Mending the Urban Fabric
By Daniel Penrice
America's cities had a hard time of it through much of the twentieth
century. Suburbanization, the rise of the automobile, the modernist movement
in architecture and urban design-all of these forces, and others, combined
to profoundly transform American cities, and eventually to challenge their
centrality to our national life. A hundred years ago, cities were growing
explosively, turning themselves into the dynamic engines of what was still
a newly industrialized country. Today, having survived a depression, the
post World War II suburban boom, and other traumas ranging from "urban
renewal" to the social and fiscal crises of the 1960s and 1970s, American
cities-with Boston prominently among them-are staging a comeback. Yet their
place in the national scheme of things is now hard to pin down, and their
futures are uncertain.
Even defining the word city is harder today than it was at the beginning
of the century. Describing a "whole new pattern of metropolitan settlement"
that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s, the urban historian Jon C. Teaford
has written, "In many areas, no longer was there a dominant central
city and economically subordinate and dependent communities worthy of the
name suburbs. So-called central cities were no longer central to the lives
of metropolitan residents, and the so-called suburbs did not merit the
prefix sub." At Northeastern's new Center for Urban and Regional Policy
(CURP), associate director Charles Euchner gives qualified endorsement
to the view that city and suburbs are no longer distinguishable. "There
is a clear blurring of lines because of how mobile people are right now,"
he says.
Euchner-who holds a Ph.D. in urban studies and worked as an urban planner
before coming to N.U. this fall-defines a city in a way that transcends
the old urban-suburban divide. "People need to be part of a community
that they can understand," he points out. "On the other hand,
there is no small community that can be self-sufficient in this global
system that we have now. And the way to have the best of both worlds-the
localism of the neighborhood and the cosmopolitanism of a global economy
and a global culture-is to think about cities and regions as networks of
urban villages."
What is an "urban village"? Euchner, who left a position as
project manager for Boston 400, the city of Boston's current long-term
physical-planning initiative, to join CURP, reels off a list of examples
in Boston. Owing to its historical pattern of development and growth, this
city is particularly rich in neighborhoods of distinctive character: Fields
Corner in Dorchester, for example, or Centre Street in Jamaica Plain, or
N.U.'s own neighboring urban village of the Fenway. Nor are such places
found only within the Boston city limits: Brookline Village, Harvard Square,
Newton Centre-"All of these places are urban villages," Euchner
maintains. What such localities share are some of the most fundamental
prerequisites for vital urban life, he says: "The urban village is
a small community held together by common spaces and a diversity of people
and activities. The key characteristic is the public realm-common spaces
focus people on something outside of and bigger than themselves, while
giving them enough room to be themselves."
For Euchner, everything that urban planners, and urbanites generally,
need to think about today flows from the concept of a city as a network
of urban villages. "What planners, developers, and people in communities,
schools, cultural institutions, and so forth need to do," he says,
"is enhance the livability of urban villages, and make sure that people
in those urban villages have convenient, attractive, efficient, and enjoyable
connections to everything else in the region."
Enhancing livability and connectedness "is simple," he says.
"You have to strengthen the public realm of the urban villages-the
streets and sidewalks, the transit stations, the schools, the community
centers, the business districts, the parks, the historic places. You have
to do everything you can to make those places work on their own and relate
to each other. And you have to make sure that anybody in the whole village
who wants to can get access to everything else that the larger city and
region offer. That means transit, it means bike networks, it means decent
roads, and so on. So you see, we're not talking rocket science here."
This emphasis on transportation speaks to one of the most serious ongoing
challenges to the vitality of urban America. The automobile has proven
a curse to American cities-and not only by choking their streets with traffic,
as horse-drawn vehicles once did. The cars have also gobbled up space for
expressways and parking (thereby diluting the physical density upon which
urban civilization has traditionally depended) and spurred the exodus to
the suburbs that followed both world wars but grew to epic proportions
in the age of Eisenhower and afterwards. As electric trolley tracks were
dismantled in most cities to make room for cars and buses, the cars took
over the streets, and mass transit (including subways) became what it remains
in most of urban America today, a distinctly second- or third-class mode
of transportation.
The implications seem clear: to realize Euchner's vision of urban villages
that are both livable on their own terms and connected with the larger
metropolis, American cities in the twenty-first century will have to develop
sensible transportation systems. And while it is easy to say that strengthening
transportation links in and around the city isn't "rocket science,"
working out the details is an exercise in complexity. This is the reason
there are transportation engineers such as Peter Furth, associate professor
of civil and environmental engineering. According to Furth, the field of
transportation engineering is now focusing on the two different, but connected,
areas where cities have traffic problems: the freeways and the streets.
Originally meant to speed the flow of traffic both to and from and within
the cities, America's urban expressways (like freeways, the word now seems
a misnomer) have become dangerously clogged arteries for which transportation
engineers today are trying to invent the equivalent of angioplasty. Furth
describes some of their efforts: "Mostly they're looking at intelligent
transportation systems-that's where they're hoping the next breakthrough
in capacity will be. One way to squeeze more cars onto a road is by getting
the cars to follow one another real close. You can have radar, so my car's
connected to yours, and my car knows just how fast your car's going. It
will sense right away when your car starts braking, so that instead of
having to be six car lengths behind you, I can be six inches behind you.
And now I've just quadrupled the capacity of my highway."
Another type of radar-based sensing system-one that would keep cars
in the center of their lanes-could be used to increase the horizontal capacity
of expressways. Yet even such "breakthroughs," Furth is careful
to point out, would only create another headache for cities. "If you
solve [the capacity problem on the freeways]," he says, "that's
only going to cause a capacity problem on the streets leading to and from
the freeways."
As for alleviating existing congestion on city streets, Furth sees "a
big push for bicycle provision." Improved mass transit, he believes,
offers no magic solution since "we've let our cities grow in a way
that was not developed around mass transit." Contrasting American
attitudes towards public transportation with European ones, Furth says,
"If a European came and saw a bus stuck on Mass. Ave., crawling along
at two miles an hour, they'd just say, 'This is crazy.' It simply is understood
in Europe that if the traffic congestion starts being bad, you've got to
protect the buses by having a bus lane. I don't know how long it will take,
but sooner or later American cities are going to have to say, 'We made
a mistake.' And if there isn't room on Mass. Ave. for all those cars and
the buses, well then either we build a subway or we've just got to limit
the number of cars there."
Although a few American cities have recently taken, or are now contemplating,
the radical step of simply dismantling parts of their freeway systems (San
Francisco, for example, tore down its Embarcadero Freeway after it was
damaged in the earthquake of 1989, and Milwaukee may soon demolish much
of its Park East Freeway), curtailing private automobile use still cuts
against the grain of American individualism. And in the absence of truly
efficient mass transit, tearing down expressways and reducing the number
of cars on city streets will not advance the goal of which Euchner and
others speak: linking urban villages into metropolitan networks.
Over at the Department of Art and Architecture, associate professor
George Thrush has been working for the better part of the last decade on
an idea for improving Boston's mass-transit network so as to help realize
such a notion. A visionary with a broad streak of pragmatism, Thrush represents
a new breed of urban architects and designers trying to reconcile Americans'
insistence on a high degree of private autonomy-and the dispersed, fragmented
cityscapes that this has left in its wake-with their growing hunger for
connectedness and livable places.
Thrush's pet project for Boston is the Urban Ring, a proposed thoroughfare
that would circle all the way from Columbia Point in Dorchester to Logan
Airport in East Boston by way of the South End medical area, lower Roxbury
(N.U.'s neighbor to the south), the Longwood medical area, MIT, east Somerville,
Everett, and Chelsea. Carrying either buses, a light railway, or some combination
of both, the ring would help relieve the congestion in some of the most
heavily trafficked parts of the city. It would also break the constriction
of a system in which four spoke-like rapid-transit lines connect with one
another only in the downtown area.
But as Thrush is quick to point out, the Urban Ring is not only-or even
primarily-about transportation. In proselytizing for the ring over the
last eight years, he has called it an "antidote to fragmentation."
"Anyone who's lived in Boston," Thrush observes, "can attest
to its sometimes byzantine physical character. And not only to byzantine
physical character but to the inability to relate one part of town to another
perceptually." Contrasting Boston with his hometown of Chicago-a city
that "you can make a mental map of in about a day"-he argues
that a city's "legibility" and "perceptual clarity"
are essential to urban dwellers' ability to relate their individual neighborhoods
and communities to a larger whole. By creating physical markers (such as
towers) thoughtfully integrated into each of the communities it traversed
but common to many far-flung parts of the city, the Urban Ring, in Thrush's
view, would strengthen links across Boston that are more than merely logistical.
Thrush also believes that, besides giving the city improved transport
and an added "layer of legibility," the Urban Ring could become
a corridor for coherent, urban-friendly development. At N.U., he teaches
his students about what he calls "an urbanism that bridges the gap
between the spatial clarity of the traditional city, and the fragmented
post-industrial landscape of the inner-city and inner-ring suburbs."
What this means in practice, he explains, is to take urban dead-zones such
as Boston's Inner Belt Industrial Park (located beneath I-93 at the point
where east Cambridge, east Somerville, and Charlestown converge) and "look
at some new, contemporary uses that have a hard time fitting in the dense
fabric of the traditional city."
As one possible use for such areas, Thrush suggests "big-box"
retail, which is now found mostly in the suburbs. This sort of idea is
heresy to more traditional urbanists, who have long decried the destruction
of downtown and city neighborhood stores, first by suburban malls and then
by the likes of Home Depot. "As urban designers," Thrush rejoins,
"we can whine and moan about that transition, but I don't know what
the hell we're going to do about it. If it continues, then is there a way
for us to at least incorporate such building types into the fabric of our
city a bit more?" Given that "American cities are made of private
development," he continues, "I'm very interested in trying to
see the good that can come of it. All we can plan is that the incremental,
self-interested development that occurs will ultimately start to aggregate
into a pattern that actually accrues to the common good."
There is one dimension of urban (and also suburban) life, however, in
which such American imperatives as mobility and maximum private enrichment
can unmistakably collide with the public interest. While most people would
presumably endorse the idea of development that "accrues to the common
good," a more fundamental need is for development that respects the
natural environment on which everybody, everywhere, depends. At the School
of Law, professor Lee Breckenridge, a specialist in environmental and natural-resource
law and land-use planning, provides a crucial perspective on the challenges
facing cities and metropolitan areas at the dawn of the new century.
In one obvious example of an urban issue with significant environmental
dimensions, the traffic congestion on the freeways and streets of America's
cities remains (despite the adoption of federal emissions standards a generation
ago) an abundant source of greenhouse gases and air pollution. Given the
level of automobile use in American cities, Breckenridge says, "It's
clear that the smog standards, the ozone standards, the particulate-matter
standards need to be tighter. We're right in the middle of a big battle
over ozone and particulate-matter standards now."
Yet while the federal government's war on air pollution reinforces the
struggle against congestion, other aspects of environmental law and regulation
have trammeled efforts to reverse the decline of central cities. What Breckenridge
terms "the so-called brownfields-greenfields problem" stems from
the incentives that environmental regulations create for commercial development
on pristine suburban land ("greenfields"), as opposed to abandoned,
and often polluted, urban industrial sites ("brownfields"). "The
state and federal governments have been working really hard to find answers
to that," she says, "to encourage reinvestment on so-called brownfields
without allowing unsafe levels of contamination."
As is also true of traffic congestion, a solution to the brownfields-greenfields
problem would be very much in the interests not only of cities but of whole
metropolitan areas. Twenty-five years ago, during his first term as governor
of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis led an effort to learn what kinds of
growth policies the state's cities and towns wanted to pursue. "The
cities wanted to grow," recalls Dukakis, now Distinguished Professor
of Political Science. "They were desperate for growth. But the towns
were very wary of it." Today, the issue of suburban sprawl has pushed
itself onto the national political agenda, while central cities continue
to need both residential and commercial development. Thus it would serve
the interests of cities and suburbs alike, Dukakis says, for states (which
"make the infrastructure decisions in this country") to focus
on "reinvestment in older urban communities."
According to Dukakis, investment in areas such as transport, the environment,
and housing is one of two things that will help revive America's central
cities. The other factor-already becoming evident in places like Boston,
he says-is a return to the city by people who are tiring of the suburbs.
Statistics actually show that suburbia remains more attractive than the
city for most Americans who can choose where to live. (The population of
America's suburbs, through most of the 1990s, grew more than twice as fast
as that of central cities, while several major cities actually lost population.)
Yet as Dukakis and others also point out, central cities will continue
to exert considerable influence on the larger society as nexuses of business,
education, and culture.
Etymologically speaking, after all, the words city and civilization
are synonyms, and the future of American civilization itself is likely
to depend on what happens to our cities. Along with their suburbs, "exurbs,"
and still more novel adaptations, they may evolve into entities that we
have never previously seen or imagined. And yet, Northeastern's urbanologists
seem to agree, we should still be able to foster our cities' healthy growth
by treating them as organisms to be nurtured, not machines to be reinvented.
George Thrush offers an urban designer's perspective on the historical
direction of cities in 2000. "Faced with the enormous pace of social,
technological, and cultural change that began in the late nineteenth century,"
he says, "the twentieth century's response, largely, was revolutionary,
systemic change." Urban renewal, for example, was an essentially utopian
scheme that ignored the aggregated character of living cities by trying
to rebuild vast segments of them from scratch. As Thrush puts it, "A
utopian says, 'There's this one moment in time, we're right, and everyone
else in all of recorded human history has been wrong. So let's bulldoze
it all.'" His own preference, he explains, is for change that is "revolutionary
but not utopian." "If I were recommending something," Thrush
continues, "it would be finding ways to accommodate large-scale, rapid
change that still allow the fabric of our built environment to hold together."
Unfortunately for the conscience of the academy, urban renewal (like
the modernist movement in architecture and design out of which it partly
grew) was very much a creation of academics and intellectuals. What can
universities (and especially urban ones) do today to help produce better,
more workable ideas for America's cities?
Provost David Hall, a strong proponent of N.U.'s urban mission, names
three "guiding principles" for such an effort. "One of these
general principles," Hall says, "is that academic insights and
resources have to be developed in a real-life context. Second, one of the
things we've learned from the past is that city planning is not just about
bricks and mortar and the way streets are designed-it is also the human
factors that really make a difference. And one of the beauties of an academic
environment is that you can build interdisciplinary models that can touch
on these various aspects. Third, I think that technology is so critical
in how we think about the future, that the insights that universities can
bring to bear about the long-term impact of technology-not only its benefits
but also some of its downsides-will be very helpful."
Real-life contexts, human factors, the benefits and downsides of technology-such
considerations propose a more complex, and yet more modest, approach to
enhancing the life of cities than the often arrogant and heedless ones
of the last century. And as Charles Euchner suggests, perhaps the best
way to plan our cities for the future is to remember what has worked in
the past. "People have lived in villages since the beginning of human
civilization," he observes. "We know that people need certain
things: certain places to live, certain places to get their livelihoods,
certain ways to congregate in civic spaces. The human species, and the
big human social, political, and economic imperatives, are not going to
change. And so all we need to do is take this really fundamental understanding
of what cities are and try to create as good a context as possible for
people to do what they do best."
For more information on the Urban Ring project, see the March 1997 issue
of Northeastern University Alumni Magazine <www.numag.neu.edu/9703/
UrbanRing.html>.
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