthe inadvertent result o a t trend: growing market demandfor large-scale retail complexes generously served by parking,which are best accomplished by a single developer on cheap

unbuilt land. But the continued growth of internalized malls andenclosed atria t in the fabric of traditional downtowns, whereland and parking costs are relatively high, suggests that there ismore to this phenomenon than pure economic expediency.



THE M K I N G O PUBLIC S P C E

Interior malls address the growing safey problems of cities

(guns, drugs, desperate populations undermined by decades ofpoverty) for the very reason that they are private. At the Mallof America in suburban Minneapolis, 109 surveillance camerasproved insufficient, and the security center was compelled toadd moree2 Malls have become a way of turning over to the pri-vate domain the very real responsibility for policing, cleaning,and maintaining the public domain. Further, they provide urban

mall developers with control over key factors in their invest-ment: the merchants, the merchandise, and the clientele.Control and security are key words in a mall. Recent polit-

ical battles have shown that developers will incorporate subwaystations and other traditionally public services, for example, onlywhen they judge that the right customers need access by pub-lic transportation, o i when the city demands this price inexchange for a prime location.

Both in the suburban mall, isolated by its moat of parkinglots, and in the urban mall, connected through its gateways tothe truly public street, control and security are maintainedthrough carefully crafted managerial procedures and interiordesign techniques. Physical design exerts control by the use of

materials and techniques of circulation. With no doors and com-plete physical conrinui~ ith the surrounding streets and squaresof the city, Milan's GaUeria Victor Emanuel virtually becomes acomponent of the public realm. Most of our urban malls, on thecontrary, explicitly diEerentiate themselves from the street withmultiple sets of doors, stairs, escalators, and changes of level. Themall and atrium built by John Portman at Renaissance Center

in Detroit 1979) is not unique in being almost completelyundetectable from the street.3 Whereas the Galleria VictorEmanuel emphasizes ts publicness by the use of masonry fioors,an open, ornate streetside facade, and plenty of daylighting



inside, the contemporary mall usually broadcasts messages of

exclusivity, interiority, and privacy in every detail. Floors areoften polished marble, window framing is often chrome (like

the lobbies of opulent office buildings), and daylight is typi-

cally kept to a minimum.

Ironically, it is in Las Vegas, in the most contrived of urban

shopping centers, that we come full circle to the creation of a

simulated exterior mall architecture, albeit in fiberglass and

plaster-molded classical stage-set buildings. Th e developers,aiming to m i m i c a Roman street at Caesar's Palace, could not,

howwer, go so far as dowing daylight. Instead, a painted sky with

an artificial lighting system simulates daytime, dusk, or evening.

C ~ L U M U S E N T E R

Tr was the strakgies mmifested in the Gakria Victor E m a n d

that guided and inspired certain aspects of my desigxl for the

unbuilt Cohmbus Center in New York City, set at ColurnbusCircle, the southwest cornerof Central Pqrk, mked-use,

three-million-square-foot

building, which included

theaters, cinema complexes,W subwgy stations, and com-

mercial, office, hotel, and

residential space he projectwas a, microcosm of a city, h d

the centrat issue in my mind

was how t0 refate those activi-

ties at were obviously p r h ehe offices, hotet rooms,

and residences ith thoseG olumbus Center n ew ork meant for the public at large..

6



TH M A K I N G OF PUBLIC SPACE

My strategy was to design the public facilities as true

extensions of the street, Colurnbus Circle, Gentraf Park andthe two subtvay stations, Connecting 60th and 58th streets

north-south mound the circlez Iong, cuming, five-stow-Egh

day t public gdery forms a mak civic entranw fackg Centrd

Park South, the major emt-west pubfic thoroughfare. Doors

are eliminaed; stares are entered direcey from. both the out

door street and the indoor gdlery and shops at bot.h subway

and street levels are clad in, stone such as we see on the sur-rounding stxeets. Prom the gallery Boor, a glms-roofed public

garden can be seen two Row above, which serves as a fore-

court for restaurants and a ~elve-screen moVie theater.

These ideas provoked a lot of discussion among the devef-

oper's team, as many argued for establishing an atmasphere

of exc1usit.it-y to attract walthier shoppers (and deter others),rather than serving the urban m x of the city. In this spirit,

they preferred adding doors and interior design finishes to



F C I N G R E A L I T Y

the Gallery, and playing down as much as possible its con-

nection to the two subway stations a potential sourceof

pedestrian traEc, but not of the right kind

Such debates demonstrate the risk of entrusting our publicspaces entirely to the good graces of the private sectorwhose incentive, of course, is to achieve maximum value onany investment. The natural extension of this process of pure

profit-oriented decision-making and little public involvementpresents a profoundly disturbing view of the future city: thatof a vast no-man s-land merely connecting a series of privatelycontroUled oases.

B e y o n d t h S h o p p i n g M a l lAs long as we desire places to congregate, our cities will, oneway or another, continue to represent an assemblage of pub-licly and privately controlled spaces. Although private mallsand commercial atria, as they are often built today, present seri-

ous challenges to safeguarding anoutdoor, pluralistic public realm,their success is also provocative.

This success, a t the very least, isa vote of confidence in the abilityof the private sector to constructand maintain public spaces moreeffectively than municipalities. Lesswilling to pay taxes for publicamenities, today s public, apparently,

will pay higher retail and enter-tainment prices to support theirprovision by private developers.Although there is little evidence



T H E M K I N G O PUBLIC SP CE

that such endeavors are more egectively, more efticientty, or more

economically handled by the private sector than by public agen-cies, it is clear that certain typ s of experiences currently oEeredby m lls should be included in ny type of future public space.

Yet, as we have seen, with its policies of exclusion and con-trol emphasizing revenue, the modern is a poor replacementfor the public domain. Therefore, we must go beyond the mallto invent a new breed of place, an "interactive center," which,

whether in public or private hands liv s up to its role as a majorcomponent of the urban public realm.

What kind of place will this be At the minimum, it must:connect ditferent parts of the city, instead of establishing adistrict unto itself.integrate uses that are truiy public by definition, such as court-houses, post osces, libraries, welfare oflices, day-care, schools,and community- centers.extend the public streets and spaces of the city, connecting topublic transportation, to parking specifically for the center,and to general city parking.relate existing urban institutions in the city to the pedestriancirculation system throughout the center.

relate interior space to existing outdoor parks, gardens, andplaygrounds.present exterior architectural facades that om a continuumwith buildings surrounding the center.avoid doors wherever possible and use modern technology,such as air curtains, to control climate.avoid interior-type finishes and use such exterior-type mate-

r i b as masonry and other hard maintainable surfaces for floon

accommodate the changing seasons by opening to the out-doors and allowing fresh air.be richly endowed with daylight.



Aerial view of amilla Center lookingt o w ~ r he Otd Ciw krusalem

M M I L L

Xis not often todw that n elntireliy new center is built in theheart of an existing city, particularly one that is more thanthree thousand years old. Indeed, those examples that cometo mind have ot stood time s tests very convincingly; Urban

renewal. eEorts suchs

Boston's government center, or shop-ping centers like the Prudential Center at the edge of Boston'sBack Bay today create such empty and unfriendiy plazas th t

they make urban public space appear remarhbly undesirable.It was in this cantext that faced with great trepidation

the planning of Manzala, a mixed-use center in the heart of

Jerusalem, adjacent to Jaffa Gate, the Citadel, and the ancient

city walls, and connecting the Old City with the New, theIsraeli with Arab sectors, The rebuilding of Marnilla was notso much the result of an u&an renewal decision, but of wars.A no-man's-land for nineteen years, the border betwen two



T H E M K I N G Q F PUBLEG SP CE

divided cities, the district had deteriorated and been par-

tially destroyed in battles, It was slated for rebuitding in 1972after the city was unified in 1967.

Mindful of the pitfalls of downtown interventions else-

where, could I do better? Could provide parking without

creating walls of parEng garages along urban streets Could

I organize the lively bazaars of the Old City to form a con-

tinuum with other shopping streets in the district? Could

create a new center that meshed with the city around itsentire perimeter? Could T as the architect, guaranree truly

public character in Marnillak streets and piazzas, and avoid

the pivatized ambiance of so many urban mails?he answer lay in imbuing familiar Eorms with new

meanings to meet Jerusalem's particular conditians. Thus,

the pedestrian street clased down to traffic, so suc~essfuUy

introduced n cities like Copenhagen and Stuttgaft, becomes

the basis for Mamilla's "Cardo," Adopting the alignment of

the historic MamilXa Street, it sets out from the connectillg

street system of fgrusdexn and runs a quarter of a mile to the

historic Jaffa Gate, Xn recognition of ferusdem"s unique cli-

mate, Xopened the street to the sky, but provided it with a

continuous, sheltered arcade for protection from the rain andsun. Its width is generous i r ty feet and it breatcs nto

open piazzas overlooking the historic vdleys. Finally, the

street is fined y buildings with facades of varying heights,

with offices, hotels, and apartments above,ike urban centers e l sehere Na~nilla ncompasses a mix

of uses, but even the co erciaf. structures facing the pedes-

trian street never present their backs to the city. On thecontrary, apartments and offices are accessed from the sur-

rounding streets, Parking is never visibfe. The two thousand

p a r b g sp ces and major bus t e r m i d in Marnitla tuck under



F A C I N G R E A L I T Y

Street vel pb n sf M ~ m if la enter

Marnifta Street fitted carefully into the topography so that

all exterior walls become carefully planted terraced parks

connecting the historic valley and national park with the

pedestrian streets above m e n wmpfeted in t 999 Mamilla:

will seem tohaw

been woven into the historic fabric ofJerusalem.

I considered this as a project of invisible mending in thesense that each strand of fabric each d e y each street eachmass o existing buiiding inds a continuiq and aun te r-

paint in the project that has been constructed in its midst.

P u b l i c l P r i v a t e o m a i n

It is clear that many of the environmental qualities we woulddesire for a public place contradict the values of most current

mall developers whose interests bear more resemblance to those



THE M K I N G 8 E P U B L I C SP CE

of a casino developer than those of an urban designer entrusted

with the public domain. For as we have seen, it is supposed thatdaylight interferes with "commercial drama" inside; continuitywith the surrounding city invites people not intending to spendmoney; and investment in any feature that does not directly sup-port the exchange of money challenges basic cost-returnformulas for a profit-making commercial development. Thefundamental question why should a private developer do

anything to limit independent control over a large investmentust receive the Eundamental answer: because as a society,

we acknowledge that private developers are now constructingrrr public domain. And therefore, they should be subject to

public-minded planning and zoning.As we acknowledge the central role of these public places

in our social life, public life and urban environment, we mustacknowledge that even privately owned urban and suburbanm d s are already dependent on public investment. They dependon street access, on highways, and on heavy public investmentin infrastructure. In urbm S, his dependence often extendsto public subsidies for parking structures, atria, and interiorlandscaping. Horton Plaza in San Diego, Harborplace in

Baltimore, and Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta were ll heavily sub-sidized by public funds. Do they not automatically owe thepublic certain rmnimum standards of amenity and access

Further, if the mall preempts the street, must it not, in anycase, preserve the legal rights, public character, and accessibil-ity of the public street of old Can a U S citizen, for example,distribute leanets for political causes, or address mall shoppers

under the rights of the First Amendment Such rights havebeen reaffirmed in airports, libraries, and other facilities con-structed with public funds, but only recently, in very limitedfashion, in privately owned malls.



Even in a politicd climate generally suspicious of regulations,

we havein

recent years, in citiesll

over the world, devised com-plex regulatory devices to meet certain goals of urban planningpolicy. We mandate parking square footages, building densitiesand uses, and particularly in historic districts, we establishaesthetic standards.

Yet to date, such regulations have completely avoided thepublic issues of priwtely owned urban spaces. nd although cides

lik Toronto, Vancouver, ew York during the Lindsay a n-istration, and, fram time to time, Boston under the BostonRedevelopment Authority, have attempted to contribute to thedesign of private S, ime and dme again, as Ibronto's EatanCentre and Boston's Copley Piace demonstrate, these intentionsare ovemhehed by the developem' enormous financial leverage.

Therefore, facing the future of the regional city with openeyes, a profound question necessarily arises: i private commer-cial realms constitute the new public domain, and as writerDavid Guterson has pu exploit our acquisitive instinctswithout honoring oar c l requirements:'4 then how will

the public realm be included (if at all in the city of the future



orkin in the CiThe high-rise tower is the hallmark of the late twentieth-century city. Practically and symbolically, the skyscraper is thedominant buiiding type, its impact affecting every facet of urbanlife, its scale affecting the very form of the city. Towers haveresolved certain of society's needs for density and concentra-tion, and have opened up new ways of experiencing space. Buttheir dominance does not mean that we, as designers or as usersof these super-scale structures, have succeeded in resolving themany environmental and urbanistic issues they pose. e haveyet to use high-rise towers as an eEective urban building block.We have yet to make them uplifting places to live or work. e

have become dependent upon high-rise buldings, but we have

also been comprormsed by them. How have these unwieldy, yetoften breathtalungly elegant, buildings come to shape our urbanlives so dramatically

T h e i t y G r o w s U pIn the beginning there was the village, and then the city, theheight of their buildings dictated by the distances people could

climb our, or perhaps fiveve, tories. Based on the scale and sizeo these walk-up buildings, the organization of the city streetsand public spacesdeveloped over centuries, and evolved in rela-tionship to the transportation systems, building materials, and




technology of the times. This basic scale of cities, for centuries

closely related to human measure, was shattered (or liberated,depending on your view) by the invention of concrete framesmctzzra, the Qtis elevator, and Befsemer steel. This did not occur,of course, by chance, but in direct response to the quickening pace

erce and congestion in the nineteenth-century citya result of opportunity and necessity combined. Urban buildingssoon soared in height, first in Chicago and New York, and

quickly thereafter in cities all over the world.Tall-building design pioneers struggled with the propor-

tions and organization of this new breed of architecture. In theiready phases, in the 187 s and for several subsequent decades,the floor plates of most towers remained relatively small, lim-ited by their inherited lot sizes and by the need, beforeair-conditioning systems, to provide most interior spaces withexposure to the building s perimeter. Because they were builtin the place of low-rise commercial buildings, their plans weres i ~ l a r odified on y to acco odate an enlarged core ofelevator banks and fire stairs. Most floors consisted of a sequenceof rooms, each with a window, served by a tight central core.

In style, early tower designs ranged from neoclassical and

Gothic to more original variations by Louis Sullivan and oth-ers, but most were composed of a base, middle, and top sectionconsidered as discrete and constituent parts of the whole. Thebase often contained shops, and an eEort was made to defer tothe life of the street. These designers were urbanists at heart,preoccupied with the scale of buildings as they were perceivedby the pedestrian, and with the manner in which each one, side

by side with its neighbor, contributed to forming the contin-uous public space of the street.

y the time of the 1922 competition to design the ChicagoTribune Building, however, a clear theoretical and stylistic



WORKING I N THE C I T Y

divide had developed among designers over the appropriate

expression of tall buildings. Generally speaking, the tradition-alists attempted to address the building's unprecedented scaleby manipulating its massing to digerentiate the public, private,

ercial, or residential components, individuating windowsand entrances, and creating compositions with a variety of tra-ditionally crafted masonry details. The modernists united allcomponents of the building into a simple extruded object witha thin, repetitive nd less costly uter skin. This win-ning modernist ideology made a virtue of what was essentiallyan architecture of econormc expediency,

The impact of tall buildings on the i t y was profound. And asthe canyon syndrome set in igh-rise buildings cutting offsun and light fmm each other and from the street he ideaemerged that zoning ordinances could help moderate the neg-ative impact of these proliferating skyscrapers on the city as awhole. s early as 1916 provoked by the sheer massiveness ofthe forty-two-story Equitable Building, New York ity passedits first zoning orhnance to prohibit towers that presented con-tinuous walls from base to top and blocked daylight entirely

from the public realm below. Known as the setback law, theordinance related the height of the building wall to the widthof the street that it bordered, and specified different levels atwhich the building be set back from the street as it extendedupward into the air. Each neighborhood received guidelinesspecific to the particular character of its streets.'

Keeping the streets and sidewalks more open to light, sun,

and sky, the progressive setback had a decisive effect both out-side and inside the mass of the tower. Stepping back from thestreet as they rose, a new generation of ziggurat-like towerstook their places along New York's streets, and, like sparks of



F C X N G R E A L I T Y

energy, helped to generate a more intricate, more dynamicurban skyline. Transforming the interior spaces of towers aswell, the jagged prohte created a series of terraces and roof gar-dens outdoor spaces for both office and residential uses.

At Rockefeller Center 1931-39) in New York Ciq anawareness of the partnership between the shape of the towerand of the space around it developed even further. Here, thebuilding-street relationship was delicately and masterfully

studied. Combining different heightsof towers and lower build-ings within one city block moderated the impact of the towerat ground level and allowed for pedestrian alleys and piazzas inthe block's Interior. With rows af stores and comfortable out-door public spaces, these secondary pedestrian precincts becamenatural extensions of the major city streets, and extended thedomain of the public realm into the domain of the building.Driven by zoning laws, the skyscrapers of an era thus were shapedto preserve and enhance the urban experience at street level.

Beginning in the 1 9 5 0 ~ ~he emphasis in tower designbecame more closely focused on perceiving the building as anindependent entity in the city, rather than as part of a street wall

that shaped public spaces. Mies van der Rohe, in his earlydesigns, and later the firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill andother firms evolved for the o ce building an entirely new rolein the urban design of the city hat of a sculptural object.Using the ground plane as a kind of stage for a unique event,the tower was conceived as singular, its simple shape and undif-ferentiated skin cut oE, seemingly arbitrarily, where it hit theground and reached the sky.

s the white-collar workforce expanded exponentidy andbuilding technology evolved, with faster elevators and air-conditioning allowing large, artificially ventilated interiors

orporations generally responded with economic expediency.



W O R K f N G I N TFIE I T Y

Its broad, repetitive floor plates, simplified massing, and stan-

dardized surface treatments made the Miesian vision of aminimalist extruded tower a convenient model. Increasinglyvast, windowless work areas became an accepted answer to theneed for more space, with air-conditioning commonly replac-ing windows that open and other methods of naturalventilation. To serve greater areas, elevator cores got fatter; toaccommodate more people and services, the girth of tall buildings continued to grow.

By 1961, the setback law in New York City had beenentirely dismantled as ever larger envelopes of space presentedever greater challenges to the traditional urban fabric. The sim-pler floor-area ratio ordinance enacted in its place in whichthe total volume of the tower is regulated according to its lotsize) allowed bonus heights for outdoor public areas and theabstract and simple towers, of which Mies's 1958 SeagramBuilding was the paradigm, were thus encouraged by policyto break away from the street edge, free, so to speak, in anopen space referred to as a plaza:'

By today's standards of o&ce tower behemoths, the originalmodern prototypes like Mies's Seagram Building or Gordon

Bunshaft's Lever House are slender and delicate. But within adecade of the Seagram Building, dozens of buildings in NewYork (and many other cities) had grown to take whole blocks fortheir sites, with plazas ast, sheer, and empty ncouragedby subsidies of public funding and bonus zoning. Disruptingthe continuity and containment that had existed for the pedes-trian in the historic c i ty street, in effect, the plaza represented a

total denial of the tradition of urban space. And perceivedfrom the street or plaza, each modern tower was exaggeratedin size and scale as pedestrians stood back to see these giantbuildings crashing ll i ty floors nto the ground plane.



F C I N G RE LITY

In the newer automobile cities, particularly during the

1970s and 1 9 8 0 ~ ~owers ballooned in scale in an even moreextreme fashion. Unlike San Francisco, Chicago, New York,Philadelphia, and Boston, cities such s Dallas, Houston, Denver,and S o Paulo were less constrained y historic street andparcelization patterns. Moreover, while in Chicago and NewYork most omce workers continued to come to work by footor by some form of mass transportation, practically all oRice

workers in the newer cities arrived by car. Parlung issues in thesecities were urgent. With block sizes often larger than those intraditional urban centers, towers were built to occupy whole

ity blocks at minimum, with many levels below grade for park-ing. Roofs of the underground garages became plazas, andwhere conditions permitted, cheaper above-ground garagesappeared as low and clunky appendages to ofice towers. Beyondthe old downtown, practically every tower today is accompa-nied by its large Gve-story cousin: the parking structure.

By the 1980s, having dominated the downtoms for almostthirty years and even spread into the periphery of most cities),modernist towers began to provoke wrath on the part of thepublic, and a second cycle of compositionat invention on the part

of archtects. The repetitive monotony of scale, envelope, andmassing, the expanses of undiarentiated w lls slicing off sud-denly at the sky, the ma 0th and absolute presence of thesetowers seemed to have run their course as an urban aesthetic.

rawing upon techniques similar, in some ways, to thoseexplored in the earliest high-rise towers, designers once againattempted to break down scale and create unique identity in the

skyline. Again seeking to delineate bases, tops, and setbacks, thesedesigners employed varied materials that, without resorting tothe earlier use of costly individually crafted cut stone or cast ter-racotta, created curtain walls of different kinds of glass, metal,



W O R K I N G X T H E ITY

precast concrete, and thinly cut textured and colored stone

but continued to view their towers as singular objects in theurban landscape.

i t i e s of T o w e r s

High-rise urbanism, s we have seen both in theory and in prac-tice, was born with fundamental contradictions: unresolvedtensions between viewing towers as intrinsic parts of a dense

downtown and treating them as self-sufficient elements in theenvironment. Not surprisingly, the result of this confusion is adesultory and compromised high-rise city.

According to Le Corbusier, the tall building demanded anenormous grid ot 400 feet by 5 feet as on the east sideof midtown Manhattan, for example, but instead, a super-gridof 2 000 or 3 000 feet across, as if the goal of the tower as a formwere to allow the space of the surrounding city to becomemostly park. Thus, the most compelling image of modernisturbanism fundamentally negated the tower's historic rationaleand the original impetus of urbanism, which was to gain theeconomic benefits of bringing a large number of people orbusinesses as close together as possible close to transit, close

to services, and close to each other,In practice, the new skyscraper was simply imposed on an

old urban structure, on street scales and lot sizes that signifi-cantly predated buildings whose shadows extended hundredsof feet, whose impact on wind and air circulation was prafound,and whose tops towered over the sidewalks below Further, inmost of North America and in newer cities around the warld,

that original urban structure was an undiEerentiatedV2 grid,which meant that no hierarchy created by principal routes,unusual natural features, or an ordered pattern of civic build-ings and spaces acted to guide the placement of towers in the




city as a whole. CO ercial skyscrapers thus sprouted haphaz-

ardly to produce o rrent disordered maitrices,Recently, courthouses, museum, concert halls, performingarts centers, libraries, and institutions of governance have begunto seek financing by seUing to developers their air r i g h ~ nd

e areas aflowed by zoning. Forced to hitch a ride withial mega-structures. civic and cultural institutions must

now relegate the choice of their sites to secondary importance,

and their own visibiliy and presence in the city has, in manycases, been drastically diminished as a result. Not the productof grand plans, but of circumstance and pragmatism, the con-figuration of the city of towers we see today has emerged,therefore, almost accidentally

T h e Wo r k s p a c e o o w e r s

Towers hiwe become the most co on solution to providingurban corporations and institutions with workspace, but theyhave also become increasingly unpleasant to the people whospend much of their lives inside them. Typically designed to sat-isfy considerations of the building's facade, the interiors oftowers are rarely deterrmned by consideration for their inhab-

itants or the types of spaces they provide. In serviceon y

of theexterior design, large expanses of glass or small punched win-dows are designed abstractly, regardless of whether a wall facesnorth or south, whether it might screen the horizontal settingsun or admit diffuse light. No matter what the climate, win-dows rarely open, trapping stale recirculated air inside. Finally,acting as compositional devices (and sometimes acting to con-

trol the energy costs of poorly designed exterior envelopes),colored, reflective, or tinted glasses are used without concernfor employees, who now see the world through colored glass(usually murky brown or green) on sunny and cloudy days,



W O R K I N G I N T H E ClTV

daytime and nighttime, eight hours each day through the course

of every working year.To accommodate the growing number of people they are

designed to hold, commercial floor plates have grown increas-ingly large and increasingly crowded. With floor areas ten tofifteen times larger than the early towers, typical contemporaryo ce buildings maintain stacks of twenty thirty, or even fortyelevators with restrooms and mechanical spaces at their core

layer of space thirty to sixty feet deep with an outer rimof windows wrapping the perimeter. The organization is f a d -iar: a few managers and other senior executives are given otticeswith windows, but daylight remains scarce in the greater por-tion of these workspaces. larger number of mid-level managersare given private, but interior, offices. maze of windowlessmeeting rooms and service areas borders the elevators, and themajority of the workforce is relegated to open, subdividedworkspace, defined by low partitions and almost always withoutany natural light at all. The floors are stacked, completely uni-form in their eight-and-a-half or nine-foot heights, and lit bya grid of fluorescent fixtures. It is o&en h a d to believe that ourworkplaces, described by writer Douglas Coupland as veal-

fattening pens,''3 were designed specifically for us to work in.

W o r k in g w i t h t h e Wo r k p l a c eThe quatity of life within towers is a low (indeed, often absent)priority among designers and the public alike. It has not been acentral theme in the academic discourse, and the many bookspublished about towers focus almost exclusively on the tower as

a decorative or structural object. Many of the developmena ofpostmodernism, such as using reflective glass and highly sophis-ticated curtain walls we= aimed at giving total interior ftexJbhty,allowing a design to be adaptable to virtually any orientation or



F A C I N G R E L I T Y

geography from Minneapolis and Chicago to Riyadh and

Singapore. None has had anything to do with the qualityof

theworking environment or the spatial experience within.Over the last decade some eEorts to focus on hman con-

cerns, such as qualities of light and interior space, have led tomore organic and responsive exterior skins and daylightingdevices such as new types of light shafts and atria. In theserespects, Norman Foster's Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking

Corporation Headquarters and his Frankfurt CommerzbankHeadquarters reveal the potential for a future neo-humanismin tower design. To achieve significant change, however, ourpreoccupations in the design of the tall office building mustshift from supedcial composition, totally independent of thelife within the structure, to the quality of its interior space andthe way in which it relates to the city.

Instituting even the most rmnimal environmental standardscould completely transform the design of office towers. Weknow that exposure to the exterior is essential to mental andpsychological well-being, essential to preventing fatigue. Theability to focus visually on short and long distances and the reliefof knowing whether it is day or night, rainy or sunny, affect

everyone's daily experience. In 1901 theew

York TenementHouse Law required that all habitable rooms in residentialbuildings receive daylight. Imagine requiring today that no onespend a working day the majority of daytime hours, withoutthe benefit of natural light. We could regulate and vary ceilingheights according to the type of actlvity and number of peopleeach space contains. We could, for example, accept low spaces

for small private offices, but in large spaces that accoi ty or a hundred people, require extra height proportionate to

the size af the room,But the workday is not restricted to a workstation, and the



office tower must include a variety of spaces for solitary work

and for coUaborative work; for video interaction and for per-sonal exchange; for working as well as for socializing. Theremust be places for meeting, eating, daycare, and recreation, areasthat foster interaction during breaks, at lunch, and after work.ConGonting these issues in design will lead inevitably to manip-ulating the building's massing to increase daylight, diversiEjingthe heights of interior spaces and the window treament accord-ing to solar exposure, and introducing community amenitieslike garden lounges and social spaces within the building, eachuniquely endowed. The repetitive stacking of enormous floorplates must give way to a three-dimensionally more intricateconcept of space.

The Dutch architect, Herman Hertzberger, in his seminalproject near Amsterdam for the insurance company CentraalBeheer 1968-72), demonstrated how private work areas, day-light, lounges for coffee and discussions, even gardens, can bethree-dimensionally configured to create a stimulating work-place. Why should we not work in places that can be shapeduniquely: protective and expressive of the individual, but alsopart of a larger, collective space Will individuals eventually rec-

ognize the cost of submitting to the expedient "mega-space"now provided far them Will they wonder whether closed andshut rooms and enormous recurring floor plates with minimalpotential for vertical spatial connections, daylight, or contactwith the outdoors constitute desirable workspaces Ultimately,those who inhabit commercial skyscrapers must face a funda-mental question of privacy versus community.

long-standing premise of the clients, architects, develop-ers, and inhabitants o tall office buildings is that all can beachieved by partitioning a vast, low, and scaleless sandwich ofa space. To recognize, instead, the iversity that is possible inside



FA C I N G R E A L I T Y

the space of a tower will constitute the difference between asense of well-being and oppressiveness, generosity and depriva-tion. e just might find that freeing the interior oEce landscapefrom perpetual repetition will, in turn, fiee the office tower fromits uniform curtain-walled envelope entirely.

nvis ion ing a H i g h R i s e U r b a n i s mThe issue of the tower in the city requires concept of urban-

ity specifically constituted for towers and conceived to createpublic and private places both within and between them. In thiscontext, the undifferentiated grid clearly never was the optimalanswer. To integrate towers effectively into the city, we mustdevelop a new rationale to locate public structures and civicinstitutions in a meaningful way envision a new kind of placein which the tower is th building block nd drastically reex-amine the design of towers themselves.

As towers became the dominant urban building type, theycreated severe scale problems next to lower buildings, disruptedstreets that had worked well as public spaces, caused shadowsand wind drafts randomly, and often compounded these prob-lems by taking up large volumes of space above or below

ground for parking. Today s city streets strain under decadesaccumulation of these pressures. And beyond the limits ofdowntown, any connective urban fabric is highly dysfunctionalor nonexistent. Betraying a certain resignation, theoreticd andactual proposals for rethinking the effective use of towers toform collective district, part of city, or entire cityhave been few

Today, tall buildings in the regional city appear in h?io gen-eral configurations. Still dominant are towers packed denselythroughout the grid of the traditional center and along pre-served open spaces to form n edge. In contrast is the loose,



WORKING I N THE I T Y

almost random, grouping of towers along freeways. f you a y

over Toronto, Vancouver, Houston, or the outskirts of Chicago,you see within an area of twenty-five square miles two to threedozen eruptions of tall buildings, scarcely related to the road,interspersed with low-density suburban development, in nodiscernible pattern.

Yet we know the life and qualiv of an urban communityis greatly atfected by the configuration of tall buildings. Working

adjacent to the Boston Common is fundamentally differentfrom working at an isolated site on the rim of the regional cityAs we think about future urban developments and the qualityof urban life, it becomes essential to consider the design of tow-ers n relation to the city as a whole and the w ys in which theymight relate to one another on the ground and in the air.Towers depend on proximity to parking and road access,public transportation, and a wealth of services and amenitiesneeded by those who populate them; inherently, they are notself-sutticient. Inventing a new kind of tower in the city immediately concerns inventing a new kind of city street he gluethat binds single buildings into cities.

Today, we must recognize the ground from which the tower

rises, and discover and invent a new urban base to receive, sup-port, and connect the people and the buildings. And when wedo, the urban tower will be vibrant with life more thantoday$ cold and &nting obelisk, draped in masonry and glass,and buzzing exhaustively in monotone.



C H A P T E R

iving inFrom the detached house through the attached row house,townhouse, crescent, or atrium house to the urban tenement,the apartment block, and finally (with the advent of eleva-tors) the high-rise tower, habitation in the city has respondedto increasing demands for concentration. As the forms of ourpublic realm and places of work have changed along with formsof technology and society so too has evolved the third majorelement of ll cities: the place of residence.

Although relatively recent in historical terms, the high-riseapartment structure has become the almost universal responseto housing in cities today. To be sure, vast amounts of relativelylow-rise housing continue to be built in expanded regional

cities rom single-family tract homes in North Americato

densely packedfavelas and barrior in the Third World. Butincreasingly, in the centers and at the perimeters of cities, forthe poor, middle-income, and amuent, the high-rise, elevator-dependent apartment building emerges worldwide as thepredominant urban home.

a s s o u s i n gwo economically diverse markets have influenced both the

location and the design of residential towers: mass public hous-ing and market-sensitive, luxury housing. The images for mass



F CING R E A L I T Y

public housing were supplied in the 1920s and 1930s from the

realm of architectural theory: the annals of CIAM LeCorbusier's visions of a ille Radieuse and a Cif de o i s iles

1922); Ludwig Hilberseimer's Hochhausstadt project 1924); andother grand urban schemes. To the designers of such visions, anurban dweller's wish for a unique identity, for differentiation,and, hence, variety in housing was antiquated: an historicimpediment to be transcended. Ostensibly, the modern per-

son would overcome bourgeois inclinations of the nineteenthcentury in pursuit of a broader social purpose Governmentagencies would dispense equal acco odatioxls to each inhab-itant of a town, district, or entire city, and the resultinguniformity would constitute social justice.

Housing, therefore, became primarily a tool for socialchange, and not a means of satisfying the (assumedly corrupt)demands of popular taste. o early modern architects, acting in

Perspentt ve of Mochhausstadt project by HiEberseinzer



LI V E NG I N THE CITY

the sequestered realm of theory, uniform repetition in the built

environment became an attractive idea ven am ideal.Repetition, wrote Hilberseimer in 1927 is no longerregarded as something to be avoided for identical needs,identical buildings. ' According to architect and member ofCI M Bruno Taut, the first requirement in every building isthe achievement of the greatest possible ~tility. ~

Such theorizing conveniently dovetailed wit objective con-

ditions: an emerging urban middle class needed to be housedrapidly and eficiently Producing large numbers of aparmentsfor millions of families required cheap, uncomplicated con-struction, but it was almost inadvertent that these tracts ofmodernist high-rise buildings became the symbol and expres-sion of socialist ideology. With pressures from immigration,post-war and post-colonial rebuilding, and a population flow intocities, many countries were charging their housing authoritieswith the constaction of whole neighborhoods, all at one time,on large tracts of land, with the greatest economy possible.

Because the construction of most of this social housing(as the Europeans called it) operated outside the forces of themarket, site selection and design decisions alike were influenced

by operational expediency.To

achieve density, towers wereconstructed in the repetitive forms of tall, columnar buildings,or long, wall-like 'slab buildings, both forms that maxinrizedthe number of individual dwellings, while minimizing thenumber of expensive service cores. Out of concern for speed and

ng low-rise, mid-rise, and high-rise building cypeswas deemed excessively complicated: the number of building

configurations was minimized to two or three per development.And for budgetary and administrative reasons, the same archi-tectural plans were used again and again. Thus emerged thestandard plan of thousands of housing developments in every




European city after the war, in Singapore and Hong Kong, inTaipei, Beging, S2o Paulo and Mexico, in Caracas and Bombay,and in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s: a series, some-times stacked across the site, of slab buildings interrmngled withvertical towers.

The sites for such projects were either already vacant landat the edges of expanding cities, or more often, specific areas of

the city created by clearing existing neighborhoods entirely. In

both cases, with the traditional street pattern erased (as inBoston's West End and Cathedral Housing), or where a streetsystem had never existed (Co-op City in the Bronx), the landsurrounding the towers was intended as park space; in practice,much of this land became parking lots, as in New York's PeterCooper and Stuyvesant Town, Boston's Cathedral Housing, andMontreal's Jeanne Manse. Further, public housing has rarelyexploited even an adjacent natural ameniv You would neverknow from looking at its site plan, for example, that StuyvesantTown borders the East River; but in this, it is similar to devel-opments built by the public sector ll over the world.

ous ing o n t h e E d g e

The relentless character of post-war urban social housingcontrasts vividly with the less regimented, more humane, andgenerally more appealing places to live in the city for those witha choice. Because private land purchases tend to be relativelysmall, as a rule a single developer builds only one or two build-ings at a time. DiEerent architects designing ditferent buildingforms with diEerent materials have produced urban neighbor-

hoods with natural variety. Design features ranging from thetrivial (posh lobbies with fancy materials and uniformed door-men) to the significant @alconies and terraces, penthouses androoftop units, bay windows and more generous fenestration,



L I V I N G I N T H C I T Y

and shorter, ventilated corridors) create a sense of individual

address and identity to attract potential residents.W ith developers seeking the most attractive sites for hous-ing for the affluent, apartm ent buildings gravitated from th ebeginning toward the choice locations in the city, locations withnatural amenities: distant views, the water's edge, acljacency togreat parks and open spaces. This linear clustering of high-risetowers produced a new urban pattern housing on the edge.

Such private developm ent occurred first along dramatic openspaces, such as Chicago'sLake Shore Drive and Manhattan's EastRiver, Hudson. River shore,and Central Park, and in mostseashore and harbor cities along the coast. But as urban edgeswere built up, they created a corollary problem. They formedwalls against the city behind them.

In almost every city today, apartm entsand hotels are packedalong particular alignments.In Boston, prim e housing lines thePublic Garden and the Com mon; in Miami and Tel Aviv, hotelsand apartments cluster, wall-like,by the shore; in R io, theCopacabanaS apartment blocks and hotels curve, massive andsolid, to line the beach. Development along rivers, large parks,and perm anen t undeveloped land manifests the w idespread

desire for openness with in cities, but typically, the built resulteffectively denies this valued feature to all but the relatively fewwho can afford to buy i t Thus, for the privilegedwho livealong Lake Shore Drive there is the pleasure ofLake Michigan,but for those beh ind, a substantialwall against the lake.

This egefect is not new; city planners have long struggled tofind ways of keeping urban edges visibly and physically accessi-

ble to the population at large.When urban buildings were

restricted to the height people could climb ( walk-up build-ings, as in ome along the Tiber or Paris along the Seine),the challenges related to circulation: moving pedestrians and



vehicles both along and toward the desirable edge. But the

advent of urban towers (which was recent in t e r m s f urbanhistory) complicated the problem further: because of their

height and girth, skyscrapers and superblocks shut out views

and access to desirable edges much more completely than buildings ever had bcfore.

The traditional technique for arranging tall buildings with

respect to an edge has been to presenre a view corridor an

open vista down the length of streets from the interior towardthe edge. For those moving along street level, these slices of tight

and space quite effectively open views, but in between these

corridors, long, continuous walls of buildings block the edge

S I M P N G

Since the founding of the state of Singapare, the government

has made a priorit-y of providing housi~g or its gmwing pop-ulation. s historic Singapore became fully built, the

government developed a national. plan to create a series o

new towns around the island, l ided by a system of highwaysand mass transit, n he past fifteen years, several new towns

have been built according to the official formula: hi&-rise

slab buildings organized around large court)lards. Onlyschools and commrtnity shopping are accommodated in lowbuildings, and as these towns each house more than 100,000

people, the result is an extensive area o high rise towers ofsimilar height. Visiting a new town, you ride the elevator to

the top of a tower only to find that any distant view is

reserved for those who live on the perimeter af the neigh-

borbood. For most residents, looEng out means stming, intoyet another apartment across a cowtyard.

Early in &e Z990s, withSiqapards starrdard of living and

public expectations on the rise, this approach to housing



began to concern several planners at the Housing andDevelopment Boatd. Because Singapore's land resources wereseverely restricted by the small area of the island city-state,all remained in agreement that high densities w r e required.But within the agency, a raging debate developed, betweenthose who felt the environment of new towns could be

improved, and those convinced that the formula rerepre-sented the optimal economic and design solution. Xn thecontea of this debate, I was invited in f 99 to develop alter-native concepts for the Simpang New Town to be built on the

northern part of the island, facing the Strait o Ifohor, andloolring toward Malaysia.

As w begnn to discuss the project, the housing board offi-

cials became greatSry concerned that, working in y Bostonoffice, y colleagues and I miljht ignore hndarnental plan-ning principles or living patterns particular to Shgaporeaas,and their senior architects and planners wanted to participate




in our charrette he intense, sustained work session that

would characterize much of our two-month design effbrt.Tbus, after a series of site visits and briefings, eturned toBown with four Singaporean architects,

The site, almost squart: and facing the sea, was we11 servedy Singapore's sew subway system and ring; highway, But the

flat land extended deep inland, and in the official pl n pre-pared for this site, most units blocked the light from one

another; only those dwelling along the water edge wereoffered the pleasure of an open vista. Therefore, when I beganthe design for Simpang New Town I made it our objective tomakmize living opportunities on the open edge o createas many residences as possible that looked out to distant vis-tas nd to produce a new design at the same high densityas the oficial plan.

began the design exercise using bigh-rise towers asbuilding blocks., Wrking with our large model of the site,however, it rapidly became apparent that our assumption,that only high-rise buildings could satis@ he required highdensities, would prevent the kind of formal transformationwe were looking for. As we explored the options, we com-

bined low- and high-rise housing types to make the townplan much more diverse. The low-rise buildings, three andfour stories high, would be planned and built within thetrees, surrounded by nature ith gardens, roof terraces,and small-scale parks. By creating large areas of lotr-rise,but high-density, cluster apartments, we were then able toarrange high-rise buildings in linear formations, with large

open spaces bet-cueen them.AS t civic focus for the town, we combined the schooXs,

shopping areas, and other community amenities with play-grounds and parks to create a central, low-rise linear district



L I V I N G N TH CITY

atong which high-rise structures could be concmtrate d. Xnthis way we were effectively creatingnew, interior builtedges: inne r lines of tall buildings w ith qu alities of space,views, and light similar to those at the edges of th e site.

But when we turned to the original, spectacular edgethe line of seashore with views toward Malaysia he ideaof concentrating high-rise buildings there seemedas aggres-sive as buildting awall As n so many coastal resorts where

hotels and apartm ents crovvd alongthe water, we would beforming a barrier th at cu t offm ny of the town's residentsfrom a view of th e sea.It was at this point th atwe began todevelop a particular shapefor those buildings along the coast:the form of thirty-story wall pierced w ith fifteen-or twenty-story openings at remlar in te rv h , dm os t like a monumentalviaduct one could live in. Th e uppe r pa rt of the buildingsprovided a great num ber of a par tm ents with open views

Simpang W own with spine ofcentral park and communityfacilities

77




across the sea and city, while the lower levels formed giant

windows from the street and l w e r buildings, providing theinland neighborhoods with views t the coast and allowingthe sea breeze to sweep across the entire development.

The mix of low- and high-rise housing opened up newopportunities to create dynamic building apograghy toreplace the oEficial unifarm towers: a plan that recreated andexpanded the quality of urban edges in built form. Terraced

high-rise towers pierced by urban windows:' ridge-like,but permeable, followed the coastline. Within the site, theseridges recurred as series of apartment towers that acted likeinternal edges along the linear park nd each edge of the site

ike a series of steep and slender mountain ridges, piercedwith open passes and separated by valleys of low-risehousing, community buildings, and parks. Thus, almost allthe tall buildings in Simpang ended up in linear formations,with generous open spaces to their front and back.

Urban windows, SimprtngNew Town



e returned to Singapore eight weeks later, the model

shipped in sections to be assembled in the Housing Board'shuge conference room. The official plan sat in model formon an enormous table next to ours, presenting a xlentlessand uninterrupted assetnblagr: of tall buildings. Looking atit, the density was overwheIming. Our alternative concept,with its near p rk and vast areas of low-rise buildings, cre-ated an openness that completely transformed the town'ssense of space. There was a sense of disbelief as officials cameinto the raorn, onvinced that we h d changed the rules ofthe game, that we had reduced the density they had consid-ered sacrosanct. And so, as ten p u n g architects from theHousing Board's staff were caUed in, our tabulations of thedensity and number of housing units for our scheme w r eput may Three days of analysis of e ch and every buifding,in minute detail, finafly produced new set of density calcu-lations . and the numbers were idential.

Towers o w e l l i n g sThe basic organization and architectural features of apartmenttowers have remained almost unchanged over the last forty

years. With in an effectively static envelope, designers haveproduced rent relationships between individual aparnents;they have designated varying proportions of public and privatespaces, and developed myriad improvements in building ser-vices. But the ubiquitous, artificially ventilated and lit corridor,buried between apartments on either side, remains singularlyunlikely place for sitting, talking, playing, or ny kind of

community interaction at d The trip fiom outdoors ridingthe elevator and traversing the s t u y corridor to an apartment

remains major reason people have preferred low-rise hous-ing. And while balconies, roof penthouses, and bay windows do



FA C I N G R E L I T Y

create connections between the apartment w i t h he block and

the world of nature outside, these features pale in comparison

to the amenities offered by alternative forms of habitation like

single-famity houses.

Consider the qualities of the single-family house that we

have come to take for granted: privacy, multiple exterior expo-

sures, private entry visible from the street, extensive and

accessible outdoor space, garages and carports attached to the

living space. We intuitively prefer rooms that look out in morethan one direction; light streaming in from multiple directions

is psychologically different from light entering only one of four

walls. We experience this in the difference between a typical

hotel room with vvindows facing a view or courqard, and a cor-

ner suite with windows in two directions. Moreover, one of the

most frustrating aspects of living in a high-rise building is its

inaccessibility to the outdoors ts removal from the groundand fresh air, even the weather, not to mention the range of

activities like sitting in a garden, reading, eating, or celebrating

outdoors. These o p p o r t u ~ t i e s re all but absent from the typ

ical high-rise residential tower.

H B I T T

Thirty years ago, such concerns generated my design o

Habitat. beg n with the assumption that we might design

houses in the air, with open streets, clustered like vil-

lage but occurring in a city. f we could break loose from a

simplistic envelope into a liberated three-dimensional

matrix, we might be able to create the amenities of a house

in the form of a high-rise residential tower. was compelledby the desire to provide distant long views for each and

every dwelling, and therefore was delighted to have site

that could be called double-edged : a linear strip bordered



LIVING I N T H G l T Y

by water and dramatic views out from either side.Habitat emerged as a structure maximizing exposure,

with each and every apartment loogng oat in three or fourdirections. To increase the number of walls from which theviews could be seen, I folded and bent the perimeter of the

building in intricae three-bimmsianal patterns, At the time,I did not realize I tvaspursuing n mercise in fractd geometv:beginning with a singje verlicd plane facfngthe viw nd ;henbreafing it up, unddating it, stepping it back ractalizingit with a particular end in mind. f had not, of course, beadof Mandebmt's term, fractal: but I realized then the greatpotential of ma~mizing built edge

In studying t e options far clusteriq the dvueXlings, I w s

troubled about the potential sotid mass of the buiIding as itlined the river,Accordingly, I organized the dusters of apart-men with major gaps in betcveen, opening dramatic views




of the sky and the city orming great holes in the other-

wise. massive wall of the building.Substituting exterior walkways fox interior corridors

shaping the building s mass to create roof gardens multiple

exposures acoustic privacy and articulating the scale of

individual dwellings allowed Habitat to combine some of

the amenities o single-Eamily. housing with the unique

opportunities of a high-rise building The result evoked a

village hill town orvertical housing cluster

rather than an imper-

sonal behemoth to

which the edstence and

scale of an individual

dwelling is subordinated

behind a uniform skin

of relentless identical

winclows As the Habitat

complex was built and

inhabited i change in

Cross-section through Hab ita t houses perception

roofgardens and pedestrian streetsoccurred on the part of

its residents: corridor

became street apartment became house and balcony became

garden. The pleasures of living with privacy were added to

the benefits of living in close community.

Th e tremendous gap between the experience of living in a

house versus a high-rise apartment tower has played a large partin fueling our decades-long exodus from the realm o f down-town. If we are to confront the problem of our ities realistically

the tau building must e reevaluated for the type of residential



L I V I N G I N T H E l T Y

space it provides, as well as for its role in urban design. Inherent

in this question are many issues: for example, how the build-ing and the individual apartment are entered, as well as thespatial qualities of the dwelling itself- the number of expo-sures, visual and acoustic privacy, the availability of outdoorspace contiguous to the dwelling. These matters are subde, butthey are critical. They will make the digereace between urbanvariety that satisfies the differing needs of families and indi-viduals, and cookie-cutter uniformity; between a place in

unison with nature, and one detached and cut off from it; andultimately, between community and isolation.

The design of post-Second World War era urban housingreveals a significant gap between the popular tastes, desires, andaspirations expressed in market-rate housing, and those of thearchitectural avant-garde, more directly embodied in socialhousing. At the time, while private developers were respond-ing to the taste of the market with the stylistically eclectic anddecorated facades we see in the affluent neighborhoods ofNew York or Chicago, the leading architects were designingconsiderable numbers of uniform and stylistically austere mod-

ernist public housing projects and prototypes. Ridiculed and

highlighted in Torn Wolfe s rom nuhaus to Our Hotlse 1981),this conflict between public taste and the values of the designprofession has only deepened in recent decades, with the trulyregrettable consequence or the public as well as the archi-tectural profession f diminishing society s faith in the roleof the architect, and the architect s ability (and inclination) tocontribute to the public built environment.

But no one neither from the public at large nor even theamuent consumer has demanded gardens in the air, multi-ple exposures within an individual apartment, or the preservationof broad access to public amenities. To most people, such



demands seem unattainable, fantastical, or utopian. And they

appear inconsistent with the popular developers'axiom

that thesimpler the massing and the more cube-like the envelope, thegreater the economy. Manipulating structural systems to createcantilevers or terraces, roof gardens, or cavities w i t h he vol-ume of the building increases labor, design, and material costs.Indeed, to give each apartment two, three, or four orientationsmeans more exterior w d more corners, more itlsulatioxl nd

ensurately higher price.he basic need to stack and cluster housing units arises from

the desire to live in cities. y reconsidering the apartment towerfrom first principles, we would amplify tremendously theopportunities offered by urbanity. For everyone a garden, foreveryone a penthouse, for everyone a view hese ambitionsare surely not considered econormcal in a mathematical sense,or within the reach of most people, in the practical sense. Butwhat has been considered economically sound in the past thirtyyears may prove, in the long term, to be more sociologically,politically, and even financially costly than we ever imagined.



C H A P T E R

Mega-ScaT h e i m p c t o c a l e

In 1900 there were 3.4 d i o n people in ew York City. Todaythere are 7.3 million. There were 345 000 people in MexicoCity then; today there are almost 21 million. There were 1.8

d i o n people in Tokyo then, and there are 27 million today.'Ebenezer Howard designed his Garden Cities for Tomorrowfor a population o f 30 000; sixty-six years later, a singl housingproject in the Brom (Co-op Ciri was designed for a popula-tion of 50 000. Today, a typical new Singapore town is built tohouse 200 000.

Today's tallest office building, the Sears Tower in Chicago,stands 1,454 feet in height, with 110 stories. In 1900 Newb r k ' s St. Paul Building, standing 26 stories h , v s one of thetallest buildings in the world. In 1900 there were 8 000 cars inthe United States. There are 143 million today. ColumbiaUniversity's enrollment was 2 208 then; today, it is almost20 000. London5 famous Burlingron Arcade had 54 shops and

22 open stands. The West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada,has over 800 shops, 20 000 parking places, and 5.2 millionsquare feet of commercial spacee2

These are not merely statistics, innocent indications of



FACING R E A L I T Y

expanding population or urbanization. Rather, they are signs that

this century's population growth, and its convergence into giantmetro-cities, has created an entirely new scale of development,a scale that has generically changed the nature and character ofour institutions and the structures built to house them.

M e g a S c a l e a n d t h e esignere experience the disorientation of mega-scale regularly on

our highways, in parking structures and in airports, in shoppingmalls and discount superstores. At extremes, we see it in suchcities as Tokyo and in such institutions as the MetropolitanMuseum of Art.

Any trip to the hospital today w n reveal how changes in thescale of medical practice have created entirely new kinds ofexperiences for all of us; the difiFerence between a small-townforty-bed hospital and today's mega-hospital with several build-ings and thousands of beds is not merely size, but also nature.Technology facilitates preparation and distribution of food anddrugs, medical support systems, even the equipment used topractice medicine. Computerization and miniaturization havemade it possible to control information Bow: patient registra-

tion, hospital menus, and medical records. Processingthousands of patients every day, mega-hospitals are streamlinedfor eaciency with complete disregard for patients' comfort, pri-vacy or f m i l ymembers.In order to operate such an insdtutionmust develop fundamentally new methods for people to move,congregate, operate, and confer. Although we are familiarenough with sophisticated organization and technology, we

have little considered the enormous psychological and envi-ronmental impact of these changes, or the urgent demand foran architecture that can respond.

Some of the architectural implications are practical. For



O N F R O N T I N G M E G A S C A L E

example, how are we to gain a sense of orientation in a mega-

project, find our way around the many wings and departments ofan enormous complex We have become all too familiar withtoday's endless array of signs and color codes. At one time, we

passed through a public entrance and headed snaight for the mgallery of the museum, the public reception room at the Pentagon,or the main lecture hall of the university these were the spaces

ounced out~ide y the gilded dome or windowed barrel vault.Today, we often enter through the double doors, only to pursuea red or yellow Line down corridors and around corners.

We know from old cities that techniques for creating hierar-chy, amplified by an appropriate architectural vocabulary, can giveus our bearings. Today's large complexes demand the develop-ment of hierarchy and an articulation of parts we would take forgranted in a small building or town. A system of major interior"streets," smaller passages, and private "alleys,?' or example, couldbreak down a complex building into comprehensible compo-nents. Distinctive architecture could then make each partrecognizable and distinct within the whole. With countless newmega-plexes to design, vv must recomize that n m a y cases, thebuiiding has become a ciw, and the task of an architect, inher-

ently, that of a city planner.A more subtle issue of building scale has to do with a sense

of personal identity: what is our psychological mind-set as wecompare our bodies to the size of the structures around usConsider living in a house in a village. Clusters of smallerdwellings even if compact ompare closely enough to thesize of our own houses and bodies to give us a sense of location:

we can automatically project ourselves into our surroundings.This is profoundly different from the feeling of a resident of

the fifteenth floor of a sixty-story apartment tower, one oftwenty-five such towers compactly clustered, as in a Singapore




new town or the suburbs of 9 Paulo. five-foot-tall person

whowdks

among man-made seuctures one hundred eimes tderthan he or she, who dwells behind a square in a repetitive facadene of a dozen; idendcd facades s bound to feel & ~ n -

ished and lost,Consider an o6ce worker at the turn of the centuv, before

the advent of air-conmtioning. Working at a desk in a room witha window, he would have shared the space with three to fifteen

other people. When hot, he might open the window, or whenbored, call down to an acquaintance crossing the street below.

ow different is this experience when the building floor plategrows to one acre in size, is med with hundreds of identical cubi-cles that block eye contact and vision to the outdoors, and thenreplicates vertically into the air, fifty sixty, or seventy floors highHow different does it feel to enter and exit this building, to workwith hundreds or thousands of people breathing the sameprocessed air without access to daylight ne penon in a thou-sand, in the same cube of air for cycles of days, months, and years

These dilemmas are not, of course, m t e d fundamentau)"" narchitecture or the art of building. They are dilemmas of thestructure of our sociew its economy, and its methods of orga-nization, of humaniy reproducing out of control wo, four,six, eight billion in population and still on the rise ithalmost half of this number concentrated in metropolitan citiesglobally. Thus, public policy specialists have written on thenecessity of stabilizing or decreasing the birth rate so that ourhuman population might better relate to the earth's resources;social scientists have critiqued the evolution of multinational

corporations, whose visions of efftciency demand vast, mini-mal, and rudimentary working facilities. And architects haveresponded to mega-scale by trying to camouflage it, attempt-ing to ignore it, or adopting it wholeheartedly.



r c h i t e c t s R e a c t

decade ago, postmodernist architects specialized in surfacetreatments that were aimed, in part, at counteracting the inher-ently new nature of mega-scale in the architectural program.Devoting much effbrt to composing the curtain wall kom mul-tiple materials and tints of glass, the designer would createcomplexity in the building envelope simply accepting theinflated space inside. It was as i archtects were more troubled

by the scale of buildings as objects, and less by the giganticspaces they held. Zigzags of color as on military airplanes orships made forty-story buildings into assemblies of parts.Decorated skyscrapers came alive, like textiles, with pattern.

As we've seen, another group of architects has confionted theproblem more recently by redefining it. Leon Krier has perchedcharming classical towns on hilltops; his brother Rob Krier hascreated urbane scenes of streets Lined with five-story structures;Duany Plater-Zyberk has built charming pre-industrial viuages;Wdt Disney Co. with Robert A. M. Stern, acquelin Robertson,and others, has built a new town with the theme nameCelebradon ll of which completely ignore contemporary

conditions of population, co erce, and transportation.

To propose that the new problems of scale can be restruc-tured and reversed in order to return us to pre-industrialsettlement patterns and nineteenth-century building typesrequires a high measure of wishful thinking, and, to an archi-tect or planner confronted with the reality of urban NorthAmerica and the developing world, is quite basing. Knowinglyor unknowingly, these designers rely on social, economic, and

political conditions that cannot by any reasonable measure ofrealism be seriously considered obtainable in the face of theurban ills affecting the vast majority of the global population:ever-increasing densities, diminishing environmental and land



resources, hugely scaled manufacturing and retail facilities,

increasing car ownership, traffic, and parking needs. For anarchitect in Singapore, Hong Kong, or Tokyo contemplatingnew residential communities of hundreds of thousands of peo-ple, each of an average density of fifty to one hundred unitsper acre, the problem of scale is real: it is the result of funda-mental changes to the statistical condition of humanity. Andin this context, the argument that it can be avoided by re-

arrangement appears naive and misdirected.The mega-school, whose most articulate spokesperson is

Rem Koolhaas, recognizes and accepts the realities that arecreating a mega-world of mega-buildings and mega-cities. n

the face of apocalyptic demographics . . . (and] the seemingfailure of the urban, w.tstes Koollraas, we have to dare to beutterly un~ritical:'~ he architectural translation of this accep-tance, in Koolhaas's projects for a proposed library at theUniversity of Paris in Jussieu, the Congrexpo at Lille, and others,is a cacophony of juxtaposed forms and materials, loosely relatedparts, and a certain tentativeness toward building materials andform. Koolhaas accepts our huge-scale, century's end alienationat face value, and amplifies it into a new kind of aesthetic.Urbanism, he writes, d ot only or mostly, be a profession,

but a way of thinking, an ideology: to accept what exists. Wewere making sand castles. Now we swim in the sea that sweptthem away 4

Beneath all of this lies resignation, the root conviction thatthese forces are bigger than us: that we cannot fight or harnessthem. Even more profoundly, any attempt to get to their

deeper meaning, to act critically, to seek order, or to interveneis tantamount to assuming an inappropriate power in the con-text of today's pluralistic democracy. It would require,Koolhaas writes, aecond innocence to believe, at the end of



C O N F R O N T I N G M E G A S C A L E

the twentieth century, that the urban he built can be

planned and ma~tered . ~The deep pessimism in this attitude toward mega-scale is

concealed in kind of joyous acceptance of what is emerging,

not unlike the manner in which some arcfiitects embracedpop mass culture several decades ago. But mass culture, of

course, is misnomer for mega-scale. It is not m ss culture th tis being displayed, but the uncontrolled, rampant emergence of

a post-industrial consumer economy gone mad pouring intocities in every part of the world, growing at an enormous rate,and csnsuming limited, precious resources. In this reality, wehumanity in general, and architects in particular ecomeinstruments of mega-scale's raw expression.

True, the forces causing mega-scale are overwhelming, andthey appear irreversible, at least for a few generations to come.

The undiiferentiated, relentlessly repetitive workspaces, the

windowless environments, the cacophony of industrial struc-tures, the gigantic, repetitive assemblage of apartment towers

these are the uninhibited results of forces larger than anindividual architect, corporate trader, international busi-nessperson, or citizen, nd of patterns that simply did not exist

in the era of the New England town or the gentle, classical city.We must, with the mega-school, agree that changing tech-nology, information transfer, social structures, demographics,mobility requirements, and economic forces are shaping theenivir~nment n which we live.

But to decide that we are innocent and helpless bystandersis surely no response worthy of us as a society. As architecu, i we

are to be compassionate and identify with those for whom webuild hose navigating through vast parking structures, inse-

cure and alienated; those driving through urban landscapes ofnonexistent buildings screened by parking structures and the



blank back w lk of shops he onlypath is to anempt to under-

stand the forces of mega-scale, to appreciate the need for newarchitectural inventions, and to intewene, in search of a morehumane, spiritually uplifting, and unoppressive environment.

T h e o l e of t h e r c h i t e c t

The architectural program for a building today, without stren-uous intervention on the part of the designer, often directly

translates into an endlessly repetitive maze of internal passages,public corridors, football fields of manufacturing functions,and indoor oEce landscapes. Mega-scale must be recognizedas a paradigm shift that inevitably challenges the basic assump-tions of architecture.

The organization and hierarchy of circulation, the articula-tion of the component parts within the whole, themanipulation of forms and masses to maximize exposure to theoutside, the refinement of interior and exterior relationships,the moderation of the building$ scale as experienced he city:these are all architectural means of addressing fundamentalaspects of human perception. Given the assignment to design amega-facility, architects must apply their professional exper-

tise meaningfully to engage the growing tyranny of size.To start, we must critically evaluate the assumptions that leadto super-scaled places. e might solve trattic congestion by cre-ating wider roads, or we might consider ways to eliminate theneed for so many car trips in the first place. When new cities andtowns are built, as in Singapore, Hong Kong, Israel, and otherparts of the world, the notion that we must build t v r y great

densities is often taken for granted; it is natural to do so in down-town land that is very expensive and desirable. But why shouldthese assumptions of high density be taken for granted? In somecases, by consuming more l nd initidy, we might preserve more



G O N R O N T l N G M E G A S C A L E

open space in the long term. One way to diffuse mega-scale, cer-

tainly, is to rethink its basic premise.Architects cannot solve everything, but we can and mustask the right questions. Before we build structures to holdthousands of work cubicles on a single floor, we should be ask-ing how many people r quir being in the same building, or ona single, continuous floor, to complete a task egectively? Beforebuilding yet another wing of a mega-hospital, why not ask our-

selves whether one mega-hospital is preferable to half a dozenspecialized facilities? Might we be better served by a complexof pavilions, and i so, should they be joined in a sequence sideby side, or one on top of the other Should there be twentypatients around a nursing station, or fifty? Should there be tenpeople in a room, or two What degree of privacy can bemaintained for a patient? Under what conditions mightpatients want to interact with their families? These are ques-tions most often resolved on a purely economic basis. Yet theyare also architectural decisions of consequence, and we cannotcontinue to analyze the costs and benefits of a design with-out considering the qualitative, three-dimensional consequencesof decisions such as these,

The role of an architect, therefore, must be to actively ques-tion assumptions from a spatial point of view. n each case, thearchitect should help w igh the cost-etfectiveness of buildingdecisions against human comfort, wefl-being, even dignity, overthe building's lifetime. Certain features, such as larger or morenumerous windows, might cost more. Others, such as maxi-mizing southern exposures for living spaces, have no bearing

on cost whatsoever. Still others might even save money, such s

designing a hospital room to provide opportunities for familymembers themselves to care for patients.

Because of our particular knowledge of, and sensitivity to,



there be a centrdized campus How might hteraction annong

diverse members of the community be encouraged? We spokeof other scientific communities taxlford SLAC), GenevaC E W ) here great laboratories existed, and what did

and did not m x k there,By day's end, Schwitters invited me to come t Waahachie

and meet with the planning group; I was to take on theresponsibjliq for master planning and designing the cmpus,

As f traveled south, had a romantic vision of wh t awaitedme: one of the greatest teams of scientists ever assembledworking intensively under one roof factually, it was W .

A twenty-minute drive south from downtown Dallas,a giant conve-d wwehouse called "Building F o u r ' 3 t d in acluster of other industrial buildings housing the laboratory;With an area of 1.00 000 square feet, Building Four was asingle-story structure, and with theexception. of one wall of offices,windowless. With four hundredphysicists, engineers, technicims, andsupport staff at work in identicallittle cubides, it was impossible to

find ssmeone ~ t h o u t mapn

hand.few miles closer to Wmahachieand the accelerator tunnel was a so-called "central facility" notherwarehouse (a former Sears Roebuckdistribution ceater) more recentlyconverted to handle the overflow ofS ce n l

SSC personnel from Building Four. faility wit W strations

"Central" had an area of 500 000

square feet and accommodated one thousand people, eachwithout exception assigned to a cubicle in another endless,




artificially lit space. As an outsider stumbling upon the scene,

I wondered how these individuals leading physicists andscientists from around the world could tolerate this totallydehumanized and disorienting environment. After just oneday, I felt dizzy and humiliated by the succession of meetingsin windowless rooms and total lack of daylight in this vast,oppressive enviranment.

Some months later, I developed a plan for the SSC cam-

pus with the architects in my Boston oEce. In order to createa strong sense of place in the flat prairie, we organized thecampus around a large pond necessary to regulate the tern

perature of the Collider, created by damming a small streamon the site. Our objective was to design diverse workspaces of

d ofices; to provide housing for thosewho came far brief periods; and tocreate a strong center where alE corn

man facilities would be clustered.Qn one side o the pond, w plannedlaboratories and oPfices protrudinginto the water, endowed with generous daylight and views onto the

prairie; on the opposite side, a hoteland education center and in be-tween, joining each shore of thepond, a bridge-building containingthe caFeteria, library, meetingrooms,auditorium, and electronic controlroams. Accessible both to scientists

and the public at large, the double-height wing constituted a kind of

Plan f theuperconducgng downtown street along which every-Strger ollider Campus one wodd meet.



C O N F R O N T I N G M E C A - S C A L E

In presentations to the group of physicists, staff, and offi-

cials from the Department of Energy (which was funding theproject), we illustrated how the campus might act as a catalystfor the interaction of the thousands of individuds t&ng partin this great experiment. any partaking in the discussionswere skeptical that an environment of such quality could beachieved. Indeed a group of scientists on the frontiers ofknowledge, trying to discover a unified theory to explain all

of the workings of nature, was unable to comprehend that itmight be possible to achieve a wholesome and uplifting workenvironment But as models and drwings wttre elaboratedand presented for group discussion, an excitement set in. Ourmodels of ponds, gardens, and articutated three-story struc-tures overlooking the water contrasted bizarrely with the spacewithin Building Four where we were presenting the material.

The government officials involved, particularly thoseCom the Department of Enexg, w r e not only skeptical, butalmost cynical, and their doubts were only to be confirmedin the summer of 1993, when the House of Representativesvoted against continuing the SSC At the ensuing congres-sional hearings, the debate was not about architecture and

the campus. It was about Big Science and the 8 billionneeded to try to find the basic building blocks of nature.Undoubtedly; much of the debate was precipitated by the factthat the Gold ar was over, and with no direct or indirectbexregt for national defense, the pure scientifxc research rep-resented by the SSC was bound to suffer a blow,

But afthowh the debate centered on science and its costs

per se- the committee did not spare the issue of the pbysi-cal environment and the projected campus plan far the SSC.Reviewing the 8 billion ouday fox the experiment, the cam-mittee was critical of the cost of some potted plants that had



F C f N C R E L I T Y

been purchased t relieve the dismal existing facility, and in

time, they came to ask about the costo

the architecturalmodel of the SS campus ot t-he cost of the campus, butof the modet rord had gotten out, apprently, th& a glam-orous scheme had been developed for the campus.

I reflected b w ypical it w s hat a group of elected rep-resentatives would consider that two thousand scientiststvorking in windowtess wrehouses a responsible use of

public funds, Sensitive to any possible accusations o waste-fulness: politicians felt compelled to reject the idea o

building a humane mrkspace to serve the scientific corn-munity at the SS for the decades to came. It became clearthat in the public psyche, a well-endowed working environ-ment is deemed to be a lmury and an impropriety, whereasan oppressive, mean environment represents an appropri-ate gesture of fiscal responsibility.

T h e Role o t h e u b l i c

At the beginning of this century, adherents of the Progressiveand City Beautiful Movements took to the streets, the news-papers, and magazines to protest, with great indignation, against

inhumane conditions in the industrializing cities where theylived. In Chicago and New York, in particular, numerous voicescalled for action to improve qualities they found substandard inthe urban spaces provided for living, working, and gathering:darkness and poor ventilation in tenement buildings, crowdingand exploitation in industrial sweatshops, the lack of publicparks or a well-maintained public realm. Today, we take equiv-

alent types of environmental deprivation for granted.We are clearly facing a conflict b e ~ e e n he realicy of grow-

ing numbers of individuals who must be fed, housed, employed,and cared for, and the innate human desire for the measure of



P RT XI

T O W R D

T H E

F U T U R E



C H A P T E R 8

anning the Regiona k i n g P l a c e s

A memorable place often occupies an important feature in thelandscape: a harbor, a bay, a river delta, a lake, a hill within atown physical event in the natural environment. Weremember places that are dignified by a unique interactionbemeen the man-made and the natural, places like Naples bythe bay, Geneva at the lake s end, Rome on the Tiber s bend,Cape Town with Table Mountain, Amsterdam and its canals, orRonda Spain, a city bridging between two cliEs. Not only arethese places set in special points in the landscape, but their ownconstruction often amplifies their surroundings: an alignmentof buildings on the watershed to overlook views aerusalem),

buildings that contain the curve of a harbor (Cannes), an impor-tant bridge to cross a river (the Ponte Vecchio). Great urbanstreets frequently maintain specific relationships to the naturalterrain (Barcelona s Ramblas descending to the bay and linkthe most intense urban activity with great parks and gardens(Fifth Avenue in New York City, the Champs Elysies in Paris,or Regent Street in London).

What we recognize as the special character of a city is thesynthesis of an identifiable spatial structure with the uniquemysteries and secrets of its site. As we know, many urban cen-ters share the same generic diagram (a grid or radiating



T O W R D T H F U T U R

boulevards, for example) but differ enormously from one

another, DiKerencesa f

culture, scal e, and architectural vocab-ulary all contribute to making cities particular, yet truly singularplaces are often characterized by an unusually close interactionbetween the builders ideals and the specific character of theirterrain. Fundamental to developing a sense of place is the art ofrecognizing and seizing upon the very special, sometimes sub-tle, features over which an urban diagram is laid.

In the past, survival had much to do with this coto investigating and discovering the best place to build.Conditioned by necessities of defense (hilltops or cliEs as atMasada), effective transportation (rivers, valleys, harbors, orcanals as in Venice or Amterclarn), sources of mter, fertile land,the availabili~ f building materials, or even mystical issues ofgeometry and orientation, the construction of urban and ruralsettlements was initiated by an almost sacred act of planning.Thus were cities and villages born of a plan, a structure, a socialcontract ven a covenant ntended to chart the future..

Litde of such consideration has occurred in the develop-ment of the regional city. With the heavy hand of today stechnologies exerted against nature, the constraints of old have

disappeared; the development process today is almost ruthlesslypredictable. In redeveloped cities (such as Stamford), as well asin entirely new developing regions, the process begins withnumerous developers operating independently. hey start byexploring all reasonably priced land zoned for their particularsegment of urban activity. In a vacuum of public input or pro-fessional cooperation, each developer is concerned with a

specialized component of development: oEce or manufactur-ing, shopping center or housing. One of the principal criteriais proGmity to a major transportation corridor and the oppor-tunity for automobile access. The second criterion is ample and



PLANPJINC THE REGION

cheap parking. In less developed regional locations, the built

development will often begin with a mall sited at a cloverleafbetween two interstate highways. Office parks and shopping

centers immediately follow, replacing woods, Gelds, and views.

Rarely does the placement of a road recognize the natural

potential of the land it makes accessible, since freeway align-

ments punctuated by their rhythm of intersections andcloverleafs, are based purely on aerial photographs and engi-

neering analysis o f optimal routes between various points. Norcan we identify a single suburban shopping mall whose loca-

tion was chosen specifically to take advantage of a special

fealltlre of the land. Instead, eve herct we look, we see rolling

hillsides bulldozed Rat to facilitate the eficient mconstruc-

tion of wburban tracf houses; valleys filled in as giant parking

lots for shopping mall sites; rivers culverted and covered to

avoid the complications of surface drainage and maintenance.

Our modern capacity to overcome any formation of nature s

currently exercised by habit, blindly disrupting our dwindling

natural resources and destroying the idiosyncratic topography

that once made each place unique.

M O D X ~ NThe key to designing a building, for me is discaverillg the

secrets of a site the ways in which the land cues a design

to suggest the building's organization and form. This applies

to designing a building Mrithin an existing city, where the pattern af streets, neigfiboring structures, architectural heritage,

and culture all constitute the site, or to designing a project

sited in the open landscape, where the shares of the topog-raphy can generate form.

In 2988 I w s asked to develop the plan far a brand new

city odi'in o be built in Israel in the foothills halhay



T O W R D T H F U T U R E

b e ~ e e neX Aviv and Jerusalem. Athough the region was the

place of the ancient city of Modi in of the Maccabees someWO housand years ago, the land then consisted of a series ofbare hills and valleys oriented east-west with respect to theMediterrimean, Sea,

began thi&ng &our ModTin, w preoccupkd withthe notion of other new cities hose built n recent decadesboth in Israel and abroad and what might be learned from

their successes and failures. The new cities built in Israeli sincethe inception of the State drew upon the same concepts thathad guided most cities of the post-Second Werld MTar etaBrasilia, Chandigarh (the n w capital of Punjab designed byLe Corbusier), and the many new towns built in England andelsewhete in Europe, Gomman to all of them w s he beliefthat a city should be made up of relatively autonornous neigh-borhoods, each provided with focal services such as shops,schools, and community centers. Wth these services gener-dly placed he heart of the neighbarhood, a super-grid ofarterial roads was then imposed on the plan so that each areawould be well semed by highways to c rry lieav trafic around

the perimeter. Somewhere within this super-grid, one great

square w u l d be dedicated as the urban center. This layoutwas applied as readily to towns in Bat desert areas as to thosenestfed i a o rugged hillsides.

Today, the new Israeli co unities of the 1950s and 1960shave deteriorated, Ignoring most landscape features existingon the sire has erased any sense of identity or indkidual character for these nevv twns, and with edges defined y arterial

roads, wide, lonely p p s were created b e ~ e e n mun it ies .Lackng variety, disconnected from each other and from anycivic center, the disunified developmentssterile canglorneratictn of dormitory-like c



Such modern planned cities are based on concepts of dis-

conrinuiv With only hi&ways to conned neighborboods,and dead-end streets or cul de jacs to ' rotect the residents

thru-trafic, no continuous nework of thoroughfaresis possible, In traditional cieies, evolved over time, neighbor-hoods overlap and the borders between them are ambiguous.Neighbarhood centers are located along an arterial road thatextends from one neighborhood through the next, and on tothe city center, These normal ities, as came to call them,were often based in part on a simple grid, and they prosperedon continuity.

While did not think that a grid was the appropriateresponse to Modi'ids complex topography, a continuoushierarchic& network was essential to connect the city. cameto think of designing Modiyn as the task of preserving thequalities of a normal city: while responding to tbe contern-porary needs of transportation and mobility;

Mrith these objectives in mind turned to the site, recog-nizing patterns in the valleys as they linked t form largervalleys and contain hills in b e ~ e e n . had ~ O W R rom othernew towns built in hilly terrain that valleys inevitably become

the domain of the highway planners. t is there they can placeroads most convenienfly? nd thus, on the hifltops and slopes,create neighborhoods as separate enclaves. n ModiYin, thismodel w u l d only perpetuate th precedent. of a discontinu-ous city, where it is hpossihle to W from one neighborhoodto another, where the separation of communities would killany potential for urban vitality.

Driving by Jeep through the treeless land, also wonderedhow we night make this city a garden city, a green place, Therich togs02 that ha gathered in the valleys would surely bethe easiest place to plant trees, to create a natural newark of



T O WA R D T H E F U T U R E

parks and playgrounds, together with community facilities. It

&ru& me then that the valleys of Modi'in might be the key tothe solution; they must carry traffic, I thought, but not via

highways, The vatleys, t h i w to one hundred yards wide, a d dbecome green rivers ~alavishl-y lanted, with parks, schools,neighborhaod sbops, and cammunity facilities contained bya caupl& of one-way roads on either side. These roads, resem-bling grand-scale boulevards, w u l d define the vdleys' edges,

and housing w u l d extend up each slope of the hill.I became determined that the city w u l d preserve the

forms of the Land, protecting the places of exceptional beautyand archeology; and malcing plant life an integral part of itsdesign. Xwas essential that the construction both of roadsand of buifdinge; not reshape the topography.

BaGk in the studio, we made a large model of the entiresite. At a scale of 1:2 500 it w s made up of fi&y one-meter-square modules, and it filled a Large room. MTorking directlywith building blocks of foam-core, we designed the housingto folfotv the slope of the land and to rise only up to four sto-ries in height, just within the taps of trees. s the h& sloped,the buildings terraced dawn with them. I h e w hat without

special care, roads would be cut into the land as a matter ofhabit, wiping out hilltops nd fillingin vallep. Therefore, wefit the raads into the model's topography o u r s h s with minimum earthwork, and designed tall buildings as landmarkson the landscaped hilltops: housing with distant views towardthe Mediterranean and the hills of Jerusalem.

Integrating the function of an arterial road with the civic

scale and identity of an urban boulevard, the valley roadswould define the spine or lifeline of the community as akind of river of urban activiv and open space. m e r eneighbarhood roads intersected with the valley roads,



P t N N f N G T H R G I O N

A Modi iin. v lley

neighborhood centers would occur, with clustered shop-ping, local offices, clinics, community services, and schools.As a whole, the mixed-use district of each valley seemed tocreate the kind of synergy w associate with the vital urbanlife of normal cities.

The v ueys of Modi in and Eheir neighborhsods meander

through the topography, and at their confluence, the heartof the city occurs: the downtownP ox urban center, Natural,central gathering places, rh valleys re Yisible horn the neigh-barhoods on the surrounding hiHy slopes, and like traditionalcenters, they combine a variety of hnctians route oftravel, places for shopping, education, and recreation. Freeof those aspects of street that Le Corbusier so vehemently

rejected, they become a public place for the community,and integrate street and urban park into a new hrm,Laivishly planted and irrigated, each valley is planted withspecific species to enhance its individual character be



T O W R D T H E F U T U R E

Valley of the Pines, the Palms, the Jacarandas, and so on,

In the heart of the city, extending westward from the city

center, runs the existing Wadi Anaba valley. Typical for the

area, the Wadi forms steepty sfaped natural terracing, which

in many places was extended with retaining walls built into

the natural rack layers by ancient farmers. Filled with water

in the rainy winter, but dry in the summer, the crevice of the

valley changes from a deep green filled with wild flowers and

trees, to dry and thorny wheat calor over the seasons o ayear. Set side as nature preserve of biblical rocky cliffs and

sparse alive and carob trees, the Wndi will r e m i n an

untouched resource for residents of the city.

In 1996, the first residents move into Modi in. As palmtrees were being planted in the first valley, children were

arriving at the valley schools, descending from the houses

on the hills ioneers of the city to be: projected popula-

tion, 200,000.

Recen t P a t t e r n s o f e v e l o p m e n tIn the great urban expansion of recent decades, two distinct

patterns of development predominate. Within traditional city

centers, well-established city planning departments, redevel-

opment authorities, and often strong constituencies of

interested parties have brought some degree of public inter-

est to bear on new development. Developers would be the first

to admit that writ ten zoning and urban design guidelines are

only part of the set of forces they must confront in undertak-

ing any major downtown project. In downtown San Francisco,

New York Boston, Philadelphia, and even Los Angeles, devel-opers must face, in addition to regulatory guidelines, a number

of quasi-official and less predictable procedures: evaluations by

appointed community consultation boards and citizen action



P L A N N I N G T H R E G I O N

groups; required approvals by historic district boards and

environmental protection organizers; and/or litigation byneighborhood associations and private interests.In contrast, a major project in the outlying regional city

often faces a regulatory t bul rasa in which the only issuesof concern to the developer are locating vast undevelopedparcels of land, easy highway access, and captive populationsall regulated only by the forces of the market. There is rarely

any preexisting urban pattern to fit into, few neighboring res-idents to placate, and no history or memory to constrain desip.

Even when the project is enormous and its environmentalimpact potentially very significant, the developer usually con-fronts only a county government with little power or a smallmunicipality eager for major investment (and a new tax base).Opposition to an individual development by environmental orno-growth lobbies can often be overcome by the sheer powerof investment capital. And because a large proportion of newdevelopment occurs in relatively sparsely populated areas, thereis seldom an established constituency to express its views, eventhough within a decade or the center could serve hundredsof thousands of people. Of course, by this time every archi-

tectural, economic, planning, and land-use decision alreadyw l l

have become a fact of Life

For more than a century we have thought of the urbanrealm as primarily the c i t y core and, perhaps, its innermost sub-urbs. Land beyond the immediate periphery of the downtown,where the majority of developers now and for many years havebeen investing and building, has been recognized, perhaps, as

developing and therefore, in progress) not as a place ofediate relevance. The farther away it lies kom existing cen-

ters, the less likely such development is to draw any attentionor planning intervention; n other words, the place most directly



T O W R D T H F U T U R

affected by new construction is conveniently yet to be built.

Nor, aswe

have seen, are individual developers motivatedto consider their developments as part of an urban whole.Sensitive specifically to vehicular connections, developers aregenerally indifterent to the notion that if combined with otherdevelopments, the sum might be greater than the individual,and in most cases, isolated parts. Thus, each development is untoitselfi a world with its own. rules.

Development outside the historic city centers has suEeredbecause there has simply been very little or no attempt what-soever to plan the environment comprehensively. Land-useplanning he conservation of agriculture or open green spacem zoning for new develapment as been generated dmostentirely at the local level. In North America, farsighted land-use planning at the scale of the expanded city has beenpractically nonexistent: no proactive regional strategy designatescertain areas for development, others for conservation and greenbelts, others for preservation as agricultural land.

The only reasonable excuse for this situation can be the factthat we have not yet recognized the regional city as an inte-grated formal, social, or political entity. he greatest resistanceto

regional administration has been raised by the individualsmall towns and peripheral centers that make up the regionitself. Development that would strengthen an entire region isoften opposed by local residents who perceive any movetoward regional unity as a threat to their own mandate. Becausemany towns and cities derive as much as 75 percent of theirtax revenues from tax on property, local land-use decisions

are enormously relevant to property owners and municipalgovernments alike, with tensions arising frequently betweenthe need to seek revenue and the desire to protect a lifesvlethat drew residents away from downtown in the first place.



By distributing authority to the most local levels, we tend

to believe we can incmase our control, rentembering this or thatdisastrous highway project that was stopped by local opposition,saving neighbarhood or a coastline. What has become clear,however, is th t local government is potent in stopping projects

n saying no ut has proven entirely unable to developconsensus, let alone action, in impl m nting ny bro d project orprogram. Even projects considered generally in the public good

building mass transit line to an airport, creating a nationalor regional park, or developing a coordinated plan for variouselements of public transportation and roads roduce endlesscontroversy Therefore, we more comfortably defer to the powerof the veto than take positive action.

The problem is also administrative: metro-regions growwithout respect to any existing legislative borders. While manymunicipalities proclaim autonomy, and hence the right to self-determination, most have become inextricably part of anexpanded city. Woven into the culture of the region, residentsof these enclaves choose their places of work and recreationfrom a broad range of possibilities; they benefit from what theentire region has to offer ts services, and its cultural and

commercial facilities. They also benefit from the hospitals andenjoy the higher education provided in the expanded cityaround them. Finally, they rely upon and at the same time arefinancially, socially, and politically aEected by regional road sys-tems, public nansportation networks, and shared infrastructure.Thus, because contemporary communities are developingacross municipal government lines, no institution wields the

power to enact a comprehensive development strategy venif such were desired.

For this reason, only a complete reorientation of publicthinking about the significance nd long-term impact of v ry



T O W R D T H F U T U R E

development in the regional city, no matter how isolated it is

in the short term or how unrelated to existing patterns of set-tlement, will create from today s disjointed environment acohesive and coherent regional city in the future.

e n t r a l l a n n i n gThe 1980s and 1990s in North America mark two decades ofparticular disengagement from, and suspicion of planning cities

ew and old. The broad visions of modernist urbanism, SO

indelibly marked in the minds of designers around the worldfrom the 1930s into the 1950s, depended upon a powerful cen-tral planning entity. nd we have grown to associate many ofthe catastrophes of real-life projects (like the now crime-infested Robert Taylor homes in Chicago or the nowdemolished Pruitt-Igoe housing in St. Louis) with an imageof rampant power transforming entire neighborhoods, severalbroad strokes at a time. For when a poweriul building author-ity errs, its mistakes can be both very large and very long-lasting.The mid-1960s Model Cities program, ior example, plannedwhole neighborhoods as part of its egort at urban renewd, andfederal block grants funded many of these projects. Central

planning authorities at the time devised massive interventionsin cities across the country that eEectively bypassed the demo-cratic involvement of the commnities and cirizens whom theydirectly affected. Although they were undertaken with greatoptimism, so many of those housing projects and freeways dev-astated o u r cities and demolished our neighborhoods that theentire enterprise has been, with hindsight, discredited.

While some have criticized these projects as motivated lessby idealism than by prejudice (cleaning up neighborhoods byclearing out their populations), he central failure of these pro-jects was not intrinsically their scale or social intentions, but their



P L N N I N G T H E R E G I O N

design methods. They intentionally replaced an authentic urban

fabric with new precincts off w

streets, no public dom ain, andtowers floating in flat, open space that constituted an urban vac-uum. Having so recently witnessed this almost universal failureof central planning, therefore, when it comes to real estate, ou rdistrust of com prehensive urban planning today is profound.

Above all, there has been a suspicion in the U nited States,especially, that any comprehensivetype of urban p lanning is

merely, and inherently, an authoritarian act and an extension ofBig Government. As deregulation occurred in many fields

banking, aviation, trucking here also emerged the idea thatderegulating the city planning and development process wouldresult in a system shaped purely by the market, which , it wasthought, would produce more efficient and responsive devel-opment. Meanwhile, over the last two decades, most cities haveintroduced a battery of public review requirements, environ-mental impact statements, and co n v planning boards intothe development process a system of checks and balancesas a dem ocra tic way to prevent mistakes.

The notion of central planning, therefore, has been attackedand e roded from both directions: by in trodu cing disunified

methods of public intervention o n the on e hand, and on theother, by assuming that the marketplace, without comprehen-sive guidance, is an effective tool for creating workable cities.

This is no t to say that the United States, in particular, hasnever resorted to central planning. Certainly, the production ofvital goods during the world wars was centrally controlled, aswere prices, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, fou nded in

933 and fully funded by the federal government, providedcheap hydroelectric power to towns all over the AmericanSouth. W hen it came to the construction of the interstate high-way system in the 1950s,considerable central planning, federal



TOWAR 2 T H E F U T U R E

financing, and coordination were undertaken and supported,and today, supervision of the airways and the sky, even outerspace, is centrally planned.

Indeed, it could be argued that some of the greatest achieve-ments of American t e c h n o l o ~ nd initiative have been theresult of central planning, carefully camouflaged. Perhaps the

le is the planning undertaken in the designand implementation of the national and international telephone

systems. Here, to avoid the intervention of a national planningauthoriq? s in the case of the PTT national post ottice and tele-phone networks of Europe, a monopoly was created (AT Tand the Bell system in the United States) to allow a private-sector company enough incubation time and latitude to planand finance the entire national phone system. Only with thesystem in place and fully coordinated have t s ownership andmanagement been broken down into several competing entities

a tacit admission, perhaps, that real solutions demand someform of centralized planning.

T h e i m i t s o f t h e a r k e t

Only recently have we begun to question our now long-standing

assumption that a flourishing free market economy wouldalso generate rational and desirable urban form. To be sure,private development generated considerable expansion duringthe 1980s uch of which occurred not downtown, but inthe regional city. In 1991 n his book Edge Ci ty Joel Garreauheralded the sprawling suburban centers as a vigorous worldrising far from the old downtowns, where little save viUages or

farmland lay only thirty years before. 2 The book, a f m r i t eamong developers, argues that by dowing uninhbited business-people to act in a free markerplace, we have brought about a newcity that closely conform to the aspirations of most Americans.



P L A N N I N G TH R GION

Of all metropolitan regions, Houston, Texas, has been, per-

haps, the least constricted in recent years by grand plans. Witha local development slogan of no zoning whatsoever, Houston

embodies every urban ill ound in metropolitan cities. And asarchitect Deyan Sudjic puts it, in the resulting kee-for-all envi-ronment, you feel an emptiness ev e r y ~h e r e . ~ hat is in

question today is our confidence in the fundamental processeso representative democracy. Without some form o coopera-

tive, comprehensive planning, we find the widespreaddisappearance of public open space, habitable parks, and naturalamenities downtown and out of town alike.

M O N T R E A LIn. the heart of Montred stands Mount Royal Park, created in1877 and designed by Frederick Latv O h s e d , t o d q servinga regional city of 3 1 malion people, A visit to the Montredarchives, sbarprisingly, w u l d reveal the lively debate that

occurred in connection with acquiring the land as a park Atthat time, Montreal comprised a population of about 112,000

and its ily limi.ts wr bound y a line ten c i q blocks from

the river edge. One councilman after another protested that

buying this land s far from the ity for a park was unl&ely toserve the citizens well. hat it was too far to be useful.Despite the opposition o the many pavverful landownerswhos country mansions surrounded and populated the

mcrunt;lk, the lmd w s eqropriated and the park estabLished.Todq the park is in the geographic heart of the m oa

intense development in the city, It is impossible ta think of

Mantreal d f i o u t Mount Royd Park, ut t is also abviaus thatwithout tlk foretsight of certain co univ leaders more m

one hundred yeaxs ago, creating the park would have beenimpossible, Even witlrin two or three decades of the decision



T O WA R D T H E FUTUR

to establish the park development pressures and increased

Xand vatues wu l d have made the expropriation of the landprohibitively expensive, and politically improbabie.

Today the decision to merve scsverd square miles as park

for an entire city woul antagonize landowners losing devel-opment options, conservatives opposing social spending,pdivate carporations promoting downtown vitality, and any

number of citizen interest groups. In the mood and politi-

cal structure prevailing todayy creating Central Park in NewYork City would be impossible,

T(et I am absolutely certain that projects equally signifi-

cant as Central Park and Mount Royal Park exist today inevery regional city and clearly; these are opportunities that

do not h o c k twice,

e w C a s e f o r Regional P l a n n i n gThere are in many areas of the United States already models

for metro governments, as they are often called, which tac-

itly recognize that the future of our built environment is nota local-scale problem, but requires cooperation and foresight.Setting priorities and agendas for various types of planning at

the regional scale, many agencies have started by addressingthose issues most clearly demanding regional coordination

water and power grids; regional waste disposal; coordination

of the regional road system;and in some cases creation of ametropolitan transit authority. Recently, some of these agen-

cies have expanded to deal with social and economic issues

affecting a geographic region, like attracting new business

development, providing low-interest home-ownership loans,and rebuilding regionat inf~ast ructure.~ egional restructur-

ing has been gaining power in recent years, from the

Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto to the Montreal Urban



P L N N I N G T H R E G I O N

Community; from the regional government of greater

Vancouver to the State of Oregon.It is relatively easy to imagine new concepts for greater

mobility, equity, and control over land-use in our cities thatcould be implemented by a highly structured central authoritywith a broad mandate. But today in North America, to enactpowerful central planningof urban development would requireserious ideological and practical changes in our mindset. Ourburden, instead, is to conceive new arrangements that are plau-sible in an environment delicately balancing a free market, apluralistic society, and the rights of the individual on one side,and the best interests of the community on the other. We mustcreate new conditions in which a vision of the city is integratedwith feedback from the city s inhabitants, and in which a cen-tral authority is vested with power to enact this vision in amanner unthreatening to individuals or communities.

I t is not in the nature of North American realpolitik to

devise stringent regulatory schemes, even when the objectiveappears uncontroversial to create a vital, wholesome, econom-ically viable public domain. In fact, the entire land developmenttradition in the United States is deeply rooted in the concept

of individual land ownership, and it breeds a landowner whofeels an intrinsic right to determine what might happen to hisor her holdings.

ranspor ta t ion P l a n n i n g s t h e K e yny proposal for reshaping the city must include the means to

take us from present conditions to the conditions we desire in

the future. Therefore, we must consider those conditions ofthe new regional city that are already, necessarily, inherentlypublic and that already involve and require broad cooperation.Transportation is the one central, shared concern of governing



T O WA R D T H E FUTUR

entities within one region. It is the one subject around which

disparate municipal governments have real incentive to coop-erate and raUy.As long as we continue to settle outside the boundaries of

walking city centers, our dependence on mobility wiu remainconstant or increase. Recognizing that transportadon is intrin-sically a regional concern, intrinsically connected with urbanform, and therefore, a key to shaping and guiding regional land-

use today, can transform our approach to planning the region.Consider a special case in land development: the planning

of resorts. For this particular land-use, the selection of a siteand the role of transportation have always been reversed fromthe process we normally see in North America. In planning aresort, it would be inconceivable simply to build where a high-way happened to be present. Instead, a careful survey across acoastline, a mountain range, or valley is conducted to identifythe most attractive location; th n a road, highway, airport, orrailway link is constructed. This technique irst surveyingthe land for special places, and then designing the appropriatetransportation system hould become a model for planningour regional cities.

To date, a multitude of agencies at different administrativelevels have been responsible for regional transportation in theUnited States. This has been mostly demand-side planning:keeways are financed by federal, state, and local governments toalleviate congestion. City subway lines have been extended toreach newer suburbs years after they are sorely needed. Fromthe federal government, Amtrak receives about percent of the

amount of money invested annually in roads, and in 1995 thenational railwayk budget was cut in half by ~ongres s .~egiondtrains, lacking popular demand and therefore ancing, havescarcely been built at all. Today it is essential that we plan rapid



P L N N I N G T H R G I O N

rail and traditional or automated highways to link existing and

expanding centers andto

no lesser extent that we use thesetransportation systems to guide new development that is sensi-tive and appropriate to its location in the region.

As we develop new places to discover and respond to thespecificity of a building site will be as relevant to existing citiesas it is to virgin land. Instead of depending upon market forcesand independent local initiatives we can establish the qualitieswe admire in the city by carelinly and strategically planning public invesment n idas~ucture nd transportation. s in the pastby rationalizing our transportation systems we w ll create theopportunity for a new kind of city.



C H P T E R

Traveling he RegionSome have predicted that the dispersed city and its indispens-able automobile will ultimately threaten our society's survival.Based on a premise that highly developed societies require theinteraction provided by compact and concentrated cities,European planners, in particular, have argued that we must vig-orously resist any further suburbanization. Our society and citiesmight then, with some luck and drastic measures, be served (andsaved) by more agordable utilides, services, eEe'ective public trans-portation and infused with a healthy level of human contact.

Yet we must not mistake cause for eEect, the means fromthe motivating desire. The extensive suburban migration thathas created our dispersed cities is not only a response to the

growth and congestion in the city center, but also a profoundcultural and psychological desire mnipresent in NorthAmerica or freedom, expansiveness, privacy, and flexibil-ity. For this reason, the post-Second World War suburban thrustin North America has continued to leap-frog and extend for-ever beyond existing urbanization. This core motivationrepresents a fundamental departure from the cultural and social

mindset that has sustained traditional concentrated cities inother times and societies.

If the Pope shaped Rome and the doge Venice and BaronHaussmann the grand$boulevardsof the Champs-Elystes, writer



T O WA R D T H FUTUR

Joel Garreau has pithily noted, the marketplace rules EdgeCity. ' This observation is partly true. The power of the realestate speculator over the pattern and shape of our cities pastand present, as we have obsenred, should not be underestimated,and the broad and weg-nurmred market for the automobile far-ther ensures that distances can and will be traveled. But thepublic's deep desire for open space and unrestrained mobility isitself fueled by powedul cultural forces indeed. And the idea of

a concentrated, intense city seems tolerable to us only when itis forever held in counterpoint to the dispened city: open, with

out limits, bordering limidess land.Policy for the coming decades cannot, therefore, rest on the

premise of forcing a reversal of the desire to disperse. Rather,we should aim to facilitate and shape our wanderings, creadngnew centers of concentration within dispersed, leafy districts

n other words, designing the best of both worlds.

Transpor t a t ion and t h e mer ican Dream

To date, urban policies around the world have focused primar-ily either on concentration in Europe or Singapore, forexample r dispersal, as in the United States. In NorthAmerica, proponents of investing in our highway programs fun-damentally seek to further what they perceive as the AmericanDream for a suburban lifestyle. Through highway construction,they support and amplify the components of dispersal single-family houses, development of regional supeand affordable car travel whil dismissing the economies ofscale and quality of life that have dways resulted from concen-

tration. Indeed, while much of the public might agree with theidea of developing a fast convenient mass transportation sys-tem to supplement road travel, few would actually support anypolicy that appeared to limit their ability to use their own cars.



T R V E L I N G THE R E G l O N

In contrast proponents of the traditional city have advo-

cated investment in all Eorms of mass transit seeingwell-developed alternadves to the car as the most potent toofin strengrhening and revitalizing concentrated city centers. Thisgroup lobbies against investment in roads and fuel subsidieswhich they see as merely encouraging further dispersal. Yet theirargument is not only unrealistic but also just as limited in scopeas rejecting urban centers completely.

The most necessary profound change in our visions is torecognize that only a variety of great concentrations stronglyand permanently joined with expansive areas of dispersalwill create for us the rich accessible diverse O

scaped city we desire for our present and futregional city must be place where multiple centers of greatdensity integrate work co erce culture residence and socialservices. That same city must also have regions of low-densitydevelopment expanses of single-family houses parks shoppingand other facilities and institutions that support the qu lity oflife associated with the traditional green suburbs.

The coexistence of these two very different types of set-tlement within single urban region only becomes possible as

we rethink aD facets of urban transportation as a united system.With our congested highways and steadily decreasing mobilityvehicles that are progressively destroying the environment masstransportation goals that are shortsighted and uncoordinatedand outmoded rail systems that barely make ends meet it is timewe completely rethink each component of our urban trans-portation network the relationships and interfaces between

them and their inextricable link to the quality of the urbanenvironment we inhacbit.

This cannot be a time of business as usual. As we go for-ward any investment or policy decision we m ke regarding



T O WA R D T H F U T U R E

transportation must sustain the full range of urban experiences

within the scopeo

an individual3 daily rorrtine No proposal thatreduces or inhibits our personal mobility has any reasonablechance of success within the Western industrialized worldor, by extension over time, in the cities of the developing world.

M a s s T r a n s p a r t a t i o nAlthough simple cost comparisons consistently f m r mass trans-

portation, over recent decades, subway and regional trainsystems have been funded and built in most cities at a surpris-ingly slow pace. In the 1990s, the Century Freeway in LosAngeles cost 127 million per mile to construct, while a state-of-the-art magnetic levitation train system, which couldtransport passengers at 3 miles per hour, would have costb e ~ e e n ne-fifth and one-haK of that amounte2 n the newercar-oriented cities and in older cities with original pedestriancores, very different but closely related issues have challengedplans to construct various forms of mass transportation.

g a s A n g e l e s D i s p e r s e d i t y

The transportation pattern of the city of Los Angeles developed

almost exclusively in the era of the automobile, and to live andwork in the Los Angeles region is almost impossible withoutone. This is as true today as for the past fifty years, for adults asfor teenagers, at ll economic strata. Although several streetcarlines effPctively served some of the denser, more coparts of the city for several decades early this century, a power-ful consortium of car, oil, and tire manufacturers had, by the end

of the 1940s, acquired and shut them down to eliminate com-petition. Today, there is currently no public transportadon otherthan an extremely limited bus system, one 19-mile and one 4.4-mile stretch of subway fifteen years in the making),and privately



TRAVELINC THE R EGIO N

oned individual vans or cabs. In the Los Angeles region,

68 percent of ll travel is by private car and another 24 percentby rented car. Public transportation is involved in only 8 percentof ll trips taken in the city.3

Like most automobile-era cities, in Los Angeles each des-tination ffice, shop, mega-shopping center, school, oruniversity ust provide adequate parking for every singletraveler who in most cases, arrives alone by car. In most dis-persed locations in the United States, every 1,000 square feetof omce space requires 1,300 square feet of parking space, upto fiv parking places. For shopping centers, every 1,000 netsquare feet built requires 990 square feet of parking. Similarratios apply also to universities, hospitals, and, of course, hous-ing. Land requirements thus expand geometrically: disperseddevelopment consumes, on average, more than double theamount of land as would development accessible primarilyby foot or mass transportation.

The parcelization of land, the sizes of blocks, and the adventercial strip with parking have all, therefore, been

shaped in these car cities by the dictates of vehicular mobility.And in turn, car-oriented development has demanded the

maintenance and growth of a vast system of freeways, urbanarteries, parkways, streets, and parking lots. The specific reasonwe desire a new system oo many cars (creating too muchcongestion, smog, and dispersal) s the same reason we findit digcult to devise a substitute. As cars shaped the city, so thecity itself is now shaped to require cars.

The wide dispersd of urb n development in Los Angeles illus-trates why most attempts to introduce new public transportationhave failed or, n the case of the Los Angeles subway system, havefaltered) in similar places around the world. Given the stancebetween each element, there is rarely enough density along any




particdar corridor, or within any particdar area, to rationalize the

planning of fixed mass transit lines. The cycle itself almost defieslogic: the greater the dispersal (and the ensuing congestion onlyleads to further dispersal), the greater the number of roads, andthe more adverse the condidons for developing any concentra-tion or any traditional mode of mass transit. In cities like LssAngeles or Houston, the situation is so extreme that to JoelGarreau, going there and not renting a car is like going to Venice

and not hiring a boat. It is missing the point('4

e w Yo r k T r a d i t i o n a l D o w n t o w n

New York City's street system and land parcelization patternwas in place long before Henry Ford initiated his Modelassembly line in 1914 by 181 he standardized grid hadbeen extended to the entire island of anh hat tan.^ Vet evenduring the 192 s and 1930s as Americans rapidly acquired pri-vately owned cars, billions of public dollars were invested inthe construction of subways and an extensive New Uorkregional train system. The regional train facilitated the daily

ate in and out of Manhattan within a radius of forty tofifty miles, enabling thousands to work daily in New York City

while residing in more rural boroughs: Westchester county, theHudson valley, and suburbs in New Jersey, Long Island, andConnecticut. Today, with exorbitantly high parking rates andeffective, relatively inexpensive public transportation, manyManhattanites do not even own cars.

The apparent success of public transportation in New YorkCity is, nevertheless, misleading. Thousands of people enter

the central traditional city by car every day for both workand recreation. Combined with commercial truclng and taxi-cabs, the resulting congestion paralyzes the downtownparticularly oppressively at entrance and exit routes to the city.



TR VELIEJG THE REGION

These arteries for automobile travel remain so central to New

York's survival that terrorist threats have teUingly targeted notmass transportation, but roads and tunnels to and from theisland of Manhattan.

The full picture can be appreciated only from the vantagepoint of the region as a whole: at the scope of the expandedcity population8.6 d i o n , area 1,100 squaremilese6From thisperspective, the dilemma of regional transportation is clearly

far &om msolved, Over the last four decades, more than 360,008people have stopped co uting to New York City for work;during the same period, among those still working in the citymore than 450,000 have switched to driving every day. By thebeginning of the 1990s New York's mass rail system was beingused by only half of those commuting into the city7 Theregional portrait of New York City, despite its famously exten-sive public transportation and its daunting downtown traffic,reveals a remarkably unexceptional pattern of increasing car useand increasing dispersal.

o s t s o f t h e C a r

North Americans drive the equivalent of a trip to the planet

Pluto and back every day8 They own close to two hundredmillion cars, pay an average of 6,000 a year to buy maintain,insure, and regulate every one of them, and $3,000 to 4,000

per car in addition for infrastructure, policing, parking, andother car-related service^ ^ Federal, state, and local governmentsin the United States during the rmd-1990s together spent 93

billion on highways alone.

Perhaps our biggest problem is a road system that, particu-larly during peak demand, is unable to accommodate thevolume required. Thus, what is normally a fifteen-minute tripfrom home to work can during ever more numerous rush



TO W R D T H F U T U R E

hours, become forty-five minutes, an hour, or even more. The

Beltway around the city of Washington, DC carries one hun-dred times the amount of trafic it was designed for, and in thenext fifteen years, this figure is expected to grow by almost 50

percent again.'' Clearly, the physical conflict b e ~ e e n he num-ber of people desiring personal mobairy and the capaciw of theroad systems to acco odate them is rapidly escalating.

The second looming crisis in automobile transportation is

the impact of pollution caused by our almost total reliance onfossil fuels. This egect has been greatest around cities that evolvedpredominantly during the automobile era (Los Angeles, Dallas,Houston), and in the mega-cities of the Third World (MexicoCity, Bangkok, Siio Paulo), where various types of degradationn air quality have reached such levels as to threaten human habi-tation itself. In urban regions susr ing extreme smog and ozonedepletion, the eventual conclusion must be that the days of thetraditional car, powered by gasoline, are numbered.

Recent attempts to fend oEa crisis have taken diametricallyopposing tactics: either to curtail, or to facilitate, our use of thecar. o make traveling by car easier, governments worldwidehave allocated ever greater budgets for highway and road con-

struction. Some techniques for coping with trafic are aimed atenhancing the automobile infrastructure in which we havealready so heavily invested: improving existing roads, wideningfreeways, or building downtown highway bypasses. Techniquesfor helping cars flow more easily throughout the existing roadsystem include coordinating traffic lights, designating car-poollanes, and disseminating road conditions by cell phone. Others

are technological: installing intelligent transportation systems(ITS) like active road dgns describing road conditions or delays,or devising global positioning systems GPS) to give driversalternative routes.



T R V E L E N G THE R G I O N

To discourage car use, on the other hand, and promote other

forms of transportation, some cities have eliminated tax breaksthat allow downtown employers to provide cheap parking, orhave instituted tolls on major roads during peak hours.Supporting the shared use of cars n other words, increasingeach car's ridership arpooling incentives and highwaycommuter lanes have been instituted for the trip most taxingon the road system: the co te fram home to m r k and back.

Such efforts, for the most part, however, have failed. Masstransportation, as well as carpools and other modes of sharingautomobiles, tend to add at least one extra leg of the com-mute per pGrson. In the case of carpools, individuals resistcoordinating their own timetables and destinations with thoseof others, and in the case of mass transportation, while theprospect of sharing a cab, bus, or train with other passengers fora f w minutes seems to be a fairly insignificant issue for mostpeople, getting to the station from one's point of origin, andthen from the station to one5 final destination, entails majorinconveniences. Traditional mass transportation systemssubways, trains, and buses re generally resisted by all thosewho have the luxury to choose.

Developing countries have attempted to reduce the totalnumber of vehicles by imposing formidable taxes on automo-bile purchases; in Israel, Mexico, India, Singapore, and Taiwan,taxes of three hundred percent are common. In Mexico City,car use is already rationed. One day a week, each car isexcluded from the road, and in certain urban districts, throughthe course o a day or at certain hours, cars are entirely pro-

hibited. In Singapore during the morning rush hour, only carscarrying either four passengers or a special costly permit canenter the downtown. n Athens, car use is restricted on alter-nating days to cars with either odd or even license plate



TOW RD T H F U T U R E

numbers. Incredibly, however, even burdensome costs in these

cases have only temporarily stalled the move toward universaldependence on the automobile, and the trend is clear: conges-tion is mounting. At some point the answer will not be moreroads and cleaner cars, but some radical change.

After a century of use, it is time to reconsider the automo-bile from first principles. And since we do not Eve or work enmasse, clearly, we cannot travel entirely en masse by public

transportation, no matter how much improved. Therefore, wemust acknowledge the car's inefticiencies and study how theycan be modified. s we recognize the development of vast newurban forms and our limited ability to move around themwith ease e might also find that the current necessity toreexamine the city coincides with time of extraordinarypotential for innovation.

Lines o f T r a v e l

With automobile use, plane aavel from city to city, and virtual&er-optic travel ll on the rise, it is clear that every scde andmeans of mobility will be essential to our future. But wh n itcomes to personal mobiliy, the entire existing web of regional

travelrom

point of origin to point of destination is in question.ting h m ity to city, for example, we generay drivefrom home to airport, ly from airport to airport, and drive bytaxi or rented automobile to our destination. At the end of thed y or trip, we must do the reverse. n alternative scenario is anautomobile, taxi, or subway ride to the train station, relativelylonger ain nip, and a similar taxi, automobile, or subway seg-

ment at the other end. Finding a parking space at an airport ortrain station is formidable obstacle, which must be repeatedupon return. Given their complexity, length of time, and poten-ti l for delay, neither alternative is particularly e&cient.



Further, mass transportation lines in most traditional cities

like New York radiate from the city center, making rail travelto and from the hub efficient for a vast geographical area, butdirect travel by mass transport from one suburban location toanother, in many cases, impossible. Regional airports, as inManhattan, are also often linked almost exclusively through thedowntown. Therefore, as demand increases for travel not onlyamong New York suburbs, but also among major airports andother cities in the northeast corridor (such as New Haven,Stamford, Philadelphia, and Washington), cars fill the g p ifpublic transportation does not, and in the end, cities likeGreater New York face the same dangerous cycle s those morelike Greater Los Angeles.

ToQy while older concentrated centers emerge as expandedregional cihies with vast dispersed development, the newer cities,already primarily dispersed and car-dependent, are evolvingto include areas of considerable concentration. This patternaEecu travel within the regional city as weU as between majorurban areas. Even a brief glance at an airline schedule betweenWashingon, New York, and Boston conjures dauntingly intri-cate pattern of individual ground and ir trips. Urban planners

have for decades been advocating that short-distance air travela major contributor to congestion both in the air and on theroads be replaced by publicly funded regional rapid rail net

works connecting downtown to downtown directly (like thoseconstructed by the Japanese and the French). But this notion isbased on the misperception that business travel consists o tripsbetween center cities, that the city today is constituted by the

downtown core alone. Even in older regions like the Northeast,where substantial concentration would be more likely to sup-port mass transport, business destinations are already soextensively dispersed that even when one can travel into the



T O W R D T H E FUTUR

center of downtown by train, in many cases a car is then

required to reach the ultimate destination, out in the region.

R e s t r u c t u r i n g I n f r a s t r u c t u r eHints of the need to restructure our transportation systemsabound. In suburban locations, subway and train stations arecontinually being further nourished by large quantities of park-ing, or as an alternative, the kiss-and-ride arrangement that

encourages commuters to be dropped off or picked up by carat the station for a ride downtown eliminating the need forparking, but requiring an extra driver. Municipal authoritieshave instaUed bike racks at suburban stations and repaved oldunused railway rights-of-way to be used as bike paths. Toaddress travel into downtown, the so-called park-and-rideallows drivers to park their cars in the suburbs and ride masstransportation toward downtown.

In some cities, the most active shopping streets have beenclosed off to cars when they have reached unacceptable levelsof congestion and pollution, with both subway stations andlarge parking structures at the periphery allowing a transitionfrom travel by foot in the pedestrian sector to high-speed travel

in more dispersed areas. In response to citizen pressure, subwayauthorities in Manhattan and several other cities have recentfyallowed a Zimited nunlber of bikes aboard. nd an activist group

called 'Trirxticaf, Mass has even forced car traffic to a haft inentire dawntowns around the world ondon, Mew Yorkand San Francisco included with thousands filling the streetson bicycle to protest the effects and use of automobiles.

Incentives to use mass transit, peripheral parking schemes, andthe creation of new walking paths and cycling lanes have hadvarying success in reducing car-use locally. But piecemeal asthey are, and slow to make any appreciable change in the



regional quality of life they std remain as techniques for fend-

ingo

the inevitable.In recent decades we have heard cyclical cries of panic thatone or another system of travel he car the subway the public

uter air travel is either doomed in the long runor destined to solve ll our problems. We read books and articleshe r news progr ms nd speechesfocusing entirelyon one newtechnology as if diKerent modes of travel were mutually exclu-

sive and heavily investing in one would clearly precludesimultaneously funding another.

But diverse environmems and lifestyles require opportuni-ties for choice. Short of assuming t blrl r s of ourenvironment: from which ta start f a m scratch it is clear thatno single method of transportation is going to serve s thegolden breakthrough to an effortless commute trip or hourof errands. The key to rationalizing transportation in theregional city is to focus first on mobility itself s a goal and sec-ond on the best system of transport to satisfy e ch type ofmobility we desire.

he regional city if it is to maintain any diversity of archi-tecture density and balance between natural and man-made

environments will require broad range of speeds scales andmeans of movement. grand unified system of travel wi l l fos-ter place of diversity and richness unequaled in past cities andan exponential expansion of opportunities appropriate to thecomplexity and sophistication of contemporary life.



C H A P T E R 1

he Utility Car

Some years ago the National Film Board of Canada producedan animated film depicting an invasion of Martians to earth.Hovering over a modern city in their spacecraft the Martiansreport back to their planet on the behavior of earth dwellers. Thedominant species they say is a metallic organism of rectilinearform whose locomotion is achieved by four wheels attached tothe main body. These organisms the Martians report are capa-ble of moving at great speeds always along designated channelsthat appear to have been constructed to facilitate their move-ment. They eat rather infrequently in feeding stations in whicha liquid is pumped into their system. They seem to demonstrategreat skill in moving about at high speeds though at times they

appear to misjudge which leadsto

catastrophic collisions anddestruction. There is one batning question the Martians reportto home base. Associated with this four-wheeled species appearsto be another organism a two-legged species that inhabits thefour-wheeled creatures and appears to be t otdy parasitic.

To us human beings driving a car has become secondnature. Popular myth holds that often dogs resemble or reflect

the character of their owners. This is equally true of cars andtheir owners. We select our cars carefully sporty two-door a heavy Jeep or rugged truck a domestic or importedfour-door sedan snobby or earthy muted silver or bright red




ith all the accoutrements reflecting our economic posi-

tion, our practical needs, our self-image. Some of us pamper ourcars: we are as sensitive to a slight change in the motor5 humor the pull of its steering as we might be to our own digestivesystem. The more afnuent become more indulgent as well, dri-ving a convertible in certain seasons, a four-wheel Jeep inothers. There is a story of a famous architect who owned aPorsche, a Mercedes, and a Cadifiac so that he might choose the

car depending on the client he was going to meet.For their part, cars have served us well. They have become

relatively reliable and offer exceptional and unprecedentedmobility. Cars can take us from almost any point on the land toany other point. The absolute, infinite mobility of the car canonly be compared with the global communication capacity o

the telephone system, wbich now aflows us to trave1 via fiber-optic and cellular t e c h n o l o ~ m ny phone anywhere on theglobe to any other, at any time: am the heart of the Amazonto a Saharan village if we so desire.

But while we do it without thinking, the automobile expe-rience, taken as a totality, is full of anxiety he tension oftraffic jams and gridlock; the cycle of searching for parking,walking through desolate parking garages, relocating our cars;getting towed; and getting parking tickets. We experience thecity as a constant sequence of parking structures and lots.Whereas the price demandedby the phone system is essen

t idy economic (iu cables and satellites are effectively invisible),the physical mobility onered by the car has brought with itoverwhelmingly high costs.

P u b l i c P r i v a t e Tr a n s i tThe City of Amsterdam embarked on a great experiment sev-eral years ago. Thousands of white bicycles were distributed



THE UTILITY C R

throughout the city, kee to be used by ny citizen. A person could

pick up a bike when he or she needed it, and when through, leaveit at a sidewallc bike stand waiting for the next rider.Imagine having a car when we wanted one, but being free

m worrying about it when we did not. Imagine a vehicle withall the convenience and mobility of the car, but that is leftat the curb when we arrive, waiting for us when we leave, andof no personal concern whatsoever when we are not using it.Consider, then, the possibility that the car is not privatelyowned, but rather, part of a pool of vehicles at our disposal bythe hour, day, week, or month.

Utility cars (or U-cars ) could be gotten from storagedepots icked up like airport baggage carts wit an accesscard corn the kont of the line o be used as long as we pleaseand billed automatically in accordance with time and mileageused. A universal driver's licenseicredit card might be confirmedby voice activation, and vehicles might be available as two-,four- and six-seaters. The car could be electric: charged andserviced while in the storage depots to completely eliminatethe time we each currently spend on maintenance.

Such a system would enhance the freedom of movement we

now enjoy from our cars, but add the convenience of a publiclyrun and maintained utility. We would have the liberty of hold-ing on to a U-car parking it in our driveway, garage, or atraditional parking lot as we leave it for short durations withour belongings in it, and returning to it as needed. Travelingfrom a regional workplace to a suburban house, we might storethe vehicle overnight in the driveway and keep it throughout

the day. The pattern of use of such vehicles might, in somecases, be almost identical to our current use of a personal car.On the other hand, traveling to a crowded central location,we would leave the vehicle at a storage depot upon arrival.




Consider the flexibility made possible even in a mere trip to

the shopping mall, if, as we became pedestrians, we could dropoff the vehicle at point A and ready to leave several hours later,pick up a new vehicle at point B from the waiting supply.

As for the operation of the system, technology aficionadoswould marvel at the possibilities. The most promising innova-tion in automobile design in the decades to come w l l be theintroduction of electronically guided highways. With prototypes

dmost ready for testing in California, these will enable us to becarried more safely and rapidly than today, in an automatedfashion, along guided tracks, bunched up into trains duringentire segments of travel.' Assured a space in the movingcorridor like that designated to an aircraft in its Bight pathwith less fatigue, the abiiity to work or read during travel, andno congestion he prospects are certainly appealing.

One of the major digculties of the highway guidance sys-tem will be the required standardization of vehicles for theelectronic highway. In the U-car, the highway guidance systemcould be oEered as a feature of the system, and the U-car sys-tem would help assure that the qualiq of maintenance wouldbe equally high for every car on the road. The construction and

maintenanceof

guided roads could even be financed by a con-stantly levied toll in the package of U-car charges. In time, anextensive n e ~ o r k f guided highways compatible with U-carswould improve safety and eEficiency and reduce congestion.

S t o r i n g t h A u t o m o b i l e a c k i n g I t I n

The moment we re&ze we are going to have to park in a garage

is one of the great displeasures of daily life in the automobilecity. We would do anything to avoid it by parking on the streetor in an auey; but alas, usually there is no choice. Whether it isat an airport, shopping center, o&ce building, or hospital, we



THE U T L T Y CAR

must enter the garage, wind through level after level looking

for a vacant spot, and then navigate stairs, elevators, and unpleas-ant dark spaces to return to the street or enter a building.Judging from the preponderance of violent and unsavory deal-ings set in public garages in recent movies, the garage is darklyingrained in our psyche.

ediate benefitso f the automobileas publicd reform this entire sequence, saving both

our own time and much space. Perhaps the greatest etficiencyof a public car system would be the reduction in the overallnumber of cars needed, Each vehicle would be used much moreeaciently, and as part of a mass transportation system, the U-carwould drastically reduce the amount of space we now devote toidle private vehicles. Today, Boston's Logan and Los Angeles'LAX airports have a total of about eleven thousand and twenty-two thousand parking spaces, respectively. In Boston, a fewhundred are resenred for short-term parking, say one hour, forpicking up or dropping off passengers. Ninety-six percent ofthem, however, are devoted to long-term parking esignatedfor the day, several days, or a week as long-term parking lots:'which dominate most metropolitan airports and their i

ate neighborhoods. Thousands more cars still are parked in rentallots and used by passengers who are visiting regional destina-tions. These pafsengers, in mrn, have ofien left their own vehiclesparked at the airport of another metropolitan region.

WMe the recurring sequence of parking currendy consumestime and energy in our lives, it also takes up a tremendousamount of space. The average car has an area of 22 square

feet and a volume of 615 cubic feet. But the driveways,access ramps, and space needed to negotiate each car intoposition require that we construct 350 square feet in area, or2 800 cubic feet in volume, to park each car in a garage. This




circulation space accounts for much of the inetticiency of park-

ing garages, and a great deal of their cost: from 15,000 to40,000 per car. Many inventors have tried to overcome theseextensive driveways and ramps. In the 1960s, a pigeonholesystem, in whlch cars are hoisted by elevator to a vertical stor-age grid, was introduced briefly, but failed economically.

The U-car would be stacked likethe airport luggage cart and stored

com~actlv on a continuous belt.Storing a stacking train of vehicles in asilo-like parking structure would con-sume only one-quarter of the spacenow required per vehicle. Once aans-formed to the new system, an airport

Convmtionalgarage n d for the public domain: more landscap-U car parking depot ing, fewer parking structures along the

street, and increased space for thepedatrian being only the most obvious. During ll the hours ourcars stand immobile and unused, the U-car erviced andmaintained would be sewing the needs of other drivers.

ohting 2,000 carscould hold 7,650,~ nd thus reduce thecost of constructing parking by up to75 percent

By reduci~lg he total land area cov-ered with asphalt (currently 25 to 40percent of the entire regional city3),

tremendous opportunities would arise

P l a n o A c t i o nA major metropolitan airport could become the pilot locationfor introducing the U-car. Today, pressed to make a flight, we



THE UTILITY C R

cruise through parking garages looking for space, more distant

all the time from check-in. Then, burdened with luggage, wewalk through levels of parking garage to the terminal, only tobegin the long path toward the gate. The whole sequence, ofcourse, must be repeated in reverse when we return. For hoursor days, our idle parked car occupies its parking space.

Piloting the U car project, a major airport would offerdrop-off points adjacent to terminal entrances. We would notcruise to look for parking. We would not walk through acres ofparking garages. Our luggage checked directly from our U-carat the sheltered curb, would stand comfortably at the ter-minal entrance ready to step on a moving sidewalk to our gateor any other destination in the complex. A conveyor belt, likethe type used today at the car wash, for example, would pick upthe U-car; it would disappear into its storage depot, and wewould befree. Upon return, we would simply step on a movingsidewalk at the gate, get off at the U-car point, and, morequickly than waiting for the next cab to drive up, we woulddrive o in a clean, fueled U-car,

Such an application could be extended to an entire cityfor example, to the whole Borough of Manhattan nd the

experience could be repeated each time we went to a majorbusiness center, mall or movie complex, central hospital, or uni-versity. The metropolitan airport scene is but a microcosm ofthe regional city as a whole. In this world, the car is freely available, and we are free of it,

h e a y f f

What would our U-cars look like in the city Just as withcars today, there would be models of varying sizes that wouldundoubtedly be produced by different manufacturers, withpotential diversity in styling and color. There would be




universal technical standards: a standard hook-up for the high-way system, certain dimensions to fit automated storage, anautomated credit system activated by one's personal card. In

time, U-cars could become available in a great variety of mod-els. In addition to basic vehicles, we might have theopportunity to drive four-by-four, off-road Jeeps, glamorousconvertibles for d y in the country, or super-fast sports cars,perhaps for a surcharge on the basic rate. Who has not fanta-

sized about owning a whole fleet of different vehicles toindulge his or her daily moods

Nor would the privately owned car entirely disappear.Undoubtedly, there would be those, particularly the affluent,who would also want to have their own personal recreationalvehicle for special occasions, as the owner of a special car doestoday. The eccentricity of such vehicle might attract us inmuch the same way that an antique car passing by on a city roadmight appeal to us today. But even those whose garages d g h tboast such automobile exotica would not be able to resist theconvenience of U-car for ordinary daily urban travel.

New modes of lifestyle bring about new behavioral pat-terns indeed, new demands. Utility car etiquette would have

to develop. Cleanliness and reasonable carewould

be expected,with offenses fined by means of the digital identification sys-tem. From purely economic point of view, the cost to anindividual per mile per day would be less than operating his orher own vehicle. But the most appealing, most seductive, mostcompelling aspect of the U-car is pure and simple, the fulfill-ment of a longtime promise of cars: the carefree life. To have

it at our disposal at ny time; to have the freedom of mindnot to worry about it and the physical freedom to get rid of it;and not to incur the cost a f it when we do not need it hisindeed would be liberation.



THE UTILITY C R

Tr a n s p o r t a t i o n n t e r f a c e

Because it is the transfer between modes of transportation thatso burdens us, to develop mass and individual transit methodsthat mesh seadessly is by far the most potent prescription forthe future of personal mobility. If the most efficient trip com-bines segments by car and by mass transportation, the transferpoint between automobile and the mass mode must be easy.In the most affluent areas, valet parking was invented to over-come the inconvenience of having to park and then walk fromthe car. The concept of a car as a disposable utility raises theprospect of the design of truly rapid transit.

Depersonalizing the car opens up a whole range of newpossibilities. Regional transportation centers, along with majorshopping malls, civic center complexes, and universities, forexample, might provide U-car storage and maintenance depotsconnected with rapid transit lines. With the U-car, we couldmake instant transfers from rapid transit to car at both ends ofour trip.

Further, we would be able to consider using the car in thevast regional city specifically and only for those segments ofa trip for which it is most effective and necessary: to reach

dispersed houses and businesses, for example. We would be ableto consider relatively long trips without the logisticd acrobat-ics necessary today.

Within the broader region, the northeast corridor of theUnited States, for example, utility cars could give the edgeneeded for rapid rail to displace local air travel. In turn, devel-oping rapid mass transit that is facilitated by easy car transfer

would open up entirely new land-use opportunities. t is herethat we can see the framework for our twenty-first-centurycity emerging.



T O WA R D T H E F U T U R

D a y i n t h i f e o t h e U t i l i t y C a r

J lives in a single family house overlooking a ravine. Leavingin the morning, she drives five miles through her tree-filledsuburb to the regional center. At the center s entrance, she dropsoff the U-car and picks up the adjacent rapid train downtown.In the evening, J will make the same trip in reverse, pickingup another U-car at the regional center near her house. Shekeeps the U-car overnight to go to a variety of destinations.

M lives in a high-rise apartment in the traditional downtown.His company has relocated thilty miles away, to a large, woodedcampus-style facility. M however, does not wish to move awayfrom downtown, and so catches the rapid train daily for a fif-teen-minute, twenoj-mile trip to an adjacent regional center.There, upon arrival, M picks up a U-car (many suburbanitestraveling to downtown throughout the morning have beendropping off their U-cars as they proceed by train). From thestation, M drives ten minutes to the campus, where parking isprovided. M i U-car is idle through the day, to be dropped offagain at the regional center en route to downtown.

R lives in a sprawling neighborhood in the eastern part of theregional city. Being a communications consultant, R s jobinvolves a variety of destinations. On certain days, she drives ina U-car along the highways to destinations in the local region.Other days she drops the U-car at the regional center four mil s

from home, proceeds by rapid train to other centers, and picksup a U-car there to drive to different regional destinations.

R s daughter is studying in a community college located adja-cent to a regional center. To visit her parents, she picks up aU-car when required. She frequently travels on the regional



T H U T L T Y CAR

system to downtown, and to the medical center library in

another regional center eight miles away.

R's son is studying in a city three hundred miles away. Whentraveling off campus, R's son picks up a U-car. To make thetwo-hour trip to his parents' home, he drives a U-car to a cen-ter where the regional rapid train stops, and picks up anotherU-car for the final segment of his trip. Sometimes R's son likesto avoid the regional train, particularly when coming homeheavily laden with baggage. On such occasions he picks up theU-car on campus, and travels six rmles to the entry point of theguided highway. Hooking up to the guided highway takes anhour longer than the rapid train, but R's son does not mind,given the heavy baggage. Besides, if there is an overdue paperhe has not yet completed, the three hours on the guided high-way give him time to complete his work.

T h e B a t t o m Line Wi l l I t Wo r kOne can hear the skeptic's voice: what about the possible abusesof a system consisting of millions of vehicles in thousands ofdepots What about the appropriate maintenance and upkeep

of such a system How many storage structures would be nec-essary throughout a region?

To be sure, there would be many practical problems to over-come. Perhaps the most difficult issue would be coping withpeak and variable demands at different locations. In the longterm car drop-offs and pick-ups in diEerent storage locationswould balance one another, but undoubtedly, moments of greatdemand at certain locations would arise, and with more takersthan depositors, a particular depot could suffer a shortage ofvehicles. But as the car-rental industry has discovered, withcareful planning and anticipation of demand, a built-up reserve



T O W R D T H FUTUR

capacity in the system can accommodate such fluctuations. Itwould be necessary, in this case, to provide for the convenienttransfer of cars from one storage point to another inkingup for example, ten or more vehicles into a short train for tram-fer from one point to another. In the end, U-car supplymanagement might not &Eer tremendously from the distrib-ution of any market product.

What about the pride of automobile ownership What

about the car as a manifestation of our egos and personalitiesWhy, the skepric might ask, would we give up all this for theconvenience of a U-car, one that we drive so briefly as to makeany kind of attachment or identification with it impossibleas impersonal as a public phone we use for a few moments, orthe railway car or plane in which we sit for some hours

For the past century, the car has been relatively novel. Great

diversity in quality, pedormance, design, and styling has led toa whole system of social identification and stereotyping relatedto car ownership. Yet most of us accept renting anonymous carswhen traveling. Others choose long-term leases. And most ofus resent the inconvenience of required maintenance. As wetake car travel more and more for granted, we grow less patient

with the inconvenienceof

not having a vehicle exactly whenand where we want it. The student studying away from home,the retiree vacationing in the Sunbelt, the scientist on tempo-rary assignment, and others in the increasingly mobileworkforce need ro use cars in places quite distant from theirpermanent residences. Given the U-car's potential, we mightbe ready to begin treating the automobile as a public utility.

But the real answer to this question is that people do notchange habits easily. In the United States, we willingly spendmore today on transportation than we spend on food? We willwant to continue owning a car, using it indiscriminately and



C H P T E R

Today at the end of the de nn i u m , the greatest task co ~ o n t i n gus is to errolve, invent, and create a new urban envimnment: aplace of meeting and interaction; a place that is adaptable andpluralistic; a place of man-made and natural beauty.

What if this new environment integrated the best aspectsof traditional cities and the calm green neighborhoods solong ago promised by suburbanization What if, in the courseof a single day, we could choose to experience any one of awhole range of different types of cities and experiences Howwould our lives change if we lived in dense urban centers,

but had easy access to nature or in the old downtown, butphysically connected by easy and affordable transportation tothe diversified economy, social opportunities, and naturalamenities of an entire region

The city after the automobile is a broad network of dis-persed, low-rise residential neighborhoods mixed with openland reserves nd, in contrast, bold on the skyline, a num

ber of dense, intensive districts replete with culture; street life;diversified commerce, business, and residential opportunities;and a multitude of services and entertainment.




T h e e w egion

Urban growth has always been cultivated by the points of inter-section between various transportation systems t thecrossing, corners, or junction. A rationalized regional

transportation system ntegrating many scales and means ofmobility ould create a structure for urban development,with the points of transfer between all these systems oflferingnatural sites for rich interactive centers.

Streamlined interface among all scales of transportation w ll

be the key to making travel among concentrated pedestriandowntowns, dispersed suburbs, and preserved open spacesequally accessible and eficient. But we must coordinate thespeeds and methods of transportadon throughout the variousparts of the region specifically with the nature of each envi-ronment: to serve dispersal, we must adapt the car; to connectareas of concentration, we must institute rapid trains; to travelwithin reasonably concentrated districts, we must support localsubway and light-rail systems. And finally, among all of thesesystems of mobility we must plan and design points of transferas catalysts for the kind of built environment we desire.

Transportation nodes would be the transfer points between

rapid trains connecting the historic downtown and newer out-lying centers of activity and major &eeway access points, airports,local subways, and adequate parking. To support new and exist-ing areas of concentration in the regional city, they would belocated in existing traditional city centers, as well as in the urbanconcentrations that are currently evolving around the nuclei of

existing towns (like Stamford, Connecticut, for example). Others

would be positioned to take advantage of particularly beautifulplaces, unique natural resources, or existing specialized facilities.Attracting private investment of all kinds and public investmentin infrastructure and institutions, these transportation nodes



T H E I T Y F T E R T H A U T O M O B I L E

would pool new development (otherwise destined to follow cur-

rent random, dispersed patterns) into concentrations, therebypreserving more land for potential natural reserves.In the new urban environment of multiple nuclei, with an

increased abiliv to travel easily from one center to another, wewill reduce our current need to duplicate services, institutions,and businesses endlessly across the land. Diversity in the region,therefore, w l l expand in proportion to the sophistication of the

region s transportation network. Improved access among indi-vidual concentrations of activity will allow each area to take ona specialized role over time, perhaps pertaining to the majorbusinesses or industries within them, perhaps to an institutionlocated there. Distinctive identity for each interactive centerwill derive not only from the specific nature of its institutions,but in some cases, from the unique physical characteristics ofits location. There might be centers along the coast, a center onthe ridge of hills, on the riverbanks, along the lake, or opposite the austere beauty of the plains or the prairie.

Within this new regional urban field, the traditional city mayremain pivotal, but will no longer be isolated. In a single urbanregion, a variety of experiences undreamt of in the past will

erneqe, as the urban experience in its d d y and .weekly routineneed no longer be limited to one district similar to many others,but can open itself to the diversity of places and opportunities.

We might begin with a regional transportation plan, locat-ing transportation nodes both in existing areas of intensedevelopment and at locations identified for their beauty, con-venience, or unique institutional endowments as optimal for

future growth. Surrounding each node, zoning would guide awide spectrum of activities within each new development,encouraging developers to collaborate to their mutual benefit.

Healthy urban interaction can be achieved, while at the same




time supporting our widespread desire for openness and privacyAs a byproduct of careful regional planning we wi evolve anoverlapping regional necklace of many concentrated down-towns vital and diverse. Rather than continuing to accept citiesthat are merely the result of uncontrolled and expedient trans-port systems and development it is time we envision a wholecity that comprises many places: a regional city adorned by anecklace of urban concentrations conceived to take advantage

of contemporary modes of transportation and coand to be fostered by them. In short it is time we confront andrevise the development habits of the ~ e n t i e t h entury.

nvis ioning t h e w C e n t e r

The new urban center would be linear structured by a spineof intense activity a modern-day Cardo. As the place of max-imum interaction n the region the New Cardo would bedesigned specifically to create an urbanism that invigoratesthose who move through it to foster the accidental and spon-taneous encounters so central to urban life. To this end eachdistrict would seek that critical mass of population and insti-tutions to achieve the complexity and diversity we associatewith stimulating and vital environments.

Running the length of each linear center the New Cardowould constitute a public urban place and an organizing spinefor concentrated development within the regional city. As thespine of the linear center the New Cardo might stretch for thedistance of about one mile providing fiv or ten million squarefeet of ofice space and employing some twenty thousand to

forty thousand people. million or more square feet could bedevoted to all kinds of shopping as well as a cinema complexclubs and other night entertainment. There could be severalmajor hotels for conferences tourism and local events as w ll



T H E CXT Y A F T E R T H AUTOMOBILE

as low- and high-rise housing. Special educational institutions,

such as a community college, an art school, or a music conser-vatory, would e located within the district, and culturalbuildings such as a regional pedorming arts center, library, orteaching museum would gravitate toward its linear center. Thisspine might include a major clinic (and, in some cases, a full-fledged hospital), a government service center with branches of

various federal and state sewices, a courthouse, day-care facil-ities, health clubs, or perhaps a major public park.

Like any traditional downtown, the linear center wouldhave primary and secondary streets, with public buildings,schools, and institutions marking pivotal intersections alongthe length of the New Cardo. With qualities of both the bazaarand the garden, the New Cardo would act as the focus for pub-lic life. Flanked by stores and entrances to major officecomplexes, hotels, and similar facilities, its character might insome places be boulevard-like lined with trees; in others, itsspace might become more contained and intimate, like a nar-row, multi-level Galleria. Elsewhere, it might open up into apiazza, face a public park, join the edge of a waterfront, or crossa river like the Porrte Vecchio,

Extending on either side of the New Cardo, networks ofsmaller alleys fined with restaurants, clubs, and unusual bou-tiques would fill the street with an array of signs reminiscent ofTokyo s many alleys. At either end, it would be served by a trans-portation node including a regional rapid transit station, amultidirectional freeway system, and an integrated parkingreservair combining space for shoppers, residents, and tourists,

uting ofice workers.Finally, bordering the busy Cardo and its intersecting thor-

oughfares, new configurations of housing and living would bepossible. In contrast to the dispersed suburbs stretching away on



THE CITY F T E R THE UTOMOBILE

the Arlanta, Tampa, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Denver, and Stanstead,

UK airports , a train of small troflies can be designed as thebasic organization of an entire airport moving people fromparking, to terminals, to a sequence of concourses in a reason-able amount of time.

Likewise, we could expand the range we can travel by footin the new linear centers of the regional i ~n ities todaythe elevator extends our ability to travel vertical distances, andfor this reason, it has become a necessary component o urbantravel. Automated, reliable, safe, fast, and free to the publicelevators instrumentally shaped our era by stretching urbanbuildings into skyscrapers. The same principle for vertical con-veyance can be applied to horizontal movement: pedestrianscan be ferried along the length of the New Cardo. indeed, theelevator and the conveyor together would complete the networkof ull pedestrian access to the contemporary scale of the city.

Applying the principle of the high-speed elevator to hori-zontal travel, a system of cabs could run along horizontal shafts,serve a series o progra ed stops, and be operated by call but-tons on the street and destination buttons in the cab, Far moreegcient and economical service, fewer cabs might travel a long

loop between fewer, equally spaced stops. Traversing distancesof up to a mile rapid, automated, and free he Conveyorcould do for urban downtowns, airports, and other complexeswhat the elevator did for the tall building. In time, the Conveyorcould become as natural to us as the elevator today, traveling adedicated track through the street like horizontal glass eleva-tors, open to the sky above, or alternatively, suspended in space

to serve upper levels of shops, buildings, and facilities.The Conveyor could eliminate one of the most rigorous

constraints in planning during this century: the fact that mostindividuals travel through a n s t road system to a particular spot




by personalized vehicle (or mass transportation) t which

point they must entern

urban center whose dimensions exceedtheir walking range. Designers would begin planning a publiccenter or complex by laying out the Conveyor and positioningits stops to match the major points of access, the transportationnodes, vertical towers, and urban landmarks along its length.

The Conveyor could contribute to the essential vitality andenergy of a new kind of public place by extending the area that

each mass transit stop and parking depot can serve, making llfacilities within the stretch of a mile accessible to the pedes-trian, and no less significantly, connecting the center in apowerful way to the rest of the regional city.

The o n v e r t i b l e S t r e e t

In 1960 Buckminster Fuller proposed enclosing Manhattan witha giant glass dome. At the t h e , air-conditionjng W just becom-ing commonplace, with new office buildings, hotels, shoppingcenters, and libraries being air-canctitioned as a routine matter.Fuller was simply extending this idea to the scale of the city asa whole. Why Fuller reasoned, expose individuals in the city tothe hardships of heat and cold through the emerne seasons hy

not treat the entire city as a giant air-conditioned greenhouseIn recent decades, many cities have built extensive networksof weather-protected paths. Montreal and Toronto boast under-ground systems sheltered from the long and vi ious winter;Minneapolis has skyways. Today's Mall of America might notbe the entire borough of Manhattan, as Fuller envisioned, butit is an actual seventy-eight-acre development under one air-

conditioned roof.z But these solutions are separated fromnature: confined in the network, one is forevex indoors, Whenthe weather outside is uncomfortable, we appreciate such protection from nature, but even then, we often crave daylight,



T H E I T Y F T E R T H E A UTQMO BILIF,

views of the city or countryside around us and natural air.

When the weather outside is pleasant we often dread having toface such environmentally sealed-off places.Imagine that we could keep urban streets enclosed in com-

fort on snowy winter and steamy summer days but open tothe sky on the many days of the year during which we cravethe outdoors. The New Cardo could in fact be environ-mentally versatile. In those regions of the world where there

are many days of comfortable weather pring fall,and luxurious summer days t could be designed as a convertiblespace. Its character could be outdoor looded with daylight

The ew ardo with enclosing glass roof




nd just as we swing open a car s convertible roof to enjoy

the vveather and Gcesh air, soould

the evv Card05 clear roofsretract, opening the street to the outside, and allowing a realdifference of experience between an outdoor walk on a gen-tle day and a protected stroll through the city in a snowstorm.

There are of course, prototypes for convertible spaces, par-ticularly in the form of sports arenas.Toronto s SkyDome roofretracts n large sections to expose the field to the sky, while

in Pittsburgh, pie-shaped pieces of roof travel about a centeraxis to protect or expose the arena. In Montreal, the Olympicstadium was intended to be retractable, suspended from a giant

he ew ardo with roofremcted



T H E f T Y P T E R THE A U T O M O B I L E

tower. But these are heroic elaborate examples of the much

more straightfomard concept for the New Cardo. Arched orgabled glass roofs could be supported by hinge connections atthe top of their supporting columns, and operated by a cableand tower system on either side of the street. Or, a series ofvaulted frames could act as a track to support individual slidingsections of glass roof. Along the length of a New Cardo a varietyof smaller passages, major boulevards, and urban piazzas couldbe fitted with their own appropriate system of glass membranes,while the main thoroughfares of certain existing traditionalcenters could be retrofitted,

The design of the roof would vary greatly through digerentregions and climates. Adapted to the Tropics, it could providesunshading, rain protection, and cooling; at the oppositeextreme, it could act to trap heat and sunlight. Sunshadingcould be accomplished by orientation, or perhaps by a sec-ondary system of sail-like shades, while in cold climates, thespace might be conceived as a giant, public, habitable green-house or botanical garden.

T h e e w T o w e r

As we have seen, until the twentieth century; urban structuredepended on the public domain the street, the bazaar, theforum, the agora, the boulevard, the piazza) to connect and unitethe diverse components of the city. As just such a continuouspublic space, the New Cardo would allow a completely newrelationship between the street and the high-rise commercialand residential tower. In contrast to the typical undifferentiated

grid, the linear center and the New Cardo would provide anexpandable, hierarchical order by which to locate urban build-ings with respect to transportation and outdoor spaces.

The alignment of the New a d o in a northern climate



T O WA R D THE F U T U R E

could be organized with towers along the north side of the busypublic domain, to avoid shadows. Located at intervals to matchstops along the Conveyor, the towers would step b ck a shortdistance h m he continuous edge of retail structures, nd rise

abovethem

to mark each linear center in the skyline of theregional city. Clusters of residential towers might rise to thesouth, within e sy walking distance o the New Cardo, but setback a couple o blocks to preserve daylight along the center,privacy and quiet for the residents.

As natural components of a dense urban district, thetower s lobby and entrance would therefore become events to

experience along the New Cardo: the tower s mass would risebehind the flow o pedestrians and smaller-scale buildings and

its elevator core would meet the pedestrian level close to aConveyor stop, and thus, to a transportation node connected



T H E fTU FTER T H E U T O M O B I L E

by rapid train to other linear centers or by U-car to dispersed

locations in the region.Freed from the constraints of the regularized street grid, thedesign of the new tower would be free to respond to its inte-rior uses and spaces with sensitivity and invention. To maximizedaylight or sunshading, natural ventilation, outdoor areas, andindoor open space the new tower unlike ts historical pre-decessors would rise in slightly or radically different forms

and materials in each linear center around the globe. The newtower could be designed to function at numerous scales, withnumerous relationships to its environment: based in the linearcenter, integrated with the region, and breaking out into anirregular edge of multiple exposures and terraces facing theopen landscape.

As the linear center expands, the New Cardo would sim-ply extend, conserving its internal hierarchy and its continuitywith the public spaces, services, and transportation opportuni-ties already established in the now-mature original city center.

t ruc tu r ing the N e w C e n t e r

T h e P e r m a n e n t and the TemporaryIn

1980 the Venice Biennale architectural exhibition took placein the city s Arsenale, a structure of heavy masonry columnssupporting a large-scale overhead wood truss. Several architectswere invited to design displays, each receiving one bay markedout b e ~ e e n set of columns. As might be expected, the out-pouring of diverse responses was formidable: every shape andcolor onolithic and ethereal, monochromatic and poly-

chrome ere present.But without the simple and regular order provided by

the Arsenale, the wildly competing designs would haveamounted to an unintelligible jumble Instead, the even rhythm



T O WA R D T H FUTUR

of massive columns on either side and the roof trusses above

served as a stabilizing and unifying structure for the whimsicalthe provocative and that which defied categorization. Togetherthe individual inventions and the more permanent overarch-ing construction created a powerful coexistence of civic andpersonal scales that we rarely experience but continue to seekn our cities

Today depending on our preferences we tend to criticize

our built environment for lacking either civic monumentalityommonly conceived as consistent repetitive and colossal

structures or picturesque complexity: small-scale varied orinformally ordered structures. Yet grand buildings and districtsseem to require unreasonable public expense consensus orauthority while spontaneous or individualistic statements canappear excessively challenging to the public order.

To institute and conserve a balance between the enduringcivic and the vital picturesque today we must recognize theneed for and the diaerence between urban constructions thatare by their very nantre rhythmic and repetitive from those witha natural tendency toward diversity. The new interactive cen

ter could be created by combining two fundamentauy digereat

ingredients: those elements reflecting the stability and expensewe normally associate with infrastructure and those more tern-poral structures for commerce entertainment advertising andconsumption. At one end of the spectrum is the shop window

short-lived installation a mini stage set whose purpose isto present merchandise and to attract appeal and seduce in thespace of a moment. At the opposite end is what we might call

urban infrastructure. Added to the bridges roads railway tracksand udlity systemswe currently think of as infrastructure wouldbe ll those elements of construction. hat contain and order ourprincipal public spaces hose life should extend beyond that



TH XTY AFTER. T H E AUTOMOBILE

of temporary installations. In short, those elements that make

up the New Cardo.If we were to treat the New Cardo ith its convertibleenclosure, public squares, conveyor, and transportation nodesat either end s a long-term civic infrastructure, we wouldcreate a framework within which diverse short-lived buildingscould be built and rebuilt and in which the civic the outra-geous, and the temporary could all comfortably coexist. With

its grand operable glass roof supported by giant pylons spacedsixty feet apart across thousands of feet, clustering in certainlocations around major piazzas and crossroads, the New Cardowould connect the long-lived public institutions within thelinear center thearers, buildings of governance, libraries, muse-ums, etc.) and be treated as a permanent, well-maintained, andcivic component of the public domain.

In great conaast, built into the structure of pylons and roof,individual merchants and department stores might constructtheir tentative, fashionable, and provocative buildings. Here thebusiness owners, with their army of architects and designers,would be given free reign. The street wall of the linear centerwould be enlivened not merely by shop windows, but by an

entire secondary architecture of individual two- to four-story

ermanent infiasfructure and temporary commercialbuiltilings



T O WA R D T H E F U T U R

structures. These structures would now be designed to seduce

or to shock to scream for attention or to create a mood of ele-gant sophistication. They might undergo radical nansformationsor incremental change just as storefronts do today. Truly indi-vidual creations with a relatively short architectural life theselighthearted and playful or challenging and avant-garde struc-tures could be given complete liberty within the grand civicinfrastructure to provide the vitality and diversity indeed the

dynamic character we seek n an urban experience.

o w a r d t h F u t u r eToday we build at new scales. We live in regional mega-cities

of many millions. If we are to evolve invent and design ourfuture built environment to function effectively and satisfyemerging needs we must collaborate on all fronts to join ourpersonalized patterns of car travel with fixed planned corridorsof public transportation so seamlessly as to create a singular sys-tem of mobility. With a unified transportation plan we mustguide the growth of open green and thinly populated suburbsas well as dense concentrations where diversified transportationlines intersect. Weaving the old and the new into a single organ-

ism we should strive in our cities for the delicate bafancebetween the desire to disperse and the need to concentrate; theneed to maintain the civic meeting places vital to an enlight-

ened society and the desire to possess the vastness and freedom

of the open road.

erial view f the ne r center n the regi n l city

S6



ogue: UrbanaWe travel through Urbana silently, gliding by guided elec tricU-car through the landscape. Vast expanses of gardens andhouses pass us as we move within a canopy of trees. O n thehorizon, a long silhouette rises from th e terrain like the giantcurved skeleton of a dinosaur, Soon we see towers and rowsof great columns:a spine rising to form a skyline. T he terrainof trees and fields flows along this urban edge like wavesbrushing the shore. W he n we reach the linear center, a greatgateway welcom es us,a portal that receives hundreds of arriv-ing vehicles. O n a platform along the N ew Cardo, we leavethe car, instantly on foot. Latched o n to a moving beltway, ourvehicle disappears.

Another day, we travel through Urbana by rapid train.Looking ou t across acres of g reen, the linear center s spine-like skyline echoes the silhouettes of neighboring centers onthe horizon. At a transportation node, like a great urbanthreshold,we enter the glass-roofed station and transfer toaConveyor, moving easily into the ew Cardo unencumberedby vehicles. We step o n and off th e Conveyor many times:

to window-shop, chat w ith friends, stroll through the centralpark. The urban boulevards, linedby shops and criss-crossedby little alleys, open broad vistas to us as we pass. As th e cabsof the Conveyor move in opposite directions, here and there



E P I L O G U E

suspended to cross generous open spaces, their wisping

motion complements the sounds of business and leisure thatfill the street.

Appalled by the long winters of rain and snow, but elated bythe coming of spring, the citizens of Urbana have made theirNew Cardos convertible, with great pylons constructed alongthem. Like giant sycamores, these pylons rise to branch-like

beams, reaching out to cover the center, their transparent pan-els like the broad leaves that rise over a banana plantation. Atthe touch of a button, this canopy can open to the sun and sky.

City dwellers come to know the weather Gom the soundsof each morning. n beautiful spring days, winding cables andsliding glazed sections of the retracting canopy send echoesthrough the streets. Other days the people of Urbana watch thesky with anticipation, awaiting a change in the weather: a coldfront, a rain shower. As the first drops of rain are heard, theglazed panels rise up cables swinging, the segments fitting mag-ically together. As the rain flows down the lofty glass roofs, lifegoes on in the street below.

Below, the people of Urbana are forever constructing theirCardos. A visitor is struck by the great mriety of stmctuns; hereand there, a f w are always being rebuilt, dismantled, or trans-formed. At three and four stories, these small buildings fit b e w e nthe great ~ l o n s f the New Cardo. And with no need to worryabout changeable weather, Urbana s artists and architects havegreat freedom of expression. The facades line up, one after

another, boldly contrasting in color, material, and texture. Somehave no glass, protected as they are from water and great tem-perature change. Others are composed entirely of recycled paper

urn, very cheaply made but strilang in texture.



Strolling along the ew Cardo, we are always taken by sur-

prise. A large, three-story department store has been constructedto be totally transparent, and as we walk by display shelves ladenwith goods and racks with hanging clothes all seem to be float-ing in space, as if without support. At each level people arevisible, their shadows swimfingly cast on the sand-blasted glassfloors. At night the glass department store glows out over thestreet like a shimmering crystal palace.

Elsewhere a store boasts a hundred kinds of stone broughtfrom all over the world: granite and marble, onyx and sand-stone. Across the boulevard a new jewelry store appears likefishing nets hung out to dry; getting closer, we can see thedelicate mesh of metals brass, gold, and shimmering silverstrands interwoven forming a tent-like structure to encloseinner pavilions laden with precious displays. The facade ofone store is a giant community poster board, where movieposters accompany children s paintings and announcementsof future events. Farther down the street is one of Urbana sgreat and ever-changing toyshops. With edible architecturaldetalils, the frames, sills, and sashes of windows, the shades ofchandeliers, wainscotting and moldings are progressively

consumed by young visitors, and built and designed aneweach season.The New Cardo itself is a place where we find the great

institutions of the area, but the intricate and intimate alleys,extending out of the main street in a series of intersecting loops,are where we go to find specialties. There is the famous fleamarket alley and the alley of sports where we can find any kind

of popular or obscure sports accessory. There is the electronicalley, the alley of music, a decorator s alley with furniture shops,and art galleries. The alley of the weavers is a maze of passagesbetween small stalls, where we can get any fabric imaginable. A



E P I L O G U E

short distance away from each Conveyor stop, tall towers rise

above Main Street s glass roofs.

The people of Urbana take great pleasure in their unique land-scape. The side of one linear center rises above a long stretchof fields and trees; the other runs along the seashore, its mainaxis descending along a ridge to cliffs, beaches, and the seabelow. At the point where the New Cardo crosses a river out-

let to the shore, it becomes a great bridge, its pylons descendingto form an archway from cliff to cldF, the glass roofs above openox closed: a whole section of the linear center reminiscent ofthe ancient viaducts. Along the gentler slopes toward the sea,apartments and hotels terrace down hills right to the water sedge. n inclined Conveyor travels continuously from the sta-tion and parking silos down the hillside to the shore.

Looking in the opposite direction toward the fields, we seethe great variety of towers that form a ridge. Some are twentyor thirty stories high others, lining the central park at the inter-section of the New Cardo, are sixty stories. All are different:here a tower of hanging gardens, there a tower with deep diag-onal recesses. Yet another steps as it rises, forming terraces on

one side and an arch over the street on the other, Soon we cansee the pattern of these broad expanses of glass, facing southtoward the path of the sun.

Morning is an active time in Urbana s centers. Thousands arriveam he bpersed regions by U-car or rapid train, stepping onto

the Conveyor as they head for jobs in the high-rise towers near

the ew Cardo. Others pass through the transportation nodeto leave their U-cars and catch the rapid train to a neighbor-ing linear center. Others yet arrive by train to pick up a U-caron the way to jobs in the dispersed areas of the Urbana region.



E P I L O G U E

Before the shops open along the New Cardo and the cen-

tral park, students arrive at the local college and high school.It is a pleasant hour to stroll through the linear center prepar-ing for a busy day. Co uters passing through the New Cardoand those arriving at corporate towers stop at cafis and cotreestands, watching merchandise unloaded at stores not yet open.There is always the element of wonder: will the great roofsremain closed for a fourth day o cold and rainy weather, or wiUthey open to a clear and sunny sky

On the mekends, the centers of Urbma re transformed bystrollers, families, and young couples. Although the New Cardohas several supermarkets, Saturday is grand market day. With theofice buildings silent, families travel in great numbers from thesurrounding region. Many push small carts, clearly headed forshopping. In the great square between the performing arts cen-ter and the courthouse, stalls full of fresh produce are erectedweekly, and a flea market draws people with goods to buy, sell,and trade. There are pedormers, musicians, magicians, and spe-cial programs for children at the museum.

Many attractions draw visitors to one o Urbana s centers.Halfway between the two gates to the New Cardo, the street

opens up into a larger square. Here pylons form a great rec-tangle, only partially enclosing a city plaza that extends towardthe central park, with shops surrounding tw sides of the space.Along the street, there are a number o public institutions inwhich the citizens of Urbana take great pride. BotanicalGardens surround the Fine Arts Museum. There is the recentlycompleted performing arts center, with its three halls for music

and theater, and the science museum, which is boasted as thebest in the region. The Safari Park occupies a verdant ten-acrestrip, a variety o animals roaming through its natural terrain.

At night in Urbana, activity often migrates toward the



P I L O G U

bay below one of the centers. Along the alleys leading to the bay

are many places for music and dancing. The large b y is famousas Urbana s evening recreation district and thousands of peoplefrom the sursclundirag region travel to and from the coast eachnight. Teenagers descend from everywhere. On boats dockedin the harbor, there are restaurants for the more sedate, books

and antiques sold on the promenade along the sea. n the weehours of UrbanaS morning, s the first squares of light appear

in dispersed house windows of the region, the last lights to goout are those of the linear centers, here nd there sparkling likejewels in a long, brilliant necklace.



End Notes

PART

CHAPTER : The Ailing ity

Thomas Angotti, MetropolL 2000 (New York: Routledge,1993 ,p. 21.

Peter G Rowe, Making a Middle Landscape (Cambridge:The MIT Press 1992 , p 184.

U.S. Census Bureau Document CPH-L-145.

CHAPTER 2: he Evolving ity

Spiro Kostof The City Shaped Urban Patterns and Meaningrmraergh History poston: Little, Brown and Co., 199 , p. 37.

E L. Wright, Broadacre City: A New Community Plan inA ~ h i t e f t ~ ~ r a lecord 77, April 1935, pp 243-54

Wright, Broadacre Civy

Wright, Broadacre Civ.

Le Corbusier, h e City o Tomorrow and i t s PlanningPJw York: Dover, 1%87), pp 116-18,



E N D NOT S

Peter ICatz, Ttae Ricrw m a n i s m : ward an Architecttlre ofCommunity(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993).

S Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL:Small Medium,Large, Extra-Large New York: MonaceE Press, 19951, p. 961.

Rem Koolhaas, Sixteen Years of OMA: in acques Lucan,Rem Koolhaas O M A(Princeton: Princeton ArchitecturalPress, 1991), pp, 162-63.

CHAPTER 3: The End of the Cityoel Garreau, Edge ity (New York: Doubleday, 1991).

dward W. Soja, Inside ExopoEs: Scenes from OrangeCounty, in Michael Sorkin, ed., Variationson a ThemePark

N e w York: Noonday Press, 1992), p. 95.

William J. Mitchell, City Bits (Cambridge: The MITPress, 1995), p. 28.

ichard Sennett, Hesh and Sbne ( N e wYork: W.W. Norton,1994), p. 111.

Mitchell, Ci ty o Bits, p 26.

CHAPTER : The Making of Public pace

Witold Rybczynski, The New Downtowns, in TheAtlanticMonthly(May 1993 ,pp. 96-106.

David Guterson, Enclosed. Encyclopedic. Endured.:

One Weekend at the Mall of America, in Harper?(August 19931, p 54.



E N D N O T E S

K ~ ~ l h a a snd Mau. S, M, L, XL, p. 971.

P Rem Koolhaas, as quoted in Richard Vine, Post-Deliriumin Art in America April 19951 vol 83, no. 4, p. 35.

CHAPTER : lanning the egion

Man Finder, Lock Step with the New York CityEconomy: Budget Treads Path of Booms and Busts,in n e ew York Li'mes, May 3,1992 Section l p. 38.

~ o e l arreau, Edge City (New York: Doubleday, 19911 p. 4.

Deyan Sudjic, 100 Mile City (London: Harcourt BraceCampany, 1993), p. 99,

See Rob Gumitt, The Painful Truth About Cicies andSuburbs: They Need Each OLher,' in Governing (February1992), pp 5 8 4 0

h e Boston Sunday Globe, October 6,1996, p. D1.

CHAPTER : Traveling the egion

oel Garreau, Edge City (New York: Doubleday, 1991),p 223.

New York State's Two-Track Strategy to Improve RailService, ' i e ew York Times, December 9,1993.

Los Angeles Convention Association, 1993.

Garreau, Edge City, p. 22 1.

Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and MeaningsThrough History (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. 1991),p. 95



E N D NOTES

According to 1990 Census (CPH-L- 1451, which considersBronx, Kings, New York, Putnam, Queens, Richmond,Rockland, and Westchester counties to be a single PrimaryMetropolitan Statistical Area (PMSA) .

NY Metropolitan Transportation Council, Hub-BoundBauel I P 1.

Dr. James Lowenthal, Lick Observatory, University ofCalifornia, Santa Crrrz,

T h e Boston Sunday Globe October 6,1996, p. D2.

According to the figures quoted in Maryland meklyNovember 3,1394, p. M25,

CHAPTER 1 : The Utility Car

Los Angeles Times November 3 1996 p. D 14.iven a standard average car dimension of 122 sq. ft. in area

and 6 ft. in height, and a required 350 sq. ft. in area and 8 ft.height/car fsr parking and circulation,

Angotti, Metropolis 2000, p. 12; h e Boston Sunday Globe,October 6,1996, p D2,

Phil Patton, Open Road (New York: Simon and Schuster,19861, p. 13.

CHAPTER : The City fter the Automobile

oel Garreau, Edge City (New York: Doubleday, 199 , p. 464.

avid Guterson, Enclosed. Encyclopedic. Endured.:One Weekend a t the Mall of America:' in Harper s(August 1993), p, 49,



Index

air-conditioning, 58,59,158airports, 7,133,141,142439

15657air rights, 62air travel, short-distance, 133Mexatzder the Great, 1 1Amsterdam, 103,104,13%39h t r a k , 20aparment Irru8dling See high-rise

residendal buildingsArchigram group, 24architects

o f mega-schaol, 90,91of Modern movement, 14-19,

20,57,70-71,114of ew Urbanism, 22-23,25pastmoderist, 89of radical school, 23-25role of, 2 1-22,83,92-94

ksende, 163-64AtErens, 131-32autaxnobile, See car

Ban&ok, to

Barcelona, 103bike paths, 534Boston, S, 34,40,50,54,72,73,141Brasillia, 106Broadacre Cie-y; I4,15buildinp, See also hi&-rise

ercial t~wers; igh-riseresidential buildng; names ofindividual btriI ings

heights of, 55-56scale of, 85. See also mega-scale

slab, 7 ,72

165 370W&-ups9 55, 73Bunshag, Gordon, S9Burlington Arcade, 85business travel, 133-34

Caesar5 Pahce, 46Canada, 7Cannes, 103Gape Town, 103



car trafic volumes in, &5,15,92costs of, 129, 144 City Beaudful Movement, 98

discouraging use of, 131-32,134 City o Bitr (Mitchell), 31electric, 139 city planning, 21,110,114,115impact on older citim 6 4-5, civic monumentality in built

19,26 environment, 1 64impact on younger cities of,

5-6,127,1230ownership of, 4,85,128,

137-38,14849

pollution, 136shared use of, 131. SL e aEso utiliq

carcarpools, l3 1central planning, 1 14-1 6,119Century Freeway 126C handigarh, 166

Charles, Princes f

Wales,Chicago, 27,33,56,67, 1,114Chicago Tribune Building, 56cities

contemporary; 2&26,40--4 1,60, 9-96,286-7

hierarchical, 1-1 3inner, 32-35,125

modern, 13-23percenw of people E h g n S

88post-autsmob2e, 151pre-automobile, 1 1-1.3,39-40walirry of life in 25,226,528regiond. See region4 cities

scale of, 55-56sites of 103,104-5specid character of, 103-4traditional, 3,107,109,110-1 1,

133,153

collective spaces, 1 7 229Coiumbia Point, 34Columbia University, 85Colurnbus Ceneer, 46,46,47, 47

4 8 4 8communication, &gitd modes of,

28,29,30-3 1ting, 15,128-29,130,131,

132,172concentration, 36,124,125,133Congr&s nternationam

d9Arckitecture Moderne

consumer economy 91convertible spaces, I 59-6 1,170Conveyor system, 157-58,169-70Copenhagen, 5 1Copfey Race, 43,544Corbett, Hawey Wiiey, 1 6, 6

Coupland, Dougas, 63Critical Mass, 134cyberspace, 28-29,31

DaHas 6,7,27,32,60,130De Carlo, Giancarfo, 20densiy9 kg h, 96,92

Denver, 660developers, private, 104, 111,116

of housing, 72,73,83o shopping malls 43,44,

52-53,54



INDEX

developmentand h e market economy,

116,124patterns of 11&14process, 1065,115

discontinaitty; 22,107clispersd, 3,4,6,7-8,16,2?, 1124,

125,127,128cybernetic, 28-29

downtown centers, 4,27,82of hture, 15 4 5 6new developmea n traditiond,

110 -11of pre-autsmobife cities, 38

repair 06 32-35Ruany Plater-Zyberk, 23,89

Eaton Centre, 54Edge Cities, 2 7

Edge ity (Garreau), 1 16elevators, 157Equitable Budding, 57Europe, 17,20, 124

ED. K e h Campany, 41Ferriss, Hugh, l 6

Faster, Norman, 64

Headquarters, 6

Franun, Me~ssa, 4From atdlzatls to ur Howe

Volfe), 83

Fuller, Bucb ns te r, 158

G&eria Victor Emanuel, 39 3840,41,4546

Garden Civ,' 4 85

Garreau,jod, 27,116,124,128Gautreaux Assisted Housing

program, 33Geneva, 103dobd positioning systems

EPS), 130government

locd, 112-33regiond, 18-1 9

Gmpius, Walter, 21Guterson, Bavid, 54

Habitat, 80,81,81,82,82Haharpface, Bd~mo re , 3Har~ord , T 5Harvard Universiv, 2 1Hertzberger, Herman, 65

early desips, 56-57firture of, 6 H 7

grid for, 61-62,66impact on city of, 57 61 6647

of Modern movement, 15,1&20,57,61

in New Cardo, 1 6 1 4 3parking garctges, 60plazas, 553,6Opost- 5Q desips, 58-59,

6&61,63,89progressive setback o 57-58d e s t , 85workspace in, 62-66 88

zorring or&nances regarding, 5758,553

high-rise residendd buadntg, 69&sip , 79-&0,82-84and mass pubGc housing, 7 1,83



in New Cardo, 161-63and private developers, 72-73

and urban edges, 73-74highways, 4,6

capaciy oc 129-30electronicay guided, 140phnning of, 1 05,120-2 1U.S. 4, 11 51 6, 129

Hdilberseimer, Ladwig, 18,70,71Ho~hhausstallfirdect, 70, 70Hong Kong, 90Wong Kong and Shanghai

Banking CorporationHeadquarters, 64

Horton Plaza, 53hcrspitds, 86,93kouse, singe-fady, 80

housingprivate, 72-74,8Qpublic, 69-Z,83

Houston, 6 ? 32,60,67,11'7,128,130

Howard, Ebenezer, 14,85

interactive borne shopping, 28Israel 134

Jerusalem, 11-1 2, 12 13 5051,103

kiss-and-ride, 134Koolkaas, Rem, 2425,90-91

landscape architecture, 2 1land use

concentrated, 16dispersed, 6,7-8,16,27., 1124,

125,127,128planning, 7,112-13,119

Lang, Fritz, 16Las Vegas 46LAX krport, 141Le Corbusier, 16-19, 18 19 61,

78 206Lever House, W C , 59linear center, 15656,157,

165 167Logan. krport , 141Lonhn, l03Los Angeles, h ? 27,33,130,141

transportation in, 1 2 6 2 8

Mall of America, 45,158s, shagping, 6,43,48, See also

n a m a findividualmallscontrol and s e c u r i ~ h 45design of, 45- t, 53 54lengh of 1561location. of, 44,105pakklng for 127regerlations regarctrng, 54

RRada, 5&52,50, 52Manhattan, 6,32Masada, 104

mass culture, 91



I N E X

mss tramportadon, 6-7,126,133.See also r d ravel; subway lines

s

dternaeive to car 125,131,132in Los Angeles, 126-28in New York, City; 128-29b e ~ e e n &urban locations, 133transfer point b e ~ e e n ar and,

145mega-scde, 85-86

and architects, 86-94and the pubEc, 98-99and sense of personal identity,

87-88Metropolis 16Metropolitan, Museum of Artt 86metro-regions, 113,118-19

Mefico Ciell; 85,130,131Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig,58,59

rvliami, 7

Milan, 39Minneapohs, 5,45,158Mitchell, WUiarn J 31Model Cities progmm, 1 14Modern movement, 13-2 l 24,

57,61,124ModiYiur, 105-9, 09, 0

Montred, 5, 7,40,43-44,72,118,158,160

Mount Royal Park, 1 17-1 8moving sidewdks, 156

Naples, 103Naband F h oard of C== , 137neighbarhook, 107

paor, 3 S 3 5

New Cardo, 15656,159-60,159,160, I 62,169

high-rise towers in, 161-163stores in, 170-71

New Urbanism, 22-23New York City 32,33,34,40,54,

56,72,73,103,118pupuhtion, 85pubfic m n~ or ta ti on ystem,

128,129,133setback law, 57,59Tenement House Law 64

tr2Ec congestion, 128-29

Paris, 12,17,73,163

""prk-and-ride,"" 134

and high-rise towers, 60aE-street, 5,6,1?, 19vzlet, 145

parks, 40,118Peachtree Plaza, Adanta, 53pedestrim travel, 5,6,20,30,154,

157,158picturesque in uilt en~ronment,

164Pittsburgh, 160poEution, car, 130

Xfoannan,Jofrn, 45power W , 156Progressive Movement, 98Prudential. Center, SO

pubkc housing, mass, 69-72



INDEX

public institutions, 62,165public r e a h

defining, 39-43priva~zation f, 4H8,52-53,54

Quiney Market, 4 W 1

rail travelrapid, 7,120-21,126,133, I45traditional, 7,120,133

regiond cities, 3,4,8,27 , 123, 125development process in, 104-5,

111-14,116,120of hture, 152-56hi&-rise towers in, 66-67travel within, 133,135

regisnd pl an ~n g, 18-1 9

Renarissance Center, 45repetidon in built environment,

7,83,88resorts, 120Rio de Janeiro, 7

Robertson,Jacquetin, 89Rockefefier Center, 58R o m n Forum, 29

Rome, 12,29,73, I03Ronda, 103Ryhcqnski, Witold, 43

St. Louis, 114St. Paul Budding, 85San Francisco, 7Sant ba, A~ntanio, 6SZo Paulo, 66,130scale, impact of, 85-86, See also

me@-scde

schools, suburban, 6Schwitters, Roy, 94,135

Seagrm Buil ig, S9Sears Tower, 85Seaside resort, 23Seatde, 5Sert,Josep Lluis, 2 1shopping centers. See mSimpang New Town, 7 7 7 , 7 7 ,

78, 78,79Singapore, 32,7475, 75,76,85,

90,124,131Sitte, C a ~ f l o , 6S k ib o r e O wi ng and Merrrll, 58SkyDame, 160skyscrapers. Gee high-rise

Saja,Edward, 27Sorkn, Michad, 24spcidization o roles n soeiet)~,

213,30Stadord, 4 1,42,43, 04

Starnford M&, 4 1 4 3Stern, Robert A M,, 89streets

dead-end, l07famous, 103pedestrian, 5 1

suburban o&ce complex,on, 3,14,15,33,123,

24

subway lines, 420,126,134Sudjic, D q m 17

The City After the Automobile

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