Urban Design Discussion

Not since Milton Keynes (wiki) have we seen more “ordering up” of new cities.   The whole idea of a new city or town reflects the history of human civilization, but do these more recent orders deflect from or contribute to the challenge of dense urban living?

In the past:

Washington, DC, was a place ordered for design and development to be a city in a district separate from the states by Article I of the U.S. Constitution.  Is one enough?

Australia’s capital city Canberra was a “not Sydney or Melbourne” compromise. 

President Kubitschek ordered the construction of Brasilia in 1956.  By mid 1960 urban planner Lucio Costa and architect Oscar Niemeyer, defined it as a “start over” city, one that makes a clean break with coastal urbanism, divisive class divisions and lack of planning.

The new capital of Kazakhstan- Astana is a similarly ambitious restatement of what a city should represent. 

And now:

Norman Foster’s architecture and planning firm’s vision of global urban living is in the firm’s idea for Serrenia on the Red Sea.  The concept draws from the success of the Palms of Abu Dubai.  Utopian concepts are coming to life.  What is really on offer here?  Escape from rising sea levels and global climate destabilization in a cozy villa by the sea?  Is it a sense of instant mobility?  New cities or urbanized living centers are popping up all over the earth, and almost all of them continue to take a “city-as-failure” approach to development.  Are these investments likely or unlikely to yield a couple of “moon shot” breakthroughs in environmental urbanism?   Maybe.

From the mid-evil castles of Europe to the Palms on the Persian Gulf, little has changed.  One modest look at all of them reveals the ongoing destruction of the earth’s surface hidden behind the mask of green marketing and wealth.  Much of it is along the equator.  Is this not city building?  The ground breaking is on a new frontier — the ocean edge and floor.  It may appear to be an ostentatious transfer of the aristocracy’s demand to include those of media celebrities, but it is so much more.

Elevator to Space

Designers present images of the world’s urban possibilities as if they could be compatible with natural systems complexity.  They cannot.  Recall the city building ideas by designers such as Paolo Soleri or Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright.   These and many others envisioned the human capacity to build massive self-contained cities.  Writers too, such as Arthur C. Clark suggested an elevator to space that gained credibility when it proved technically feasible.   This idea happened because Clark imagined a time when getting into space might require something other than a fossil fuel.

On earth, the self-contained city-building story is quite different.  A case in point is the 61-story residential Marina City towers designed by Bertrand Goldberg in Chicago, IL have the “city within a city” label that proved to be more marketing that architecture.  Yet, in this case of vision implementation something is withdrawn, products like this became versions of multiple block “Stuyvesant Towns” – once constructed.  Our “towers in the park” have been exquisitely criticized as little more than warehouses with personal open space potential.

The lessons are uncomplicated; a successful urban environment is not one set in a park, or one laid out in neat single use plats, or self-contained and walled up.  The success of a city is a measure of how changeable it can become, how mutable and adaptable to new ideas it can be, and how it offers itself up into new kinds of space and use that are soft, pliable and connectable.

Who said “it is either a box or a duck”?

Only recently, has architecture addressed its creations as one of two things, “a box or a duck”.  As a critique, it speaks to the two main components of architecture that shape most of what we know today – Greco-Roman and Gothic.  While discovering a million new ways to decorate a box will continue joyfully (e.g. Gehry),  the architecture and engineering professions led by people such as John Todd, are steadily moving toward organic “ism” and the science of biomimicry.  Here the potential is to grow space as an alternative to building it.  There is one word for this change in outlook about the possibilities of design.  It is “fractal”.

Given the potential of a natural “as is above, as is below” architecture, a serious look at the urban form of the nation’s mega-regions could offer much instruction.  The order of it is there, but limited and flawed.   It is Newtonian (point to point) but Euclidean with two meanings.  Euclid was a mathematician well worth knowing because of the way Newton added “time” to his dimension equations and the second is Euclid vs. Ambler.  This is a landmark planning law case defining the regulation of use as a power of the state.  If it was possible to write an algorithm to counterbalance Newton’s math and land use law with quantum physics, the fractal nature of urban design might reveal the city’s sensitive dependence on initial conditions for an entirely different kind of restoration.  All things in life have a point where its parts and thus the whole, stops growing, and the outer boundaries of its form of life as a community are limited by external factors.  The question is whether cities as the prime expression of human life have similar boundaries, and if not why not.

Yielding to the vast humanity that is literally built into the bewildering mathematical model of quantum physics offers a useful pathway into the chaos of nature.  It illustrates how the smallest level of action represented by a square foot of a vacant and abandoned lot, has the capacity for creative self-renewal.  It is how leadership rises to meet a need through a community garden association and how they coalesce into creative institutions with new mandates and missions.  These exquisite forms of discrete energy vibrate at the heart of decay itself, within that square foot of soil, to the garden group formed by its promise, to the citywide and national movement it ultimately represents.  This is quantum physics.  It really is as simple as that, and it repeats as energy in millions of ways, thousands of times over.  It is about paying attention to the data, whether it is a square foot of soil or an entire continent.  In either case is about a response to energy as individuals in a community.