Before we know it the fall semester will be upon us and another batch of interesting conferences! In order to begin planning for possible Student Planning Association subsidy of student registration fees, please indicate whether you are interested in attending the 18-21 October 2007 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning conference in Milwaukee.
An extraordinary time, to be sure, for planning-related news! Just a week ago, Michael Bloomburg, Mayor of New York City (and a Republican, at that!), announced an aggressive policy slate that included a number of non-trivial environmental steps the implementation of which would result in a New York City even more sustainable than it is now. PLANYC proposes to reduce the city’s carbon dioxide emissions by a 30% through a multidimensional environmental program addressing land, air, water, energy, and transportation. He’s even pushing a plan to implement a congestion pricing cordon for most of Manhattan! While controversial and attacked in some quarters as having an disproportionate impact on the poor, the repercussions of our self-inflicted global warming crisis require dramatic — and immediate — action.
And check out the Tony Blair heir-apparent, Gordon Brown’s call for the development of a number of new eco-towns. Ostensibly designed to help relieve a shortage in affordable housing in Britain and constructed on brownfield sites, these “new towns” will significantly advance the cause of sustainable development by incorporating such features as “renewable energy, rainwater harvesting, [and] locally-sourced and reclaimed materials.”
Subtraction by Subtraction
By Fred Siegel
13 April 2007
City Journal
From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City, by Nathan Glazer (Princeton University Press, 300 pp., $24.95)
Nathan Glazer, East Harlem native and now professor emeritus of sociology and education at Harvard, has written brilliantly about cities for more than half a century. He became famous with his pathbreaking 1961 study of ethnicity, Beyond the Melting Pot, coauthored with Daniel Patrick Moynihan. But there’s much more. Writing in Commentary in the 1950s and 60s, Glazer was the first to warn that the intersection of entrenched interest groups and an unaccountable bureaucracy was making New York City “ungovernable.” In the 1970s and 80s, Glazer, both as a thinker and as the coeditor of The Public Interest, played a key role in explaining why the Great Society’s social programs for the urban poor had backfired. In the 1990s, writing in City Journal, he explained how New York’s tripling of public expenditures since the 1960s, during a period when its population was stable, was leading it to ruin.
Many know Glazer from these and other writings on immigration and social policy, but there remains yet another facet to this polymath. His new book, From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City, collects his intriguing–and accessible–essays on urban architecture and public space, some of which originally appeared in City Journal and The Public Interest.
Aesthetic and social causes, seemingly reinforcing one another, animated modernist architecture as it developed in the 1920s and 30s. Victorian architecture was rich in expensive ornamentation; its public buildings arose as imitations of Greek and Roman structures. Aesthetically, architectural modernism, like modernism more generally, was a revolt against Victorian forms and their art-deco successors. The “symbols, icons and forms of that world,” modernists argued, had lost their meaning with the decline of religious belief; it was the modernists’ job to “make it new.” In an effort both to break with the past and to provide the working classes with better living conditions, Glazer explains, the modernists insisted that buildings should be relentlessly functional and rational, accommodating specific needs. Architects should make no concessions to public taste–the public would need to learn what to like.
Modernism was a kind of architectural Protestantism that sought to cleanse its version of sacred space from the encrustations of tradition. Buildings should be monuments to the genius of the modernist architect rather than to the glory of Greece, Rome, or God. Modernist slogans straightforwardly expressed this rationalist turn of mind: “Ornament is a crime,” “Less is more,” “Form follows function,” and so on.
Simpler design would lower the costs of housing, the modernists believed. Apartment towers, or “machines for living” as Le Corbusier described them, could be built in factories with new materials like reinforced concrete, instead of incurring the expense of hand craftsmen. A leading Dutch modernist called for “material and labor economy” in the name of “social equality.”
If this book has a fault, it’s that Glazer takes the modernists at their word on their good intentions. Like the Fabians, who represented a political version of modernism, modernist architects in the early twentieth century acted as much out of disdain as empathy for the lives of the middle-class people meant to crowd into the “machines for living.” Three of the most prominent modernists–Mies van der Rohe, Phillip Johnson, and Le Corbusier–flirted with fascism. Modernism appealed to bureaucrats of all stripes. In the 1950s, East New York housing projects bore a striking resemblance to those of East London and East Berlin, not to mention Moscow.
Whatever its intentions, modernism’s record is mostly one of failure. The public has resisted reeducation. Modernist homes, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, still draw wide admiration, but virtually all American private homes come in one decorative style or another. “Nearly all our suburbs–tracts of Georgian revivals, Cape Cod bungalows, faux adobes–evoke the past rather than the Modernists’ future,” writes Glazer. And modernists have been notoriously unable to build civic spaces that can win public admiration, the Vietnam memorial being a partial exception. Boston’s soulless slab of a city hall, hailed in the early 1960s as a modernist masterpiece, draws only scorn from the people who work in it and from the citizens of Boston. Coldly uninhabitable, its concrete exterior cracked and crumbling, the building will soon face the wrecking ball, most Bostonians hope. Former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, a devotee of modern art, gave his state the Albany Mal! l, a wasteland so unwelcoming that few wander its desolate paths, even in good weather. Many State University of New York branches come in a similarly brutalist style, which has resulted in campuses defined by walls of chipped concrete that exude a forbidding chill.
Glazer compares the lively street life of the East Harlem of his childhood with the desolation of what eventually followed: streetscape-less towers in a park. In the 1960s, Chicago mayor Richard Daley, told of federal plans to build vertical hives, protested that people of all races preferred to live in two- and three-story walk-ups of the sort he’d grown up in. But he found himself overruled. Only the towers, he was told, were economically efficient. The upshot was the massive Robert Taylor Homes, which became a synonym for social breakdown. All across the country, public housing towers, cut off from the ordinary street life of city neighborhoods, came to symbolize modernism’s failure.
For many, the demolition of St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in 1972 heralded modernism’s fall from grace. But despite public rejection, the style survives–and even thrives in some settings. Thirty-five years later, virtually all new office buildings arise in a modernist style. The future for urban architecture looks less than promising.
True, there is better and worse in modernism. Chicago’s Loop, for example, is far more architecturally interesting than midtown Manhattan. But the grim gray steel and glass office buildings that define many downtowns have not, for the most part, been replaced. The reason, Glazer explains, goes beyond the modernist monopoly in our schools of architecture. It’s in large measure a matter of cost. The vast scale of modern buildings, he writes, “means that the attention to detail . . . must go by the board.” The immense size of the contemporary office building means that the design must be “determined by structural engineers, air conditioning and heating engineers, experts in . . . electronic communication facilities,” and he might have added, the pressure to build “green.”
In recent years, modernism has come under sustained assault from preservationists and “new urbanists,” who recognize the need for an architecture that reflects the public’s sense of beauty. Their efforts to return grace and vitality to urban life have borne considerable fruit in Providence and Portland, among other cities that have preserved old office buildings. But unless architects working in these new styles get broad-scale commissions, the way modernists have and do, we can expect to inhabit cities whose architecture repels at least as much as it attracts.
Fred Siegel is the editor of the Manhattan Institute’s Cities on a Hill and a professor of history at the Cooper Union for Science and Art.
According to Elaine Chao, Secretary of Labor in the present Bush administration:
“There are more words in the Federal Register describing OSHA regulations than there are words in the Bible. They’re a lot less inspired to red and a lot harder to understand. This is not fair.”
The quote appeared in 25 April 2007 New York Times article chronicling the evisceration of the regulatory responsibilities of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in favor of voluntary industry compliance agreements.
Words fail me.
Once again, the Exhibit Hall at this year’s National Planning Conference was one of the most interesting and energetic places at the conference. While it might not be quite so frenetic as in San Antonio last year (remember the CalTrans manager tackling potential job candidates in the aisle?), the job market for entry- and mid-level planners seems pretty robust. Two MCRP students with whom I spoke had to beat recruiters off with cats … uh, sticks. One of them was actually looking for a job! He spent quite a bit of his time here interviewing and has follow-up interviews scheduled with both cities with whom he spoke. It sort of makes me whish I were in the market!
Yet another reason (if you needed one) to attend these conferences!!
It only take a few years in the “real world” to realize that it’s true. It often matters more who, rather than what, you know. After being deluged by MBA-speak, networking opportunities, and virtual communities, it may sound trite … but it’s true. And it’s especially true when one is pursuing an academic or professional degree in a new functional area (as am I) or refreshing/extending one’s knowledge base in an age in which one must be able to remake oneself multiple times during ones working life. With each new epaulet (a metaphor I came to appreciate after reading an interview with the late, great, and iconoclastic Richard Feynman), one must struggle to not land on “Go” when restarting one’s career. This is where personal contacts are especially helpful. Whereas HR departments through which one is accustomed to circulating one’s résumé are increasingly automated and hostile to non-traditional qualifications (e.g., multiple, diverse job experiences or career restarts), acquaintances in the biz are particularly attuned to the variety of skills and personalities necessary in successful public, private, or non-profit sector organizations. Through face-to-face encounters, these professionals are very often able to better assess your potential worth to their organization than can some pencil-pushing, HR functionary sitting at headquarters. Contacts made through these personal encounters can be valuable champions in your search for a better-than-average (if not perfect) position after graduation.
The student turnout here at the Philadelphia conference has been terrific. Of course, one would expect to see the area schools well-represented, and they are. However, it truly astonished me to learn that 16 (count them, s-i-x-t-e-e-n!) planning students from Texas A&M attended. What an amazing showing! (I’m sure that Dr. Bright had no little role in encouraging them to make the investment.) In general, you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a student here!
I’d be remiss in this lament if I didn’t reiterate the oportunity cost incurred by planning students who don’t take advantage of this sort of opportunity. Yes, it’s a tad expensive, but so are life’s best lessons. And once you try one of these things, I think that you’ll be hooked. There’s just so much to learn in such a collegial environment, and there are so many interesting people to meet and with whom to talk about almost anything planning. Try it! You’ll like it!
It never ceases to amaze me how important attendance at these things can be! Not only does one have the opportunity to listen to really smart people talking about things that really matter (in either the general or particular sense), but you also realize that you are part of a community of professionals that is genuinely committed to making the world a better place in which to live. In the midst of all our exam taking and book reading and lecture listeneing, we may forget that what we’re all about is … people!
This morning I had the the great honor to hear the Global Planning Keynote address delivered by Carolina Barco Isakson, Ambassador from Columbia to the US, and former head planner of Bogotá. Her’s was a remarkable story of the confluence of inspired mayoral leadership and of harnessing public commitment and participation in the transformation of a city once characterized by crime, violence, corruption, and fiscal irresponsibility into a place you might actually want to live. (Thanks to Grist for that particular sentiment; see A Tale of Two Mayors.)
As difficult and frustrating and complex as the encouragement and incorporation of public participation into the planning process is, one was left with the clear message that no sustainable community can be created without civic commitment to the goal and participation in the process. Ambassador Barco’s inspirational story was truly a moving testament to what the public sector can accomplish when it enlists the civic quarter in it’s initiatives.
Well, I had intended to blow off all but one of today’s sessions and walk the city, but the weather we had on Friday is now camped out on top of Philadelphia. Maybe tomorrow …
The “Politics and Planning” session this morning was pretty extraordinary. Hosted by Roger Waldon, author of Planners and Politics: Helping Communities Make Decisions, the panel addressed the need for planners of all stripes and seniorities to embrace their roles as political agents. Maxine Griffith, Executive VP and Special Advisor fo Campus Planninng at Columbia University discussed the complexities of Columbia’s efforts to build a new campus in the Manhattanville section of Harlem. David Godschalk, Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reflected on his career in public sector and academic planning as it currently intersects his role as politician sitting on the town council. He suggested that a planners greatest assets may be patience and a commitment to consensus. Finally, Alec Bash regaled us with stories of his long career in the San Francisco planning department, framed in the generalization that “good planning is good politics.”
In his opening anecdote, Waldon suggested that planners should seek to be outcome agnostic (my term, not his). I asked the panel to reflect on this proposed role in light of the emerging threat to the public interest posed by various environmental threats (global warming chief among them). I was relieved to hear from them all that planners, indeed, should strive to address the common good in their consultations and advice, and to “manage the planning process” (Bash) when it appears to be acting contrary to that good. Griffith acknowledged that the degree to which a planner is able to so affect the agenda is related to her organizational level and the political credentials of her peers. Bash recognized the planner’s responsibility to the public interest as an ethical one that should take priority over organizational loyalty.
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I was looking forward to the “Climate Change & Planners” session. The NRDC policy guy, Ned Farquhar, primarily emphasized the central role of energy policy in the global warming debate. At the same time, though, he suggested that intelligent land use planning can have as much impact on the problem as can solutions based on new energy technologies. In short, he argued that local planning choices are crucial to addressing global warming threats.
The remainder of this session was absorbed by an excellent review of the Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court case given by Tim Dowling from the Community Rights Council. I’m actually motivated to read the decision!
Oh City of Brotherly Love, I have returned! After 25 years, you are new to me, yet strangely and comfortingly familiar. Ben Franklin surveys you from atop a City Hall more gleaming that I every remember seeing. And on an early Saturday evening, your streets bustle with purpose and festivity. It’s great to be back!
And I can only imagine that you who thought you had more important things to do (like schoolwork) are just a little bit sorry that you didn’t make the trip. Philadelphia is one of America’s best examples of urban planning done right. The city radiates from Ben and City Hall south through the Italian neighborhoods and out to the sports stadia, airport, and shipyards; north along Broad Street into some of the toughest neighborhoods you’ll hope to never experience along to Temple University; west through an intimate Central City and across the Schuylkill River to the University of Pennsylvania (one of my alma maters) and West Philadelphia; and east across Independence Mall, over Franklin Bridge, and into Camden.
Out my hotel window I look down over Broad Street the august Academy of Music. I saw my first performance of Handel’s Messiah in 1980 with my best girl and her girl friend. My treat, it was, indeed, a night to remember for us all. Diagonally across I gaze upon the old Fairmount Hotel building, the site of the famous outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease.
Philadelphia was my first big city. Old memories of life in this then foreign land drift back to me. I lived in my first converted warehouse loft here, and then in the demilitarized boundary of West Philadelphia with the unruly city to the west. This is where I was mugged and where we braved the streets of West Philly at night on the lookout for marauding “wolf packs.” Several Penn students were set upon and beaten by these youth. And a guy in the walk-up next door to me was murdered by a shotgun blast through his front door. But at the same time it was welcoming and embraceable. While those were the days, I’m looking forward to learning how the city has change from that of my youth. My other youth, that is.
I found a fascinating article in the 13 April national edition of the NY Times: A Plan to Tame the Architectural Chaos of India’s Capital. I suspect that it may/should be of more than passing interest to many of us.
The reporter, Amelia Gentleman, outlines characteristics of the new (not “New”) Delhi Master Plan that calls for the razing of many structures that have been erected over the past many years under the radar of planning officials. These residences are to be replaced by high density, hi-rise buildings. Much of the informal construction constitutes established communities the social fabric of which is threatened by their destruction. The article raises some of the same questions that American planners face when contemplating the redevelopment of decaying urban neighborhoods. What would you do?
Check it out at A Plan to Tame …
