Shaping the City, 2nd Edition

Taking on the key issues in urban design, Shaping the City examines the critical
ideas that have driven these themes and debates through a study of particular
cities at important periods in their development.

As well as retaining crucial discussions about cities such as Los Angeles,

Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Brasilia at particular moments in
their history that exemplified the problems and themes at hand like the megacity,
the post-colonial city and New Urbanism, in this new edition the editors have
introduced new case studies critical to any study of contemporary urbanism –
China, Dubai, Tijuana, and the wider issues of informal cities in the Global
South.

The book serves as both a textbook for classes in urban design, planning and
theory and is also attractive to the increasing interest in urbanism by scholars in
other fields. Shaping the City provides an essential overview of the range and
variety of urbanisms and urban issues that are critical to an understanding of
contemporary urbanism.

Rodolphe El-Khoury is an urban designer and historian. He is Associate

Professor and Canada Research Chair in Architecture and Urban Design at The
University of Toronto. El-Khoury is also a partner in Khoury Levit Fong, an
award winning practice that has gained international recognition for innovative
design.

Edward Robbins, trained as an anthropologist, is Professor of Urbanism in the

Institute of Urbanism, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design who has
written and taught extensively about the relation of design to social theory and
practice. Presently he is engaged in working on the challenges posed by cities in
the south, especially the issue of poverty.
Shaping The City, 2nd Edition
Studies in History, Theory and Urban Design

Edited by
Rodolphe El-Khoury and Edward Robbins
Second edition published 2013
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 selection and editorial
material, Rodolphe El-Khoury and Edward Robbins; individual chapters, the contributors The right of
Rodolphe El-Khoury and Edward Robbins to be identified as authors of the editorial material, and of the
individual authors as authors of their contributions, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any
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only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

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for this book ISBN: 978-0-415-58458-6 (hbk)
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Contents

List of Contributors
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Rodolphe El-Khoury and Edward Robbins

1 Abu Dhabi and Dubai – World City Doubles

Keller Easterling

2 Atlanta
Rem Koolhaas

3 Barcelona – Re-thinking Urbanistic Projects

Joan Busquets

4 Brasilia – City as Park Forever

Farès el-Dahdah

5 Chicago – Superblockism: Chicago’s Elastic Grid

Sarah Whiting

6 Detroit – Motor City

Charles Waldheim

7 Hong Kong – Aformal Urbanism

Jonathan D. Solomon

8 Los Angeles – Between Cognitive Mapping and Dirty Realism

 Paulette Singley

9 New Orleans – Ecological Urbanism

Victor J. Jones

10 Oslo – The Triumph of Zombie Urbanism

Jonny Aspen

11 Philadelphia – The Urban Design of Philadelphia: Taking the Towne for the
City
Richard M. Sommer

12 San Francisco – San Francisco in an Age of Reaction

Mitchell Schwarzer

13 San Diego/Tijuana – An Urbanism Beyond the Property Line

Teddy Cruz

14 Shenzhen – Topology of a Neoliberal City

Adrian Blackwell

15 New Urbanism
Edward Robbins

Bibliography
Index
Contributors

Jonny Aspen is an Associate Professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and

Design Joan Busquets is Architect Barcelona, Martin Bucksbaum Professor in
Practice in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Design School Teddy
Cruz is Professor in Public Culture and Urbanism at the University of
California, San Diego, Visual Arts Department Farès el-Dahdah is Associate
Professor at Rice University, School of Architecture Keller Easterling is
Professor at Yale University, School of Architecture

Victor J. Jones is an Assistant Professor at University of Southern California

Rodolphe El-Khoury is Associate Professor at University of Toronto, John H.
Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design Adrian Blackwell is
Assistant Professor at University of Waterloo, School of Architecture Rem
Koolhaas is founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture

Edward Robbins is a Professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design

Mitchell Schwarzer is a Professor at California College of the Arts

Paulette Singley is an Associate Professor at Woodbury University,

Jonathan D. Solomon is Associate Professor at Syracuse University

Richard M. Sommer is Dean of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture,

Landscape and Design, University of Toronto Charles Waldheim is Chair of
Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design Sarah
Whiting is Dean of the School of Architecture at Rice University
Acknowledgments

The editors would first and foremost like to thank all the authors who
contributed to this volume.
The editors and publishers also gratefully acknowledge the following for
their permission to reproduce material in the book.
Rem Koolhaas, “Atlanta” © 1995, Rem Koolhaas and The Monacelli Press,
Inc, was first published in S,M,L,XL, by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, The
Monacelli Press, Inc, New York.
“Abu Dhabi and Dubai: World City Doubles” is adapted and updated from
a text published as “Extrastatecraft” from Perspecta 39, “Re_Urbanism” (2007).
Among several peers, colleagues and friends who have contributed critical
insights and expert knowledge to the book the editors especially recognize and
thank George Baird, Robert Levit, Jennifer Schirmer, and Nader Tehrani.
We thank the book’s production team for flawlessly orchestrating the
publication of the work: Caroline Mallinder, Michelle Green, and Sarah Wray
for the first edition; Louise Fox, Nicole Solano, and Fredrick Brantley for this
second edition.
Introduction
Rodolphe El-Khoury Edward Robbins

In the face of dramatic urban transformations, there has been a growing concern
about how to develop a lively and engaging urban life. The rub, however, for
designers is how to represent and make sense of this urban reality, how to
comprehend it as an artifact that can be constructed and transformed, and how to
make real the physical stage upon which urban socio-spatial practices are played
out.
The challenge emerges out of the incalculable complexity of what we call
the “urban,” composed as it is of so many different actors, groups, and
institutions, and so many layers making up the sites and places of our cities.
Adding to this complexity is the way different agents, forms, and practices create
different sites that although not reducible to each other often inhabit the same
location. Imagine the old 42nd Street in New York with its multiplicity of
people; locals, tourists, day workers, prostitutes, johns, pimps, drug addicts and
pushers, street vendors and more, sharing little in the way of practices and
predilections but all found on 42nd Street amid its porno theaters, legitimate
businesses, restaurants, and central transportation hub. At the other extreme,
there are urban places that often are completely segregated and homogeneous in
their form and social reality; gated neighborhoods, suburban enclaves, and
public housing projects for the very poor. At critical points, this multitude of
different realties makes up an entity that we might conceive of as a whole. While
this whole sets out a structural framework to which we all respond, it neither
penetrates nor circumscribes all aspects of our local cultural and social practices.
It is because we are all part of the same urban universe yet live often in parallel
worlds that are connected in different ways to the whole and to each other that it
is problematic at best to think of the urban as a singular reality. More to the
point, the whole is ephemeral; it is as if, to paraphrase Karl Marx, all that is solid
is continually melting into air.
 This helps to explain why we find so many different and conflicting
viewpoints among urban designers, architects, planners, and urban theorists
about the city. It may be that “Everyone knows what is meant when we speak of
… the ‘corner’ of a street, a ‘marketplace’, a shopping or cultural ‘centre’, a
‘public place’, and so on.”1 What everyone knows, however, may not be the
same. The same place is often the site of antinomian discourses and
contradictory and conflicting practices. The urban can neither be defined and
understood through its reality as a whole nor adequately described by reference
to its many fragments and parts. It is neither total nor partial, its elements neither
wholly intertwined nor totally unrelated. The city is the multiple of its many
parts and the whole of its many multiple sites and practices.
Equally as critical, there is an almost Manichean sensibility regarding the
urban. As Thomas Gieryn points out:

Urban places have been described as the locus of diversity, tolerance,

sophistication, sociation, public participation, cosmopolitanism, integration,
specialization, personal network-formation, coping, frequent spontaneous
interactions, freedom, creativity … But urban places have also been
described as the locus of anonymity, detachment, loneliness, calculating
egoism, privatization, formalized social controls, segregations,
individualism, withdrawal, detachment, parochialism, disconnections,
isolation, fear, seclusion, mental illness …2

This inclination to emphasize the urban as the site of one or another condition
results in a tendency to ignore or underplay the complexity and even
contradictions that underlie urban life. The street life of the city center and the
coming together of strangers so popular with so many intellectuals living in
older and gentrified city centers with their many and different forms of cultural
consumption and social engagement, for example, is one reality. Another reality
is that of the ghetto where so much of the street life we see is an escape from the
desolation and despair embodied in the broken down and decrepit interiors of the
buildings people inhabit. It may be useful to recall, even romanticize, the great
centers of traditional cities: they provide many of us with what is a most
engaging and exciting life. Equally as important to recall is that these centers of
great wealth are but the flip side of miles of urban misery: for every new and
exciting gentrified neighborhood, every revived urban center, there are new
slums on the city’s margins often as the consequence of urban renewal
elsewhere. But even this is a simplification for poverty reaches out and affects
the center in the figures of street people and beggars, and street life becomes less
a coming together of strangers and more a contested terrain between us and
those who are other. And, the slum streets with their despair also support a
wealth of social engagement and cultural interchange, creativity, and joy.
The same, it could be said, holds for those for whom the traditional
neighborhood and the image of the small-town street are exemplars of
meaningful and successful urbanity. Forgotten, though, are the xenophobia, the
racism, the malicious gossip, and the oppressive restrictions of the small and the
local. Yet again it is reductive to so condemn the small and the local. Main
streets and local neighborhoods even as they create bounded worlds offer what is
best of the urban, full of the strong social engagement and supports that make
the city such a rich and engaging social and cultural environment.
That may be why there are so many differing and even conflicting views
about urban form and what and how we should plan for it among architects,
planners, and urban designers. Some emphasize the mega-scale of the city while
others place great emphasis on the city as a townscape (or as contained
neighborhood). While some argue for the necessity of keeping things compact
and well ordered and excoriate what they see as sprawl, others see the extension
of the city as a natural and unproblematic reality. For some the city is best seen
as a machine for others as an ecology and for still others as a splintered whole.
Yet, even though there exists a broad range of conflicting views about the
urban, the complex and multiple realities go unrecognized by architects,
planners, and urban designers. What we should continually engage when dealing
with the urban is its many and different publics, its heterogeneous and often
conflicting mix of peoples all demanding a public voice. It is, we should always
keep in mind, an amalgam of different realities. Each of the many different
actors who make up the urban often inhabits the same location, each has its own
sense of urbanity and each has its own ideas about what constitutes good urban
form. The notion that we can develop some clear and universal ideal or plan for
the good city in a society like our own is a chimera. Designers and planners
today, in ways that are new and unique, face not the design of a city singular, but
the realities of similarity and difference.
Thus our collection of essays! None of the authors claims to represent the
city in its entirety but looks at different cities with different optics. It is a
collection that is devoted to both analyses and descriptions of one or another city
in one or another aspect and to generating a plural sense of that which we might
call “THE CITY” in an attempt to address, if not completely answer, the
question posed by Michel de Certeau, that is, how “To think the very plurality of
the real and to make that way of thinking the plural effective?”3 This book is the
result of a series of conversations that we, the editors (one an anthropologist and
the other a designer), have had over the years about the shaping of cities and the
making of particular cities and their parts. We felt that most books about urban
design dealt primarily either with urban form as a kind of autonomous
phenomenon or with urban design as a technical and professional field. There
was strong agreement that there was little in the literature that addressed the
contradictions and dilemmas of urban design as a polymorphous and
transdisciplinary practice. We were certainly aware that there could be no one
book about urban design that could claim to encompass the whole and all its
parts. What we hoped we could do was present a series of essays that, in
different ways and by addressing different themes from different perspectives,
would provide an introduction to the rich variety and contradictions that are a
part of the shaping of the city – i.e. urban design.
We wanted to address the rich variety of critical issues and approaches
within urban design, which can be epitomized by different cities. We therefore
asked the contributors to present visions and ideas of urban design associated
with the different cities or historical moments that they have come to exemplify.
The goal was to derive from the context vivid demonstrations of theoretical
constructs in their physical and/or cultural manifestation, not exhaustive
historical accounts or analytical descriptions of the cities themselves. Thus what
follows are not complete descriptions of the urban design of particular cities, but
a series of chapters that find in each city a lesson that demonstrates a particular
way of reading the city and the consequent strategies that may be deployed in
reshaping it. Although it is critical to emphasize the variety and complexity of
urban design, we need to be constantly reminded that there are a number of core
issues that have reappeared in negotiating the persistent challenges and
opportunities of rapidly growing cities in the modern world. The essays in this
book engage a number of those critical themes.
Central to much urban design is the belief that an understanding of the
planning process is central to any discourse about the city, as demonstrated in
the work of Whiting and Sommer. Others would argue that there is a danger in
an uncritical adherence to planning regulations, and this is addressed by
Schwarzer. A number of the chapters struggle with the tension between the plan
and its reality. El-Dahdah reveals that what appears as a rigid plan provides a
context for its mutation. Waldheim argues that what we see as an unstructured
process for shaping the city is rather a highly determined result of the laws of
capital. For Singley, the lack of structure is a problem of representation. What
appears as an absence of plan is the result of methods of mapping that simply do
not address this new form of urban design. Robbins deplores the reactionary
infatuation with “neighborhood” and “community” while Koolhaas relishes the
erosion of traditional urban cores by suburban typologies.
In this second edition of the book we took the opportunity to include
themes and perspectives that have gained in relevance since the initial
publication to become an important part of the evolving debate on the city.
Easterling and Blackwell consider in radically different views the staple urban
phenomenon of the new century: mushrooming cities in Special Economic
Zones. Cruz looks at the tensions and contradictions of transborder urbanism –
another staple of the new economy. Aspen frames the decline of public space
while Solomon questions its relevance in groundless and increasingly mediated
urban environments.
It is critical for the design of this book that different themes and ideas are
associated with different styles of writing and presentation. Just as different
theories of urban design are associated with different contexts, different ideas
about urban design are perforce related to a variety of intellectual approaches
and styles of writing consistent with those approaches. For some contributors a
more formal and social-scientific approach was appropriate; others preferred a
more journalistic, plannerly, or literary style. The variety is not accidental. It
seemed to us, as editors, important to present a volume that not only
encompasses the variety of forms of urban design, different urban contexts and
different ways of understanding the shaping of the city, but also allows the
reader to engage the range of stylistic and textual approaches that attempt in
various ways to make sense of urban design. All the variety, though, leads to one
theme: urban design and its role in shaping the city.
Notes
1 Lefebvre, 1991, p. 16.
2 Gieryn, 2000, p. 476.
3 De Certeau, 1984, p. 94.
Chapter 1

Abu Dhabi and Dubai – World City

Doubles
Keller Easterling

The nation-state often portrays itself and its network of cities as an ultimate
form. Yet as power continues to amass and disperse in recurring patterns as it
has throughout the ages, world capitals preside over empires and regions, as well
as nations. Some are city-states unto themselves.
In the fabled pairings of, for instance, Beijing and Shanghai, Washington,
DC and New York, Ankara and Istanbul, the national capital is the more sober
inland location that stands in contrast to its market partner, often a maritime city
with a long record of promiscuous trading and cosmopolitan intelligence. The
mercantile city is sometimes cast as the sister city or the shadow entity,
seemingly ceding power and official jurisdiction so that it can grow
extranational power outside the cumbersome regulations of government. Yet
contemporary versions of this sister city are not merely alter egos of the national
capital, but often something more like independent city-states – the descendants
of Venice or Genoa when they were trading centers of the planet. Recombining
urban power genetics into yet another species of urbanism, they exceed the
interests of global financial centers such as London, New York, Frankfurt, or
Sao Paulo.1 They also exceed the requirements of the fabled “region state” – the
financial and trans-shipment nexus of late-twentieth-century globalization
theory.2 Some contemporary world cities like Hong Kong and Singapore are not
only the crossroads and destinations of national expedition and franchise but also
the centers of global franchises that have property nested in holding companies
and national territories all around the world. Their agents of franchise may be
global trade conglomerates (e.g. Singapore’s PSA or Hong Kong’s Hutchison
Port Holdings) that are the modern descendants of organizations like the Dutch
or British East India Companies. Merging the techniques of freeport traders,
pirates, and mercenaries, the free zones of the new world city create legal
habitats for contemporary trade that naturalize the insertion of extranational
territory within national boundaries.
While Western superpowers have perhaps grown accustomed to the idea
that world cities like Singapore or Hong Kong are much more than the product
of their own colonial ventriloquism, an emergent world city like Dubai presents
an unusual political foundation and an abrupt conflation of ancient and
contemporary worlds. The usual pairing of Abu Dhabi and Dubai as capital city
and mercantile city would appear at first to follow familiar models. The two play
their roles well until it becomes clear they are both capital city and world city in
another time and dimension. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a federation of
some of the world’s last functioning kingdoms, having skipped the most
bombastic chapters in the grand history of national sovereignty. During the very
centuries that nations have emerged as a dominant framework, so too have
substantial networks of transnational business exchange and infrastructure
building. The UAE emerges at a moment when nations bluster patriotic while
also developing more relationships in this transnational milieu. Already an
“anational” society, the UAE evolves, within the legal climates of free trade, a
form of governance for which national/democratic structures are mimicked in
organizing dynasties.3 Mixtures of bargains and monarchical decrees are
designed to handle global dealings with businesses that have managed to shed
what they regard as some of the most cumbersome of those national regulations
that the UAE never possessed. In these dealings, ancient kingdoms and
contemporary empires recognize and merge with each other to form a world
capital of sorts.
The presence of world capitals like Dubai does not support the assumption
that transnational sovereignty is waxing as national sovereignty wanes. It may be
more accurate to see a historical continuity of global activity within which state
and nonstate forces, acting together, craft the most advantageous political and
economic climates by alternately sheltering, releasing, and laundering their
power. Business may, for instance, seek out relaxed, extrajurisdictional spaces
(special economic zones (SEZs), free trade zones (FTZs), export processing
zones (EPZs), etc.) while also massaging legislation in the various states they
occupy. The stances of any one nation or business are therefore often duplicitous
or discrepant reflections of divided loyalties between national and international
concerns or citizens and shareholders.
The customary portfolios of political indicators will not always reliably
return information about these complex state–nonstate partnerships. They often
create political events that exceed epistemes of war, nation, citizen, and capital.
In a contemplation of world capitals, the UAE exposes the limits of the national
capital as a self-styled unit of grand historical continuities. With the insulated
caprice of petrodollars and free zones, the UAE leads with the increasingly
common duplicitous handshake. The triggers and levers of this power may not
be easily moralized and analyzed by the left or the right; they may be more venal
and evasive as well as more shrewd and innovative. The UAE embodies a
transnational extrastatecraft filled with both the dangers and opportunities that
rule the world today.

Dubai. The hot spot where adventurers play the world’s most dangerous
games of gold, sex, oil, and war.
Dubai. A wild, seething place in the sunbaked sands of Arabia, where
billion-dollar carpetbaggers mix explosive passions with oil. And exotic
pleasures pay fabulous dividends.
Whores, assassins, spies, fortune hunters, diplomats, princes and pimps –
all gambling for their lives in a dazzling, billion-dollar game that only the
most ruthless and beautiful dare to play.4
(jacket copy from Dubai, by Robin Moore, author of
The French Connection)

In 1976, after The Green Berets, The French Connection and several other
global intrigues, Robin Moore published a novel titled Dubai. The novel opens
in 1967. Fitz, the monosyllabic hero and American intelligence officer, is fired
over his pro-Palestinian/anti-Semitic remarks that appear in the press just as the
Six Day War is launched. Dubai, like the not-yet-middle-aged protagonist, is still
fluid and unsettled. It is still a place where adventures and deals are flipped and
leveraged against each other to propel small syndicates to fame and fortune. Fitz
quickly scales a succession of events in the UAE’s history during the 1970s. He
arrives when a handful of hotels and the new Maktoum Bridge across Dubai
Creek are among the few structures that appear in an otherwise ancient
landscape, one that has changed very little in the centuries that Dubai has been
an entrepôt of gold trade and a site for pearl diving. Just on the brink of Sheikh
Rashid’s plans for an electrical grid, the air-conditioning in Fitz’s Jumeirah
beach house must struggle against the 120 degrees and 100 percent humidity by
means of an independent generator. The story proceeds by moving in and out of
air-conditioning, syndicate meetings, and sex scenes in the palaces of the Sheikh
or in hotel cocktail lounges between Tehran, Dubai, and Washington. The
tawdry glamour of tinkling ice and Range Rovers is frequently interrupted for a
number of rough and tumble adventures that are evenly distributed throughout
the book. The discovery of oil has already propelled the development of the
Trucial States (states that have made maritime truces with the original oilmen,
the British).
Fitz’s first escapade uses the old gold economy to capitalize on the new oil
and real estate economy. The syndicate’s dhow (the traditional vessel on the
creek) is souped up with munitions and technology that Fitz has stolen from the
American military. Dubai is an old hand at smuggling, or what it likes to call
“re-exporting,” during embargoes or wars that are always available in the Gulf.
Shipping gold to India usually involves armed encounters in international
waters. The dhow’s US military equipment vaporizes the Indian ships, thus
trouncing piracy and resistance to the free market. Fitz plunders enough money
to bargain with the sheikh for shares of an oil enterprise in Abu Musa, an island
in the Gulf halfway between Dubai and Iran. He has enough money left over to
finance a saloon, equipped with old CIA bugging devices and an upstairs office
with a one-way viewing window. From this perch Fitz entertains the growing
number of foreign businessmen who are laying over in Dubai and the growing
number of Arab businessmen who want to see and approach Western women.
He continues in his plot to become a diplomat to the new independent federation
of Trucial territories, the United Arab Emirates, to be established in 1971.
Fitz (like Dubai) gets things done. With a wink and a nod sheikhs and
diplomats reward him. He even manages to single-handedly crush a communist
insurgency in the desert. (Most Robin Moore novels fight the old Cold War
fight, although his most recent forays take on the new devil: terrorism.) In the
novel, America’s heroic Cold War deeds in the Gulf have made us simple
lovable heroes with both naughtiness and vulnerability. Fitz wisely realizes that
most political activities are not vetted through recognized political channels. In
Dubai, the “naughty hero” formula even goes one dyspeptic step further in
engineering sympathy for the character and happily signaling the end of the
novel: Fitz hurts his leg fighting the insurgency. Despite his wounds and even
though he has contributed a suitcase full of money in campaign contributions, he
doesn’t get the ambassadorship. He is unfairly tainted with the centuries of
regional piracy and the only too recent hotel-bar intrigues. Nevertheless, Fitz
gets the girl in the end, the daughter of a diplomat living on the Main Line in
Philadelphia, and they begin to plan their middle-aged life “on the creek” in
Dubai.
The novel’s oblivious mix of Cold War piety and soft porn is, however
fictional, appropriate evidence. Indeed, the novel is strangely more informative
than most of what is currently written about the UAE in its own self-produced
coffee-table books and marketing copy. The country is currently producing a
dazzling story of real estate development for the consumption of an obedient
press that reproduces its sound-bytes. Even snide and brainy bloggers of
architectural critique have assembled obediently in the trap, printing enthusiastic
remarks about hyperbolic development projects. Most accounts are looking for
yet another big opener to top the last story about new offshore islands, theme
parks, or shopping festivals – another superlative prefix meaning “mega.” The
Emirates get things done in a fast-forward time lapse of oil wealth. The coffee-
table books do not present the complicated history of foreign paternalizing,
meddling, and arming that has matured into something very different from what
either the US or the UK think they have wrought. Behaving as if the UAE was
simply an outcrop of Western real estate techniques, they have occasionally
offered condescending praise for their exceptionally good pupil. The UAE is
happy to nod as if in gratitude and perfectly happy if the global press bites on
that line. It may even be good for the real estate market.
Robin Moore’s Dubai ends in 1970, just before federation in 1971. Abu
Dhabi and Dubai were sibling territories, offshoots of the Ban Yas tribe that
migrated between pearl diving and the interior desert oasis of Al Ain. Abu
Dhabi, a coastal archipelago with some fresh water, became the headquarters of
the Al Nahyan family. In 1833, Sheikh Maktoum bin Butti led a group that
seceded from Abu Dhabi to settle farther east along the coast in Dubai, a small
fishing village, and the Maktoum family has ruled in Dubai ever since.5 Since
1820, the British had entered into agreements with these coastal sheikhdoms to
regulate piracy and other maritime concerns. In 1892, the so-called Trucial states
signed a joint agreement establishing an exclusive relationship with Britain in
exchange for its protection. American and British companies negotiated their
first oil concessions in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Still, Abu Dhabi did not
begin to drill for oil until after World War II and did not discover commercial
quantities of oil until 1958.6 Soon it would become clear that Abu Dhabi was
dominant in not only land area but also oil production. Dubai, endowed with far
fewer oil resources, did not export oil until 1969. Even early on, Dubai planned
to pursue tourism, finance, and trade as its chief sources of revenue.7 When the
British pulled out of territories east of the Suez in 1968, the UAE was flooded
with foreign businessmen from all over the world, and the Range Rovers gave
way to Japanese cars.8 Yet well into the 1960s, the Trucial states were barefoot,
with no roads or health care, few clothes, and brackish water.

We lived in the eighteenth century while the rest of the world, even the rest
of our neighbors, had advanced into the twentieth. We had nothing to offer
visitors, we had nothing to export, we had no importance to the outside
world whatsoever. Poverty, illiteracy, poor health, a high rate of mortality
all plagued us well into the 1960s.9

The business of government is manufacturing opportunity.

(Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum10)

When, in 1971, the legendary leaders Sheikh Zayed Bin-Sultan Al Nahyan in

Abu Dhabi and Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum in Dubai established a
federation to join the seven coastal sheikhdoms, they essentially created a
republic of monarchies. The Federal National Council is composed of the
Supreme Council, and the remaining seats of the 40-member representative body
are apportioned according to the size of each of the seven emirates and filled by
each ruler’s appointment.11 Abu Dhabi’s ruler will always be the president of the
country, while Dubai’s ruler will always be vice-president and prime minister.
Laws are made by decree and administered by various ministerial appointees
that make up the body of the council. Notably, Dubai and Ras Al Khaimah also
have an independent judicial system with civil and criminal divisions and Sharia
courts to handle family cases. Since mixtures of English, French, and Egyptian
law influenced the UAE’s federal structure, it offers some gestures and protocols
of a democratic process within an auto-representative government. While the
organs of government have a superficial resemblance, not only citizenship and
representation but other bedrock principles of democracy, such as free speech,
freedom of assembly, and the claim to racial and gender equality, are notably
absent. Concerns persist about discrimination against women and non-nationals.
As a kingdom-nation, the UAE produces partial reflections and tinctures of
Western governmental institutions, yet it operates with a different set of civil and
legal assumptions. Moreover, these structural differences often allow the country
to thrive on many of the very complications that trouble Western democracies:
the contradiction between citizenship and the need for cheap labor, the curious
position of public space within urbanism conceived as a privately themed spatial
product, the naturalized state of exception from law in corporate paradigms, and
the influence of special interests in official political representation. As if in a
state of amnesia for these perennial problems of contemporary participatory
democracies, the UAE seems not to perceive them.
UAE nationals are not only a constituency to the representative body, but a
beneficiary, conduit, and pivot of much of the country’s business; they are at
once the wealthy elite and the welfare state. While Dubai is currently pursuing
an urbanism that is measured in entries in the Guinness Book of World Records
(e.g. the world’s tallest building, the world’s largest artificial islands, the world’s
largest shopping mall, and the world’s largest underwater hotel), Abu Dhabi also
lays claim to a Guinness record made by one of its most legendary leaders.
Sheikh Zayed was once offered the largest bribe in history: the Saudis offered
him $42 million to relinquish Abu Dhabi’s claim to Al Ain. Sheikh Zayed’s
refusal during a time when even he had only a few hundred rupees was
consistent with his commitment to manage Abu Dhabi’s ensuing wealth in a way
that made its citizens beneficiaries. After becoming ruler in 1966, Sheikh Zayed
also issued land grants for each national to ensure that development would
benefit the population, and, by 1976, he had also offered 5,000 units of “people’s
housing.”12 The land grants are similar in principle to the many other laws that
stipulate partnerships or enterprises in which UAE nationals are either associates
or beneficiaries. “Offsets” are among these structuring devices. Defense
contracts with the UAE must first negotiate with the UAE offsets group. The
contracts must be profitable, and a UAE national must own 51 percent.
Moreover, the contract must seed an offset venture in a non-oil industry. So far,
these offset projects have funded a variety of industries including fish farms, air-
conditioning, medical services, shipbuilding, and even leisure activities like polo
grounds.13 Since the number of nationals is small, the UAE has managed to
convert the typically corrupt relationship between government and private-
interest lobbies into a form of hyper-representation.14 In Dubai, this direct
benefit to a manageable handful of constituents is regarded as government
welfare and beneficent leadership.
The UAE finds advantage in the notion of laborer, expat, or tourist as a
temporary citizen. As a temporary citizen, the tourist arrives to deposit vacation
money at shopping festivals, golf tournaments, and theme parks. Having paid
their taxes in tourist revenues, they then leave without further demands on the
government. Denizens of the Trucial States were themselves the guest workers
for foreign oil companies before they became partners in the oil wealth.15 Today,
rules are established for managing and housing labor in groups, and problems
are the responsibility of the contracting agent. Laborers and contractors must
agree to and abide by certain rules or be deported. Dubai can then even boast
that it is one of the most diverse places on Earth as its curates its inhabitants
from Africa, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere around the world. All of the
arrangements are perhaps more transparent than in those countries where
citizenship is the impossible option and the guest worker exists in a zone of
denial and secrecy. Yet the arrangements have also yielded a situation devoid of
responsibility and consequence, except for the outside contractors. Enforcement
applies to the infraction of rules but not to procedures or events that exist outside
of them. Human rights concerns continue to center on the trafficking of human
beings within a large volume of migratory workers as well as on the networks of
domestic workers for whom there is no record-keeping or oversight.
The UAE epitomizes the shadow jurisdictions that reside in transnational
exchanges, out-maneuvering some official acts of state, and serving as de facto
forms of global governance. Indeed, if that shadow government is loosely
defined by the scatter of headquarters and zones around the world, the UAE is
something like a parliament of this global headquartering. The “park” or free
trade zone is naturalized as the ideal urban growth unit. In recent decades, the
FTZ, EPZ, SEZ, or other similar incarnations have evolved to allow businesses
immunity from taxes, labor regulation, and environmental restrictions or to
streamline the logistics for trans-shipment, materials handling, or duty-free
retail.
Like any nation, the UAE publicizes its ennobling dispositions, often
embodied by the partnership of Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Rashid. Deploying a
familiar modernist script, the two used technology for nation building. Both
Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Rashid capitalized experimental projects that
demonstrated their eagerness to diversify. Dubai sponsored a project that paired
aluminum production and desalination. Sheikh Zayed sponsored the planting of
millions of palm trees, planning to manage water and wildlife with the help of
remote-sensing satellites. Since the modernist script usually comes with equal
parts traditionalism, the UAE associated this technological expertise with a
native wisdom about environment and natural resources. Accessorized with the
perfect mix of modern signals and traditional customs such as falconry, horses,
and camel racing, Sheikh Zayed’s leadership solicited general adoration, almost
deification, until his death in 2004. His face appears everywhere, on billboards
and talismans. To traditional music with a new-age beat, the official website
celebrating his life follows the silhouette of a falcon across the sands from a
silhouetted skyline of barasti mud huts to the silhouetted skyline of Dubai.
Moreover, part of the UAE’s beguiling formula for government involves
generosity to the neediest countries in the world. By the mid-1970s the UAE and
Sheikh Zayed had developed a reputation for philanthropy that was to become a
permanent ingredient of the country’s mystique.16
As if in suspended animation or taking a break from the twentieth century,
Abu Dhabi and Dubai might have seemed, in the 1990s, like sleepy holiday
locations offering a growing number of modern developments, air-conditioned
hotels, and office buildings. Both perhaps maintained the peculiar relaxation and
freedom of the place where one does not stay for long, but after the 1990s the
difference between the two emirates and the two cites accelerated. In 1997,
Dubai’s fabled developed boom began when it allowed for freehold property for
all nations in special development areas. In 2006, the emirate legalized foreign
property ownership. Somewhat more sober, Abu Dhabi recently clarified its
2005 freehold laws by allowing only GCC nationals to own freehold property
while non-GCC members are required to contract for 99 years.17 Traveling
between the emirates is a jolting journey forward and backward through time –
between ancient landscapes, national capitals, and new world capitals.

The earth has a new center.

(billboard advertisement for Dubai Mall on Sheikh Zayed Road)

“Dubai is like someone who owns many horses,” he said. “He doesn’t just
put one horse in the race, he puts many with many chances of success.”
(Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, adviser to the Dubai’s Maktoum family18)

Take wisdom from the wise – not everyone who rides a horse is a jockey.
(a verse of poetry by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum written in
island masses and visible from the air in the proposed Palm Jebel Ali19)

In 1979, Sheikh Rashid completed two projects in Dubai that established it as a

regional capital of the Gulf and the Middle East: the World Trade Center and the
Jebel Ali Port.20 As Moore’s novel spins around a corridor between Dubai and
Tehran, it accurately reflects alignments of power, influence, and relationship
that have caused Dubai to be called “the economic capital of Iran.”21 The World
Trade Center signaled a willingness to foster regional partners and reinforced the
image of Dubai as a Gulf nexus. Situated at the border between Abu Dhabi and
Dubai, the Jebel Ali Port was the largest man-made port in the world. The free
trade zone permitted complete foreign ownership of land and no taxes. The
stretch of development between the World Trade Center and Jebel Ali Port,
comparable to the length of Manhattan, has since been rapidly filling with a
corridor of skyscrapers since 1990. This highway, called Sheikh Zayed Road on
the Dubai side and Sheikh Rashid Road on the Abu Dhabi side, is a deferential
handshake that is perhaps more unevenly extended as development in Dubai
outpaces that of any other emirate.
Business practices that have long been familiar to the Gulf entrepôts but
that have also emerged as contemporary global business models are the perfect
accompaniment to Dubai’s overarching approach to trade. A city of
warehousing, smuggling, and gold trading, Dubai was on the circuit of the
Gulf’s Qawasim pirates, brought under control at approximately the same time
that the Barbary pirates were defeated in the Mediterranean.22 More important
than product stability has been the movement of a volume of goods. Products are
best when they are capable of behaving like fluctuating currency. With more
choices, more merchandise, and more labor from around the world, the odds are
better for playing currency and wage differentials.
General Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who succeeded his
brother Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, has, for some time, been the
mastermind behind the most recent chapters of hyperbolic development going on
in Dubai – the petrodollar flush before the 2008 economic downturn. On Sheikh
Rashid’s watch, Dubai has developed seven-star hotels and megaprojects.
Dubailand, an enormous, two-billion-square-foot tourist installation, projected to
include 45 megaprojects and 200 subprojects. Dubai has rehearsed the “park” or
zone with almost every imaginable program beginning with Dubai Internet City
in 2000, the first IT campus as free trade zone. Calling each new enclave “city,”
it has planned or built Dubai Health Care City, Dubai Maritime City, Dubai
Silicon Oasis, Dubai Knowledge Village, Dubai Techno Park, Dubai Media
City, Dubai Outsourcing Zone, Dubai Humanitarian City, Dubai Industrial City,
Dubai International Financial Centre free zone, and Dubai Textile City.23
Similarly, mutations of Portman/Hines/Jerde malls and atrium hotels like Burj
Al Arab, Dubai Mall (the largest mall in the world), or Ski Dubai (an indoor ski
resort in a 120-degrees desert), were all components of an instant metropolis
growing before the world’s eyes. The first of Dubai’s largest artificial islands,
Palm Island, launched in 2001 by the Nakeel, was to be joined by two more
palm-frond-shaped formations, the Palm Jebel Ali and the Palm Deira. In the
interim, The World, another archipelago, this time in the shape of the world’s
continents, created a global media sensation. Island properties associated with
their position on the globe were sold as private compounds to celebrities like
Rod Stewart and Elton John. Since governments like Dubai legally engineer
their own status as islands of immunity and exemption in free-trade-zone
loopholes, or archipelagos, The World, as an archipelago of archipelagos was an
extravagant global witticism that was advertised by its own potential critics. The
financial crisis froze Dubai in its state of development euphoria. But in its recent
growth spurt, the city became a global urban paradigm as the world’s ultimate
free zone – keeping everyone’s secrets, researching everyone’s forbidden
products and procedures, and laundering global identities.

Many journalists have booked rooms in prestigious hotels here, but instead
of covering the summit they have gone to Dubai to shop.
(journalist from the Saudi delegation headquartered in Abu Dhabi for the
GCC conference, 200524)

Our long-term goal is to establish Abu Dhabi as a centre for development of

new technology in energy … we are looking forward to see Abu Dhabi as
world capital of energy.25

Passing across the border on Sheikh Zayed Road to Sheikh Rashid Road, the
difference in political disposition is visually clear. The forest of skyscrapers
gives way to cultivated palm trees and somewhat dated and earnest public-works
buildings. Abu Dhabi’s urbanism is more conservative. Tall buildings conform
to a grid and regularly offer a very similar retail podium. The emirate invokes
gravitas and tradition, playing the role of the more responsible sister, closer to
the ecological and philanthropic ethos established by Sheikh Zayed. Sitting on a
giant spout of oil, Abu Dhabi has no intention of competing with Dubai’s world
capital ambitions. Still, it too must deliberately acquire components of culture
that craft the correct global profile. While Abu Dhabi borrows from Dubai some
world capital techniques for power building, it will also work to strengthen its
position as a regional/national capital. If the UAE is to become more than a
source of oil, a temporary warehouse for goods, or a stopover for labor and
tourists, it must send a variety of special signals to the rest of the world. Sheikha
Lubna Al Qasimi, the Minister of Economy and Planning, first female
government minister of the UAE and a protégé of Sheikh Mohammed bin
Rashid Al Maktoum, is one of these signals. Among the present concerns is the
need for jobs and leadership positions for the nationals who either emigrate to
jobs elsewhere or have less expertise than foreign candidates.26 Ailing
economies in the larger region threaten stability and present some mutually
beneficial opportunities for investment and philanthropy. The UAE must also
partner with both national and corporate powers to sponsor innovation and
simultaneously appropriate technological expertise. The raft of initiatives is
designed to engage economies and power centers around the world.
While tourism is one avenue of growth, Abu Dhabi plans to distinguish
itself from Dubai by being a center of culture and education. One new initiative,
Saadiyat Island, will serve as demonstration of some of these new initiatives.
While it will have a full range of programs, its cultural center will be home to a
Guggenheim outpost by Frank Gehry, a performing arts center by Zaha Hadid, a
branch of the Louvre by Jean Nouvel, and a Zayed National museum by Norman
Foster. Promoting “universal” cultural installations, Saadiyat Island is to become
an “international cultural hub for the Middle East on par with the best in the
world.” While various educational institutions including Yale University and the
Sorbonne have been approached, NYU has most recently been promoted as an
educational partner for the venture.27
Even though located at the epicenter of oil, Abu Dhabi is leading the UAE’s
sophisticated energy and transportation experiments. Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City,
established by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, is a free zone for green
energy enterprises – something like the free zone as intentional community.
Master-planned by Norman Foster, the plan of the town, not unlike a Roman
Ideal town, is a square grid. The sectional shape of the city is designed for
shading, solar energy collection, and an underground zone for automated
personal rapid transit vehicles.28 The UAE plans to join the Arabian Railway
network connecting Abu Dhabi and Dubai with a larger Gulf circuit, making it
possible to travel from Dubai to Damascus and Beirut to Cairo by rail.29 The
emirates also have their own internal plans for a railway that would link the
coastal ports. While this UAE railway would begin as a freight network, it would
eventually service passenger travel. Dubai is also building an automated metro
system, and Abu Dhabi plans to follow suit.30

The United Arab Emirates has earned the dubious distinction of having
some of the worst labor conditions in the world. Human Rights Watch has
cited the country for discrimination, exploitation, and abuse. Many foreign
workers, especially women, face intimidation and violence, including
sexual assault, at the hands of employers, supervisors, and police and
security forces, the rights group said.31

“It’s a funny thing about Dubai, the minute people get here they try to
figure out how fast they can get out.”
(Fitz, in Dubai, by Robin Moore)

[Through Alameen] … the public can assist and communicate any

information related to security matters to law enforcement personnel. The
service is considered unique in employing the latest technologies and in not
requiring the presence of the caller. The information is dealt with in
complete confidence, without focusing on the caller’s identity or motives;
the focus is on the subject and the authenticity of the information. The
service runs 24/7 in complete confidence.
As an indication of its success, Alameen in its first year received 1,178
calls, of which 107 were traffic information, 87 prostitution reports, 30
fraud, 28 illegal immigrants and workers, 20 drug, 15 begging, 12
harassments, and 7 witchcraft, 5 money laundering, in addition to various
suggestions.32

Both Abu Dhabi and Dubai continue to be sites of labor abuse. Repeatedly cited
by the International Labour Organization and Human Rights Watch, the UAE’s
building projects draw a volume of corruption that corresponds to the volume of
construction and occasionally overwhelms regulatory agencies like the Ministry
of Labor.33 Labor problems such as nonpayment are brought before the ministry,
which in turn insists on compliance with the rules, exacting fines and
administering cures at least in those situations about which it is made aware. The
stories are familiar. Laborers, primarily from Asia, are organized in crowded
labor camps, with 50–60 immigrants per house and 6–10 workers per room.34
Human Rights Watch even cited Saadiyat Island, the “island of happiness,” for
labor abuse, putting on notice the Tourism Development and Investment
Company of Abu Dhabi as well as all of the high-profile architecture offices
involved in the project.35 One response in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi has been
to create model labor villages like Labour City in Dubai or the Saadiayat Island
Construction Village. These demonstration cities may contain everything from
air-conditioned rooms and cafeterias to a cricket pitch.36 While the labor camps
that are legal and partially transparent are largely for men in jobs ranging from
taxi drivers to road workers, domestic workers who are largely women are often
isolated in individual homes with few avenues for protest or assembly.
The UAE merges traditional, commercial, and civil practices to address a
variety of political concerns including the labor issue. For instance, in the
absence of familiar forms of citizenship or representation, workers may
communicate grievances through a hotline. Just as there is a hotline to report
labor abuses, there is also a hotline to report suspicious activity or people for
deportation. Dubai is then at once rehearsing new techniques that acknowledge
labor contradictions and evading responsibility for labor’s alienation from
culture.
UAE development companies like Emaar and Nakeel are offering
development expertise to other nations in the region and in Africa. King
Abdullah Economic City, on the Red Sea, near Jedda, is a free zone world city
on the Dubai model. Launched in 2006 by the Saudi government and the Dubai
real estate developers, Emaar the city, when complete, will be 168 square
kilometers and comparable to the size of Brussels. If techniques for sharing oil
wealth (like those used to share oil wealth among UAE nationals) were on offer
in the partnerships with African nations, there might be real opportunities to
alleviate some of the extreme suffering exacerbated by oil on that continent. In
Khartoum, capital of the Sudan, the UAE is reaching out to offer Dubai-style
real estate development. Yet, Almogran, 1,660 acres of skyscrapers and
residential properties, only underlines the extreme discrepancies between oil
wealth and the exploitation of oil resources in mostly black southern Sudan. The
overt, even hyperbolic expressions of oil money have been among the chief tools
for instigating war and violence within non-Arab populations in the south.37
Most chilling is the sense that outside the UAE an ethos of using oil for nation
building and social welfare need not be deployed for non-Arab populations like
those in the Sudan.

Oh Cloud above all others!

Oh sea of generosity let nothing bring you harm
Nourishing rain that brings life to kith and kin
But denies to your adversaries
Is pure for your neighbors but not for your foes
To whom it offers but a bitter draught of woe
Fearless hand of generosity
No sacrifice we make for you can be too great
 You ward off all misfortunes
All dangers banished with no efforts spared
In your inscriptions in the book of glory
Every letter betokens honour.
(poem by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum in memory of
Sheikh Zayed)

Kingdoms and brands have a mutual understanding about mythmaking. Both

deploy ambitious and comprehensive use of traditional imagery, capitalizing,
tabulating, and constantly refreshing the effects of irrational desire and value.
Fetish and symbolic capital, no longer merely ineffable enhancements of capital,
are themselves fully capitalized as commodities. In the UAE’s versions of
experience economies, the collapse between architectural language and logistical
envelope becomes complete, and it becomes even easier to float more fantastic
fictions over a revenue stream. Without introspection, experience economies
instantly blend with the natural urges and talents of a dynasty. Like the Burj Al
Arab’s imagery of sabers, turbans, and billowing dhow sails, Sheikhs, more than
Jon Jerde or postmodern architects, come by it honestly. But in this sense, the
UAE only makes a broad cartoon, a vivid indicator, of the ageless mutually
sustaining partnership between power and fiction. There can be no handwringing
over the potential power of a totemic marketplace to wipe away meaning. Here,
the supposedly tragic, meaningless sign of the spectacle is the meaning – a
subtextual indicator of a willingness to be in the game. It may therefore also
indicate a willingness to make bargains of all sorts, within which
meaninglessness is an instrumental political lubricant.
The UAE has created a global model for development that the entire world
wishes to emulate. Now major cities and national capitals that did not have a
sister city are engineering their own world city doppelgängers on the Singapore
or Dubai model. Navi Mumbai, New Songdo City outside Seoul, or Astana in
Kazakhstan are national capitals cum free trade zones perfectly designed to
legally legitimize the duplicities of nonstate transactions. The world capital and
national capital can shadow each other, alternately exhibiting a regional cultural
ethos and a global ambition.
Social critic Mike Davis loads, aims, and fires his bracing message from the
left, saying that the future of Dubai “looks like nothing so much as a nightmare
of the past: Walt Disney meets Albert Speer on the shores of Araby.”38 Yet the
UAE tutors much more than righteous binary opposition. In some sense the UAE
is an example of “new/old” or “the new oldness and the old newness,” to borrow
from the activist group Retort.39 For Retort, the phrase describes a dyspeptic
mixture of primitive power urges accessorized with sophisticated techniques of
spectacle, allowing it to float financial sustenance over an even more obdurate
ancient script. The emirates have found a number of lubricated techniques for
pirating the world that are both primitive and sophisticated. Some of those
techniques override the entrenched corruption of national stances to initiate
mechanisms of intergovernmental cooperation, while others intensify that
corruption in outlaw environments designed to avoid global compacts. The UAE
recognizes that aggression, but never violence, keeps the money flowing. Most
politics operate through subterfuge and contradiction rather than in environments
of conceptual or ethical purity. The new/ancient is at once more resilient and
stable than the Western spectacle it absorbs. If the emirates can maintain enough
contradictions and the secrets of enough foreign powers, no one can call their
bluff.
Postscript
The Burj Dubai, now called the Burj Khalifa in honor of Sheikh Khalifa of Abu
Dhabi, has become a monument of sorts to Dubai’s debt crisis and its special
relationship with Abu Dhabi. Freighted with some resentment, the wealthier and
more sober emirate offered a bail out to its sister city-state in December 2009 by
giving $10 billion to Dubai World. Dubai World, Dubai Holding, and
Investment Corporation of Dubai are three sprawling investment instruments in
which the government and the sovereign Sheikh Mohammed are major
stakeholders. In the years since 2009, Dubai has been scrambling to restructure
debt and is showing some positive signs of recovery. Yet even in May 2011, the
IMF warned Dubai that their total debt would reach 53 percent of their total
GDP by 2016.40
Dubai World has within its umbrella Nakeel, the developer of The World
and the various Palm Island experiments as well as DP World, the global ports
company. Nakeel’s debts presented the most precarious situation and the one
that prompted Abu Dhabi to ride to the rescue. Dubai now hopes to rely less on
the floating real estate casino of artificial islands and focus on trade, logistics,
and tourism. Its cachet as the Vegas of the emirates is only partially diminished
by mimicry from other cities in the Middle East who are hiring starchitects for
enclaves of all sorts.41 Meanwhile the furious pace of building – previously
almost as fast as a stop-frame time-lapse – has ground to a halt with over 200
projects on hold or canceled and reports of the artificial islands dissolving back
into the sea.42
Winds of change from the Arab Spring met with the UAE’s characteristic
set of duplicitous political gifts. The federation has often appeared to opened its
front doors while bolting all of the others or appeared to completely capitulate to
demands while simultaneously defanging those demands. They often respond to
controversy in a way that preserves both public image and the status quo of
power. As mentioned above, the government is always prepared to provide a gift
of an airline ticket out of the country. In response to demands for something like
universal suffrage in electing the Federal National Council members, the UAE
relented, and yet this body is largely a ceremonious demonstration of
representation since important decisions about the regime are made elsewhere.43
Zayed Military City, another of the enclave units of development in Dubai, is
reportedly training a private military force for security against both external and
internal disruption.44
Acknowledgment
This text is adapted and updated from a text published as “Extrastatecraft” from
Perspecta 39, “Re_Urbanism” (2007). Reprinted with the permission of
Perspecta, Yale School of Architecture.
Notes
1 Credit might naturally go to Peter Hall and his book The World Cities (1971) or to Saskia Sassen’s The
Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (1991). This train of thought is, however, closer to an analysis
offered by Marchal, 2003. Marchal uses the term “world cities” in reference to Fernand Braudel’s 1992
work on city-states and trading capitals.
2 Ohmae, 2000.
3 Anscombe, 2003.
4 Moore, 1976, frontispiece.
5 Heard-Bey, 2004, pp. 174, 238.
6 Al-Fahim, 1995, pp. 73–74.
7 Heard-Bey, 2004, p. 238.
8 Al-Fahim, 1995, p. 147.
9 Al-Fahim, 1995, p. 88.
10 Al Tamimi, 2003, p. 3.
11 Moving west to northeast, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Sharjah are the first three emirates, and they each
have a chief city of the same name. Continuing further north, toward the Straits of Hormuz are the
smaller emirates of Umm al Qaiwain, Ajman, and Ras al Khaimah. Finally, on the eastern coast of this
rocky peninsula is the seventh emirate, Fujairah.
12 Al-Fahim, 1995, p. 140; Heard-Bey, 2004, p. 405.
13 www.state.gov/e/eb/ifd/2005/42194.htm; www.abudhabichamber.ae/user/SectionView. aspx?
PNodeId=802.
14 Only 18 percent of the population are UAE nationals. The majority of the population (65 percent) are
Asians. See: www.datadubai.com/population.htm.
15 Heard-Bey, 2004, p. 107.
16 Al-Fahim, 1995, p. 163.
17 http://realestate.theemiratesnetwork.com/articles/freehold_property.php;
www.ameinfo.com/110401.html.
18 New York Times, February 17, 2006, p. C1.
19 www.thepalm.ae/index.html.
20 www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=107779;www.jafza.ae/jafza;
www.dnrd.gov.ae/dnrd/Profile/JabalAliPort+.htm; www.dpworld.ae/jafz/jafz.htm.
21 See www.datadubai.com/population.htm and Marchal, p. 96. The population of the UAE is over three
million and at least 70,000 UAE nationals have Iranian background. Marchal quotes Fariba Adelkhah’s
“Dubaï, capitale économique de l’Iran,” in Marchal, 2001, pp. 39–55.
22 Heard-Bey, 2004, pp. 68–72, 284–286.
23 www.dubaiinternetcity.com; www.arabsat.com/Default/About/OurHistory.aspx;
www.dubaiholding.com/english/index.html.
24 Gulf News, December 19, 2005.
25 “Energy 2030 to get underway next Wednesday,” Emirates News Agency, October 27, 2006.
26 Marchal, 2003, p. 107.
27 www.saadiyat.ae/en.
28 www.masdarcity.ae/en/index.aspx.
29 MENA Business Reports, December 13, 2005.
30 Construction Week, December 17–23, 2005, p. 1.
31 Herald Tribune, September 26, 2005.
32 www.dubai.ae/portal/en.portal?dae_citizen,Article_000214,1,&_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=view.
33 Construction Week, December 17–23, 2005, p. 32.
34 Khalaf and Alkobaisi, 1999, p. 292.
35 www.hrw.org/reports/2009/05/18/island-happiness-0.
36 www.saadiyat.ae/en/project-update/saadiyat-construction-village.html.
37 www.alsunut.com; “Glittering towers in a war zone,” The Economist, December 7, 2006. Alsunut
Development Company Ltd. is a venture of the Khartoum State, National Social Insurance, the DAL
Group Company Ltd.
38 Davis, 2005.
39 Boal et al., 2005, p. 18 (use of “new/old”); and “An exchange on Afflicted Powers: Capital and
Spectacle in a New Age of War,” interview with Hal Foster and Retort, October 115, Winter 2006, p. 5.
40 The Times, October 12, 2011.
41 The Economist, December 29, 2010; The Guardian, November 29, 2010.
42 The Telegraph, June 12, 2011.
43 The Economist, June 30, 2011.
44 New York Times, May 14, 2011.
Chapter 2

Atlanta
Rem Koolhaas

Sometimes it is important to find what the city is – instead of what it was, or

what it should be. That is what drove me to Atlanta – an intuition that the real
city at the end of the 20th century could be found there …

• Atlanta has CNN and Coca-Cola.

• Atlanta has a black mayor, and it will have the Olympics.
• Atlanta has culture, or at least it has a Richard Meier museum (like Ulm,
Barcelona, Frankfurt, The Hague, etc.).
• Atlanta has an airport; actually it has 40 airports. One of them is the
biggest airport in the world. Not that everybody wants to be there; it’s a
hub, a spoke, an airport for connections. It could be anywhere.
• Atlanta has history, or rather it had history; now it has history machines
that replay the battles of the Civil War every hour on the hour. Its real
history has been erased, removed, or artificially resuscitated.
• Atlanta has other elements that provide intensity without physical
density: one building looks innocent from the outside – like a regular
supermarket – but is actually the largest, most sophisticated food hall in
the world. Each day it receives three cargo planes of fresh products from
Holland, four from Paris, two from Southeast Asia. It proves that there
are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of gourmets in Atlanta.
• Atlanta does not have the classical symptoms of city; it is not dense; it is
a sparse, thin carpet of habitation, a kind of suprematist composition of
little fields. Its strongest contextual givens are vegetal and infrastructural:
forest and roads. Atlanta is not a city; it is a landscape.
 • Atlanta’s basic form – but it is not a form – its basic formlessness is
generated by the highway system, a stretched X surrounded by an O:
branches running across the city connecting to a single perimeter
highway. The X brings people in and out; the O – like a turntable – takes
them anywhere. They are thinking about projecting a super-O somewhere
in the beyond.
• Atlanta has nature, both original and improved – a sparkling, perfect
nature where no leaf is ever out of place. Its artificiality sometimes makes
it hard to tell whether you are outside or inside; somehow, you’re always
in nature.
• Atlanta does not have planning, exactly, but another process called
zoning. Atlanta’s zoning law is very interesting; its first line tells you
what to do if you want to propose an exception to the regulations. The
regulations are so weak that the exception is the norm. Elsewhere, zoning
has a bad name – for putting things in their place simplistically: work,
sleep, shop, play. Atlanta has a kind of reverse zoning, zoning as
instrument of indetermination, making anything possible anywhere.

Atlanta has changed at an unbelievable speed, like in a nature film when a tree
grows in five seconds. It reveals some of the most critical shifts in
architecture/urbanism1 of the past 15 years, the most important being the shift
from center to periphery, and beyond.
No city illustrates this shift, its reasons and its potentials, better than
Atlanta. In fact, Atlanta shifted so quickly and so completely that the center/edge
opposition is no longer the point. There is no center, therefore no periphery.
Atlanta is now a centerless city, or a city with a potentially infinite number of
centers. In that way, Atlanta is like LA, but LA is always urban; Atlanta
sometimes post-urban.
When I first went there in 1973, the notion of downtown in America was in
crisis. Downtown Manhattan, downtown Boston, downtown San Francisco: the
cores of most American cities were in total, demonstrative states of disrepair –
crime, rotting infrastructures, eroding tax bases, etc. There was an apocalyptic
atmosphere of downtown doom, doubt that they could ever be rescued.
But Atlanta was an exception. Construction was resuming in former
disaster areas. Block by block, downtown was being recovered (literally, some
downtowns looked like accidental checkerboards: half-full, half-empty) and
actually rebuilt. Atlanta was the test case for an American renaissance, for the
rebirth of the American downtown. And you can’t talk about Atlanta’s rebirth
without talking about John Portman.
John Portman, artist-architect, is said to be a very rich billionaire, his story
shrouded in rumors of bankruptcy. He works in offices crowded with his own
Pollock-like paintings.
He is undoubtedly a genius in his own mind.
In a book on John Portman by John Portman, John Portman writes, “I
consider architecture frozen music.”
The lobby of his newest building downtown is a private museum for his
own sculptures, gigantic homages to fellow artists such as Dubuffet, Brancusi,
and Stella: megalomania as welcome.
John Portman is a hybrid; he is architect and developer, two roles in one.
That explains his tremendous power: the combination makes him a myth.
It means, theoretically, that every idea he has can be realized, that he can
make money with his architecture, and that the roles of architect and developer
can forever fuel each other.
In the early seventies, to a power-starved profession, this synthesis seemed
revolutionary, like a self-administered Faustian bargain.
But with these two identities merged in one person, the traditional
opposition between client and architect – two stones that create sparks –
disappears. The vision of the architect is realized without opposition, without
influence, without inhibition.
Portman started with one block, made money, and developed the next
block, a cycle that then triggered Atlanta’s rebirth. But the new Atlanta was a
virgin rebirth: a city of clones. It was not enough for Portman to fill block after
block with his own architecture (usually without very interesting programs), but
as further consolidation, he connected each of his buildings to each of his other
buildings with bridges, forming an elaborate spiderweb of skywalks with himself
at the center. Once you ventured into the system, there was almost no incentive
to visit the rest of downtown, no way to escape.
John Portman is also responsible for single-handedly perfecting a device
that spread from Atlanta to the rest of America, and from America to the rest of
the world (even Europe): he (re)invented the atrium.
Since the Romans, the atrium had been a hole in a house or a building that
injects light and air – the outside – into the center; in Portman’s hands it became
the opposite: a container of artificiality that allows its occupants to avoid
daylight forever – a hermetic interior, sealed against the real. Actually, the
evacuation of the center implied by the atrium, the subsequent covering of the
hole, the mostly cellular accommodation of its perimeter – hotel rooms, office
cubicles – make it a modern panopticon: the cube hollowed out to create an
invasive, allinclusive, revealing transparency in which everyone becomes
everyone else’s guard – architectural equivalent of Sartre’s No Exit, “Hell is
other people …”
Downtown becomes an accumulation of voided panopticons inviting their
own voluntary prisoners: the center as a prison system.
Portman’s most outrageous atrium is the Atlanta Marriott, a tour de force
transformation of the slab – democratic, neutral, anonymous – which he splits in
two halves, then eviscerates to bend its carcass into a sphere – as nearly as
concrete permits.
This interior is not “frozen music” but “arrested maelstrom.” Its
accumulated architectural intensity is beyond a single perceptual grasp. Is the
result of this convulsive effort beauty? Does it matter?
The new atrium became a replica as inclusive as downtown itself, an ersatz
downtown. Downtown’s buildings are no longer complementary; they don’t
need each other; they become hostile; they compete. Downtown disintegrates
into multiple downtowns, a cluster of autonomies. The more ambitious these
autonomies, the more they undermine the real downtown – its messy conditions,
its complexities, its irregularities, its densities, its ethnicities.
With atriums as their private mini-centers, buildings no longer depend on
specific locations. They can be anywhere.
And if they can be anywhere, why should they be downtown?
At first the atrium seemed to help rehabilitate and stabilize Atlanta’s
downtown, but it actually accelerated its demise.
That was Portman’s Paradox.
The rediscovery of downtown quickly degenerated into a proliferation of
quasi-downtowns that together destroyed the essence of center.
By the eighties, building activity had moved away from Portman’s part of
the city, north toward the perimeter highway, then beyond …
Atlanta was the launching pad of the distributed downtown; downtown had
exploded. Once atomized, its autonomous particles could go anywhere; they
gravitated opportunistically toward points of freedom, cheapness, easy access,
diminished contextual nuisance. Millions of fragments landed in primeval forests
sometimes connected to highways, sometimes to nothing at all. Infrastructure
seemed almost irrelevant – some splinters flourished in complete isolation – or
even counter-productive: in the middle-class imagination, not being connected to
MARTA, the subway system, meant protection from downtown’s unspeakable
“problems.”
The new program was usually abstract – offices for companies that were no
longer tied to geography, fueled by an unlimited demand for insurance (cruel
equation: hell for the insured – Elsewhere; paradise for the insurers – Atlanta).
Sometimes an area becomes suddenly popular. Attractors appear: it might
be the proximity of a new, or even a rumored highway, beautiful nature, or
comfortable neighborhoods. Attraction is translated in building. Sometimes the
nature of the attractor remains a mystery; seemingly nothing is there (that may
be the attraction!) – it might be the building itself. Suddenly clumps of office
and residential towers spring up, then a church, a mall, a Hyatt, a cineplex.
Another “center” is born, stretching the city to apparent infinity.
North of downtown there is a place where a highway starts to fork, leaving
downtown behind. There is an area of nothingness, and beyond the nothingness
you see outposts of a new architecture that has the intensity of downtown, but
it’s not downtown. It’s something totally different.
In 1987, somewhere near here, two skyscrapers were built facing each
other, one hyper-modern (i.e., clad in mirror-glass), the other almost Stalinist
(covered in prefabricated concrete). They were built by the same firm for
different corporate entities, each searching for its own elusive identity.
Two buildings, so close together, built by a single firm in opposite
languages … A new esthetic operates in Atlanta: the random juxtaposition of
entities that have nothing in common except their coexistence, or – favorite
formulation of the surrealists – “the accidental encounter between an umbrella
and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.”2
I wanted to find out what kind of firm could design with such equanimity,
what kind of firm could generate the same enthusiasm for such different
architectures. So I made a tour of Atlanta’s architects’ offices.
They were usually located in idyllic situations – dense forests, hills, on
lakes. Designed as corporate villas, they were large, sometimes very large: 250–
300 people. The typical architect was a southerner, 26, laundered at an Ivy
League school, who then returned to Atlanta to produce buildings like these two
towers. They could generate an entire oeuvre in one afternoon – receiving
instructions over the phone – then have it rejected without pain. They would plan
symmetrical projects, then find them distorted overnight by economics – shrunk
by failure, inflated by success – and have to perform adaptive amputations or
stitch on additional limbs with the urgency of a field hospital: infantry on the
frontline of an architectural panic.
The partners were very accessible and eager to talk about Atlanta, their
work, the present situation, the dilemmas they faced – a cluster of issues that
formed a very plausible argument for the emergence and consolidation of
postmodern architecture, the only architecture, it seemed, that could be
generated quickly enough to satisfy the needs of the clients.
In a situation where architecture is no longer the construction of city but,
like a new branch of physics, the outcome of the dynamics of force fields in
perpetual motion, that precious professional alibi of the architect – the mystical
“spark” of inspiration – is obviously outdated. No one can wait for it, least of all
the architect. His task is truly impossible: to express increasing turbulence in a
stable medium.
Architecture has always equated greatness with the breaking of rules.
Now you can be great through their effortless application.
Only a postmodern architect can design building proposals of huge scale
and complexity in a day, any day. Postmodernism is not a movement: it is a new
form of professionalism, of architectural education, not one that creates
knowledge or culture, but a technical training that creates a new unquestioning, a
new efficacy in applying new, streamlined dogma.
Post-inspirational, past erudition, intimately connected with speed, a
futurism, postmodernism is a mutation that will be from now on part of
architectural practice – an architecture of the flight forward.
One of the offices I visited had a room: it was locked. Inside was a model
of a large piece of Atlanta – particular features: none. Twelve people were
working on four schemes, each as big as the Rockefeller Center, each
composition hyper-symmetrical but placed arbitrarily on the huge map,
surrounded by single-family homes; there was no sign of highways … At the last
moment the table had been enlarged to make room for one additional
Rockefeller Center.
The model was a complete inversion of metropolis as we know it – not the
systematic assembly of a critical mass but its systematic dismantlement, a
seemingly absurd dispersion of concentration. Alarmingly, it suggested that the
elements that had once made the city would now cease to work if they got too
close together. Spaced out, far apart, they needed the neutral medium of nature
or (at the most) the single-family house to ensure further their noninterference.
 The reason that the room had to be secret – the only vault in the otherwise
open office landscape – was that none of the clients of these five centers knew
that the other projects were being prepared. The architects believed that there
were probably still other architects working on similar projects, maybe for the
same neighborhood – in similar rooms in other offices – but nobody could really
be sure.
This deliberate disinformation, lack of adjustment, represents a
revolutionary reversal of the role architects traditionally claim. They no longer
create order, resist chaos, imagine coherence, fabricate entities. From form
givers they have become facilitators. In Atlanta, architects have aligned
themselves with the uncontrollable, have become its official agents, instruments
of the unpredictable: from imposing to yielding in one generation.
Working on the emergence of new urban configurations, they have
discovered a vast new realm of potential and freedom: to go rigorously with the
flow, architecture/urbanism as a form of letting go …
Atlanta is a creative experiment, but it is not intellectual or critical; it has
taken place without argument. It represents current conditions without any
imposition of program, manifesto, ideology.
As extrapolation, each site in Atlanta is exposed to a theoretical carpet
bombardment of “centers,” possibilities hovering somewhere, waiting to be
activated by a mysterious process – only vaguely related to money – according
to laws not yet identified, at least not by architects.
It is now possible, at any point in Atlanta (and Atlanta is just a metaphor for
the world) to create a brutal, often ugly container that accommodates a wide
variety of quasi-urban activities and to turn anywhere, with savage competence,
into a point of density, a ghost of city.
In the future, a “realistic” frisson3 about the periphery as a new playground
for architects, a field of one-liners, will not be enough. If the center no longer
exists, it follows that there is no longer a periphery either. The death of the first
implies the evaporation of the second. Now all is city, a new pervasiveness that
includes landscape, park, industry, rust belt, parking lot, housing tract, single-
family house, desert, airport, beach, river, ski slope, even downtown.
Atlanta’s is a conclusive architecture that will eventually acquire beauty.
Sometimes there are prefigurations, occasional schemes that seem to
intellectualize the new freedoms: a project by I. M. Pei for a chain of skyscrapers
very close to the highway, causing short, stroboscopic sensations for passing
cars, even at 55 mph.
 Paradoxically, a more convincing premonition of this potential architecture
is the prefabricated landscape that is being prepared to receive it. Atlanta has an
ideal climate. Because it approximates jungle conditions it was used as training
ground for the war in Vietnam. Everything grows there immediately and
energetically. Landscaping carries authority, the vegetal sometimes more robust
than the built. A thick tapestry of idyll accommodates each architectural
appearance and forms its only context; the vegetal is replacing the urban: a
panorama of seamless artificiality, so organized, lush, welcoming, that it
sometimes seems like another interior, a fluid collective domain, glimpsed
through tinted glass, venetian blinds, and the other distancing devices of the
alienated architecture – almost accessible, like a seductive fairy tale.
Imagine Atlanta as a new imperial Rome – large urban figures no longer
held together by small-scale urban cement but by forest, fragments floating in
trees.4
After John Portman rescued the center, he could only react to its explosion
as a developer must – by following the “demand.” To outbid its centrifugality he
proposed an entirely new city way up north, beyond the periphery even, and
named it Northpark.
It is presented in an impressionistic brochure with a conscious fuzziness
(derived from recent breakthrough in science?).
“The first of the series symbolizes the gaseous state,” says the caption,
“beginnings of an idea with only a hint of structure. The second expresses the
solidification of ideas into emerging forms. And the last adds shading, form, and
structure, bringing Northpark closer to reality.”
Looking at the Northpark renderings, you may laugh, but you may also
think, “Where have we seen these forms before?” Are they ugly or accidentally,
unbelievably beautiful? Is this the reappearance of the sublime? Is it finally
possible to identify them as the same shapes that Malevich launched at the
beginning of the century – Architectons – abstract pre-architectures, the vacant
but available volumes that could contain whatever program the century would
generate in its ruthless unfolding?
If the forms of Northpark can be traced back to Malevich’s Architectons,
the most extreme streak of modernism, Atlanta itself can be described as a
mixture of the imaginations of Malevich and Frank Lloyd Wright, whose
Broadacre City described the American continent as a continuous urban – that is
to say, artificial – condition: homogeneous, low intensity, with an occasional
high point of visible concentration. In other words: there was advance warning.
It did not come as a surprise. Atlanta is a realized prophesy.
Are these inhabited envelopes in their thick forests the final manifestation
of modernization? Is this modernity?
Modernity is a radical principle. It is destructive. It has destroyed the city as
we know it. We now inhabit “what used to be the city.” In a bizarre way,
Portman’s Northpark – in fact, Atlanta as a whole – comes close to fulfilling that
kind of modernity, a post-cataclysmic new beginning that celebrates
revolutionary forms in liberated relationships, justified, finally, by no other
reason than their appeal to our senses.
Portman lost his nerve with Northpark.
Maybe it was the economy, or maybe he never believed in it. He returned to
the center, this time applying the esthetics of the periphery: a singular tower no
longer interested in belonging, in being part of his web, but a needle, standing
simply on its own.
It is in downtown, but not of downtown.
Downtown has become anywhere.
Hiding behind it, a private dream: his very last, most secret project is a
touching relic – it shows the depth of his own misreading.
Now, maybe as a personal testament, he wants to bring the European city to
the heart of Atlanta: arrogance or sentimentality? A rip-off of Leon Krier’s
“community” emblem: glass pyramid over pedestrian plaza supported on four
pylonlike buildings. When I asked in Portman’s office whether he was inspired
by Krier, I was officially told, “Mr Portman doesn’t need inspiration.”
Portman has three identities according to Portman: artist, architect,
developer. He has yet to discover a fourth: that of the thinker or theoretician. He
could assert that each city is now an Atlanta – Singapore, Paris – what is the
Louvre now if not the ultimate atrium?
He could have been – or maybe is – disurbanist to the world. 1987/1994
Notes
1 Of course, the word urbanism – which somehow suggests a minimum of steering – does not apply. For
now, we could adopt the term disurbanism which, in the twenties, described a branch of constructivist
urban theory aimed at dissolving the city.
2 Comte du Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, 1868–70.
3 During the eighties, critics like Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre began to suggest that the
periphery might be the appropriate territory for a disabused architecture of Dirty Realism, so named
after its eponymous literary equivalent.
4 The purity of this contrast may soon be compromised by the extravagant, palatial frenzy of Atlanta’s
residential architecture, now generating colossal mansions in absurd proximities at the potential
expense of the vegetal. But then, that may make the city ultimately even more Roman.
Chapter 3

Barcelona – Re-thinking Urbanistic

Projects
Joan Busquets

In the 1980–2000 period, the city of Barcelona developed a series of urbanistic

strategies which sought to reinterpret existing urban structures and to restructure
primary functional systems in order to face up to the start of the new century. In
a description of this process it is vital to bring a new approach to certain of the
city’s urban planning projects, with a view to including new urban dynamics.
Barcelona’s urban planning process over the last two decades led to many
reflections on the necessity of disciplinary changes. The spaces of city planning,
whether in terms of urban architecture or the urban project, have undergone a
highly interesting development and are potential points of reference for future
evolutions.
There are a number of important approaches to the issue of citymaking that
are a part of the recent discussions in Barcelona, as well as Europe as a whole.
These include the following.

1 The existing city is a point of departure for future planning rather than a
passive datum in the long-term project. An understanding of its forms and
its capacity for modification and transformation can provide the basis for
valuable projects of intervention and urban improvement.
This approach sees the city as an entity comprising different
morphologies. According to the intrinsic conditions of their historical
origins and the way in which their construction materialized, strategies of
change can be introduced in the form of specific projects. So morphologies
 have different forms of organization and act as relatively autonomous urban
units. The Italian school of the 1970s, represented by A. Rossi and C.
Aymonino, blazed a trail for this kind of disciplinary development.1

3.1
Barcelona region. Compact central town and city system around it

2 Infrastructures are the means to ensuring the functioning of the city, and
sometimes explain its origin. Their importance led the Modern Movement
to use them as the basis for their prepositional structure: Le Corbusier
described infrastructures as communicating with seven levels or “ways,”
corresponding to different levels in their organizational hierarchy.
Conventional planning still accords infrastructures a demiurgical value in
ensuring the correct functioning of the whole. It was according to these
principles that networks of motorways were planned for post-war European
cities, sometimes generating greater urban destruction than the war itself.
Above all, they established gaps between the infrastructure – the terrain of
engineers – and the spaces between the roads to be developed by architects
for residence, industry, amenities, etc.
It is true that certain levels of efficiency have to be guaranteed, but we
are discovering that there are different ways to ensure sufficient levels of
service and a need to evaluate the material, social and cultural costs of
transforming infrastructures. The city has to be efficient but also habitable,
and the use of infrastructures is more adaptable than we ever imagined. By
way of example, the discussion between public transport and private
mobility is, in Europe, finding innovative and exemplary formulas of
 commitment. At the same time, the evolution of the various infrastructures
– communication between parts of the territory – is changing at a dizzying
rate.

3.2
Metropolitan Barcelona and housing development in the 1960s: housing estates, row houses and
informal sectors

It seems necessary to reinstate the role of infrastructure as an integrated

element of the city, which is attributed the power of articulation and the
weight of urban significance, rather than being an element of separation
between adjacent parts. This is one of the major targets of today’s
urbanistic discipline, which is recovering the strategic, dynamic value of
infrastructures, but also their innovative capacity within the urban and
territorial landscape. This leads to the hypothesis that urban systems have to
be designed in “networks” that on the one hand ensure their complementary
nature, and on the other allow their definition as multipurpose units which
are firmly implanted in their territory.
3 A new understanding of the city’s fit within its macrogeography – to apply
a similar interpretation to that of F. Braudel2 – seems to be the motive
behind the orientation of major urban projects in Europe. The issues of the
greater landscape and the relationship with the territory are, once again,
basic: this explains the force behind the recovery of the line between cities
 and water (the famous waterfronts), the connection of ports with historic
cities, and the reservation of valleys and watercourses, etc. These are
themes which appear as leitmotifs in strategic operations in Barcelona,
Lisbon, Lyons and many other European cities.

3.3
Aerial view, 1998

4 Recognition that the complexity of the project in the city calls for the
intervention of various actors, including the public and private sectors but
also associative and cultural sectors. It is only on the basis of the judicious
involvement of these agents that the urban project can achieve the
revitalizing effects in economic and social terms that are so often pursued.
This explains its importance for the communicative action that is so
relevant in the Anglo-Saxon context, as represented in the work of John
 Forester, Patsy Healey or Jordi Borja.3 This capacity for dialogue of the
projects does not signify the propositional negation that occasionally
confounded advocacy planning in the 1970s, as “consensus” is only
effective if there is a prior proposal which can be submitted for critical
discussion. This is also the root of the force of image to which urban
projects are subjected, on occasion succumbing to the temptations of the
media and overlooking the rigor that is vital to their disciplinary
argumentation.

3.4
Suburban fabrics, made of different types of urban projects

5 The evolution of projects in the city is subject to an ever-increasing

multicultural tension. The “ideas of force” in each context vary very
quickly. The discussion between global innovation conveyed by the
international media, sometimes acting as leader culture, and the intrinsic
value of that which is local, contextual and unique is a central issue. Writers
such as François Ascher4 seek to distinguish the consequences for the urban
planning model, while others such as Joel Garreau advocate the innovative
strength of this tension, which, in keeping with its argument, takes place
outside the city in the form of “edge cities” where “the new” seeks the best
 space.
Yet it is true that the city today is more than ever a “multicultural” place,
due both to the composition and origin of its residents, and to the variety of
people who visit and use it in very different ways. This leads to the need to
recover in projects a capacity for symbiosis – in other words, an active state
of these situations seeking recognition of their values in their differences.

3.5
Urban park, placed within the suburban fabric

6 The general objective of projects with the most progressive ambitions is to

seek a rebalance between the various parts of the city, according to which a
fair city is not one that is equal in form but one that offers a fairly
homogeneous level of service and use. These principles of “social justice”
advocated among others by David Harvey5 on the basis of a Marxist
interpretation of urban evolution are based on more general strategies as to
the indexes of land or the rates of urban development and socialization of
 the surplus value, etc. This is where the legal framework has to back the
plan and the urban project in order for these aims to be achieved.
It might be said that, in our context, the legal framework is defined by
laws which happen to take their name from “land,” giving us an idea of
how important this factor is in urban development. It has on occasion been
these laws which have dictated the formal structure of plans and projects for
the city, but we need to reinterpret them as the framework according to
which more rational and balanced development can come about without
overlooking other variables.
7 Recognition of the seminal value of cities’ “historic” planning projects,
which act as distinguishing references but also as models for their modern-
day development. This is the case of the influence of Cerdà’s project on the
Barcelona of 1855, or Wagner’s for Vienna at the turn of the century.6

The interpretation of some of these projects will be key to the interventions

described below.
Recovering the city
These salient factors or dimensions go to explain the theoretical “framework” in
which urbanistic projects are taking place. We are, then, a long way from having
a single, precise, well-defined “theory,” and are working in a context which is
multidimensional and above all “non-linear,” as it was thought after the war, to
produce proposals for urban transformation and rehabilitation.

3.6
Plaza intervention to recover left over spaces

It is important to realize that among these factors, the project or the plan for
the city and its parts revived a concern with the physical aspect which two-
dimensional “planning” had practically forgotten. Today the urban project seeks
to discern, within this complexity, criteria of physical coherence, urban
composition and spatial priority that suggest a rebirth of the practice of “urban
urbanism”7 and “urban architecture.” This direction, not without its difficulties,
centers the discussion of the project for our cities on the turn of this century. The
recovery of a degree of protagonism of the physical dimension of the project or
the urban strategy to a large extent involves emphasis on the development of the
public space as a privileged space in the urban event, be it in the city center or on
the suburban outskirts. Its recomposition answers the abovementioned criteria of
integration and symbiosis, more than the criterion of order in urban composition
in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Multidimensionality, a differential use of spaces and their adaptability oblige us
to consider other criteria in the composition of spaces of this kind.

The different scales of the urban project

Recent urbanistic practice has been based on proposals which correspond to
fields of a different scale and different levels of definition according to the needs
of the brief. While we describe the factor of context, plans and projects are
subject to their individual times of development. We might almost say that a city
works with “visions” of its future in the mid-term, which are linked to fairly
precise proposals for some elements – infrastructure, landscape,
macrogeography, etc. – and on the basis of which a general “consensus” can be
established, such as, for example, the opening up to the seafront of Barcelona,
which then went on to take the form of plans and projects with more specific
briefs.8 However the city works at the same time with strategies of improvement
and rehabilitation, which are based on the internal logic of the existing
construction of its fabrics and neighborhoods.

An interpretation of the contemporary urban

planning experience of Barcelona
This chapter now goes on to describe a series of actions on the fabrics and empty
interstices of today’s Barcelona in an attempt to explain how it can operate on
different levels: projects to improve and renovate neighborhoods, programs to
improve mobility, and areas of new centrality supported by large obsolete spaces
left between districts.
3.7
Old City reinterpretation

Suburban fabrics and the residential periphery

Barcelona, like most cities, can be considered on the basis of the construction of
its various districts. In 1981, at a seminar at the School of Architecture,9 we
worked on an interpretation of Barcelona on the basis of its main morphologies:
the old town, the Eixample, the suburban fabrics and the residential periphery.
The “suburban Barcelona reading” stands out in particular: in the second half of
the nineteenth century the old boroughs around central Barcelona (Poblenou,
Sagrera, Sant Andreu, Horta, Gràcia, Sarrià, Sant Gervasi, Sants, Poble Sec, etc.)
mainly developed a series of interesting urban planning parts, constituting the
base which is sometimes referred to as “other Barcelonas.” The work shows the
many latent or explicit projects and plans on which the traditional Barcelona,
comprising its present-day Districts, was built, modified and transformed,10 with
the urbanization of streets and roads, projects for squares, the creation of new
streets through districts, drawn-back facades, avenues to connect the entire city,
housing projects with squares, major amenities or residential complexes, etc. It
explains the continual propositional capacity which is so often based on a
conflicting logic but which, finally, after differing periods of time, produces and
renovates the city. These projects are sometimes considered “minor” in
comparison with large urban planning proposals, such as the expansion of the
Eixample across the plain, but together they represent a projectual articulation of
comparable entity which should perhaps not be seen as exclusive. In this way a
fundamental part of Barcelona was woven from medium-density housing with
shops, amenities and production and industrial centers on the same scale.
It is on the basis of this logic that we have to reinterpret the PERIs (Internal
Renovation Plans) of the city districts carried out in the eighties with the idea of
“adding” new elements to the existing city in order to ensure its rehabilitation
and renovation.11 The specific aims vary a great deal: from the rationalization of
the existing street layout to the reuse of unoccupied land within these districts
for amenities and gardens.

Interventions in squares, parks and gardens

The planning logic and legal framework for a hundred or so squares, parks and
gardens throughout these districts in the internal process of this suburban
Barcelona constitute an updating of its original structure, conforming a
metropolitan whole with the central city. This process judiciously pieces
together a puzzle in which we can highlight the following types.

Urban parks
These parks, set in the urban fabric, with dimensions of between six and ten
hectares, correspond to the re-use of industrial and service enclosures. Obvious
examples include the Escorxador (a former abattoir), España Industrial, El Clot,
Pegaso and Renfe-Meridiana.
The foremost purpose of these parks was to turn a situation of “urban
backs” – historically created by the walls of these enclosures – into a permeable
urban element capable of offering a new service to the surrounding
neighborhoods.12

Squares and gardens

These are small operations totally integrated into the city’s various residential
fabrics. The sheer quantity of works carried out – over 150 – and their quality
supposes a thorough-going rehabilitation of the urban space of Barcelona.
Despite their limited size, their central positions in each district fragment
has the quite remarkable effect of generating increased urbanity. The squares
respond to clear functional needs to systematize traffic and overground car
parking, and set out very varied spaces.
Most of the projects manifest a particular concern with restoring the
symbolic values of the square, such as the incorporation of especially significant
elements like sculptures, which had previously disappeared with excess
functionality of design.

Gardens with amenities

These include a series of old private properties which are now re-used as public
spaces in the city. The old buildings are converted for use as communal
amenities. The specific theme of the project is the adaptation of a garden that
was designed for exclusive use to new functional and urban requirements.

Urban axes
These interventions systematize the intermediate street layout in order to
increase the protagonism of pedestrian space in some principal elements of the
urban form. They are predominantly linear projects whose most significant
decisions involve the design of the cross section. In turn, the project always
tables a new discussion with the general street layout and public transport; and
with parking opportunities and the tangential uses of the commercial ground
floors. It is, then, easy to see how this introduces a degree of complexity into the
management process.
Particular mention should also be made of Via Julia and Carrer de Prim,
two newly designed urban axes on Barcelona’s periphery. Their construction has
turned abandoned spaces between building into civic axes, which give a new
lease of life to the areas of Nou Barris and El Besòs, respectively.

Large-scale parks
These larger interventions change Barcelona’s overall proportion of green. They
include: the seafront, with its conversion into a great linear park and public
access to the new beaches; the western side of Montjuïc overlooking the
Llobregat delta, where the Olympic sports amenities were installed; the Vall
d’Hebron in the northern part of the city, where residential land has been used to
build a great park with amenities in one of the most built-up sectors; and the
Diagonal park in the western extreme, which completes one of the city’s large
sports areas.
The restructuring of Ciutat Vella
The strategy of recovering the suburban districts and peripheral areas was to find
a special complement in Ciutat Vella and the Eixample.
Urban areas such as the district of Ciutat Vella (the old town) called for
more resolute action, in view of the fact that they were in a very advanced state
of decline. Here the “projects” sought “internal reform,” which consisted of
evacuating strategic blocks to improve living conditions (the sunlighting and
ventilation of houses that J. L. Sert and the GATCPAC had called for in the
1930s for these very same sectors), based on the theory that this was the only
way to bring about a change in the process. In the face of the disinterest of
proprietors, who considered these districts to have no future and to be destined to
become ghettos, reorganization meant major public investment. These
interventions led to others which reinforced the historically central functions
based there. To this end, new cultural functions were developed, like the Centre
de Cultura Contemporània and the Museu d’Art Contemporani in the old Casa
de Caritat hospice buildings, and agreements were promoted to encourage the
universities to relocate faculties there to attract students and lecturers to these
spaces. Reconversion has reached an advanced stage, yet it is a project which
still needs time to become irreversible.13
3.8
Building code to green internal courtyards for Barcelona’s Eixample

“Rehabilitation strategies” were also undertaken in the famous Eixample,

the city extension designed by Cerdà in the midnineteenth century, which was
the point of reference of a seminal “urban plan” for Barcelona. The Eixample
had its own economic dynamic in which, like so many modern downtowns,
residents were tending to get pushed out by the pressures of more powerful
tertiary activities. Intervention in interior spaces, turning inner courtyards into
mainly private gardens with a dozen or so for public use, gave a new incentive to
residence, the strategy being accompanied by other means of support for housing
and detaining the tertiary sector – which was later to find more convenient
premises in the new downtowns.

From the Cerdà Plan to Barcelona’s Eixample

The value of the area of the Eixample in the formation of contemporary
Barcelona requires attention to both the dimensions of the project and the
present-day urbanistic result. Let’s compare the plan to the built city.
Ildefons Cerdà devoted over twenty years to generating the ideas in his
project and making its implementation viable. It is beyond doubt a fundamental
project in the formalization of contemporary Barcelona, but it is also a
pioneering work in modern urban planning theory.
Cerdà planned a thorough reworking of Barcelona, on the scale and
dimension expressed in his powerful concept of city. At the same time he was
introducing the first set of modern urban planning instruments, where the project
for the new city involved an analytical approach to reality and cities which was
neither deterministic nor univocal.
The advances made by Cerdà have recently been discussed in the light of
documents discovered in various archives.14 These prove that he was a singular
figure in European urban planning, and one who has been underestimated to date
– due perhaps to the difficult gestation of his project.
We have to bear in mind the fact that the “founders” of modern urban
planning generally mentioned in the history books – R. Baumeister (1874), J.
Stübben (1890), R. Unwin (1909) etc. – carried out their work after Cerdà and
probably did not have information about Barcelona’s urbanistic process.
The theory of urban development on which Cerdà was working regarded
prior conceptual formulation as being vital to the drafting of a city project.15 His
theory included the 1859 Teoría para la Construcción de la Ciudad (Theory for
the Construction of the City) and the 1879 Teoría General de la Urbanización
(General Theory of Urbanization).
For Cerdà, each work of “theory on” required its “application to” a specific
case, and his theoretical approaches in turn had to be proved to be viable; in his
own words, “the best idea is useless unless the means to carry it out are
presented at the same time.”
He developed his theory according to three principles:

1 Hygiene, based on the critique of the existing urban situation, with sound
precedents. Cerdà wrote the Monografía estadística de la clase obrera
(Statistical report on the working class) which accompanies the description
of the preliminary project in which he minutely studies living conditions in
the walled city. In addition, the description of the preliminary project
presupposes an in-depth geographical analysis of the position and siting of
the city, as well as its climatology and sunlighting. His ultimate purpose
was to produce a thorough-going urban analysis to help him make
propositional decisions. This concern with information based on
disciplinary research led him to a further study of other cities such as Paris,
and to interpreting maps of such far-flung cities as Boston, Turin,
Stockholm, Buenos Aires and Saint Petersburg, among others.
2 The second component of Cerdà’s theory was traffic flow. The profound
impression of the steam train, with which he became acquainted on its
introduction in Barcelona, led him to think about how to prepare the city for
this great instrument of mechanical mobility.
3 Finally, Cerdà introduced a new idea of city which saw it spread right
across the Barcelona plain: the already constructed and the yet to be built.
We might say that his project involved the refounding of Barcelona.

This idea of a hygienic, functional city was, according to Cerdà, to produce

conditions of equality among the residents using it; his proposal was therefore to
cover the entire territory so that all the forms of settlement would fit into this
homogeneous fabric.
Cerdà’s proposal for the natural space consisted of organizing the city by
means of street layout and regulations:

1 The basic layout comprised a system of street blocks situated between axes
of 113.3 meters and streets of 20 meters. Its directrices correspond to the
 dominant lines of the plain, and are turned through 45° from the north,
repeating the Roman orientation. The general or regional layout comprised
a greater breadth of layout – 50 meters – to establish the main functional
relations: Gran Via, Diagonal, Meridiana and Paral·lel. These two latter
layouts correspond, as their names indicate, to their geographical position,
and explicitly manifest the idea of bringing a global design to the city by
integrating the different scales of interpretation.
2 When finally passed in 1860, Cerdà’s proposal included a series of
construction regulations that differed from those established by the urban
police, which had traditionally formed part of a single juridical habeas. At
the same time, he purported to guarantee good hygienic conditions, and
proposed that only 50 per cent of the plot in the center of the block be
developed. Cerdà trusted that the scope of the great Eixample would
introduce large tracts of land into the market, thereby making cheap land
available for affordable housing.
3 Economic thought aimed to put into practice Cerdà’s constant idea that
projects should be viable. The distinguished engineer’s concern with this
issue had been revived by his visits to Paris, where he had been a privileged
observer of the fundamental changes that Baron Hausmann was carrying
out in the French capital. Here, there were two interesting extremes. The
first was the need for property-owners to contribute to the development
scheme – a bold and highly socializing proposal for the time. The second
controversial idea was his determination to make the renovation of Ciutat
Vella economically viable by associating it with the dynamics and benefits
of the extension of the city over the plain. The very ambitious scope of this
proposal came up against an overwhelming reaction on the part of property-
owners in the old town, who finally vetoed the situation, and the
“Renovation” part of the Cerdà project was never passed.
3.9
Intervention on existing blocks to improve residential quality

This was one of the great urban planning projects in nineteenth-century Europe,
which, having been approved in 1860, after 140 years of construction has now
produced an admirable complex known as “Barcelona’s Eixample.” However,
during the process of development, the complex became built up beyond the
limits originally planned, and some of the principal ideas of the project lost
definition.
As it stands today, the central Eixample covers half the area planned by
Cerdà; however, in terms of building and activity it has multiplied by four. It
covers 880 hectares, or 550 street blocks, and in the order of 125 kilometers of
street; there is a resident population of about 350,000 inhabitants, and 300,000
people are employed there. Another indicator of use, activity and structure is
traffic: some 600,000 cars pass through this area. This highlights the importance
of this center, and the major presence of both residential and work functions.16
3.10
Cerdà Plan, designed in 1855

The significance of this major project and the different reality it actually
produced illustrates the importance of this urbanistic episode, and also explains
other elements of the rehabilitation of Barcelona. Its protagonism in the urban
form and second its influence on the morphological transformation were effected
by the large-scale projects described below.

Large-scale urbanistic projects

We must also look at the situation from the reverse or complementary point of
view. The urban form can be understood by its empty spaces, and we must bear
in mind the problems of function or brief arising in each situation. Let’s take a
look.
The empty spaces between “urban pieces” usually comprise vast tracts of
land which are unused or have an obsolete function – industries that have fallen
into disuse, dismantled railway spaces, old port land, and so on. Here we have
spaces of opportunity, providing potential for endogenous development in the
city. However, in Barcelona there were also problems of traffic access and a
shortage of public transport between different areas of the city. Through-traffic
was still using the Eixample to the extent that it attracted commerce and
services, and spoiled its residential quality.
 A series of large-scale projects were drawn up, endeavoring to combine
increased connectivity of traffic and public transport between districts with the
development of a series of new downtowns in empty or obsolete central areas. A
system of large connector roads (the Ronda) was also to provide a means of
bypassing the city.
3.11
Barcelona, plain designed by Cerdà as preparation for the Plan

This program of multiple “centrality” meant that the increase in value of

interstitial areas as a result of new accessibility was not totally privatized. Each
new downtown would offer facilities and parks in the newly introduced areas
and decentralize the overcrowded tertiary sector.
The program meant that the waterfront – previously occupied by
nineteenth-century industry – was now brought into use, and development
included new residential areas and the necessary infrastructures to provide
access to the city’s beaches.
These projects were all furthered by these: election of Barcelona as the
1992 Olympic host city, which served to concentrate a great many of the
strategies of the various public and private operators.
A highlight among these schemes was the recovery of the city’s port and
seafront. Barcelona is proud of its role in the development of Mediterranean
urban civilization, yet any possible relation with the sea was blocked by the old
railway line, the port and the old warehouses, and the drainage system emptied
straight out into the sea. This question had for decades been the center of ideas
aspirations, but the problems of infrastructure and land ownership were difficult
ones to solve.
The Barcelona of the 1980s threw itself into the task with a series of
successive projects. First of all, the project for the Moll de la Fusta wharf created
a new link between Ciutat Vella and the port, through-traffic was taken to a
semi-underground level, and work was started on a model which was later
extended to the Ronda ring roads: separating through-traffic from urban traffic
heading for neighboring sectors. This urban project was the basis for the reform
of the port, which was completed in 1995 by the Viaplana-Piñón team with a
leisure and recreation complex called Port Vell.
Meanwhile, by 1985 work had started on designing the infrastructure ready
for the construction of the Olympic Village and regeneration of the city’s
beaches. The project team, headed by O. Bohigas, systematized the route of the
Rondas, the rail tracks were taken underground, a sewage plant beside the river
Besòs freed the beaches of pollution, and its geometry was drawn out on the
basis of a series of dikes which followed the rhythm of the Eixample. The
construction of the Olympic Village involved the collaboration of a dozen teams
of architects, and the different buildings follow Cerdà’s urban scale, reducing
density and producing a housing district which incorporates the services of the
present-day central residential area.
At the same time, other new downtowns were developed in empty
interstices such as Glòries, Carrer Tarragona and in Diagonal, with the project
for L’Illa by M. Solà-Morales and R. Moneo. Each project worked with specific
functional briefs in which the objective requirements of the development were
common to certain urbanistic conditions of this new “urban piece” in relation to
others surrounding it. This was perhaps the way to promote a public–private
partnership in which the quality of spaces and buildings was not an incidental
component. In the case of L’Illa, the building became a landmark in the city’s
most important avenue, and, as part of the development, the project includes two
public schools, a new street underpass connection, and a huge public garden in a
dense residential area that needed opening up.
The experience of Barcelona reveals the need to bring together the solution
of major infrastructures (traffic, drainage, etc.) and services (parks, schools, etc.)
with the urban space that surrounds them, not merely as a condition of context,
but also, and above all, because it is these spaces that can give them their real
urban meaning.
This premise leads to new relationships, such as the one between built
artefacts and environment in the case of Foster’s Communications Tower set in
the midst of the Parc de Collserola, justifying the effort of creating a 268-meter
high element at the top of the hill with a minimum shaft of 4.5 meters in
diameter to reduce its environmental impact.

Barcelona’s experience in the framework of Europe

In Barcelona, as in other major European urban development projects, we would
seem to be looking at operations with one singular characteristic. One of them is
infill of the existing city to increase its value by placing particular emphasis on
improving the urban space. If at other times the dynamics of cities found
expression in what happened beyond them, such as the huge urban expansions
outside the cities during the 1960s and 1970s, the central theme now is
reorganization of the city in itself. This does not mean that there are no processes
of suburbanization on the edges of the metropolis, though they are, for the
moment, complementary.
As a working hypothesis, we might suggest that these “urbanistic projects”
concentrate their efforts on providing a strong projectual content, with attention
to at least four components:

1 Public space is becoming the leitmotif of urban composition, be it in the city

center or on the outskirts. It is acknowledged as the element which can
voice the city’s cultural capacities and respond to its functional and esthetic
requirements. Here, the use of other urban spaces or the city’s own
historical projects serves as a point of reference for planners who have to
propose layouts in their designs which may require time to take shape.
Think of green and environmental systems in the city.
2 Urbanistic projects have to move around the most complex network of
public and private agents ever. The present-day situation, with the
superposition of various levels of government (state, regional, provincial,
municipal, district, etc.), makes unitary administration of the urban project
very complicated, but only by launching the project into this arena can
possible efforts be catalyzed. The case is similar for private investors at
various levels, who, with forms of partnership, have to try and go beyond
the programmatic requirements of each developer.
3.12
Boston, midnineteenth century, as incorporated on Cerdà research for Barcelona’s expansion

3 Time also becomes an important factor. Urbanistic projects need time, as

we all know, but if they are to last, the project has to channel its efforts
towards “strong” elements of the urban form. We know that our thoughts
and forms of action on the city often change; for “long-term” projects we
 have to go back to basics in the terms J. D. Burnham referred to at the
beginning of the twentieth century, while our projects for intervention have
to be well delimited and contextualized. This dimension has to be taken into
account in urban projects, not so much to “think small” as to be aware of
their capacities for implementation.

3.13
Block development, as proposed by Cerdà

4 On the other hand, the “urban form” is once again the central element in the
urbanistic project. We are coming to recognize its power of synthesis to
express the urban process and make for a field of negotiation between
technical, social and development agencies. But the urban form is now
benefiting from the wide repertory of methodological disciplinary
instruments developed in recent decades, which help to combine the
discourse of the project with relevant analyses, describe morphological
realities, and gauge the impact of the proposals – in short, to understand the
form not so much as a final result but as a guide in an urban transformation
process which is full of uncertainties that sometimes serve to cover up
mediocre projects.
3.14
Crossing, as proposed on Cerdà (Plan)

This is where work on the “intermediate scale” comes in very useful: this means
that while we establish the project on the basis of its own scale and autonomy,
we force ourselves to look up to its wider context and down in a refusal to
validate the project unless we are sure that it is reasonable in its viability. This
exercise in planning brings us closer to the discussion concerning the traditional
terms of the space of the Plan and the space of the Project.
To return to the recent Barcelona experience, there were two singular
conditions: the major political capacity of the municipality, and the fact that the
city’s Olympic candidature for 1992 was accepted in 1986. We can see how
many other cities have sought to take advantage of the spin-off of a set date:
Lisbon in 1998 with its Expo, Rome in 2000 with its Jubilee, Berlin and the new
capital projects, and so on. Yet we also see other major projects in Europe which
have produced satisfactory results, such as K + Z in Rotterdam, or the cases of
rehabilitation in Lyons, which have not had the advantage of a set date (which,
on the other hand, has the disadvantage of unduly pressurizing some parts of the
project and of forcing a double course of simultaneous projects, one for the event
and, another for the future city).

3.15
Barcelona’s Eixample as it is now after Cerdà Plan and 140 years of development
3.16
Fragment of large-scale project on mobility
3.17
New “centrality” programe. Olympic sites were placed on four of its poles
3.18
Waterfront infrastructures. Diagram representing the situation before and after the urbanistic
intervention

In these projects, too, we see a search for specific objectives, attention to

harmonic formulas based on well contextualized “pieces” of urban form and
urban infrastructure. The logistics of these operations tend to differ from the
classical bureaucratic services, and task forces are created with well-defined
objectives – partly by government agencies, but also with a great many external
private services.
In any case, here we have a great many of the ingredients of the discussion
regarding the urban project today. These lead us to think of the vast field of work
in cities, with, very different specific situations, though starting with the logic of
mobilization of efforts – where existing opportunities allow us to turn some
problematic points in cities into innovative, dynamic spaces.
This is a moment of far-reaching change of our urban systems in which we
can appreciate the phenomena of change in their main functions and the
appearance of new infrastructures almost without fixed channels which, with
limited issuing centers, make for city development with unprecedented forms.
Here we come up against more marked situations of discontinuity, as well as
examples of heterogeneity between urban areas of different orders. We think we
can understand this new territory without denying the efforts to revalue the
existing city covered above, but it undoubtedly forces us to validate these new
instruments of intervention in the light of new realities. This is where we have to
be aware of the complexity of this new situation, which is so open in terms of
decision-making mechanisms, and urban and market forces. Yet a major effort
would seem to be in order on the part of the design disciplines to come up with
rules of play that allow interesting urban results, and also the endogenous
development which is characteristic of every city. This new urban culture will
force us to discover the values of the city in the mutation surrounding every
urban building or space, and concentrate our efforts on the “strong points” of
form of these new territories – which doubtless offer other stimuli and charms.
In short, each generation has to come to a new understanding of the “basic”
problems of the urban territory and ambitiously articulate the proposals it can put
into effect. This is the only way to see the new waterfront in Barcelona; as the
carrying out of a long-range idea, with the means and skills brought to bear by
the generation of the 1990s. In Barcelona and in every city, this is the starting
point for new potentials and new themes for the beginning of this century.
3.19
Waterfront view in 1985. Access to the edge blocked by old railway line and drainage emptied

3.20
Waterfront rebuilt for 1992

Notes
1 See, among others, Rossi, 1982 (1st edn, 1966); Caniggia and Maffei, 1979.
2 Braudel, 1976.
3 See, for example, Borja, 2001; Healey, 1989.
4 Ascher, 1999.
5 See the recent work by Harvey, 2000.
6 Various authors; also Cerdà, 1995; Blau and Platzer, 2000.
7 Terms which are covered in detail in issues 5 and 6 of the UR magazine of the Laboratori d’Urbanisme,
Barcelona 1988. See principally the article by M. Solà-Morales.
8 Busquets, 1992.
9 See Busquets and Parcerisa, 1983.
10 The present-day Districts were defined in 1985 within the municipality of Barcelona in order to
facilitate administrative decentralization and broadly to reproduce the perimeters of the old nineteenth-
century municipalities before they were annexed to Barcelona at the turn of the twentieth century.
11 A more precise description can be found in Barcelona. Plans cap al 92 (Ajuntament de Barcelona,
 1987) and, more recently, Barcelona. La segona renovació (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1997).
12 Many books have been written both here and abroad about these projects. For a more complete version,
see Barcelona espais i escultures (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1987); Plans i Projectes 1981–82
(Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1983).
13 Further explanation of this process can be seen in Busquets, 2002.
14 The relatively large bibliography devoted to Cerdà and his work includes: Estapé 1971, 1977; LUB,
1978; Cerdà, 1992.
15 Cerdà himself, in Despojos (Facsímil, Madrid, 1991) tells us at the end of his life: “I did not merely
content myself with solving questions by casuistry, which is the common and most convenient
procedure; instead, when I needed a theory to apply to the issue in hand, I invented it, in most cases,
not to say always, with the most laborious effort.”
16 Data taken from the detailed study of the evolution and present state of the Eixample, produced by a
team directed by Busquets and Ordóñez, 1983.
Chapter 4

Brasilia – City as Park Forever

Farès el-Dahdah

Beneath Brasilia’s Three Powers Plaza is an underground gallery called Espaço

Lucio Costa, suggested by Oscar Niemeyer in 1989 to memorialize the winning
entry of the 1957 design competition as well as its author, Costa. Niemeyer
suggested this space in response to an inquiry from the Minister of Culture, José
Aparecido de Oliveira, regarding eventual locations where a 50′ × 50′ model of
Brasilia could be housed.1 The model had been built as an exact replica of what
Brazil’s modern capital looked like in 1987 when UNESCO added it to its
World Heritage list. Where to house this model prompted Niemeyer to find a
solution that would give Costa “the tribute owed to him by the city” and be so
discrete as to neither offend his modesty nor “inconveniently” compete with the
plaza’s principal monuments.2 Niemeyer’s proposal, presented in a letter and a
few sketches, was for an underground space that would house both the model
and a copy of Costa’s design competition winning entry boards.
Inaugurated on Lucio Costa’s ninetieth birthday, i.e. February 27, 1992, the
subterranean room is equipped with a marble plaque next to its entrance,
whereon Niemeyer dedicates the space to “Lucio Costa, Creator of the Brasilia
Pilot Plan 1957–1992.” What is noteworthy about this dedication and the space
itself is that they were, in fact, both written and detailed by Costa, not Niemeyer.
The two architects are often mistaken for each other in terms of Brasilia’s
authorship, yet their collaboration in this case reveals Costa’s apparently
“modest” participation in anything related to his creation, his words all the while
tending to not only end up being written in stone but also become law. Another
illustration of such all powerful, yet modest, control of the Brasilia project
occurs in Costa’s Memória Descritiva, the 1957 competition report that begins
with an apology to the jury, claiming that it was not his intention even to enter
the competition.3 Some 30 years later, however, the same text becomes the
standard against which the urbanism of Brazil’s capital is legally protected.
Costa may have initially proposed his Brasilia project hesitantly yet he
simultaneously conceptualized, as will be shown below, the means by which his
creation would survive in perpetuity.
Represented in the giant model is the usual image one has of Brasilia, a
dragonfly-shaped plan commonly referred to as “Plano Piloto” or “Pilot Plan.”
The origin of such nomenclature dates back at least to 1955, when Brazil’s
Commission for the Location of the New Federal Capital attempted to invite Le
Corbusier himself to supervise the planning of the new Brazilian capital.4 Even
though the commission’s president eventually vetoed the participation of a
“foreign urbanist,” Le Corbusier did go so far as to propose a five-stage process
in which he would be responsible for the city’s schematic design, or “Plan
Pilote” as he called it and had previously used for his 1951 project for Bogotá.5
The expression “Pilot Plan” also serves today to distinguish the city’s original
form from subsequent peripheral developments, known as satellite cities. Even
road signs refer to Brasilia as Pilot Plan, as if to suggest that once in Brasilia,
one theoretically lives in a “project” rather than in a city. This semantic slippage
between the name of a city and the title of its masterplan is also borrowed by the
city’s critics, who use the metonym to prove that living in Brasilia is like living
in an architectural model. What is nonetheless telling about the recurrent
labeling of Brasilia as Pilot Plan is how Brazil’s new capital ever since its
inauguration has always been identified with the project described by Costa in
his report.
4.1
Oscar Niemeyer, sketches for the Espaço Lucio Costa, 1989

4.2
Lucio Costa, sketches for the Espaço Lucio Costa, c.1991

4.3
Lucio Costa, Brasilia Pilot Plan, first six pages of the competion report, 1957
4.4
Lucio Costa, Brasilia Pilot Plan, competition entry board, 1957

Filling almost the entire room, the giant model also makes it possible to
understand what Costa means when he uses another peculiar nomenclature to
describe his project: “cidade parque” or “park city.”6 The expression is used not
only in the competition report but also in subsequent correspondence urging
Oscar Niemeyer, for example, to speak with Israel Pinheiro – president of the
development company in charge of executing the Brasilia project – in order to
have Roberto Burle Marx hired as the landscape architect of Brazil’s new
capital. Given the stature of Burle Marx’s international reputation, it was not
understandable, in Costa’s opinion, “that a capital be built without someone
responsible for the proper treatment of its natural environment, especially when
in the Pilot Plan’s competition report the city was already identified as a park
city.”7
The use of the expression “park city” is significant inasmuch as it reveals
the degree to which Brasilia was, in fact, conceived as a landscape architectural
project, making Burle Marx’s absence from the construction process all the more
critical. In his choice of words, Costa avoided using the obvious and more
common term of “garden city,” which as an urban design strategy had, in fact,
been criticized by Le Corbusier during the lectures conducted at Rio de Janeiro’s
National Music Institute back in 1936.8 Le Corbusier’s own expression “Ville
verte” was another possible and predictable choice but it would have indicated
only that a city should be equipped with trees rather than necessarily be
considered a park as such.
For Costa, Brasilia is a park in the strict sense of the word and it is this park
that qualifies its urban form. Brasilia is therefore to be understood as a
constructed nature, one that requires terraces, terrepleins, embankments, and
retaining walls to distinguish it from the surrounding savannah-like cerrado
vegetation. The language Costa often chose to describe many elements of his
“park city” – high atop Brazil’s Central Plateau – is particularly landscape
architectural, especially when referring to such important areas of the Pilot Plan
as the Three Powers Plaza, the Ministries Esplanade, the Cultural Sector, or the
housing schemed termed Superquadra.
When, for example, Costa describes his Three Powers Plaza as “the
Versailles of the people,” he is obviously not referring to the architecture of
Louis XIV’s palace but rather to the latter’s relation with the surrounding
complex of deep axes and grand vistas.9 The Pilot Plan’s competition report
gives particular emphasis to the governmental plaza as being elevated off the
natural ground by relying “in contemporary terms” on an “ancient eastern
terreplein technique” that would ensure “the cohesion of the project as a whole
and lend it unexpected monumental emphasis.”10 This technique is extended
along the Ministries Esplanade, which Costa fittingly compares to the English
“lawns” of his childhood, in addition to which, French perspectives, Chinese
terraces, and American cloverleaf interchanges were retroactively chosen as the
landscape architectural “ingredients” of his project.11 The competition report is
itself written in such a way as to organize a visitor’s promenade through the city
much like the park at Versailles was to be visited according to a prescribed
itinerary.12 Having gone through the Three Powers Plaza and the Ministries
Esplanade, the promenade Costa describes proceeds through the bus station
platform and continues along the monumental axis before coming back to the
Superquadras and ending on the lake’s bucolic shore.
4.5
Lucio Costa, Brasilia Pilot Plan, detail of the Three Powers Plaza and the Monumental Axis,
competion report, 1957

Many years later, in 1986, when Niemeyer made his first proposal for
completing Brasilia’s Cultural Sector, Costa sent him a note reminding him that
the area in question had always been imagined as “duly wooded in order to
contrast with the vast and empty lawns, and where great clearings would be left
open.”13 Costa’s suggestion went so far as to indicate the diameters of these
clearings. The purpose of the note was to remind Niemeyer of the original
intention behind the Pilot Plan, which consisted of landscape architectural
devices that, in this case, would frame the lawns of the Ministries Esplanade
rather than have them extend beyond preconceived limits. Brasilia’s vast
“malls,” as Costa called them, would, therefore, extend from the Three Powers
Plaza all the way up to a wooded barrier that would, in turn, define the North and
South Cultural Sectors. Niemeyer subsequently proposed many versions for the
Cultural Sectors, all Giacometti-esque with platonic shapes strewn about in a
landscape void of vegetation.14.
4.6
Lucio Costa, Sketch for Brasilia’s Cultural Sectors, c.1986
4.7
Oscar Niemeyer, Sketch for Brasilia’s Cultural Sectors, c. 1986

The Superquadra is yet another element in the Pilot Plan that is entirely
described in landscape architectural terms. The architecture itself is given almost
no specifications other than the fact that it ought be elevated on pilotis and be
limited to six stories in height. The natural setting, however, is “framed” by a
“wide” and “densely wooded belt” that can be interrupted only once for
vehicular access but is otherwise permeable to pedestrians.15 In each
Superquadra, Costa determined that only one particular type of tree would
predominate, the ground would be carpeted with grass, and there would also be
“an additional and intermittent curtain of shrubs and foliage always in the
background and as if blended in the landscape in order to better identify,
irrespective of viewpoints, the content of each quadra.”16 The percentage of land
occupancy (equivalent to 15 percent) was derived from one of the vignettes that
illustrated the Memória and no other architectural requirements was suggested in
order, on the one hand, to favor innovation while, on the other hand, insuring
uniformity along the Residential–Highway Axis by surrounding all
Superquadras with the compulsory tree canopy suggested in another of Costa’s
vignettes. The green belt is essentially there to visually outline city blocks where
residential slab buildings can “hover” on their pilotis above a continuous ground.
The resulting skyline is therefore always underscored with trees in the
foreground, which all together act as an interface between the city’s residential
scale, necessarily attenuated, and its monumental scale, deliberately vast.
It is ultimately the project of this “park city” as a whole that state and
federal laws today protect by preserving the voids between buildings, which for
the most part can be torn down and rebuilt according to a given “scale.”17 The
question of how to protect Brasilia was originally posed by Juscelino Kubitschek
himself, soon after the city’s inauguration, in a note written to Rodrigo Mello
Franco de Andrade, then director of the SPHAN, the agency in charge of
protecting Brazil’s historic and artistic heritage.18 This, however, only became a
pressing issue in 1985 when the then governor, José Aparecido de Oliveira,
invited Costa, Niemeyer, and Burle Marx to complete (and rectify) the project as
it had been intended. The governor’s strategy for protecting the city against local
real-estate development forces also included the pursuit of international
recognition, which is why he proposed to UNESCO that contemporary
monuments such as Brasilia should also be added to the World Heritage list.
UNESCO, in turn, commissioned a report that described Brasilia as one of the
greatest achievements in the history of urbanism, yet it nonetheless dismissed the
governor’s petition, arguing that he could not make such a request when Brazil’s
own preservation laws regarding Brasilia were so abstract and ill-defined.19
4.8
Lucio Costa, Brasilia Pilot Plan, detail of a Superquadra, competion report, 1957

Two sets of preservation measures were subsequently undertaken on state

and federal levels in Brazil, and in both cases Costa’s opinion was not far away.
At the state level, the governor’s decree included the addendum “Brasília
Revisitada,” written by Costa himself, which explained how the four “scales” of
his “park city” ought to be protected.20 Federal District Government Decree Law
#10.829/1987 begins by stating accordingly that the protection of Brasilia’s
“Pilot Plan” will be guaranteed by the preservation of the essential
characteristics of its four distinct monumental, residential, aggregation, and
bucolic scales. The Federal District Law is the legal instrument that ultimately
convinced UNESCO to confer the title of World Heritage Site on Brasilia. At the
federal level, the Instituto Brasileiro do Patrimônio Cultural (Brazilian Institute
of Cultural Heritage), or IBPC, and the former Secretária do Patrimônio
Histórico e Artístico Nacional (Secretariat of Historical and Artistic National
Heritage), or SPHAN, passed Ministerial Directive #314/1992, which afforded
the city a level of national protection. The directive replicates the language of
Costa’s “Brasília Revisitada” and ratifies the notion that in Brasilia voids are
protected yet buildings are not – only their outline and the ratio of their
building/land occupancy are maintained. Another common denominator between
the two laws is Ítalo Campofiorito, who had astutely suggested to Costa that the
four scales in question could very well become themselves an “object” worthy of
legal protection.21 In 1987 Campofiorito was the research coordinator at the
Fundação Nacional Pró-Memória (FNPM) who was, at Governor Aparecido de
Oliveira’s request, in charge of putting together the legal case for Brasilia’s
preservation. Campofiorito subsequently headed both the FNPM and the
SPHAN, and in 1990 he drafted the first version of the Federal District Law that
was enacted two years later.
In terms of historic preservation, an unprecedented condition in Brasilia
therefore permits most buildings to be destroyed as long as their scale is
somehow reconstituted (the exception is those buildings that are specifically
protected, such as the cathedral and the Catetinho). It is the project – the “Pilot
Plan” as “park city” – rather than the city itself that is to ultimately survive.
What the two federal and state laws seek to protect is not Brasilia’s urban fabric,
but its grammar as dictated in the competition report. This means that, thanks to
Lucio Costa, a modern city in Brazil is not protected in the same way as an
eighteenth-century town. The difference being that in colonial Ouro Preto, for
example (which is also on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites), buildings
are physically frozen in time, while in Brasilia they remain forever new … and
open areas are to remain park-like, in perpetuity.
Notes
1 Letter, Oscar Niemeyer to José Aparecido, October 4, 1989.
2 Letter, Oscar Niemeyer to José Aparecido, October 4, 1989.
3 Lucio Costa, “Memória Descritiva do Plano Piloto” [1957], in Registro de uma vivência, 1995, pp.
283–297.
4 Telegram, Hugo Gontier to Le Corbusier, June 2, 1955.
5 Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, 1958, p. 189.
6 On Costa’s use of the term “cidade parque” in a comparative study between the Memória Descritiva
and the Athens Charter, see also Tattara, 2011.
7 Letter, Lucio Costa to Oscar Niemeyer, undated, VI.A.01.
8 Le Corbusier, 2006.
9 Costa, “Saudação aos críticos de arte” [1959], in Registro de uma vivência, p. 299.
10 Costa, “Memória Descritiva do Plano Piloto,” p. 289.
11 Costa, “Ingredientes da concepção urbanística de Brasília,” in Registro de uma vivência, p. 282.
12 See Berger and Hedin, 2008.
13 Letter, Lucio Costa to Oscar Niemeyer, undated, III.B.04–03362.
14 See Alberto Giacometti, Model for a Public Square (Projet pour une place), 1931–1932, Peggy
Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 76.2553 PG 130.
15 Costa, “Memória Descritiva do Plano Piloto,” p. 292.
16 Costa, “Memória Descritiva do Plano Piloto,” p. 292.
17 Federal District Government Decree Law #10.892, October 14, 1987 and IPHAN Portaria #314,
October 8, 1992.
18 Letter, Juscelino Kubitschek to Rodrigo Mello Franco de Andrade, June 15, 1960.
19 See Peralva, 1988, pp. 105–110.
20 Costa, 1987.
21 Campofiorito, 1989, p. 36–41.
Chapter 5

Chicago – Superblockism: Chicago’s

Elastic Grid
Sarah Whiting

The September 11, 2001 destruction of Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center
rapidly rekindled the long-standing debate over the viability and desirability of
the superblock as an urban type. Condemnations forcefully outnumbered
endorsements: “Break up the 16-acre Trade Center superblock” was the
dismissive refrain of many a newspaper editorial. “Restore the traditional street
grid so as to restore neighborhoods [… and] espouse community”1 and other
such suggestions directly echoed the urban critiques penned by urban advocate
Jane Jacobs 43 years ago when she took on Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein,
Henry Wright, and the rest of the Garden City movement in The Death and Life
of Great American Cities: “The Garden City planners and their ever increasing
following among housing reformers, students and architects,” Jacobs
complained, “were indefatigably popularizing the ideas of the superblock, the
project neighborhood, the unchangeable plan, and grass, grass, grass; what is
more they were successfully establishing such attributes as the hallmarks of
humane, socially responsible, functional high-minded planning.”2
That one can draw a ring around bucolic suburban Garden Cities – such as
Stein and Wright’s Radburn, New Jersey of 1929 – and the extremely
metropolitan World Trade Center and then label the entire lot of it “superblocks”
reveals the Houdini-esque quality of this term, which eludes hard definition
despite its extensive use throughout the world during the twentieth century. As
an urban strategy – more specifically, as a platting strategy – the term
“superblock” is used to describe three completely different organizational
paradigms: the park-like configurations belonging to the Garden City; the
enormous slabs or perimeter blocks of housing and other programs that emerged
in Red Vienna, the Amsterdam School and the Soviet Union in the early
twentieth century; and the superscaled plats embedded within Modernism’s
gridded orthogonality. If the former is associated with Mumford and Stein (and
eventually with the pastoral pretense of suburban subdivisions), the second
invokes de Klerk, Karl Ehn, and Mosei Ginzburg, and the third is firmly wed to
Le Corbusier, whose “towers in the park” sprouted in city centers around the
world throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Enter Chicago and its particular perpendicular proliferation of the
superblock. How does Chicago fit into the superblock’s multifarious
genealogical tree? Simple: it doesn’t. Offering examples of all types of
superblocks avant la lettre and then some, it exposes the weak spots of this
system of classification. This is not to suggest that Chicago offers the origin of
the superblock or an especially atypical form (or forms) of this urban type.
Instead, it is to highlight the special case of Chicago as a city where the
superblock is more a norm than an anomaly, due to the city’s settlement history
as well as certain economic and political histories. The value of Chicago as a
case study for the superblock emerges especially from the particularities of its
grid – a grid that marks the coincidence of urban and agricultural logics as they
intersected at what was once the gateway to the American west. The historically
threaded textual blocks below offer a verbal corollary to the urban superblocks
of the Chicago metropolis: different in scope, scale and import, each offers a
freeze-frame image of the elastic grid that makes up this city.
Long division
The Chicago plain, in common with most of the Western United States, was
surveyed in mile-square sections, which in turn were cut into four square
quarter-sections and thus sold to settlers. Subdividers found it convenient to
adopt a rectangular block plan in cutting up these quarter-sections, and such
a layout was virtually forced upon them when the one-hundred-and-sixty-
acre tracts were divided into four square “forties,” or into sixteen square
ten-acre parcels.3

Platted in 1830, Chicago, Illinois was squarely set within the gridiron tradition
systematized by Thomas Jefferson’s 1785 Northwest Ordinance, which
subdivided the Western Territories into townships of 36 square miles. This
gridded system divided the landscape into commodifiable parcels, thereby
facilitating rapid (and rampant) land speculation. The grid homogenized the
landscape in such a way that the cityscape was liberated, unanchored from its
ground. Whereas earlier examples of landownership turned a deed or a title into
a metaphoric stake in the earth, in Chicago and other Western cities land became
paper thin, as if each plot were but randomly dealt chances in an endless game of
seven-card draw. James Silk Buckingham’s hyperbolic description from the
early 1830s provides a telling glimpse of the city’s speculative whirlwind: “some
lots changed hands ten times in a single day and the ‘evening purchaser’ paid at
least ‘ten times as much as the price paid by the morning buyer for the same
spot!’”4 Land division multiplies economies. This redundant, repetitive
exchange of plots depended upon the assumption that the city’s platted
rectangles were both easily identifiable and interchangeable. Accordingly, the
plots were numbered and, throughout the city’s first real estate boom of 1836,
were sold sight-unseen in auction houses in New York, oftentimes offering
surprises to the owners when they eventually made their way to the city named
by the Indians for its unpleasant smells.5

Usually …
The blocks may be made 300 feet square, and usually not over 320 feet by
 400 feet, with a 20-foot alley running the long dimension of the block. The
principal streets are usually made 80 feet in width, though frequently as
much as 100 feet where the greater width appears to be needed or desirable,
and the less important intersecting streets are seldom given a width of less
than 60 feet. An alley is usually placed in each block, 20 feet in width and
paralleling the principal street system…. Unless planned differently, the
whole system is laid out on cardinal directions …6

Despite the implied rigor of the Ordinance grid’s mathematical definition,

Chicago’s blocks are not entirely homogeneous. The phrase “usually,” oft
repeated within the pages of The Manual of Surveying Instructions of 1947,
props up the image of a uniform grid like a broomstick holding a scarecrow
against the wind: the term suggests regularity but admits aberration. If New
York’s unyielding grid “forces Manhattan’s builders to develop a new system of
formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from
another,”7 Chicago’s is essentially the opposite: the grid itself is manipulated in
order to distinguish one project from another. Because Chicago emerged from a
territorial organization (unlike Manhattan, whose organization is limited by its
island configuration), the city’s logic lies at a scale much greater than its
urbanism. Jefferson’s original Ordinance divided the Northwest Territories into a
grid of squares of 100 miles; subsequent amendments reduced the township
scale to grids of 36 miles, 6 miles square on each side. Townships that were sold
whole alternated in a checkerboard pattern with townships that were divided into
640 acre lots (1 square mile) or “sections.”8 Only when divided do these sizes
become viable for agriculture or urbanism. Forty acres, one-sixteenth of a
section, became the standard module size for farms, which would thereafter
appear as 40 acres or multiples thereof (hence the saying, “forty acres and a
mule”). Even if cities were divided into smaller parcels, urban subdivisions to
this day continue to reveal the importance of the 40-acre module. Homer Hoyt’s
One Hundred Years of Land Values of 1933 illustrates the various ways in which
a 40-acre tract can be divided into urban lots (Figure 5.1). It was this practice of
subdivision that led to Chicago’s “usually” blocks: some areas of the city were
developed and therefore subdivided at the same time, leading to homogenous
block sizes for entire zones. While it was only speculation that determined such
continuity, lengths of streets such as Western Avenue reveal the scale of
Chicago’s real estate ventures: at 24.5 miles, Western remains the longest
continuous street within city limits in the world.9 Chicago block sizes range from
218 by 341 feet to 320 by 360 feet to what became, during the real estate boom
from 1866 to 1873, the standard (or usual) Chicago block of 266 by 600 feet.3

5.1
Various Methods of Subdividing a 40 Acre Tract, 1320 Feet Square. In Homer Hoyt, 1933. One
Hundred Years of Land Values, p. 431, Figure 103, University of Chicago Press

Quarter-sections
The site comprises a quarter-section of land assumed to be located on the
level prairie about 8 miles distant from the business district of the City of
Chicago. The tract is without trees or buildings and is not subdivided. The
surrounding property is subdivided in the prevailing gridiron fashion …10

It was only in 1832 that Congress permitted the sale of the quarter-quarter-
section, or the “forty.” Until then, the primary module of land sale had been the
quarter-section, or 160 acres.11 Although the forty quickly became the favored
unit for individual sales, the quarter-section remained firmly established as the
module for subdivisions, as demonstrated by the City Club of Chicago’s
competition of 1913 for subdividing a typical quarter-section of land in the
outskirts of Chicago.10 While many of the 39 submitted entries can be
considered “superblocks” in that they offer grids greater than the surrounding
contextual grid of 272.5 by 610.5 blocks, one entry in particular constitutes an
innovative superblock: Frank Lloyd Wright’s non-competitive quarter-section
plan12 (Figures 5.2, 5.3). Wright’s design maintained the overriding
orthogonality of the Chicago grid system, but eschewed monotony by
introducing what Wright called “picturesque variety.” Wright’s innovation for
developing the residential section was the “quadruple block plan,” which he had
developed for an article that appeared in the Ladles’ Home Journal in 1901.13
The Quadruple Block Plan adopts not a rectangular but a square block
subdivision (equivalent to Option E in Hoyt’s diagram, Figure 5.1). By placing
only four houses on a single small block, Wright was able to offer each house its
own orientation. He pinwheeled the four around an inner core of shared utilities,
thereby guaranteeing a degree of privacy while also ensuring visual variety:
“[Each] building,” Wright argued, “is in unconscious but necessary grouping
with three of his neighbors’, looking out upon harmonious groups of other
neighbors, no two of which would present to him the same elevation even were
they all cast in one mould. A succession of buildings of any given length by this
arrangement presents the aspect of well-grouped buildings in a park, of greater
picturesque variety than is possible where façade follows façade.”14

5.2
Bird’s-Eye View of the Quarter-Section,” Frank Lloyd Wright, in Alfred B. Yeomans, 1916, City
Residential Land Development: Studies in Planning, p. 97. University of Chicago Press

5.3
Plan by Frank Lloyd Wright, in Alfred B. Yeomans, 1916, City Residential Land Development: Studies
in Planning, p. 98. University of Chicago Press
 Indeed Wright created a picturesque relationship between buildings and
park, but without either sacrificing the orthogonality of the grid or reducing the
park to the role of mere spatial buffer. Financed by the sale of the residential
property, the internalized park system weaves through the subdivision, ordering
recreation features such as playgrounds, athletic fields, and a music pavilion.
Balanced, although not entirely symmetrically, around a diagonal axis across the
site, the park subtly segregates the residential from the civic and commercial
sections of the subdivision in addition to differentiating residential zones of
seven-or eight-room houses, two-flat buildings, workmen’s houses, and
women’s and men’s apartment buildings. It is this park that makes Wright’s
proposal a superblock prototype: the project foreshadows the two superblock
types of the tower in the park and the garden city. The park reaches to the edges
of the superblock but unlike the green carpets that Le Corbusier would design a
decade later, this one is strategically programed: it combines low-rise and
medium-rise densities with non-residential programming to animate the entire
subdivision perpetually. While the park system blocks some through streets, it
never creates cul de sacs like garden city superblocks would do, and thereby
does not turn its back on Chicago by asphyxiating the larger urban grid.15 While
architect Albert Pope’s book Ladders offers a provocative tableau of how the
superblock can be read as a closed system, inverting the grid’s centrifugal spatial
field by introducing centripetal points of gravity within it, I would argue that
certain developments in Chicago stem from the original platting patterns of this
region and that, rather than shutting down the grid, these developments reveal
this particular grid’s ability to absorb and promote different scales and uses.
While Wright’s Quarter-Section Plan for the 1916 Competition was never
executed, it illustrates the relationship between the dominant quarter-section
subdivision land package and the superblock as a Chicago type. Additionally, it
offers a more appropriate prototype for Chicago’s boom period of superblock
development during the 1940s than do the three typical models of superblock,
for it demonstrates how development can work within the logic of the Chicago
grid (that is, by prioritizing the most efficient sale of property) without being
entirely subsumed by that same grid: Wright’s superblock offers an urbanism of
its own that emerges from the larger-gridded urbanism of its surroundings.
Centering the civic
A civic center to serve Chicago where governmental and other related
functions could be grouped, would promote greater efficiency in the
conduct of the public’s business. Its location should be readily accessible to
all Chicagoans and at the same time tend to reduce congestion within the
Loop.16

In 1943, the mayor of Chicago, Edward Kelly, was so confident that the United
States would win the war he asked the Chicago Plan Commission to coordinate
the city’s envisioned public works projects so as to establish a Master Plan for a
long-term improvement campaign. Like Daniel Burnham’s famous Chicago Plan
of 1909, the 1943 preliminary study included a proposal for a civic center.
However, where Burnham’s Civic Center interrupted the city grid – providing a
Haussmannian focal point for his Plan’s diagonal axes – the 1943 schematic
proposal made a superblock (Figure 5.4). The whole Center occupied
approximately eleven city blocks, straddling the Chicago River and Wacker
Drive, both which were bridged by the project’s gardens.
5.4
Civic Center. In Chicago Plan Commission, 1943, Chicago Looks Ahead: Design for Public
Improvements, p. 30

Six years later the Chicago Plan Commission submitted to the city a more
complete proposal for the Civic Center. Covering the same eleven blocks and
still a superblock, the project reveals modernism’s impact on America at the
war’s end (Figure 5.5). The classical axes of the previous scheme were
abandoned in favor of modernist slabs in a park, with each building
corresponding to one part of government: Federal, State, County, and City.
Additionally, there was one building for the Board of Education and another for
all levels of judicial courts. The project was characterized by open siting,
accessibility, efficiency, spaciousness, and diverse, flexible programming,
including private as well as government offices. Sited along the river, the Civic
Center foretells a new beginning, a renewal of Chicago’s downtown in light of
burgeoning suburban flight. The green carpet of the project deliberately offers a
striking contrast to the Loop’s three-dimensional density, and the Center’s
similar but not identical buildings suggest a continuity of government without
compromising the autonomy of each branch – a “proper atmosphere,” as the
presentation booklet notes. Modernist forms – maximal in size and minimal in
articulation – were asymmetrically arranged like objects placed on a coffee table,
and the space between and around these forms was as formed as the buildings
themselves. The project’s presentation emphasized these public spaces,
suggesting that spectacles could take place in the expansive plaza and that more
personal exchanges would result within the project’s various social arenas, such
as its restaurant and shops. The twelfth floor was a public concourse, like a street
in the sky that joined all the slabs where its social and commercial amenities
were concentrated. The openness of the planning, the reliance on spectacles and
leisure, and the absence of traditional ornamental references were part of an
effort to foster and symbolize what Sigfried Giedion had referred to as
“communities of experience” in his 1944 argument for a redefined modern
monumentality.17 Indeed, underlying the project’s openness and emphasis on
public space was a desire to concretize post-war democracy.
5.5
Chicago Civic Center. In Chicago Plan Commission, 1949, Chicago Civic Center, p. 17

Looking at the scheme, it would be easy to claim that its superblock

configuration was as influenced by European modernism as its building forms
were; however, the classical Civic Center proposal from 1943 reveals that the
superblock urbanism preceded the architecture. And it was the urbanism that
remained constant even as the project underwent several more incarnations
before Chicago was to get a Civic Center in the 1960s. It is not insignificant that
when the Chicago Civic Center project went dormant after failing to secure the
land east of the river, it was revived five years later for a site north of the river
under the auspices of a privately funded business venture led by developer
Arthur Rubiloff. Business was in a stronger position to design post-war
democracy than government. “The Fort Dearborn Project” (even its name shed
the legislative emphasis implied by “civic center”) formally resembled the 1949
project (Figure 5.6). Programmatically, this version maintained the Civic
Center’s municipal and juridical functions, but also included significant
additional programs, such as a Chicago campus for the University of Illinois. (As
an aside, that campus was eventually realized west of the river in the 1960s.
Remarkably, the University of Illinois Chicago campus site is exactly that of
Burnham’s 1909 Civic Center.) Like the 1949 project, Fort Dearborn was also
never built because Rubiloff could not acquire the necessary land. Ultimately,
the realized Federal Center and Civic Center, designed by Mies van der Rohe
and C.F. Murphy respectively, which were built in the 1960s, dropped much of
the programmatic complexity and “event-potential” of these previous schemes,
but maintained the superblock configuration, albeit at a much smaller scale.
Mies’s Federal Center, for example, combines three buildings – an office
building, courtroom building and post office – that cover a block and a half of
the city. While Dearborn Street cuts the project in two, the Federal Center
nevertheless reads as a single superblock of civic programming.

5.6
A vision of Hope and Promise: How the Ft. Dearborn Project would appear in a view looking west
from Dearborn St. Building in rear would be Federal building. Round building would be Hall of
Justice. Building at right would be State building. Reflecting pool would be ice rink in winter. From
The Chicago Daily News, Wednesday March 17, 1954, p. 60

The conflation of public and private in these projects – most evident in the
Fort Dearborn project, but even visible in the Civic Center proposal of 1949,
which included shopping and restaurant facilities – was almost obligatory in the
face of the large urban scale of these schemes. Like the Rockefeller Center, they
were “cities within the city.” While this designation may imply a fortress-like
condition, these large campus-like insertions necessarily included the larger city
within their borders – or, to put it differently, the boundary between the city and
the city within was rarely exclusionary, particularly in the case of these primarily
public institutions.

Inner-city landfill
So I think it was a matter of passing through a space, spaces that were
varying in dimension and varying in scale of height between buildings,
length … You have a different psychological feeling when you come into a
space with a high vis-à-vis a low, and vice-versa, building. So I think
[Mies] was very careful, just in studying these things abstractly in blocks,
cut pieces of wood … I was aware, yes, of what kind of space he was
creating and what the effect was going to be by being in it.18

In 1937, after four years of trying to purchase property somewhere other than the
Near South Side, the Armour Institute of Technology (later renamed the Illinois
Institute of Technology or IIT) Board of Trustees concluded that the school
could not afford to leave the area. With resigned optimism (tinged with a stiff
shot of Manifest Destiny), President Willard Hotchkiss proclaimed that “now is
the time to move forward and possess the land.”19 The 100-acre campus
designed by Mies van der Rohe between 1939 and 1958 that ultimately emerged
from this fortuitous decision has been recognized for its structural integrity and
elegance, as well as for its innovative approach to American campus design, but
it has yet to be read as a productive urban model (Figure 5.7). When studied in
the context of Chicago’s Near South Side of the 1940s, however, another, more
effective reading of IIT emerges: rather than forming just a set of innovative
buildings, the campus forms an integral component of a larger, more complex
and multifarious field. Mies’s plan for IIT initiated a new form of modern
urbanism that represents an epitome of the Chicago superblock that is at once
figural and abstract, figure and ground. An inner-city landfill of green carpet, the
campus offers an example of how the superblock reconfigures the urban grid in
order to figure space.20
5.7
Mies van der Rohe, “IIT campus, photomontage aerial view showing model within Near South Side”
(detail), 1947. Hedrich-Blessing, photographer. Chicago Historical Society HB 26823B

Even fans of the campus describe it as an autonomous island that disregards

its physical and social context. Such an interpretation is only reinforced by
Mies’s presentation collages, which ruthlessly eliminated 100 acres of the city’s
dense urban fabric in order to make way for the expansive, low-density campus.
But both the size of the campus and the strategy of dispersing buildings on the
site were decisions that predated Mies’s arrival on the scene. IIT was one of a
network of superblocks that emerged in unison on the Chicago South Side
during this period (Figure 5.8). Beginning with IIT, and later including Michael
Reese Hospital, the Chicago Housing Authority, Mercy Hospital, and several
private-housing developments, a group of institutions collaborated to plan and
execute one of the first large-scale modern urban plans in the United States. This
seven-mile-square plan paved the way for federal slum clearance,
redevelopment, and urban renewal legislation, including the Housing Acts of
1949 and 1954. In addition to Mies and Ludwig Hilberseimer from IIT, key
figures involved in the promotion of the Near South Side Plan included Walter
Gropius, planners Reginald Isaacs and Walter Blucher, real-estate developer
Ferd Kramer, IIT President Henry Heald, and University of Chicago sociologist
Louis Wirth, among others.
5.8
South Side Planning Board Redevelopment Plan for the Near South Side. In John McKinlay, 1950,
Redevelopment Project No. 1: A Second Report, The New York Life Insurance Company
Redevelopment Plan, p. 8

Contrary to what one might assume, once Mies was officially asked to
design the campus, he did not start by designing the plan. Instead he began by
studying the program, which was just being developed (and which would
continue to be developed over the twenty years that Mies directed the project).
After considering and testing various alternatives, he determined that a 24-foot-
square module could be used to accommodate the programs of classroom
buildings, lab buildings, and office spaces. Rough volumes were established and
wooden blocks were cut, with gridded elevations pasted on, and then Mies and
his associates played with the blocks on the “site”: a large piece of paper,
gridded with the same 24-foot module.21 Although Mies once claimed that he
did not think that site was “that important,”22 the combination of the gridded
background and the gridded blocks gives the impression that the blocks protrude
from the paper – that the figures of the buildings emerge from the field of the
Chicago grid, flipping it up 90 degrees from a horizontal to a vertical surface.
Although the decision to divide the school’s program into several individual
buildings predated Mies’s arrival at IIT, and although this choice was probably
driven largely by economic concerns (it was easier to raise money for individual
departments and to proceed slowly if the process was broken down into pieces),
this decision was also the mechanism that allowed the design of IIT to be as
much the design of a campus (or quasi-urban) space as it was a design of
buildings. Mies’s method of moving blocks about rather than working only in
plan demonstrates to what extent he recognized the problem of the campus
design to be a three-dimensional spatial issue.
At the scale of the campus, the “ceremonial” or communal programs (the
library and the student union) are given significant sites, but do not serve to
centralize or focus the campus as they would had they been conceived along the
lines of a traditional city plan. Rather than occupying the center of the central
courtyard space these programs define its edge, as well as the edge of what is
referred to as Mies Alley. Presentation drawings also reveal the campus’s
accessible institutional identity, or new monumentality. Rather than converging
onto one significant point or feature, Mies’s perspectival views tend to draw the
outsider into the campus; their multiple side axes promise endless possibilities
lying just around the corners of the drawn buildings. When the perspectives do
focus upon a building’s entry, the ground plane slips through the door into the
lobby, suggesting a continuum rather than a boundary. In the earliest schemes,
many of the buildings were on pilotis; it was Mies’s dream that the entire ground
plane could be one surface, interrupted only by the glass walls of the lobby
spaces and stairs, smoothly taking people up into the buildings above. Each
building would then have a transitional, public/private space between the
exterior public world and the interior private or academic world. Even if budget
considerations eventually forced the elimination of the pilotis, the continuum
was stressed: once the decision was made to put the buildings on the ground,
Mies put them directly onto the ground, aligning the ground floor slab with the
ground itself.23 Even the detailing of the doors does not interrupt the flow of
space between outdoors and indoors, as demonstrated by the centered, pivot-
hinge doors to Lewis (now Perlstein) Hall: the door handles are kept vertical and
in alignment with the doorframe, avoiding any interruption of the view. Given
that the campus plan was designed as if the field and the figures were one and
the same – the gridded blocks emerging from the grid of the ground plane – it
was not necessary for the “ground level” of the buildings and of the landscape to
remain level zero: the “ground” is sometimes at grade and sometimes raised
above grade, as with Crown Hall, where the main level is half a level above
street level. Even the lower levels that get used – Crown, the Commons, and
Alumni Memorial Hall – are more like a ground plane that has dipped
downwards rather than a basement. The use of half-levels, high clerestory
windows, ramps, and shallow, wide, and unenclosed stairways turn the
experience of this modulated ground plane into that of a continuous
topographical surface.
In 1942, then IIT President Henry Heald wrote a letter to Mies suggesting
that, for esthetic and security reasons, a wall be erected around the perimeter of
the campus. In a particularly insensitive gesture toward those displaced by the
demolition, Heald even suggested building the wall of recycled materials culled
from former homes: “It has been suggested that a brick wall might be used, built
from brick salvaged from some of our wrecking operations.”24 While no reply is
documented, Mies’s answer lies in the campus’s permeability.25 Just as the
courtyards are not closed off with four walls, the campus as a whole is open. The
field upon which IIT’s buildings sit extends out from the centermost courtyards
to the very edges of the campus. With such moves, Mies deliberately redirected
the city grid in a positive way and at two scales: that of IIT itself, where he
replaced the tabula rasa of the land-clearance program with a modulated
abstraction, and that of the entire Near South Side, which would follow Mies’s
design lead.
Superscale
Marina City was the first mixed use city center complex in the United
States to include housing … The Marina City towers were the tallest
apartment buildings in the world and the highest concrete buildings in the
world at the time of construction … Marina City remains the densest
modern residential plan in the United States, and possibly in the world, with
635 dwellings per acre.26

America’s Midwest is the land of big vistas, Big Gulps™, and big buildings. Not
surprisingly, Chicago is no stranger to superlatives. It is the home of the first
mail-order company (Montgomery Ward), the largest commercial building (the
Merchandize Mart), and, until recently, the world’s busiest airport (O’Hare) and
the world’s tallest building (the Sears Tower). Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City
is perhaps best known for its formal and structural innovation: the primary
components of the project are two concrete residential towers shaped like
corncobs (Figure 5.9). Goldberg himself underscored the project’s superlative
achievements: “At 588 feet, these towers were the tallest concrete buildings in
the world and also the highest apartment buildings; at $10 per square foot, they
were also the most economical. They were also the first American mixed-use
urban complex to include housing.”27 Each tower’s core carries the majority of
the building’s structural load: a concrete tube houses the elevators and stairs with
the apartments ringing it like flower petals on a daisy. As a superblock, it maxes
out a three-and-a-half acre block of the city grid. In comparison to IIT’s 100
acres this size may not seem very superblock-esque, but Marina City qualifies
because, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Quarter Section Competition entry, it offers
a city within a city – a residential enclave with commercial, communal and
recreation amenities.
5.9
Marina City. In Ira J. Bach, 1965, 1980, Chicago’s Famous Buildings, p. 82. University of Chicago
Press

As a type, Marina City might be compared to the Socialist superblocks of

Mosei Ginzburg and others – for few people realize that the complex includes
other buildings than the superscaled, iconic residential towers and marina base.
But Marina City presents the Narkomfin’s resolutely capitalist cousin: its
communal living occurs only at the level of recreation, rather than dining or
laundry or other aspects of personal life. The apartments were envisioned for
singles or childless couples, and the lifestyle of what was advertised as a
“twenty-four hour city block” (to heighten the contrast with the bedroom
communities surrounding Chicago) was tailored for this particular demographic.
The complex includes housing, parking, an office block, commercial space, four
theaters, and a restaurant, bowling alley, swimming pool, skating rink, and
marina. Conceived as a city within a city, the recreation and office facilities
ensured that it would participate in rather than isolate itself from the city, for the
project’s programs deliberately reach beyond its own constituency to draw
people in from all of Chicago. As a prescient solution to both urban sprawl and
urban fiscal crises, Goldberg imagined entire cities composed of such
complexes. These urban complexes would increase the city’s density, thereby
providing the population needed to support the costs of public transportation,
culture, and other urban amenities. Goldberg’s initial proposal for River City in
Chicago was a linear city of tower triads which, reminiscent of the Civic
Center’s twelfth-floor public concourse, would be connected at every eighteenth
floor by bridges offering communal amenities, such as post offices, health care,
and daycare facilities, in addition to having commercial and other support
programs at their base. This triad scheme takes the city within a city one scale
further: different identities (and amenities) are provided at the scale of the single
tower, the joined triad, and the 750 residents across the three towers who define
a bridge community (there are three such horizontal communities in each triad).
Superminiurbanism
The superblock is more (and less) than a building. It has implications of
size and complexity but also of the lowering of architectural voltage,
because, unlike the representational buildings of the past, it is unable to
acquire the status of a metaphor.28

Alan Colquhoun has argued that a superblock can never play a representational
role within the city and that these are “rapidly destroying the traditional city.” In
the context of Chicago, however, the superblocks that stretch the city’s original
grid, causing it to absorb ever-variable, ever-evolving programs, are on the
contrary constantly constructing the city, figuring it. The combination of grid
and superblocks of all kinds works to redefine the urban understanding of
background versus foreground: here the background is the grid, an ever present
datum that is consistent enough to be understood, even if in reality it varies
considerably. Read against this background, each superblock offers its own
miniurbanism – each constructs its own version of a different kind of Chicago
grid. Colquhoun is right to say that superblocks cannot operate as metaphors, but
that does not mean that they are not read or representational. Each superblock in
Chicago contains an urban vision, an urban representation or snapshot of one
part of Chicago. Like a tartan plaid, each one can read as a specific block unto
itself, but each block also connects into the city via the grid. While the
superblock has been condemned as a large-scale totalizing vision, the
totalization that is Chicago is – because of the superblock’s agglomeration – the
most heterogeneous homogeneity of urban tableaus.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Albert Pope for provoking my interest in the superblock
and Ron Witte, R. E. Somol and Cécile Whiting for their helpful suggestions
regarding this text. Thanks also to Ed Robbins and Rodolphe el-Khoury for their
generous patience and perseverance.
Notes
1 See Shiffman, 2002.
2 Jacobs, 1961, p. 22.
3 Hoyt, 1933, p. 428.
4 Buckingham, 1842 (cited in Reps, 1965, p. 302).
5 “Historians still argue over the origin of the name, some maintaining it comes from the Indian
Chicagou, ‘garlic,’ while others hold that it was derived from Shegagh, or ‘skunk.’ There is general
agreement, however, that the odors of the place were dreadful and that the Indians were correct in
referring to it as “the place of the evil smell.” Reps, 1965, p. 300.
6 Bureau of Land Management, 1947, p. 352 (emphasis added).
7 Koolhaas, 1984, pp. 20–21.
8 Johnson, 1976, pp.42–44.
9 Condit, 1973, pp. 52–53.
10 Yeomans, 1916, p. 2.
11 Johnson, 1976, pp. 60–61. An 1804 Act of Congress established the section, half section and quarter
section as units of land sale; an 1832 Amendment included the quarter-quarter section, or “forty.”
12 According to Frank Lloyd Wright specialist Neil Levine, the plan is “non-competitive” (as Yeomans
labels it in the competition book) because it was most likely submitted to the City Club after the
competition deadline, after Wright had been solicited to offer a scheme. Wright did not participate in
competitions.
13 My thanks to Neil Levine for this reference. Levine has an article forthcoming on the quadruple block
plan.
14 Yeomans, 1916, p. 99 (emphasis Frank Lloyd Wright’s).
15 Pope, 1996.
16 Chicago Plan Commission, 1945, p. 30.
17 Giedion, 1944, p. 568.
18 George Danforth in conversation with Kevin Harrington, Canadian Centre for Architecture Oral
History Project, unpublished transcript: 96–100.
19 Willard E. Hotchkiss in Armour Institute Board of Trustees Minutes (1934–40), addendum 2 (May 17,
1937), 11.
20 A longer version of this section appears in Lambert, 2001, pp. 642–691. This version, which
concentrates less on the policies that enabled this superblock than on the figuring of space within the
superblock, owes thanks to Robert McAnulty for perceptively suggesting that the thing to pay attention
to in the “tower in the park” is the park, not the tower.
21 “We then also, as Mies got the program from the various departments of the school, we made wood
blocks of the volume of the building, and on a plot of the whole site I drew up, he would work those
out in some arrangement within the spaces of the buildings, having had that plot from – what was it? –
31st Street down to 35th, State Street over to the tracks to the west, drawn up in a modular system that
he had found workable for the contents of the program.” George Danforth in conversation with Kevin
Harrington, CCA Oral History Project.
22 Interview with Katherine Kuh, in Kuh, 1971, p. 35.
23 Safety considerations were an issue as well: as George Danforth notes, had the buildings been built in
this manner, the stairwells would have been filled with a dangerously crushed crowd of students at the
beginning and end of each class. (George Danforth in conversation with Kevin Harrington, April 9,
 1996, CCA Oral History Project.
24 Letter from Henry Heald to MvdR, July 30, 1942, Heald papers, Box 17, folder 4, IIT Archives, Paul
V. Galvin Library. Thank you to Phyllis Lambert for kindly pointing me to this reference.
25 It has been argued that Mies’s open perimeter depended upon an urban “wall” of poché, formed by the
context around the campus; see Pierce, 1998, p. 5. Given that Mies was cognizant of IIT’s expansionist
desires and land-purchasing efforts, I would be surprised that he would base his logic upon the
campus’s immediate context. Second, given that the landscape of the campus deliberately extends to
the public realm, I hold to my reading that Mies envisioned it extending as far as it could.
26 Goldberg, 1985a, p. 33.
27 Goldberg, 1985b, p. 192.
28 Colquhoun, 1981, p. 98.
Chapter 6

Detroit – Motor City

Charles Waldheim

The belief that an industrial country must concentrate its industry is, in my
opinion, unfounded. That is only an intermediate phase in the development.
Industry will decentralize itself. If the city were to decline, no one would
rebuild it according to its present plan. That alone discloses our own
judgment on our cities.1

In the second half of the twentieth century, the city of Detroit, once the fourth
largest city in the US, lost over half its population.2 The motor city, once an
international model for industrialized urban development, began the process of
decentralization as early as the 1920s, catalyzed by Henry Ford’s decision to
relocate production outside the city to reduce production costs. While similar
conditions can be found in virtually every industrial city in North America,
Detroit recommends itself as the clearest, most legible example of these trends
evidenced in the spatial and social conditions of the post-war American city
(Figure 6.1).

Forget what you think you know about this place. Detroit is the most
relevant city in the United States for the simple reason that it is the most
unequivocally modern and therefore distinctive of our national culture: in
other words, a total success. Nowhere else has American modernity had its
way with people and place alike.3

In August 1990, Detroit’s City Planning Commission authored a

remarkable and virtually unprecedented report.4 This immodest document
proposed the decommissioning and abandonment of the most vacant areas of
what had been the fourth largest city in the US. With this publication,
uninspiringly titled the Detroit Vacant Land Survey, the city planners
documented a process of depopulation and disinvestment that had been under
way in Detroit since the 1950s.5 With an incendiary 1993 press release based on
the City Planning Commission’s recommendations of three years previously, the
City Ombudsman, Marie Farrell-Donaldson, publicly called for the
discontinuation of services to, and the relocation of vestigial populations from,
the most vacant portions of the city (Figure 6.2):

6.1
Downtown Detroit figure-ground diagrams, Richard Plunz, “Detroit is Everywhere,” Architecture
Magazine, 85(4), 55–61
6.2
Brush Park, aerial photograph courtesy Alex MacLean/Landslides

The city’s ombudsman … is essentially suggesting that the most blighted

bits of the city should be closed down. Residents would be relocated from
dying areas to those that still had life in them. The empty houses would be
demolished and empty areas fenced off; they Landslides would either be
landscaped, or allowed to return to “nature.”6

Until the public release of the survey, the depopulation of Detroit was
largely accomplished without the endorsement of, or meaningful
acknowledgment by, the architectural and planning professions. What was
remarkable about Detroit’s 1990 Vacant Land Survey was its unsentimental and
surprisingly clear-sighted acknowledgment of a process of post-industrial de-
densification that continues to this day in cities produced by modern
industrialization. Equally striking was how quickly the report’s
recommendations were angrily dismissed in spite of the fact that they
corroborated a practice of urban erasure that was already well under way
(Figures 6.3–6.6).
While European proponents of modernist planning had originally imported
Fordism and Taylorism from American industry and applied them to city
planning, it was the American city (and Detroit in particular) that offered the
fullest embodiment of those principles in spatial terms. Ironically, while the
American planning profession ultimately embraced the virtues of Fordist
urbanism in the middle of the twentieth century, it was ill-prepared for the
impact those ongoing processes would have on forms of urban arrangement as
evidenced by the condition of Detroit at the end of that century. Among those
impacts were the utter abandonment of traditional European models of urban
density in favor of impermanent, ad hoc arrangements of temporary utility and
steadily decreasing density.

6.3
Motor City, photographs courtesy Jordi Bernado
6.4
Motor City, photographs courtesy Jordi Bernado

While flexibility, mobility, and speed made Detroit an international model

for industrial urbanism, those very qualities rendered the city disposable.
Traditional models of dense urban arrangement were quite literally abandoned in
favor of escalating profits, accelerating accumulation and a culture of
consumption. This of course was the genius of Ford’s conception: a culture that
consumes the products of its own labor while consistently creating a surplus of
demand, ensuring a nomadic, operational, and ceaselessly reiterated model of
ex-urban arrangement. That ongoing provisional work of rearrangement is the
very model of American urbanism that Detroit offers.
6.5
Motor City, photographs courtesy Jordi Bernado

6.6
Detroit’s Vacancy, photographs courtesy Jordi Bernado

Typical of their peers in other American cities, Detroit’s city planners,

architects, and urban design professionals clinicalized the dying industrial city to
the extent that Detroit came to represent an urban failure, as though the
responsibility for its viability rested with the techniques of modernist urbanism
that shaped its development. This was to mistake effect for cause. As a product
of mobile capital and speculative development practices in the service of
evolving models of production, Detroit was a clear and unmistakable success. As
promoted internationally by the proponents of Fordism, Detroit served as a
model of urbanism placed in the service of optimized industrial production. With
each successive transformation in production paradigms, Detroit retooled itself
more completely and more quickly than virtually any other city in history.
What was remarkable about the Detroit Vacant Land Survey and the City of
Detroit’s plan to decommission parts of itself was not its impossibility, but rather
the simple fact that it dared articulate for public consumption the fact that the
city was already abandoning itself. This fact alone did not make Detroit unique.
In the 1990s, Detroit ranked a distant twenty-second nationally in the percentage
of its population lost compared with other metropolitan centers, having already
surrendered the majority of its citizenry over the previous four decades.7 The
original abandonment and subsequent suburban annexation of central Detroit
began well before similar conditions emerged in other major cities. Unlike other
cities, however, Detroit began its process of decentralization and urban
abandonment sooner and pursued it more completely than any other city in the
modern world. Perhaps more importantly, Detroit was the only city that dared
publicly to articulate a plan for its own abandonment and conceive of organizing
the process of decommissioning itself as a legitimate problem requiring the
attention of design professionals. In a graphically spare document featuring
maps blacked-out with marker to indicate areas of vacant land, Detroit’s
planners rendered an image of a previously unimaginable urbanism of erasure
that was already a material fact (Figure 6.7).4

One last question must now be asked: during a crisis period, will the
demolition of cities replace the major public works of traditional politics? If
so, it would no longer be possible to distinguish between the nature of
recessions (economic, industrial) and the nature of war.8
6.7
City of Detroit City Planning Commission Vacant Land Survey

Over the course of the 1990s, the City of Detroit lost approximately 1
percent of its housing stock annually to arson, primarily due to “Devil’s Night”
vandalism.9 Publicly, the city administration decried this astonishingly direct and
specific critique of the city’s rapidly deteriorating social conditions.
Simultaneously, the city privately corroborated the arsonists’ illegal intent by
developing, funding, and implementing one of the largest and most sweeping
demolition programs in the history of American urbanism. This program
continued throughout the 1990s, largely supported by the city’s real estate,
business, and civic communities. This curious arrangement allowed both the
disenfranchised and the propertied interests publicly to blame each other for the
city’s problems while providing a legal and economic framework within which
to carry out an ongoing process of urban erasure. Ironically, this “solution” to
Detroit’s image problems completed the unsanctioned process of erasure begun
illegally by the populations left in the wake of de-industrialization. Vast portions
of Detroit were erased through this combination of unsanctioned burning and
subsequently legitimized demolition.10 The combined impact of these two
activities, each deemed illicit by differing interests, was to coordinate the public
display of social unrest with administration attempts to erase the visual residue
of Detroit’s ongoing demise.
In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau describes the limits of
disciplinary relevance absent the human subjects demanded by professional
authority: “the dying man falls outside the thinkable, which is identified with
what one can do. In leaving the field circumscribed by the possibilities of
treatment, it enters a region of meaninglessness.”11 For the architectural
profession, the city of Detroit in the 1990s entered a similar condition of
meaninglessness precisely because it no longer required the techniques of
growth and development that had become the modus operandi of the discipline.
Absent the need for these tools, Detroit became a “non-site” for the architect in
the same sense that de Certeau’s dead body ceased to operate as a “site” for the
physician’s attention.11 As the city decommissioned itself, it entered a condition
that could not be thought by the architectural and planning disciplines. As Dan
Hoffman put it, in the early 1990s “unbuilding surpassed building as the city’s
primary architectural activity” (Figures 6.8, 6.9).12
The fact that American cities began to dissolve as a result of the pressures
of mature Fordist decentralization came as a surprise only to those disciplines
with a vested interest in the ongoing viability of a nineteenth-century model of
urbanism based on increasing density. Free of that prejudice, the development of
American industrial cities can more easily be understood as a temporary, ad hoc
arrangement based on the momentary optimization of industrial production. The
astonishing pliability of industrial arrangement and the increasing pace of
change in production paradigms suggest that any understanding of American
cities must acknowledge their temporary, provisional nature. The explosive
growth of Detroit over the first half of the twentieth century, rather than
constructing an expectation of enduring urbanism, must be understood as one-
half of an ongoing process of urban arrangement that ultimately rendered its
previous forms redundant.13 Detroit can be seen as nothing more than the most
recent idea about production as manifest in spatial terms. The fact that American
industrial urbanism would decreasingly resemble its European and pre-Fordist
precedents should come as no surprise. Rather than a permanent construction,
one must take American urbanism as an essentially temporary, provisional, and
continuously revised articulation of property ownership, speculative
development, and mobile capital.14
Especially for those modernists interested in mobility and new models of
social arrangement, the flexibility and increasing pace of technological change
associated with Fordist production served as models for an increasingly
temporary urbanism. The most obvious model for this iterative and responsive
urbanism could be found at the intersection of industrial production and military
infrastructure.15 For Le Corbusier, the origins of the city itself could be found in
the urbanism of the military encampment. Commenting on the architectural
myths of the primitive hut, this drawing of a circumscribed martial precinct
reveals the essentially nomadic pre-history of urban arrangement in European
culture (Figure 6.10). Ancient rites for the founding of Roman cities were
essentially symmetrical with those for the founding of military encampments. In
The Idea of a Town, Joseph Rykwert describes how performing the precise
reverse of those founding rites was used to signify the decommissioning or
abandonment of an encampment, thus corroborating their essentially
symmetrical status.16 With his Coop Zimmer project, Hannes Meyer commented
on the collusion between the mass consumer products of Fordist production and
their replication in the miscellany of modern military nomadism.17 Meyer’s
project arranged a petitbourgeois domestic ensemble of semi-disposable
consumer furnishings as the interior of an equally transportable military
accommodation (Figure 6.11).
6.8
Erasing Detroit, courtesy Dan Hoffman
6.9
Detroit Vacant Land Maps, City of Detroit
6.10
Military Encampment as Primitive Hut

6.11
Hannes Meyer’s Coop Zimmer

The most direct critique of modern urbanism as informed by twentieth-

century military techniques can be found in the projects of Ludwig
Hilberseimer.18 Hilberseimer’s proposals for a radically decentralized pattern of
regional infrastructure for post-war America simultaneously optimized Fordist
models of decentralized industrial production and dispersed large population
concentrations that had become increasingly obvious targets for aerial attack in
the atomic age. Hilberseimer’s drawing of an atomic blast in central Illinois
renders a clear imperative for the construction of a civil defense infrastructure
capable of transporting dense urban populations away from the dangers of the
city and toward the relative security of suburban dissolution. This model of the
highway as a military infrastructure afforded a form of civil defense through
camouflage. Not coincidentally, the depopulation of urban centers in response to
the Cold War argues quite effectively for precisely the kind of decreasing
density that his previous work had been predicated on in the name of efficient
industrial production and optimized arrangement. In both modalities, as military
encampment and industrial ensemble, the vision of a nationally scaled
infrastructure of transportation and communication networks revealed a
fundamental sympathy between Fordist models of industrial production and
military models of spatial projection.
Much has been written on the military origins of the modern interstate
highway system in the US, and the impact of military policy on post-war
American settlement patterns has been well documented. While the highway is
arguably the clearest evidence of Fordism’s impact on post-war urban
arrangement in America, it is also clear that this most Fordist network is itself an
essentially military technology. Given Ford’s well-documented sympathy to
Nazism, the infrastructural and logistical logics of the German war machine
provided an essential case study in the virtues of Fordist mobility.19 Not simply
a model of production, but an essential Fordist precept, mobilization was
understood as a preparation for not only the projection of military power but also
the retooling of the very industrial process itself toward martial ends. It should
come as no surprise that the modern interstate highway, the very invention
Ford’s success postulated, was itself first proven necessary through German
military engineering. By witnessing the logistical superiority and civil defense
potential of the autobahns, the American military industrial complex was able to
articulate the need for the highway as an increasingly urgent matter of national
security.
Not coincidentally, Detroit has the dubious honor of being the only
American city to be occupied three times by Federal troops.20 Another evidence
of the parallels to be drawn between military encampments and Detroit’s
temporary urbanism can be found in the symmetrical techniques employed to
enforce social order amid the dense concentration of heterogeneous populations.
The history of Detroit’s labor unrest documents the various quasi-military
techniques employed to render a suitably compliant labor pool to serve the needs
of the production line. Detroit’s social history has oscillated between periods of
peacefully coerced consumption (fueled by advertising and increasing wages)
and periods of profound social unrest, largely based on the desire for collective
bargaining, improvements in economic conditions, and to redress racial and
ethnic inequities.21
Ford’s famous five-dollar day and five-day workweek were quite calculated
levers intended to fuel the consumption of mass products by the working classes
themselves. The volatile concentration of diverse populations of laborers in
dense urban centers was among the factors that led Ford to begin decentralizing
production as early as the 1920s.14 The combination of decentralized pools of
workers each with sufficient income to consume the products of their own labors
produced a new economic paradigm in the twentieth century, and also helped to
fuel the rapid depopulation of post-industrial urban centers in post-war America.
In 1955, at the height of post-war emigration from the city, a uniquely
talented team was assembled to renovate one of the city’s “failing” downtown
neighborhoods.22 A federally underwritten Title I FHA urban renewal project,
which would come to be known as Lafayette Park, the work of this
interdisciplinary team offers a unique case study in a continuously viable and
vibrant mixed income community occupying a modernist superblock scheme. In
light of recently renewed interest in the problems of modernist planning
principles, and the continual demolition of many publicly subsidized modernist
housing projects nationally, Lafayette Park offers a unique counterpoint, arguing
precisely in favor of modern principles of urban planning and recommending a
thoughtful revision of the perceived failures of modern architecture and planning
vis-à-vis the city (Figures 6.12–6.14).
Led by the developer Herbert Greenwald (until his untimely death in a 1959
airplane crash) and a team of real-estate professionals, the financial
underpinnings of the project included $7.5 million in FHA loan guarantees (out
of a total construction budget of $35 million) as well as a substantial federal
subsidy toward the cost of the land. Originally planned as a mixed-income and
mixed-race development, Lafayette Park continues to this day to enjoy multiple
original family residents, high relative market value, and greater racial, ethnic,
and class diversity than both the city and suburbs that surround it. Greenwald’s
original conception of the neighborhood remains remarkably viable today, as the
site continues to provide central city housing to a middle-class group of residents
with the perceived amenities of the suburbs, including decreased density,
extensive landscaping and public parks, easy access by automobile, and safe
places for children to play.

6.12
Lafayette Park, Hedrich Blessing Photographs courtesy Chicago Historical Society
6.13
Lafayette Park, Hedrich Blessing Photographs courtesy Chicago Historical Society
6.14
Lafayette Park, Hedrich Blessing Photographs courtesy Chicago Historical Society

Greenwald enlisted the professional services of architect Ludwig Mies van

der Rohe for the design of the project, with whom he had previously worked on
the development of the 860–880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago. Mies
brought to the team Ludwig Hilberseimer, to plan the site, and Alfred Caldwell,
to execute the landscape design. Based largely on his previous academic projects
in Germany and the US, Lafayette Park provided the most significant application
of Hilberseimer’s conception of the “settlement unit” as well as the most
important commission of his career. Hilbs’s settlement unit was particularly apt
as an aggregation of planning principles and types appropriate to the
decentralizing North American city.22 Best known for his unbuilt urban design
projects from the 1920s (e.g. Hochhausstadt, 1924), Hilbs began to work on the
notion of landscape as the primary medium for a horizontal and radically
decentralized post-urban landscape as early as the 1930s. First evidenced in mid-
1930s projects for mixed-height housing schemes and the University of Berlin
campus, these tendencies toward an idea of landscape as urbanism are
immediately evident in Hilb’s plans for the Lafayette Park site, a portion of the
city of Detroit that decentralized first, fastest, and most fully.
Hilberseimer’s plans for the site proposed landscape as its primary material
element, the commission offering both sufficient acreage as well as budget for
what could have otherwise been an uninspired urban void. Central to this was
Greenwald’s finance and marketing scheme, which positioned landscape as the
central amenity in the form of an 18-acre park bisecting the site and providing a
much sought-after social and environmental amenity in the midst of Detroit.
Lafayette Park removed the vestiges of the obsolete nineteenth-century street
grid, in favor of a lush verdant and extensive green tabula verde. By doing this,
Hilberseimer accommodated the automobile completely at Lafayette Park yet
rendered it secondary to the primary exterior spaces of the site, as the parking is
in proximity to units while zoned to the perimeter of the site and dropped by
approximately one meter below grade. To the extent that landscape can be seen
as a primary ordering element (in lieu of architecture) for the urbanization of the
site, Hilbs’s collaboration with Mies at Lafayette Park provides a unique case
study for examining the role of landscape in post-war modernist planning more
generally.
At the end of the twentieth century, at least 70 urban centers in the US were
engaged in an ongoing process of abandonment, disinvestment, and decay.23
While most Americans for the first time in history now live in suburban
proximity to a metropolitan center, this fact is mitigated by the steadily
decreasing physical density in most North American cities. Rather than taking
the abandonment of these previously industrial urban centers as an indicator of
the so-called “failure” of the design disciplines to create a meaningful or
coherent public realm, these trends must be understood as the rational end game
of industrial urbanism itself, rendering legible a mobility of capital and
dispersion of infrastructure that characterize mature Fordist urbanism as
prophesied by Ford himself.14 In spite of a decade-long attempt to “revitalize”
the city of Detroit with the construction of theaters, sports stadia, casinos, and
other publicly subsidized, privately owned, for-profit destination entertainment,
Detroit continues steadily to lose population and building stock. These latest
architectural attempts to proclaim Detroit “back” have effectively committed the
city to a future as a destination entertainment theme park for its wealthy
suburban expatriates. Rather than signaling a renewed “vitality” or life for the
post-industrial city, these projects continue to mine the brand name of Detroit,
while the city continues to abandon itself to a decentralized post-industrial
future. In spite of a massive federally funded advertising campaign and a small
army of census takers, the 2000 US census showed Detroit’s population
continuing to shrink (Figure 6.15).24
6.15
The infrastructure of the automobile and the city it emptied, aerial photograph courtesy Alex
MacLean/Landslides As Detroit decamps it constructs immense empty spaces – tracts of land that are
essentially void spaces. These areas are not being “returned to nature,” but are curious landscapes of
indeterminate status. In this context, landscape is the only medium capable of dealing with simultaneously
decreasing densities and indeterminate futures. The conditions recommending an urbanism of landscape can
be found both in the abandoned central city and on the periphery of the still spreading suburbs. Ironically,
the ongoing process of greenfield development at the perimeter of Detroit’s metropolitan region brings up
similar questions posed by the incursion of opportunistic natural environmental systems into areas of post-
urban abandonment. For these sites, both brownfield and greenfield, what is demanded is a strategy of
landscape as urbanism, a landscape urbanism for Detroit’s post-industrial territories.25
Acknowledgments
Work on this chapter has benefited greatly from the support and advice of others,
particularly Rodolphe el-Khoury, whose generosity and insight were abundantly
apparent at all stages of the work. This work has particularly been informed by
numerous conversations with Jason Young and Georgia Daskalakis, with whom
I co-edited Stalking Detroit (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2001). Contributors to that
anthology, Jerry Herron, Patrick Schumacher, Dan Hoffman, and Kent
Kleinman, have each helped to clarify my interests in Detroit in particular ways.
The origins of this chapter can be found in the research and design project
“Decamping Detroit,” co-authored with Marili Santos-Munne in Stalking
Detroit, pp. 104–121.

6.16
Andrey Tarkovsky’s Stalker
6.17
Andrey Tarkovsky’s Stalker
6.18
Andrey Tarkovsky’s Stalker

Notes
1 Henry Ford as quoted in Ludwig Hilberseimer, 1945, pp. 89–93.
2 In the first half of the twentieth century, the population of Detroit grew from under 285,700 in 1900 to
over 1,849,500 in 1950. That number dropped steadily in the second half of the century to 951,270 at
the 2000 census. For more on Detroit’s declining population, see Rybczynski, 1995, pp. 14–17, 19.
3 See Herron, 1993.
4 Detroit Vacant Land Survey, 1990.
5 Detroit Vacant Land Survey, 1990, pp. 3–5.
6 The Economist, 1993, pp. 33–34.
7 US Census Bureau figures for Detroit indicate that the populations of 21 metropolitan areas in the US,
including St Louis, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, were shrinking at a faster rate than Detroit’s
during the decade of the 1990s.
8 Virilio, 1986. In 1998, Detroit’s Mayor Dennis Archer secured $60 million in loan guarantees from the
US Department of Housing and Urban Development to finance the demolition of every abandoned
residential building in the city. See Metropolis, 1998, p. 33.
9 See Chafets, 1990, pp. 3–16. While precise numbers of houses lost to arson are hard to quantify, local
myth places the figure at a conservative 1 percent annually. On media coverage of arson in Detroit, see
Herron, 1993.
10 On the urban impact of Detroit’s massive demolition program, see Hoffman, 2001a, 2001b.
11 De Certeau, 1984, p. 190.
12 See Hoffman, 2001a. According to research by Sanford Kwinter and Daniela Fabricius, between 1978
and 1998 approximately 9000 building permits were issued for new houses in Detroit, while over
108,000 demolition permits were issued. See Kwinter and Fabricius, 2000, p. 600.
13 Hoffman, 2001b.
14 Schumacher and Rogner, 2001.
15 Paul Virilio has commented on the fundamentally warlike conditions of Fordist urbanism. See Virilio,
1986.
16 Rykwert, 1988.
17 Hays, 1995, pp. 54–81.
18 Hilberseimer, 1949; Pommer et al., 1988.
19 For a discussion of the military imperatives of modernist urbanism, see Kwinter, 1994, pp. 84–
13;13;95.
20 For a description of the martial enforcement of civil order in the context of race relations in Detroit, see
Sugrue, 1996.
21 Sugrue, 1996, pp. 259–271.
22 For an excellent overview of Lafayette Park, see Pommer et al., 1988, pp. 89–93.
23 Alan Plattus, “Undercrowding and the American City: A Position Paper and a Proposal for Action,”
unpublished manuscript, pp. 1–8.
24 The aggressive and unsuccessful federally funded campaign to count Detroit’s citizens for the 2000
census was aimed in part at maintaining Detroit’s eligibility for certain federally funded programs
available only to cities with a population of one million or more. See Chicago Tribune, 2000.
25 Waldheim coined the term “landscape urbanism” in 1996 to describe the emergence of landscape as the
most relevant medium for the production and representation of contemporary urbanism.
Chapter 7

Hong Kong – Aformal Urbanism

Jonathan D. Solomon

Hong Kong is an advanced form of the spatial logic of late capitalism; a

shopping mall, a theme park or atrium hotel elaborated to the complexity of a
city. Characterized by a three-dimensional publicly accessible network that
facilitates propinquity and integration of diverse sectors, the city’s unique take
on a generic urbanism complicates understandings of the postmodern city and
suggests exciting futures.
More than any site save Disneyland, John Portman’s 1976 Bonaventure
Hotel in Los Angeles established the spatial grammar of postmodernism. With
its outwardly opaque spaces of international capital, its thoroughly disorienting
interiors, its wholesale dismantling of any sense of exteriority in the city, and its
lack of visual hierarchy and traditional urbanity, the building was characterized
by Fredric Jameson as a “Postmodern Hyperspace.”1 In Hong Kong, Hyperspace
is the norm, for there was never truly any traditional space in the city for it to
supersede. If the Bonaventure, in Jameson’s eyes, “aspires to being a total space,
a complete world, a kind of miniature city,”2 then Hong Kong succeeds. If the
Bonaventure aspired to miniaturize the city in a building, in Hong Kong the city
has coalesced into a single enlarged building.
The origins of this fascinating urban complex are unlikely: the shopping
mall in Hong Kong serves as the medium both for pedestrian connectivity and of
civic culture.3 Typically located over busy public transit nodes, these malls are a
development of the 1950s American dumb-bell mall, with two anchor
department stores linked by 600-foot arcades of smaller shops. Hong Kong malls
advance this model by adopting an inclusive approach to anchors, which can
include office or hotel lobbies, transit stations, and residential estates; these
malls also expand the network of anchors and arcades into three dimensions. At
the International Financial Center (IFC), developed on landfill in the late 1990s,
systems of interlinked publicly accessible passageways coalesce in three
dimensions around the IFC Mall, a continuous medium of pedestrian traffic
between ferry piers, underground rail stations, bus terminals, taxi stands, and the
city beyond that renders not just the streets but the very ground of the city
irrelevant.4 At the same time, the IFC and other sites like it across the city
generate a unique culture. The density, connectivity, and redundancy of these
networks generate new forms of public space that, to function, require neither
the images of classical European or Chinese urbanity to signify a street, a
courtyard, a square, nor the underlying guarantees they suggest.5
While lacking traditional legibility, Hong Kong’s pedestrian networks,
when mapped as a seamless continuum uninterrupted by ownership,
management, function, or vertical position, and describe a perceptible spatial
logic. In the case of the IFC, the mall is at the center of a network of connective
passages that link diverse populations and activities through transit. Knockoff
goods are sold meters from the real thing. Amateur musicians perform just steps
away from professionals. Tourists, expat bankers, foreign domestic workers, and
local commuters converge.
7.1
Footbridges in Central, 2001, photograph by Adam Frampton

Networks such as these are common in the city: in Mong Kok East, a
footbridge runs from Mong Kok Station through the Mong Kok East Station, the
Grand Century Plaza mall and the lobby of the adjacent Royal Plaza Hotel, down
two flights of escalators and across a bridge over Prince Edward Road West,
then through a street of local flower markets and a bird market on an elevated
park before crossing the historic border between Hong Kong and Qing Dynasty
China. In Lam Tin, a transit hub spans the highway below Sceneway Gardens
Estate, and connects to older residential estates and a bus terminal through eight
stories of escalators and two shopping malls, the Sceneway Plaza and the Kai
Tin Shopping Center.
7.2
Publicly accessible pedestrian access networks in and around IFC Mall and Exchange Square,
Central, drawing by Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon, and Clara Wong

Aformal urbanism refers to a form of decision-making and design process

in cities that falls between traditional understandings of the formal and the
informal. Evidence of aformal urbanism can be found by examining the
organizational structures it produces, which reject traditional form-based
hierarchies that rely on visual legibility, such as solid-void or figure–ground
relationships. “Aformal” thus has two meanings, one referring to the city’s
organization, the other to its spatial products.
Aformal logics
Discussions of the formal and the informal in architecture and urbanism, and
particularly in areas experiencing rapid urbanization, tend toward polarization.
On the one hand, the formal tends to be equated with the legal and specifically
with the state apparatus either directly or through the application of codification
or regulation to market forces. On the other hand, the informal, as explored by
critic Mike Davis and others, tends to be equated with the illegal, or at least with
the extra-legal solution-based results typical of less empowered operators.6
At the same time, the formal tends to be equated with the legible, and
specifically with the kind of state-modernist visual legibility described by James
C. Scott and others as ultimately ill-fated attempts to reduce complexity and
unpredictability into models that better suit bureaucratic administration, while
the informal tends to be equated with the illegible, and specifically with the
express lack of precisely that type of bureaucratic clarity.7
In Hong Kong the impression of this dualism can be reinforced by other
assumptions that rest on binary oversimplifications – residues of a colonial past
neatly incorporated in the city’s official slogan, “Asia’s World City”: East and
West, rich and poor, fast and slow, old and new. In fact, all these assumptions
are outdated. Hong Kong resists simple dualisms with surprising levels of
integration in its spatial products. Its intense pedestrian connectivity is a result of
a combination of top-down planning and bottom-up solutions, a unique
collaboration between pragmatic thinking and comprehensive masterplanning,
played out in three-dimensional space.
Take, for example, the footbridge over Chater Road, built in the early 1960s
to join second-level pedestrian shopping arcades in Prince’s building with the
Mandarin Hotel. While the continuous elevated deck has an extended modernist
pedigree, most notably in this case through the work of Colin Buchanan, whose
Traffic in Towns (1963) influenced Hong Kong planners at this time, it is hard to
see Chater Road as anything other than a pragmatic solution to the needs of the
developer to maximize profitability of space; an expression of the city’s so-
called laissez-faire urbanism.8 Once the Chater Road Bridge, and others like it in
a network joining properties owned by the developer Hong Kong Land proved
successful, the Highways Department began building footbridges too. It is hard
to see the network of bridges erected along Connaught Road in the 1980s as
anything other than the product of government bureaucracy exercising top-down
planning. The resulting complex, the network of public and private armatures,
falls into neither category. The Highways Department owns bridges between
privately developed properties and public transportation interchanges. If either
party shut their portions, the system breaks down. This network is generated by
the pressures and constraints of Hong Kong’s context, not imported as an
abstract idea. It is the result of neither top-down planning nor self-organizing
systems. It is some new thing: an aformal urbanism.

7.3
A footbridge on Chater Road, 1965, photograph courtesy the Government of Hong Kong SAR
7.4
Footbridges along Connaught Road, 1982, photograph courtesy the Government of Hong Kong SAR
7.5
Aformal urbanism of Central, 2001, photograph CS01235 reproduced with permission of the
Director of Lands.
© The Government of Hong Kong SAR. License No. 64/2011

Examples of aformal urbanism abound in Hong Kong, and not all of them
are entirely anonymous. The Central and Midlevels escalator was envisaged by
the Highways Department as a kind of pedestrian flyover linking the Central
business district with residential neighborhoods in the Midlevels of Victoria
Peak; it was proposed as a means to alleviate traffic on the region’s narrow
roads. By making the steep hills behind Central easier to access, the escalator
had the unexpected effect of transforming a formerly sleepy neighborhood into a
premier entertainment district, raising property values, and bringing new
congestion. New escalators are under construction and several more are in
planning on the west side of Hong Kong Island, pushed now not by the
Highways Department, but by developers and local politicians seeking to
emulate the effects seen in Central. Resistance to the projects from residents is
based on a desire to avoid precisely the same effects.9
Times Square, a mall in Causeway Bay, was built on the model of the
American atrium mall, multiple levels linked by elevator banks and sequential
escalators organized around a central open space. As pedestrian flows in the
upper floors of the mall decreased, it became clear they were too isolated. So the
atrium was filled. New escalators, or “Expresscalators” make the nine-storey
journey in a few quick jumps, skipping floors in an ascending spiral. Like
shortcuts taken across a formal quad that eventually create informal paths that
the college paves, the Central and Midlevels Escalator and the Times Square
Expresscalators formalize informal patterns and generate aformal urbanism.
The easy fluidity of public passage through diverse and apparently
contradictory spatial and social complexes is a symptom of a more general and
more fundamentally unlikely condition in Hong Kong with its origins in the
city’s extremes of geography and climate and unique historical circumstances. A
closer study of three Hong Kong buildings, which, while radical, fall somewhat
outside the city’s mainstream architectural narrative, reveals why aformal
urbanism flourishes in the city. Shun Tak Center in Sheung Wan is an example
of Hong Kong’s rejection of both a physical and a cultural ground and its
embrace of connectivity. Queensway Plaza in Admiralty is an example of how
the lack of a ground prevents visual hierarchies from developing by precluding
figure–ground relationships. The Lockhart Road Municipal Services Building is
an example of how in place of legible formal rules other sensorial atmospheres,
like temperature, smell, sound and touch, develop new ordering systems.
7.6
The Central and Midlevels Escalator, shortly after its opening in 1994, photograph courtesy the
Government of Hong Kong SAR
A city without ground
Ground is a continuous plane and a stable reference point for the public life of
the city. It is the surface on which the conflicts of urban propinquity – public and
private, planned and impromptu, privileged and disadvantaged – are worked out.
This stable reference point is what Hong Kong lacks.
A city built on steep slopes and vast areas of landfill at incredible density,
Hong Kong’s physical ground is equal parts elusive and irrelevant. Ground is
never where you expect it. Nor is it often what it seems. What appears to be terra
firma was likely water or air not so long ago. What appears to be a natural
outcropping of rock is more likely a formed concrete retaining wall or even the
side of a building. Often times a glance over a curb reveals not a gutter but
several stories of descending platforms, drainage channels, and forested slopes,
with no clear indication of datum. Even when a ground can be identified, such as
the few blocks of urban grid in older areas of the city, it is often remarkably
obfuscated, immersed in clouds of exhaust, or obstructed by major
infrastructural programs like bus terminals or electrical substations.10
In place of a physical ground, Hong Kong has connectivity. On the North
Shore of Hong Kong Island it is possible to walk from Sheung Wan through
Central and Admiralty to Pacific Place 3 on the edge of Wanchai without ever
having to leave a continuous network of elevated or submerged pedestrian
passageways and interconnected malls, lobbies, and gardens.11
Shun Tak Center, completed on the site of the Macau Ferry in 1984 by the
architects Spence Robinson, illustrates this substitution perfectly. The new
development replaced a broad and open pier, diverse and congested; a single
surface was the space of commerce, tourism, industry, transportation, and
leisure; substituting a complex that separates various transit modes and
functional zones, including the ferry terminal, bus station, taxi stands, parking,
connections to the Sheung Wan Station of the Mass Transit Rail (MTR), a
helipad, shopping mall, office tower, and, originally, a hotel. At the former
ground level, a sliproad formation for taxi and coach circulation precludes access
for pedestrians. Pedestrians enter at level three, where elevated walkways from
the city connect to a shopping arcade and lobbies for the towers, and escalators
lead down to trains, taxis, and buses or up to bridges to the ferry piers and
helipad.
7.7
Shun Tak Center, Section, drawing by Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon, and Clara Wong

7.8
Shun Tak Center, Sheung Wan, 1999, photograph CN23237 reproduced with permission of the
Director of Lands.
© The Government of Hong Kong SAR. License No. 64/2011©

Shun Tak Center cedes ground to connectivity. It is not seen so much as it

envelops, not entered so much as moved through, on your way from a bus to a
train. An elegant intermodal switch between land, sea, and air, it is an almost
primordial modernism – futurist in its ambitions. The scale of Shun Tak’s
coordination and efficiency require legality, coordination between government
agencies and private transit operators, not to mention customs and immigration,
demand it. Legibility, however, is absent. Spatial experiences like the sea
approach to Hong Kong’s edge are replaced by interior connective sequences
that insure continuity of flow. Symmetry, centrality, axiality – the legible visual
order that characterizes transit hubs envisaged by Garnier, St. Elia and Le
Corbusier turns out to be unnecessary.

Figure-to-figure
Without a ground Hong Kong can have no figure–ground relationships. Rather,
the city is a dense mass of figures abutting each other directly in three
dimensions. In this dense mass, even circulation becomes figural. Queensway
Plaza in Admiralty, developed by the MTR Corporation and designed by the
architects Fitch and Chung, opened in 1980.12 The complex serves as an ideal
illustration of figure-to-figure spatial relationships.

7.9
Queensway Plaza, 2012, photograph by Jonathan D. Solomon
7.10
Queensway Plaza, Model, image courtesy Chung Wah Nan Architects Ltd.

Queensway Plaza sits amid a group of towers developed in the late 1970s
above the then newly opened MTR station, on a narrow strip of land formerly
reserved for the British Navy. A shopping mall housed within an elevated
walkway, it was intended to connect the train station and new bus terminals to
the surrounding towers and over Cotton Tree drive, a high-speed artery west of
the site, to a new parking structure.
Instead of the classical modernist solution, a continuous ground or plaza
from which the figures of the six asymmetrically arranged towers would form a
void from which they could be read and appreciated, figural connectivity fills the
void with another figure. This has the effect of eliminating figure–ground
relationships on the site, an architectural move that is reinforced by narrow and
opaque reveals between the elevated shopping mall and the surrounding
buildings, just wide enough to differentiate the various figures but too slim to
allow their relationships to be read.
Pedestrians crossing into the site on elevated walkways from Central
encounter an artificially lit and ventilated double-loaded corridor lined with
shops. The interiority is extreme, an environment that could be replicated
anywhere, floating above the ground or burrowed beneath it. Intermittent breaks
in the retail façade lead over short bridges to the podiums of the surrounding
towers, past more shopping or directly into elevator lobbies. On the east side of
the site the corridor splits, one arm leading to a narrow bank of escalators
serving the bus terminal directly under the platform, the other to a similar
escalator serving the Admiralty MTR station.
New connections from the site to the rapidly developing neighborhood have
been provided since the project’s completion, notably elevated bridges south
over Queensway to the shopping mall and hotel complex at Pacific Place and
north over Harcourt Road to the new government campus at Tamar. Now
serving as a critical pedestrian link, the Hong Kong government recently
described Queensway Plaza as a “unique” property, “both a commercial retail
centre and an important public thoroughfare in a prominent location,”13 a
conflation frequently bestowed upon streets but rarely seen attributed to
interiors. Queensway Plaza is unique precisely because it is able to perform like
a street without the figure–ground relationships that signify it or the underlying
social structures it is meant to guarantee.
Public atmospheres
Hong Kong lacks the traditional lexicon of visual hierarchy established by
figure–ground relationships. It has no perceivable edge, no axis, no center, no
ground. Rather, diverse sequence of atmospheres generates urban hierarchy.
Microclimates of temperature, humidity, noise, and smell organize Hong
Kong. Order appears in the juxtaposition of climates. The domestic workers that
gather under the HSBC Main Building in Central do so for a number of complex
reasons. But they are doubtless also attracted by the shade and swell of cool air
that plunges down in summer months from the atrium above. Profit-generating
space tends to be air-conditioned, while smokers gather at covered walkways
open to bus terminals or heavily trafficked roads. The smell of streetside cooking
or a waste transfer point, the sound of street vendors or expat bars, create equally
as potent ordering systems.
The Lockhart Road Municipal Services Building, completed in 1984 by
Fitch and Chung, is an extreme example. Programs that elsewhere would be
figural, a market, a library, a gymnasium, are packed together so tightly that they
become a single building. Radically diverse atmospheres organize space that
cannot be ordered visually: the smell of meat or fish, the quiet sounds of rustling
pages under fluorescent light, a cool dry blast of air.
The origins of Lockhart Road lie in state-modernist legibility. Starting in
the 1970s, the Hong Kong government began to clear its informal street markets;
often referred to as wet markets, their main trade was in fruits and vegetables,
fish and meat, but also sold dry goods. Indoor centralized markets had already
been introduced in Hong Kong as early as 1844, but the new initiative proposed
to combine markets with other facilities to form neighborhood centers. What
were informal street markets moved indoors, where they were reordered into a
legible plan, conveniently drained, and consistently lit and ventilated.
Lockhart Road was the first centralized market to hybridize the wet market
with diverse community programs. The building includes major breaks in
section and diverse circulatory sequences in order to accommodate very different
uses. An open-air atrium leads from the street through the multi-level market to a
food court on an outdoor deck. Linked by escalators, smooth connectivity and
continuity of climate with the street is reinforced. The library, government
offices, and sports hall require isolation and climate control. Each is accessed by
a separate elevator bank. Heterogeneity of plan layout extends to massing, as the
double-loaded corridor of the government offices slims down to allow natural
lighting to penetrate the plan and the sports hall again projects out. Even
building services are planned separately as each use requires specific drainage,
lighting, and ventilation solutions.

7.11
Lockhart Road Municipal Services Building, Interior, 2012, photograph by Jonathan D. Solomon
7.12
Lockhart Road Municipal Services Building, Section, image courtesy Chung Wah Nan Architects
Ltd.

Lockhart Road is a multipurpose tower. Unlike the Downtown Athletic

Club, with which Rem Koolhaas illustrated the potential for the skyscraper to
accommodate radical heterogeneity, it is public. This is a critical difference: it
achieves continuity with the public armature of the street and structures diversity
with atmosphere. The market, envisaged as a legible cell in an organized
hierarchy, developed over 25 years into an extension of the informal streets,
complete with the heterogeneous and unpredictable clutter that modernization
was supposed to reduce. Lockhart Road, like the Expresscalators in Causeway
Bay or the Central footbridge network, is a unique collaboration between legible
order and informal solution-finding, inconceivable without the contributions of
both but reducible to neither.

A partial archeology of the present

Hong Kong is a laboratory for a form of urbanism largely ignored since
megastructure was abandoned by the avant-garde over 30 years ago.14 The
struggles of that era and its promise of reconciliation foreshadow aformal
urbanism.
In his 1976 book Megastructure, Reyner Banham credits the movement’s
original appeal with its ability to reconcile the designed and the spontaneous, the
large and the small, the permanent and the transient; and he locates its downfall
in its inability to reconcile the avant-garde and the establishment.15 The failure
of megastructure falls in the same place from which aformal urbanism grows:
between formal “comprehensible design” and informal “self-determining”
systems. In the first case, the megastructure proved too amenable to the formal,
as seen in projects for socialist governments, urban redevelopment authorities,
state expositions, and university expansions. In the second case it proved too
amenable to the informal: leaving “so much liberty for the self-housing and self-
determining intentions of the inhabitants that they had liberty also to destroy the
megastructure itself.”16

7.13
Construction of Olympic Station, West Kowloon, 1999, photograph CN23316 reproduced with
permission of the Director of Lands.
© The Government of Hong Kong SAR. License No. 64/2011
 By the 1970s, “[m]egastructure,” Banham writes, “deserted by the avant
garde, was left to the despised establishment as a conventional method for
maximizing the returns of urban development.”17
It is perhaps not coincidental that the history of aformal architecture begins
in Hong Kong at the same time Banham is chronicling megastructure’s demise.
While megastructure’s eventual collapse as a viable political or intellectual
movement in architecture, according to Banham, came about as a result of
establishment organization and avant-garde expression, the
cryptomegastructures that accompany aformal urbanism in Hong Kong and
elsewhere exhibit avant-garde organization and establishment expression. John
Portman’s Peachtree Center in Atlanta, begun in the 1960s and under continual
development since, illustrates this moment perfectly; operating like
megastructure without looking like it.
Peachtree Center is a vast aformal network joining 30 individual projects
and 16 city blocks developed over 50 years on a site in Downtown Atlanta.
Joining private developments to public transit infrastructure, its hallmark is a
continuous publicly accessible pedestrian interior. Conceived as a matrix of
“coordinate units” and “supporting structures,” the development grew
organically according to the needs of each new program. A successful furniture
mart (1956) led to a merchandise mart (1961) then to an office tower and
subsequently a hotel (1967), links to mass transit (beginning 1975), a shopping
mall (1973, expanded 1979), and more. Peachtree Center’s process-based
organization and entrepreneurial growth breaks radically from modernist
compositional masterplanning, but its comparatively mainstream architectural
expression and business model rendered it invisible to the eyes of the
contemporary avant-garde. Peachtree Center is an example of aformal urbanism
at work.18
7.14
Peachtree Center, John Portman & Associates, site plan, image courtesy John Portman & Associates

The same aformal logics can be observed in the development of the new
district surrounding Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station. Long a subcenter of the city’s
urban rail network, the undeveloped west of the neighborhood was a site for
intense speculation in the post-war period, yielding a 1960 proposal by Fumiko
Maki and Masato Otaka for an elevated pedestrian platform linking a complex of
urban activities in various formally distinct clusters. The west of the district was
eventually developed in the 1970s according to a plan by Kenzo Tange calling
for tall towers offset from the street by large plazas, while the east continued to
grow on small urban building plots. An underground network of passageways
leading from the station, the world’s busiest, gradually spread to surrounding
developments. Property owners, who saw profitability in connection to the
network, financed portions of its later growth. With establishment expression
and avant-garde organization, Shinjuku Station aformally provides the publicly
accessible pedestrian network and process-based development model Maki and
Otaka proposed.
7.15
John Portman, flanked by U.S. Secretary of Transportation John Volpe and President of Central
Atlanta Progress William Calloway, beside a model of Peachtree Center, 1972, image courtesy John
Portman & Associates

Hong Kong’s aformal architecture holds out the promise of reconciling the
formal and the informal both in the city’s decision-making process and its spatial
products, yielding a unique urbanism with broad implications worldwide. Of
particular interest are the possibilities for the aformal to generate civic culture, a
goal that was famously elusive to modernism and megastructure alike. Hong
Kong’s aformal spaces – its shopping malls and footbridges – do just this. Art
exhibitions and political protests occur in shopping malls, domestic workers
gather on footbridges on their day off, sidewalks become salons or workshops,
and streets become restaurants or dance halls. Hong Kong demonstrates the
viability and even robustness of public spaces that do not resemble a street, a
courtyard, a square.
7.16
Project for Shinjuku, Fumihiko Maki, and Masato Otaka, 1960, image courtesy Maki and Associates

7.17
The aformal urbanism of publicly accessible access networks in Shinjuku, Tokyo, 2012, image
courtesy Yahoo Japan.
7.18
The Central and Midlevels Escalator, 2012, photograph by Adam Frampton
The following design proposals exacerbate Hong Kong’s aformal architecture by testing the
interplay between the city’s formal and informal decision-making processes, by accentuating the
acuity of its atmospheric imbalances, and by generally exploring the freedom of design without
ground.
7.19
Heung Yuen Wai Border Crossing Facility, 2011. Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon, and Clara
Wong.
The proposal for Heung Yuen Wai Border Crossing Facility explores connectivity in the context of
Hong Kong’s border dynamics. The control points between Hong Kong and its northern neighbor,
Shenzhen, are the busiest land ports in the world, a kind of Maxwell’s Demon for preserving the
region’s productive cultural and economic disequilibrium. At the same time, the smooth and efficient
connectivity that characterizes other facilities like Chek Lap Kok airport is designed to erase
distinctions between the city and distant points around the globe.
Heung Yuen Wai Crossing provides spatial solutions for satisfying cross-border desire. Two malls
reach out from either side, each allowing shoppers to avail themselves of transgressive opportunities
without transgressing the border. From Shenzhen, cross directly into a climate-controlled and super-
cooled atrium mall where global luxury brands are available without import tax. From Hong Kong,
cross to a poorly ventilated labyrinthine market where illicit goods and cheap or questionable
services can be found. The project is a vision of the logical extremes of hyper-connectivity in a region
that continues to derive enormous energy from inequality

7.20
Kai Tak Park, 2011. Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon, and Clara Wong.
The proposal for Kai Tak Park explores direct figure-to-figure relationships by exacerbating the
city’s groundlessness. At Hong Kong’s Sai Kung Fish Market, fishing boats lashed to a series of piers
form a floating market. The literal dynamics of the physical urbanism of the market reflect the
dynamics of development over time in older areas of the city such as Central, where gradual
evolution of the pedestrian network generated unpredictable and productively redundant results.
Kai Tak Park includes a sports and leisure district on various craft joined together between the
new Kai Tak Cruise Terminal and the Kwun Tong boardwalk. The project explores the opportunities
of more literal dynamism applied at the scale of the Central network. Imagined as a series of linked
cruise ships, yachts, fishing boats, ferries, and tugs that already ply Victoria Harbour, the project
cruise ships, yachts, fishing boats, ferries, and tugs that already ply Victoria Harbour, the project
takes the notion of a city without ground quite literally, proposing directly abutting figures that lack
any stable reference points

7.21
Central Market Oasis, 2011. Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon, and Clara Wong.
The proposal for Central Market Oasis explores vertical atmospheric hierarchies by exacerbating
the manipulation of climate in the city’s interiors. Atmosphere is already used as a vertical ordering
system in the Lockhart Road Municipal Services Building. Other models of continuous vertical space
in the city offer expanded possibility. Langham Place in Mong Kok provides an ideal reference. A
nine-story spiral of shopping, the Jon Jerde-designed mall is imagined as a street in the sky, but the
heterogeneity of its interior design is belied by a homogeneity of atmosphere.
Central Market Oasis tops a historic market structure with a 20-story spiral of interior recreation
facilities: an equatorial beach, a tropical rainforest, a temperate forest, a ski slope, and an alpine
peak. Shopping opportunities and informal activities that organize around these diverse climates
cling to an outer loop that also provides connections to the upper levels of adjacent office towers,
creating a three-dimensional network. The project introduces levels of climate management that
while extreme and perhaps unusual in Hong Kong are hardly uncommon in contemporary urbanism

Notes
1 Jameson, 1984.
2 Jameson, 1984.
3 Solomon, 2010, pp. 67–70.
 4 For a deeper analysis of the IFC Mall and its role in the city of Hong Kong’s access networks, see
Solomon, 2012.
5 Portions of this text appeared previously in Frampton et al., 2012.
6 See Davis, 2004.
7 See Scott, 1998, for a complete review of this position.
8 Zhang et al., 1997, pp. 13–16.
9 DeWolf, 2011.
10 For an alternative analysis of Hong Kong’s “multiple” grounds, see Shelton et al., 2010.
11 For an early analysis of the elevated walkways in Central Hong Kong, see Ohno, 1992, pp. 55–77. For
a more contemporary analysis, see Frampton et al., 2012.
12 Alan Fitch, the firm’s founding partner, was the architect of Hong Kong’s City Hall, and the firm
continues to operate today as Chung Wah Nan Architects.
13 Government Property Agency, 2008.
14 Portions of this text appeared previously in Solomon, 2011.
15 Banham, 1976, p. 10.
16 Banham, 1976, p. 218.
17 Banham, 1976, p. 10.
18 Portman, 2010.
Chapter 9

New Orleans – Ecological Urbanism

Victor J. Jones

Urban discourse recognizes the role that social and economic forces play in
shaping the form and substance of a city – the continental grid as the instrument
for mapping territory and stimulating land speculation, and the axial plan as the
device that delineates social order and maximizes circulation. In practice,
however, such abstract and “totalizing” urban operations have proven to be
vulnerable to both human and natural forces at work in cities, particularly those
located in geographically challenged areas. This chapter examines alternative
“ecological” urban operations and assesses their potential effect on the
rebuilding of post-Katrina New Orleans. Among the many initiatives that have
been launched in the wake of the hurricane, three case studies in particular
represent the broad agenda of ecological urbanism as they lay the groundwork
for a symbiosis between the natural conditions of the city’s site, human activity,
and cultural identity.
In the mid-1990s, landscape architects began expanding the idea of
“landscape” to include human interventions in the urban fabric of cities. In so
doing, they enlarged their sphere of operation to engage the unnatural ecologies
as well as the natural environment – the topography of the territory, the natural
substrates, and the creatures and the plant life that inhabit it. Rather than being
relegated to a secondary and often purely ornamental role in the urban domain,
landscape (now including unnatural landscapes and unnatural ecologies of all
kinds) was elevated to a primary place.1 More recently, the term “ecological
urbanism” has enlarged this domain yet again, describing an approach to cities
that is not only more sensitive to the natural environment and issues of
sustainability, but also less ideologically driven and more socially inclusive.2 In
many ways, ecological urbanism is an evolution of, and a critique of, “landscape
urbanism,” inasmuch as it advocates a more holistic approach to the design and
management of cities.
Ecological urbanism argues for “new ethics and aesthetics of the urban.” It
recognizes and articulates the need for a systems-based design approach that
integrates and expresses complex systems and social processes in ways that are
fundamentally humane. This shift of emphasis radically alters the dynamics that
have determined how urban environments are conceived, designed, built, and
maintained up until relatively recently. At the same time, the notion of ecology,
having moved beyond the mere notion of environmental sustainability, has
gained new agency in the lexicon of urban theory and planning.
Deluge and disaster
In parallel with this renewal of traditional disciplinary recognition with respect
to natural settings and ecosystems,3 dramatic effects of climate change and
extraordinary weather events have begun to be felt in cities around the world. As
a consequence, the notion of ecology has gone from being considered “relevant”
to being a determining factor in the discourse on cities. Take as just one example
the extraordinary case of New Orleans. When Hurricane Katrina struck in late
August 2005, one of America’s worst environmental disasters exposed the fact
that the city was already poised at the threshold of oblivion before the hurricane
overwhelmed it. The incapacity of human artifice to impede natural forces was
bluntly demonstrated. The extreme event was, in part, a human disaster resulting
from three centuries of urbanization supported by an unflinching confidence in
aggressive infrastructural practices. With land uses attuned only to economic
agendas, traditional urban patterns portrayed a city as it had been dreamed,
rather than as it actually existed in relation to the landscape and the sea. The
legacy of the ancien régime, with its blind eye to the practical and the specifics
of a site, bolstered by invasive infrastructure, never acknowledged the
environmental threat that urbanism posed in this sensitive domain.
Not urban but policy renewal
In the course of reconstructing New Orleans, conventional urban planning
practices have been suspended in recognition of the precarious ecological
conditions of the site, which for centuries went unheeded. With the expressed
mandate of establishing more resilient forms of urban organization in the city,
nature itself has been invited to participate in the redefinition of territory and
boundaries based upon new logics of organization. Rather than turning the
landscape against itself by mounting heroic feats of engineering to compensate
for the city’s unfortunate topography, proponents of ecological urbanism have
begun to elicit from the design fields of landscape architecture, architecture, and
urban design alternative approaches based on the notion of cooperation with and
adaptation to natural forces. This points to a reshaping of the urban realm that is
based on something other than formalist or economic premises.
The following case studies represent reflective ecological urbanism
practices – a macro-scale comprehensive planning analysis by the Urban Land
Institute (ULI); a micro-scale design proposition located in one the hardest-hit
areas of New Orleans, Viet Village Urban Farm; and a meso-scale proposal
paradoxically located on high ground, New Orleans Waterfront: Reinventing the
Crescent. While the ULI report underscored the importance of ecologically
“sensible” redevelopment in New Orleans, the two design proposals, both
recipients of several national design awards, advocate ecologically “responsive”
approaches to urban development, expressing sensitivity not only to the natural
environment, but also to the complex social and cultural dimensions of New
Orleans. The case studies serve as pointed examples that call into question the
feasibility of “sustainable” and “ecologically based” approaches for a post-
Katrina New Orleans.
Past as foreword
American geographer Peirce F. Lewis described New Orleans as “the impossible
but inevitable city.”4 Surrounded by swamps, threatened by floods, and graced
with little solid ground, New Orleans was always the site of a struggle between
human intentions and the natural tendencies of the place. Establishing their city
at the very mouth of the Mississippi River Delta, French colonialists favored the
flat and below-sea-level terrain, speculating that the logistical advantages
outweighed the less than hospitable geographic and climatic conditions.
In 1718, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville founded a French outpost on
the site of the future city. Situated on high ground running along the Mississippi
River, what would become the French Quarter was laid out in 1728 by engineer
Pierre Le Blond de la Tour. The plan consisted of a gridiron with 14 square
blocks flanking the river and six squares inland from the river’s edge. Each
square block was surrounded by a ditch, and the whole ensemble was bordered
by a canal. Rainwater and raw sewage together would flow from the ditches
around the squares, and then were funneled into two large ditches that emptied
into the canal. The canal, in turn, emptied into the swamp lying behind the city
and stretching to the natural levee of Lake Pontchartrain. During heavy
rainstorms, the streets were completely flooded, and each square block became
an island.
9.1
Engraving of Le Vieux Carré (upper) envisioned by engineer Pierre Le Blond de la Tour. Private
collection of Alain Fièvre

Fur trading sparked a burgeoning economy, and by the end of the

eighteenth century, sugar-cane plantations occupied the natural levees along the
banks of the Mississippi. The striking difference between the gridiron of the
French Quarter and the settlement patterns of the plantations is that the latter
followed the winding geography of the Mississippi rather than the hardline
geometry of the French Quarter. As New Orleans weathered its unsavory
environmental circumstances, robust commerce and trade effected the city’s
transformation from languid, topographically challenged backwater town to
thriving and boisterous hub. Still, water haunted the fate of the city. In 1819,
architect Benjamin Latrobe described New Orleans in three words: “mud, mud,
mud.”5 By 1830, efforts to protect America’s fastest growing city from flooding
ignited extensive engineering projects to enable the unchecked expansion of the
new metropolis into a savage landscape. Those engineering feats, together with
the later subdivision of the plantations into smaller, urban-scaled parcels,
determined the foundational organization of the contemporary city. By the
1960s, every inch of land nested between the Mississippi River and Lake
Ponchetrane had been slated for development.
Shrinking the footprint
When the levees gave way in 2005, it was widely assumed that neither restoring
the entire footprint of the city nor full-scale urban abandonment and relocation
were tenable options. In November 2005, on behalf of the ULI, a 37-member
panel of experts advised Major C. Ray Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back
(BNOB) Commission to refigure the city’s footprint using natural flood levels to
determine new boundaries and territories of occupation. In theory, the notion of
conceding certain low-lying neighborhoods to nature seemed sensible. It also
resonated with the gist of pioneering ecological planner Ian McHarg’s dictum:

If one accepts the simple proposition that nature is the arena of life and that
a modicum of knowledge of her processes is indispensable for survival and
rather more for existence, health and delight, it is amazing how many
difficult problems present ready resolution.6

The ULI report submitted to the BNOB Commission was a carefully crafted
narrative that sensitively and rationally outlined guidelines for rebuilding. The
recommendations included creating an economic development corporation to
manage and dispense the billions of dollars expected to flow into the region,
establishing mixed-income neighborhoods that could incorporate affordable
housing with market-rate homes, developing more dense, walkable
neighborhoods on higher ground using mid-rise residential buildings
interspersed with commercial and retail facilities, and introducing a light-rail
system that would run from the airport to the CBD, along which new
neighborhoods could be built.
However, what caught the attention of most citizens and the press was the
re-zoning map of the city that dictated development prescriptions for three
“conditions”: Minimal or Moderate Damage (should be repopulated immediately
and services restored to current needs); Hardest Hit (should receive
environmental testing and flood protection surveys to determine which
neighborhoods should be redeveloped); and Flood Control (should include
levees, parks, neutral grounds, and water reservoirs). Hardest Hit and Flood
Control areas represented over 50 percent of the city’s landmass, which would
be refigured either through radical restructuring plans or abandonment. In any
case, whole neighborhoods of families and businesses would be expected to find
“solid ground” elsewhere.
Negative public reaction may have been the consequence of poor graphic
judgment, or more likely, failure on the part of ULI to take into account the
limitations of top-down strategies in the wake of urban disasters – a time when
the most ambitious and revolutionary rebuilding plans are subject to the greatest
likelihood of failure. The ecologically driven zoning map omitted any concrete
solutions to crucial cultural and social issues that troubled the rebuilding process.
Not even after ULI panel member, Jeffery Gardere officially acknowledged that
“we need to address the social injustices, and the psychological damage that has
been done to generations of African-Americans. We have to be able to speak
about it,” were citizens willing to support shrinking the city’s footprint.
Cultural layers composed of family lineages, social networks, and
sentimental attachments collided with the environmental realities of the site.
Before long, citizens and neighborhood community groups pushed local
politicians into guaranteeing that the city’s footprint would remain unchanged.
Residents suspected that officials did not respect every citizen’s right to return to
his or her home, pointing to a foreseeable outcome in which stakeholders and
policy makers would seize the opportunity to permanently banish the poor and
disenfranchised from New Orleans. This derailed any hope that the longstanding
struggle between the bayou habitat and humanity could find common ground.
Skeptics feared that New Orleans’s great debate over shrinking the footprint
officially ended in a political quid pro quo: citizens could return home at their
own risk, while politicians and policy makers could pursue recovery on their
own terms.
Regardless of the political outcome, the ULI’s recommendation to shrink
the city’s footprint provoked design discussions that took environmental
assessment as the starting point for the recovery of New Orleans. Design
professionals and academics eager to understand the implications of this
approach began working directly with grassroots neighborhood associations and
civic groups.

Viet Village Urban Farm

Working collaboratively with the Tulane City Center, the Urban Landscape Lab
at Louisiana State University, and the University of Montana Environmental
Studies Program, the landscape architecture firm of Spackman, Mossop and
Michaels designed the Viet Village Urban Farm – a project that embraced the
challenge of achieving environmental as well as cultural sustainability through
an ecologically based approach to remediation of an irreparable part of the city.
It opened up a conversation that had been suppressed by interest groups with
political, financial, social, and aesthetic agendas – notably the BNOB
Commission. Accepting the city’s fluid and mutable terrain, figuratively and
literally, SM+M jettisoned the fiction of occupying stable, solid, dry land in New
Orleans. Their proposal advocates newly constructed ground that creates
topographies and corridors linking existing ecologies and ecosystems with
specific site conditions.
The first Vietnamese immigrants arrived in Village de l’Est in 1975.
Developed extensively during the 1960s onwards, Village de l’Est, situated east
of the Industrial Canal, is part of the Ninth Ward, a zone labeled “Hardest Hit”
by the ULI report. Early on, the Vietnamese community established kitchen
gardens where traditional fruits and vegetables were grown. Following Katrina,
when these residents began to re-imagine their community, the idea of an urban
farm emerged and took hold. Located on 28 acres, the urban farm combines
small gardens for families with larger commercial plots focused on supplying
food to local restaurants and grocery stores throughout the region. There is also a
livestock area for raising chickens and goats using traditional Vietnamese
methods. Situated in the heart of the community, Viet Village Urban Farm is
supported by green infrastructure and is founded on sustainable irrigation and
organic agricultural practices: energy is renewable, water is managed on-site,
and kitchen waste is composted.

The goal is to make the Viet Village Urban Farm an exemplar of

sustainable technology…. We combined a system of low-tech drainage
canals with a high-tech system of recycling that water for irrigation. A
green-waste facility for composting was developed. The design for the
structures is driven by the technology involved – collecting and recycling
water, a passive solar design – and the look is modern.7

The entire site, consisting of land donations from the City of New Orleans and
Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Corporation, is riddled with
water and soil obstacles. Located in a high-water-table area subject to frequent
flooding during storms, the site is essentially flat and lacks positive drainage.
The soil is the notorious Kenner Muck, a dense and deep, and consequently very
poor draining, organic soil fundamentally unsuitable for farming or raising
livestock, or even for urban development – though it exists throughout the entire
area of New Orleans. Given the impenetrable character of the soil, the most
significant environmental issue is, not surprisingly, the movement of water.
Crops need multiple access points to water, especially in the small community
garden plots where 40–50 individual access points are required and the runoff
from irrigation must be drained back to a central location through a series of bio-
swales to aid in water remediation. A secondary system for storm-water runoff
during heavy rains must be established to prevent the farm plots from flooding
and the crops from being ruined.
The plan is organized to make most efficient use of the area, maximize
productivity, and create inviting and attractive spaces for community use. The
different uses are located to take advantage of site features. The design strategy
was developed as a series of fully functional sub-watersheds that could be
established incrementally, yet come together to create a comprehensive system
to deal with the programmatic and water/soil challenges. Water would be
distributed to the farm plots for irrigation, and post-irrigation water would return
to a central reservoir through a series of bio-swales. Each of the discrete
watersheds could supply water for irrigation independently. If there were a break
in the larger system, portable pumps powered by a windmill/water tower system
would maintain water circulation.
While design for the Viet Village Urban Farm works hand in hand with
ecological, social, and economic enterprises, funding remains the biggest
challenge, along with the administrative concerns that consume even the
simplest projects in a city where recovery is a labyrinthine process. The
resistance that thwarted ULI’s ecotopian vision for the city and similarly plagues
the realization of the Viet Village Urban Farm are systemic. Many citizens in
New Orleans have participated in what has become an endless series of public
discussions and debates that have thus far produced little. More strangely, these
open forums resemble what Ila Berman calls a “form of psycho-social therapy.”8
The topics and issues – racial, political, economic, and ethical – reflect deep
societal divisions that indicate the absence of common sense, the inability to
generate collective reasoning.
9.2
Aerial view of the Viet Village Urban Farm. Provided by Spackman Mossop and Michaels,
Landscape Architects

9.3
Perspective view of the Viet Village Urban Farm boardwalk. Provided by Spackman Mossop and
Michaels, Landscape Architects

New Orleans Waterfront: Reinventing the Crescent

The project site consists of a continuous six-mile stretch comprising 15 zones
along the East Bank of the city’s central riverfront. The crescent-shaped East
Bank of the Mississippi River is part of New Orleans’s natural high ground.
Paradoxically, most of this land is currently inaccessible to the public. Littered
with abandoned industrial wharves and railroad lines, it is also where significant
maritime structures, earthen levees, and floodwalls render the river invisible
from the city. Reinventing the Crescent was a direct response to what Alan
Berger has called the drosscape or “waste landscape,” an urban phenomenon
emerging out of two primary processes: first, rapid horizontal urbanization
(urban “sprawl”), and second, the leaving behind of land and detritus after
economic and production regimes have ended.9
Collaboratively designed by the landscape architecture firm Hargreaves
Associates, the planning firm Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, and the architectural
firms Eskew + Dumez + Ripple and TEN Arquitectos, the project sets out to
restore naturalized shoreline, produce new public open spaces interspersed with
architectural interventions, and make the river’s edge accessible to pedestrians.
Defined by a horizontal landscape strategy, the scheme deploys a series of basic
open space typologies: gardens, batture/rip-rap, green roofs, parks, plazas,
streetscapes, and pier/bridges. Decayed piers no longer in use, much less
providing good habitat for vegetation or wildlife, will be replaced with a
naturalized edge that will facilitate the return of shoreline wildlife. The
replacement of acres of impervious surfaces all along the river will further
enhance the environment as well as allocating more than 85 percent of the
river’s edge to public open space. Connective streetscapes are extended from the
city to the riverfront, frequently ending at piers and bridges surrounded by parks,
and naturalized shoreline areas of batture (ecological zones formed in the
alluvial lands between the Mississippi and the levee) are restored. New areas of
batture will be formed with rip-rap, sediment, and vegetation accruing over time.
These areas will act to restore wildlife to the original riparian edge.
9.4
Reinventing the Crescent, six miles of public space plan. Provided by Hargreaves Associates

The diverse landscape typologies along the riverfront construct a “terra

fluxus” by taking into account the temporal qualities of the site – challenging
climatic conditions and incorporating the unpredictable ecological future by
avoiding over-determined programming of the spaces. A layered composition of
open spaces also creates the potential for public space to expand and contract
with the economic ebb and flow of the city as it evolves into the future.
Some of these places reinforce and enhance existing public domains, such
as improving the riverfront’s Moonwalk by creating a better pedestrian
connection between it and Jackson Square. Others constitute new urban nodes,
allowing the city to reconnect with the river’s edge. Each of the new
development nodes is strategically located to facilitate the mitigation of physical
barriers that have kept citizens at an “urban arm’s length” from their river.
9.5
Reinventing the Crescent, six miles of public space typologies. Provided by Hargreaves Associates
9.6
Reinventing the Crescent, aerial view of Celeste Park from Jackson Avenue to Market Street.
Provided by Hargreaves Associates

This proposal offers a range of ecological solutions, for example, the

possibility that all future roofs – including the many acres of flat industrial roofs
throughout New Orleans – be designed green. Consider the possibility of
harvesting some of the 60 inches of rainfall that New Orleans endures each year,
or greater local reliance on solar-powered hot-water heaters, by now a staple of
many subtropical regions in the developing world. The scheme also advocates
alternative energy sources, including wind and solar; expanding planted areas;
reducing impervious surfaces; improving storm-water mitigation and reusing
gray water for irrigation and sanitary applications. These are but a few of the
many ways in which the proposal represents ecological aspirations to tread more
lightly on the planet.
Conclusion
In his introduction to Ecological Urbanism (2010), Mohsen Mostafavi posed the
question, “Why Ecological Urbanism?” His response was:

Increased numbers of people and cities go hand in hand with a greater

exploitation of the world’s limited resources. Every year, more cities are
feeling the devastating impacts of this situation. What are we to do? What
means do we have as designers to address this challenging reality?10

As New Orleans approaches its 300th anniversary, projects such as those

discussed here concretely illustrate the feasibility of bridging the divide between
natural systems, human activity, and cultural identity. Defined by highly specific
ecological objectives, each one adumbrates a unique proposition for a newer
New Orleans. Conventional wisdom dictates the selection of a site for human
settlement with favorable natural conditions – elevation, topography, water, air,
risk of exposure to the sea and harsh weather. This wisdom – already expounded
by Alberti in the fifteenth century, based on texts dating back to ancient Greece
– was tacitly ignored by the founders of New Orleans, who willfully occupied
and developed a place that many still believe should had never been developed.
Clearly the only way forward is to recast urbanism itself with a restored
emphasis on both the natural aspects of a city’s site and the human dimensions
of settlement.
The ULI report spurred the Viet Village Urban Farm and Reinventing the
Crescent plan, which in turn tested projective ideas drawn from the general
platform of ecological urbanism, invoking an emergent agenda that is attuned to
the myriad species – human, plant, and animal – that share the diverse and
sometimes conflicting habitats of New Orleans’s fragile ecosystem. These
studies and projects witness the transformative powers of urban and design
collaborations as landscape architects, architects, urban planners, and urban
designers blur disciplinary boundaries to respond to problems that afflict our
cities today. As global climate change triggers even harsher weather and natural
disasters, the nearly 200 million people worldwide who live in high-risk coastal
flooding zones will be faced with challenges for which conventional urban
planning currently has no response. The case studies presented here are evidence
of fresh thinking about the ecological means at our disposal to reconfigure the
urban realm. It is imperative to use these means to foster greater understanding
of the value of the natural substrates, biodiversity, and cultural diversity, and to
allow new conclusions to be drawn about where we humans, as a civilization, fit
into the planetary ecosystem.

© Victor J. Jones

Notes
1 Charles Waldheim coined the term “landscape urbanism.” As he explained, “Landscape Urbanism
describes a disciplinary realignment,” in which “landscape replaces architecture as the basic building
block of contemporary urbanism”; Waldheim, 2006, p. 11. Waldheim attributes this “realignment” to
two main factors: first, a response to changing urban conditions from dense spatial concentration and a
departure from the architectural fabric of the traditional city to a more contemporary urban organization
of sparse horizontal surfaces and infrastructure across extensive land areas; second, a reaction to the
wounds caused by the deindustrialization of city centers.
2 The term “ecological urbanism” had emerged at least by 2006, when it appeared in the title of a paper
by Jeffrey Hou delivered to the 94th annual ACSA conference in Salt Lake City (March 30–April 3);
see Hou, 2006. Mohsen Mostafavi elaborated on the idea in 2007 in his chapter on “Ecological
Urbanism” (see Mostafavi, 2007) and in a talk he presented at an international colloquium at the
Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, entitled “Sustainable?” (June 16–17, 2007). As dean of
the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, he mounted a more extensive project on the
subject, a conference and exhibition, and eventually the multi-authored volume he edited with Gareth
Doherty, 2010. See also “ecology,” in Williams, 1976.
3 In book 1, chapter 3 of De re aedificatoria, Leon Battista Alberti reflected on the requirements of the
site – the regio or locality, as it has been translated – of a city, asserting almost immediately:

For while there is no doubt that any defect of land or water could be remedied by skill and
ingenuity, no device of the mind or exertion of the hand may ever improve climate appreciably; or
so it is said.

As usual, he harks back to ancient writers on the subject as he develops the details of his argument. See
Alberti, 1988, p. 9ff.
4 Lewis, 1976, p. 17.
5 Sublette, 2008, p. 8.
6 McHarg, 1969, p. 7.
7 Mossop, 2011.
8 Berman and el Khafif, 2008, p. 17.
9 Berger, 2006, p. 12.
10 Mostafavi and Doherty, 2010, p. 12.
Chapter 10

Oslo – The Triumph of Zombie

Urbanism
Jonny Aspen

Contemporary discourses on urban redevelopment and design are, at least as

seen from the perspective of Northern Europe, surprisingly alike and
homogeneous. They all subscribe to the idea that the future lies in building some
version of “the creative city.” It is a city being rebuilt based on the happy mix of
creativity and knowledge with culture and urban consumption. In this chapter I
examine the odd and striking consensus that drives many urban redevelopment
projects and processes, especially the fact that overall attention seems to be
given to the task of staging and marketing the city as vibrant and vital: cultural
institutions, architecture and public spaces are ascribed new roles and meaning
in urban policies and redevelopment.
The point of departure for discussing these development trends is that cities
are different, often extremely so. Cities contain historical trajectories that point,
inevitably, to different futures. It is therefore peculiar that architects, planners,
and politicians, in the name of creativity, look for one and the same future city.
The overall focus of the chapter is to figure out how such a situation has come
about and with what effects. The argument is grounded on case study material
from Oslo, Norway, and especially the large Fjord City project that is in the
making.

Entrepreneurial city development

Throughout the history of modern urban planning, planners have often been
accused, especially by social scientists, of having a poor and restricted
understanding of urban ways of life. The simple zoning principles of modernist
planning were for a long time considered as emblematic of the planning
profession’s preoccupation with rigidity and order.1 Even though time has
changed and more flexible regimes of urban planning have been established, I
still believe that the core concepts of urban planning and design can be accused
of being stiff, rigid, and imprecise, maybe even more so than during the heroic
modernist period. This may seem paradoxical, especially since planners and
urban designers today claim to be more informed by “social” and “cultural”
interests and values than before.
Increased inter-urban competition, due to deregulated political economies
and global competition, seems to have effected a shift in the urban planning
agenda of many cities.2 This shift is most clearly reflected and celebrated in
notions of “the creative city” and variations on culture-led urban redevelopment
strategies. Cities and regions compete against each other in attracting investors,
tourists, and the most qualified workforce, and in positioning themselves in the
global agenda. Important assets in this competition are related to establishing
institutions and amenities of culture, knowledge production, and urban
consumption, besides mandatory factors such as good housing standards and a
well-functioning infrastructure system.3 Even though there are different voices
in this narrative and slightly different factors that are given priority between
cities, it seems that both the vocabulary used to describe challenges, ambitions,
means, and assets, as well as the strategies and plans that are prescribed for
regenerating the city, are surprisingly formulaic and increasingly similar.4
In a famous article on the transformation of urban governance in late
capitalism, the urban geographer David Harvey describes a radical shift in urban
politics starting in the 1970s, which he portrays as a change from managerialism
to entrepreneurialism. The change marks a shift from managerial practices
providing urban populations with local services, facilities, and benefits to a form
of governance increasingly preoccupied with promoting and encouraging local
development and employment growth; that is, an entrepreneurialism with an
overall focus of making the city more attractive to the outside world. Harvey
points out that this shift happens at different spatial scales, involves actors and
stakeholders in public–private partnerships, and is directed at creating an
attractive urban imagery through strategies of physical upgrading and selling
places.5
The shift that Harvey describes can be considered a still ongoing process
that increasingly informs strategies of urban development and design. It’s a shift
that carries different names and has many eloquent proponents. Within urban
policy and planning a common denominator seems to revolve around efforts to
interconnect ideas about creativity, cultural strategies, and place making through
architecture and design – as reflected in strategies of cultural planning and
culture-led urban regeneration, as propagated in manifestolike publications on
the creative city (Charles Landry) and the creative class (Richard Florida), and
as promoted by consultancies like Comedia and networks such as Knowledge
Cities.6 As Miles and Paddison put it: “What is remarkable here is not just the
speed with which culture-driven strategies have become advocated by
governments and local development agencies as means of bolstering the urban
economy, but also how their diffusion has globalised.”7 My contribution to this
volume will be to scrutinize some important features in the development here
sketched out by focusing on a contemporary Norwegian planning situation and
examining more closely the specific role and meanings of cultural institutions
and public place production in a large, and in an international context fairly
typical, urban waterfront redevelopment project.
Zombie concepts
The core concepts in the increasingly homogeneous discourse on “the creative
city” and the importance of culture in urban planning and redevelopment – the
strategic goals they point out and the main ingredients and features that the
discourse lays out as most important for redevelopment and urban design –
resemble what the German sociologist Ulrich Beck has labeled zombie concepts.
Zombie concepts are concepts that are still much in use, but no longer fit the
reality they were intended to describe. They are concepts that are living dead,
alive in our heads and our language, but not any longer useful for making precise
propositions about what the world looks like and how it might be improved.8
The perspective is that there are new kinds of driving forces in society and new
types of complexity, all of which requires that we rethink and reconceptualize
the basic notions of what constitutes society.
Even though Beck’s perspective on zombie concepts derives from a more
general theorizing about modernity, it also sheds light on contemporary
discourses on “the creative city” and culture-led urban regeneration strategies in
general and how they are translated in practice. It is especially interesting, and
also worrying, to see that zombie discourses on urban redevelopment seem to
run forward and spread on their own terms, apparently independent of what
characteristics and challenges the cities adopting them have. As such there seems
to be a mismatch between the words and concepts that are used, that is the
planning discourse on “the creative city,” and the actual state and challenges that
many cities face. What makes this situation even more disturbing is the fact that
the discourses concerned are not solely descriptive or analytical, but first and
foremost prescriptive. One therefore not only runs the risk of operating with an
inadequate understanding of the urban situation, but of actually building the new
city on the basis of zombie concepts – of building zombie cities.

Oslo’s Fjord City plan

In what follows I shall examine more closely how discourses and strategies of
urban regeneration and design are playing themselves out in Oslo. Special
attention will be given to the city’s Fjord City plan and the related planning of
public urban places in the new harborfront areas. The argument is that urban
design is given a new role both in terms of legitimizing large-scale urban
redevelopment projects and in staging public places that are putatively vibrant
and diverse.
The Fjord City plan for Oslo, which after many years of preparation and
planning was finally approved by the City Council in February 2008, is an
overall strategy for the urban development of the city’s waterfront. As in many
other cities throughout the world, removal of infrastructural functions and
barriers along the central city coastal line, especially related to harbor activities,
roads and industry, open up for massive urban redevelopment. Though the
present plan for Oslo’s new waterfront is neither especially typical nor that
explicit in invoking creative city claims, it plays upon many of the same features
and ingredients that one can find in the international discourse on creative cities
and culture-led urban regeneration. This is most evident in the role prescribed
for cultural institutions and in plans and strategies for creating public places.
This said, the most conventional and stereotypical aspect of the plan is
related to what stands out as fairly rigid zoning principles and layout of roads
and public areas. All blocks, roads, and public places are planned in detail in
order to give predictability and sense of security. In the many illustrations that
follow the actual Fjord City plan, and in the more specific plans for each of the
13 project areas, one can see pictures of vibrant new waterfront areas with all the
ingredients from the international creative city discourse in place: iconic modern
architecture, clean and tidy environments, the right amount of happy and smart-
looking people occupying streets and public places, and glimpses of urban or
natural scenery to indicate that the surrounding context is nice and enticing. The
images are exceedingly seductive and compelling. All of this makes me quite
suspicious. Not necessary because the new waterfront won’t look as depicted
when finished (the conventional mode of depicting future situations in
architectural drawing allows for quite a degree of glorification), but precisely
because it just might become what is imagined! What we can see is a kind of
staged urbanism in which there is no room for irregularity and the unexpected, a
neat and tedious urbanism based on a simplified understanding of the urban
combined with more ideal aspirations – a kind of zombie urbanism.
The development areas along Oslo’s waterfront constitute 225 hectares and
cover more than 10 kilometers of the central shoreline (see Figure 10.1). It is
divided into 13 project areas, all of them planned as comprehensive development
projects. Some of these areas have already been subject to redevelopment, such
as Aker Brygge and parts of Bjørvika (with the already famous new National
Opera and Ballet building by Snøhetta) and Tjuvholmen. The Fjord City plan
can be considered partly an overall strategy toward developing the whole of the
waterfront, partly a guideline for the planning and assessment of the remaining
areas to be redeveloped: “The idea of The Fjord City is to create better
connections between the City Centre and the fjord, providing unique physical
surroundings for living and leisure.”9 Instead of going in detail into all aspects of
the plan, I will comment upon the plan for what is to become a new cultural
institution axis along the waterfront, and, thereafter, examine how public spaces
are to be planned, especially in Bjørvika.

10.1
The Fjord City plan. Bjørvika is located in the eastern bay of the inner city.
Source: City of Oslo and ViaNova

The Bjørvika area is positioned between the sea and Oslo’s main public
transport hub (see Figure 10.2). The local development plan for the area was
approved as early as in 2003. One million square meters of building is planned
in an area of 70 hectares, for residential, commercial, and public purposes. A
road tunnel was opened in 2010, relieving the area of much heavy road traffic.
The already mentioned opera building was finished in 2008. It has developed
into an architectural spectacle; the roof of the building has been taken into use as
a public walking space, and the opera has become one of Norway’s most visited
tourist destinations. A more disputed development is the Barcode project,
situated between the railway lines and what is to become the district’s new main
boulevard, Dronning Eufemias Street (replacing the existing motorway). The
project, which involves a cluster of 12 more or less slim high-rise buildings
placed side by side as in the pattern of a barcode, all designed by renowned
Norwegian and international architects, has been criticized for both building
heights and densities. The Barcode is said to become a wall that rather than
opening the new waterfront district up to the existing city in fact closes it off.
Another important development in Bjørvika is the Sørenga Pier, a former
container port that is to be transformed into a new housing district interspersed
with public functions such as a park and a waterfront promenade.

10.2
The Fjord City plan – Bjøvika development area.
Source: Oslo Waterfront Planning Office, City Of Oslo

New cultural axis

It is, however, in terms of new cultural institutions that the district of Bjørvika
recently has gained most attention and spurred much debate. In addition to the
Opera House a new central library, Deichmanske Library (designed by Lund
Hagem and Atelier Oslo Architects), and a new art museum, the Munch Museum
and Stenersen Museum Collections, are being planned. The winning proposal for
the latter project is a tall building of 12 floors named Lambda, designed by the
Spanish architectural firm Herreros, which has been the subject of much
dispute.10 There are also plans for a new Museum of Cultural History in the area
of the Medieval Park. All the new cultural institutions make deliberate use of
state-of-the-art architecture and design features for purposes of identity building
and branding. As Herreros says it: “we are consciously designing the postcard
that everybody wants.”11 As such both the star architects involved and the
signature buildings themselves play an important role in creating an image of a
new and vibrant urban waterfront district. This is, of course, also how the
politicians have reasoned it.
The prestigious new cultural institutions in Bjørvika, of which only the
Opera House is yet completed, have in fact just recently been presented as
components in what is to be seen as a new “National Axis of Culture” along
Oslo’s redeveloping waterfront. The intention is, as it is said in the city of Oslo’s
new architectural policy, to make the cultural axis “the capital city’s most
important factor for identity-building and marketing.”12 The cultural axis
stretches from the new neighborhood of Tjuvholmen in the west, where Astrup
Fearnley Museum of Modern Art is being built (designed by the famous Italian
architect Renzo Piano), via the Vestbanen area just beside the Town Hall, where
a new National Museum is to be built (designed by the German office Kleihues
+ Schuwerk), toward Bjørvika in the east, where, in addition to the already
mentioned Opera House, Deichmanske Library, and Munch and Stenersen
Museum, a new Museum of Cultural History, which possibly might also include
a new Viking Ships Museum, is planned in the Medieval Park area at the eastern
side of the bay.
Cities all over the world strive for a distinctive image that could be used for
international branding, but surprisingly often they seem to rely on the same
means. In Oslo the insertion of some of the nation’s most important flagship
cultural institutions as a strategy for regenerating the urban harborfront stands
out as an explicit and consistent policy. The question that remains to be
answered is whether such heavy cultural investments will pay off in terms of
regeneration and branding profits. And even if it will become a success on such
terms, one should take into consideration the total relocation costs. This includes
the risk of the emptying out of places and buildings that today function well (as
do most of the cultural institutions that are to be relocated to the harborfront),
and the general danger of ignoring more prosaic amenity planning for the city’s
local residents.

Public places in Oslo’s Fjord City

Besides the cultural axis and prestigious cultural institution architecture, the
most important aspect of the Fjord City plan when it comes to public benefits
and attractions are the plans for public places and what is to become a
continuous harbor promenade along the whole seafront development area. In
their presentation of the Bjørvika plan, Oslo’s Agency for Planning and Building
Services says that “the town plan concept in the development plan is the seven
public commons.”13 Thereby it becomes clear that it is first and foremost the
public commons themselves that are to give the new district its specific urban
character. Furthermore, the agency underlines that the public commons are
“pedestrian urban spaces, which graphically resemble an open hand where the
fingers stretch from the sea into the existing city.” As such, the “public spaces
will make the seafront accessible to the residents of the urban area behind the
development area.” The report is surprisingly defensive in its way of presenting
the more public aspects of the plan: “The development will not be a barrier; on
the contrary, it will open the area up and provide good accessibility which
currently does not exist.”14 The impression one gets is that the main role of the
new public places in the area is to legitimize the overall plan as such, including
controversial issues related to what many criticize as high building heights and
floor area ratios.
This is also clearly reflected in the prevailing plans and strategies of the
landowners in Bjørvika.15 The public space program for Bjørvika consists of
seven public commons that are to be laid out in Bjørvika as an intersecting
pattern stretching from west to east: the Fortress Common, the Opera Common,
the Akerselva Common, the Station Common, Bispekilen, Kongsbakken, and the
Lo Common. Their main function is to connect the existing city to the new
developments in Bjørvika and to make the seafront more accessible. All the
commons have an elongated form as they are laid out along a walkway, a
riverbed, a greenbelt, or as a more open public area in order to bridge the
existing city with the new harborfront (Figure 10.3). The commons are described
in very insistent and assertive ways, as if there has been an urgent need to
convince the public about the plan’s good intentions and the bright and lively
future that is to come. In describing the Opera Common, the developer, Bjørvika
Development, finds it necessary to highlight that it will become “a great
gathering place for events that will create liveliness and activity.”
Furthermore,

The common is an open space that will shift between active and passive
conditions, and a hub for movements in many directions and speeds. The
common will be given a simple design, and the presence of water in
combination with places to sit down and rest, will be like an oasis in the
modern city.16

The same strange combination of insistency and approximation is found in the

description of the Station Common. The common, which will become the most
central urban space in Bjørvika, will have “urban life and activity both
throughout the day and over the year,” and “it’ll be facilitated both for places to
stay and close interaction between urban spaces and adjacent buildings.”17 How
such facilitation will take place is apparently in no need of further explanation or
validation.

10.3
Ice on the pond at the future south side of the Opera Common.
Source: Bjørvika Infrastructure Ltd./SLA Landscape Architects

The descriptions of the other five commons in Bjørvika continue in much

the same manner. The commons are to be built according to comprehensive
design principles and considerations, in which all relevant design aspects,
including lighting, sun and wind conditions, and sightlines to historical
landmarks in the city, have been the object of thorough analysis by the winning
team of the architectural competition, the Danish urban design office Gehl
Architects.18 The striking thing when it comes to how the commons are
described is, however, that, as shown in the example of the Opera Common and
the Station Common, the whole discourse on the social functions and cultural
meanings of the new public places seems so forced and distended. The language
about public spaces is overtly promotional and legitimizing: “Opportunities for
activities to invite life into the new public spaces have been maximized to
reconnect the new development areas to the existing city fabric.”19
All of the written assertions are supported by colorful illustrations, many of
them hyper-realistic perspective drawings, of what the public places will look
like when completed (Figure 10.4). The illustrations add texture and substance to
the written descriptions and make the public urban design solutions look even
more attractive and credible. Furthermore, they show urban places that either are
lively and vibrant, with an urban scenography representing a civilized feel or
atmosphere, or have a kind of calm and sensuous quality, for example in terms
of architectural and spatial articulation. The latter can be said to add dimensions
of picturesque and even pastoral meaning to the depicted scenery. The pictures
show public places that are used in meaningful and decent ways, there is no
mess or conflict, there are no obstacles or fenced-off footpaths, no people
bumping into each other or tiresome congestion, no threatening drug addicts or
annoying beggars, no icy and slippery pavements, no muddy water drops or dirty
snowdrifts, nor any cold wind or pouring rain. Neither is there any dust or
offensive smoke, garbage or pollution, noise or obtrusive smell. All in all there is
nothing frightening, strange, or discomforting about the scenery displayed, it is
all pleasant and appealing. Thus the illustrations tell us that there are no reasons
to believe that the new public places in Bjørvika will be anything but nice and
pleasant places to be in. As such the seductiveness of the illustrations play an
important role in making the public believe that there are serious plans for truly
public places. They play a major role as a legitimizing authority for the whole
waterfront redevelopment.
10.4
The future Station Common.
Source: Oslo S Utvikling/Placebo

The soft and poetic reference world of the illustrations stands out as a
salutary and radical contrast to the harsher pragmatics and politics of urban
redevelopment in this area in general, as well as to the more hardcore economic
logic and rhetoric of landowners and real estate developers more specifically.
Even though the illustrations are based on fairly conventional ways of
representing urban scenery and iconography, they function as a vision for future
Oslo (Figure 10.5). As such the illustrations refer both to a known past, in terms
of urban ways of life and conduct that people know and like, and to an enticing
near future; they inform both the Fjord City plan’s historical legitimacy and its
overall aim.
10.5
The future Opera Common at night.
Source: Bjørvika Infrastructure Ltd./SLA Landscape Architects

There obviously has been an urgent need to cover up both the fact that the
existing plans are purely based on fairly traditional design solutions and
aesthetic considerations (even though the design language is more contemporary
in terms of formal vocabulary, materials, and so on) and that one has very little
knowledge about how the places will actually function and be put into use when
completed. All the social functions and cultural meanings that the public places
are assumed to live up to in the future, are based on fairly simple and
stereotypical assumptions about what constitutes vibrant urban public places.
These assumptions have strong resemblance with zombie concepts. They play up
to ideas that most people would subscribe to regarding the attractiveness of
inclusive and vibrant public places, while at the same time cover up the fact that
the actual challenges of creating such places are not really confronted (Figures
10. 4 and 10.5). Let me take as an example the plans for the harbor promenade.
Apparently all relevant factors seem to have been researched and planned for in
detail. In this way zombie modes of thinking are disguised behind curtains of
thorough surveying and planning.
The harbor promenade
The harbor promenade will, when completed, stretch through the entire Fjord
City development area, but I will restrict my comments to the Bjørvika section
of the promenade. The promenade is described very much in the same way as
the public commons, but may be even more eloquent and verbose:

The Harbor Promenade will link together the various commons and
generally make the area a recreational space. The Promenade will act as a
link between the existing city and the fjord and cater for the variety of
identities and functions that are to be found in Bjørvika.

Furthermore, the planning agency states that

In order for The Promenade to provide the city with unique experiences and
activities, it will offer a very varied urban life, making it attractive to a wide
range of people both from all over the city and locally from the area. Here,
recreation and activities will be offered for young and old, families, office
workers and children. Both large-and small-scale activities will be offered,
in addition to places that are both vibrant and intensive.20

Since the promenade will stretch along the entire waterfront of Bjørvika, issues
of diversity and functional mix are highlighted far more than in the plans for the
public commons.
Just as with the latter, it becomes clear that the promenade, considered as a
public space, is assigned overall important functions in redeveloping the city’s
harborfront. One such function is to safeguard and provide access to the
waterfront as such, for people living and working in the area, and for people
from other parts of the city and for visitors. A second important function is to
connect the different parts of both the Bjørvika waterfront area and the entire
Fjord City development. It is tempting to see such functions as an undeniable
good. They add new features and qualities to the city, both in terms of providing
better access to one of the city’s main natural and recreational resources, namely
the fjord and the waterfront, and in providing the city with new public and
recreational places. However, as for the public commons, much of the rhetoric
around developing the harbor promenade, when it comes to both written
statements and visual representations, seems quite overstated and overdone. In
an information leaflet from the Agency for Planning and Building Services the
harbor promenade is presented in the following way:

Various cultural and recreational amenities will lie like pearls on a string
along the course of the waterfront promenade. The waterfront promenade
will be open to all and attract a broad group of users thanks to its universal
design and rich range of activities and recreational facilities.21

As the quotation indicates, the entire project of making a harbor promenade

becomes both overloaded with symbolic meanings and overburdened with
claims and expectations. The promenade is given the overall role of providing
and safeguarding a whole range of social and cultural values related to urban
living and public space use, in terms of attractiveness, multitude, safety,
openness, and inclusiveness. This is not to say that the existing plans totally lack
contextual consideration or analysis. In fact, the contrary is very much the case.
Almost everything seems to be studied and planned in detail. Gehl Architects,
the urban design office that won the open international competition for designing
the public spaces in Bjørvika, has made a detailed program report for the
promenade, as for each of the seven public commons.
The report from the jury of the competition on public places in Bjørvika
gives some clues about what priorities such urban design thinking revolves
around. The jury says that the winning proposal’s “consistent strong forms and
aesthetic coherent solution accommodates for experiences and social life.”22 The
jury’s statement about the winning proposal, called “New urban life,” reflects
the fact that overall emphasis is put on physical design solutions and related
aspects of materials and natural elements.
Both in the jury’s deliberations and in Gehl Architects’ public space
program overall priority is given to features and factors that can be quantified
and mapped, such as sightlines at different points along the promenade,
distribution of destinations and attractions, water qualities and wind conditions,
and shifting sun conditions.23 In the program for the promenade, all possible
factors and features seem to have been accounted for, however with a bias
toward factors and features that the urban designers can control and manipulate,
either on paper or, at a later stage, on site. As soon as more simple social issues
are touched upon, that is, how the promenade will be used and what kind of
activities people are assumed to be involved in, the statements are much looser
and less binding. According to Gehl Architects, the promenade will, when
completed, “offer a broad fan of variations and differences when it comes to
atmospheres, characters, and identities.” Furthermore, “there will be room for
activities both in the small and large scale, and provided for living and intensive
places.”24
In their public space program, Gehl Architects even presents a set of
“diagrams of life” that are to guarantee, it seems, that all important features of a
rich social life will be provided for, such as activities for all kinds of users and a
mixed distribution of attractions and destinations along the promenade. To make
sure that no one misses the point, it is said that the overall intention is to
guarantee “great variation in activities and spatial experiences.”25 Still, the
program statements and the diagrammatic representations stand out as fairly
general and without obligation; they seem to mean everything and nothing. The
program plays up to notions about variety and multitude, but is undeniably
generic when it comes to approach and content. Thus the language used is full of
non-binding phrases like “one should provide varying activities and
experiences” and “attractive and fluctuating destinations must be established.”26
This is why such modes of urban design thought, despite thorough analysis and
detailed programming, and despite all good intentions and aims, end up
simplifying the whole notion of public place production.
My argument is that the current way of conceptualizing, reasoning about,
and designing urban public places – and the zombie-like concepts and
understandings of what such places are, what they mean, and how they are used
that such thinking and practice is based on – represents a barrier toward more
creative and experimental ways of working. The challenges involved in creating
inviting, inclusive, and exciting public places are underestimated. The designers
and planners rely too much on physical design solutions and established
aesthetic preferences (and of course all features that can be measured and
calculated, such as weather conditions and sightlines). And they pay too little
attention to the whereabouts, preferences, and aspirations of actual and potential
users, not to mention all the uncertainties, unpredictability, and dynamics that
impact upon how people use the city in general and its public places in
particular. What appears to be missing in the design and planning of public
places is a more thorough understanding of the dynamics of social encounters
and uses of public places in urban settings. Herein lies the missing link. But it is
not a link that is easily reintroduced into urban planning and design, especially
since it will presuppose an entirely different approach and way of thinking.
Disturbingly enough, the more specific urban design strategies for the Fjord City
that have been the object of our inquiry can be said to be a clear reflection of
more overall city policies for urban development and the role of architecture and
urban design in such a context.

Architectural policy for Oslo

The general plans for the Fjord City and its different redevelopment areas and
the more specific plans for public places and a harbor promenade all reflect the
fact that qualities of architecture and urban environments are ascribed greater
importance in urban politics than before (Figure 10.6). Increasing inter-urban
competition and the happy news of city branding has made architecture and
urban design more important in both urban politics and the economy. The
architectural discipline clearly seems to have increased its status, but there are
also some quite serious disadvantages in this development. One problematic
aspect is that since urban environments, as in the case of Bjørvika, are ascribed
with new symbolic meaning and function, the practice of producing and
regenerating urban environments has become much more infused with politics,
commercial interests, and branding strategies (and as such also with many of the
zombie concepts that flourish in such disciplines). Another misfortune is that
many architects appear to be concerned more with their new role as makers of
urban scenography and symbols than in doing serious examination and
experimentation with what makes buildings and places interesting and exciting
in terms of social exchange and public functions.
10.6
The Bjørvika development area, fall 2011. Photo by Jonny Aspen

Many of these developments are reflected in a white paper on the overall

policy for Oslo’s architecture, produced by the planning agency in 2009.
Already in the introduction it is emphasized that “conscious use of architecture
and urban development in marketing Oslo” is an important task.27 The overall
vision of the new architectural policy is to facilitate for sustainability and
growth. In a future situation the capital city will “by way of its innovative
everyday and monumental architecture [be] a model both inland and abroad for
Norwegian quality of life, democracy, and sustainability.”28 The white paper
then accounts for seven areas of priority in the proposal for a new architectural
policy for the city. Even though many of the suggestions can be said to be
reasonable and well-thought-out, such as emphasizing that the public should act
as good role models in construction and urban policy and the insistence on, for
example, infrastructure as place-constructing structures of major importance, the
document is, as is usual in such policy papers, full of overall and ideal
statements and abstract description of strategic goals. What is missing is a notion
of everyday life. There is no engagement with the quotidian, with people’s lived
experiences, aspirations, and hopes. Many of the statements are well meant and
important, but put in very general language: in the priority area of public
construction, for instance, the aim is to develop prototype projects emphasizing
“inclusive, beautiful and accessible squares, parks and urban spaces.”29 Such
language, even though it is probably hard totally to avoid in an overall strategic
document, has the negative effect that it easily makes a reader mistrust what is
being said. The reason for this lies in the discrepancy between the complexities
of the issue at hand, that is how to make genuine public places, and the
generality of the language being used, which is of a kind that undermines and
levels out all controversies and contradictions in such an endeavor. There is, for
example, no reflection upon the challenge of translating people’s needs and
aspirations, different, shifting and contradictory as they often are, into inclusive
and well-functioning public places. Neither are issues of unpredictability or the
transformative potentials of urban living and conduct touched upon. The
language involved is zombie-like in that it resonates with what many people
consider as overall important values in genuine public places, for instance that
they are nice-looking and welcoming, but has little correspondence with urban
reality as we know it or as we have reason to believe it will become in the future.
Urban living is characterized by ambiguity and contradictions. It is both exciting
and tedious, delightful and stressful, enriching and exhausting, comprehensible
and bewildering. So instead of treating the public features of urban living as a
coherent quantity that can easily be manipulated, issues of complexity and
difference and of, for example, future uncertainty, should be taken far more
seriously in discussions around the making of public places.
The dangers of using a zombie-like language are of two kinds. One risk is
that all kinds of complexity, controversy, and resistance are excluded from the
challenging discussion of how to make public places proper. Therefore one very
often ends up with simplified discussions and, consequently, very simplified
proposals and solutions. The second danger is that what eventually is
constructed, be it a public square, a promenade, or the like, very likely will
become just as zombie-like as the language used to describe and resonate about
it. Zombie concepts make for zombie urbanism. All of this is, of course,
triggered and reinforced by the fact that most people, after all, will be tempted to
believe in the proclamations that are made, ideal in content and therefore hard to
refuse as they are.
Toward a more grounded urbanism
What seems to be missing in the contemporary discourse on urban harborfront
redevelopment in Oslo, which in essence is a replication of an international
discourse on “the creative city,” is first and foremost openness to and dialogue
with existing urban realities. There are at least three dimensions of urban reality
that seem to have no or little resonance in the way planners and urban designers
conceptualize new public places. First, there are few traces of how the city’s
existing social and cultural diversity will inform the programming and design of
public places in the new waterfront. Second, there seems to be no reflection
upon the fact that Oslo during the last decades has developed into a multicultural
city in which more than one in four of the city’s inhabitants originate outside
Norway. That different ethnic minority groups might use and perceive public
places in multiple ways, and that such a multitude of uses and perceptions might
represent vital and new potentials, seems to be of no interest for the planners and
urban designers creating the city’s new harborfront. Third, issues related to
digitalization of cities and urban living, and in what way it will affect how public
places are used and conceived, has yet to inform our way of urban thinking and
reasoning.
The three sets of deficiencies that are mentioned here indicate that the
redevelopment strategies are weakly grounded. Even though the Fjord City plan
pleads to be “an adventurous urban renewal project” that will “provide for new
and improved living conditions for Oslo’s inhabitants and visitors,” there are
essential forces of urban development that are not taken into account.30 Such
omissions and blind spots reflect that there are vibrant urban realities that
planners and urban designers are not seeing. One aspect that is surprisingly often
overlooked consists of the needs and desires that constitute many people’s
longing for urbanity and urban ways of life. People are attracted to cities that are
more than neat and nice, safe and tidy. People also value excitement and
challenge, they want to explore and experience things unknown and unexpected,
they long for places where multiple desires can be played out. No other places
are better suited for enabling such pursuits than urban environments that allow
for some complexity and disorder.31 The reason such issues are neglected could
very well be of a similar kind as the one Ulrich Beck raises against mainstream
social scientists: as for social scientists, the minds of planners and urban
designers seem to be “haunted and clouded by dead ideas that make [them] look
in the wrong places and miss what’s new.”32 In the same way as many social
scientists have a weak understanding of how forces of globalization and
transnationalism are shaping contemporary society, many planners and urban
designers have a weak understanding of the forces shaping cities and informing
urban living. As such the planners and urban designers’ concept of urbanity is
fairly restricted. In the Fjord City, public places and neighborhood qualities are
obviously not to be seen as something that will develop over time as a more or
less unpredictable result of a complex set of interactions and interrelations
between built-up areas, functional characteristics, open spaces (of very diverse
kinds), human uses, needs and aspirations, and a range of factors related to
appropriation, attractiveness and cultural meaning. Rather than taking on the
exciting but demanding venture of examining the complexities and ambiguities
of contemporary urban development and urban ways of life, not to say the even
more demanding task of figuring out how such features could be translated into
urban design strategies or used as an inspiration for such, the planners and urban
designers resort to stereotypical notions of social life and urban public places.
The rhetoric about the creative city has, as I have endeavored to show in
this chapter, damaging effects for the reasoning about and design of public
spaces in urban redevelopment areas such as Oslo’s Fjord City. There is a great
irony in this since urban theorists have for so long complained about urban
planners and designers’ neglect of the city’s social and cultural qualities. So
when such issues finally are put on planners and urban designers’ agendas, they
just seem to end up as yet another set of instrumental concerns that makes the
designer, more than ever, a kind of universal stage designer for a play that is yet
to be written. Thus what we still need are yet more critical perspectives on
contemporary urban development strategies, as well as more theoretically and
empirically informed discourses on the local specifics of cities. Because cities
are not only different in comparison to each other, they are in themselves also
containers of difference. Both such perspectives must be taken into consideration
in order to establish a richer and more vital discourse on future cities.
Furthermore, we need to remind ourselves that urban living is full of
ambiguities and contradictions, and must be so in order to sustain its vibrancy
and vitality. It seems to me that it is in relation to just this point that the narrative
on the creative city, and its translation into urban design strategies, falls short.
Not everything urban can or should be controlled. Especially not when one
aspires to make truly public places. Therefore we will have to look in the dark
shadows of the discourse on the creative city, and the many zombie concepts it is
based on, to get in touch with the inherent tensions that make urban living at one
and the same time attractive and repulsive.

Notes
1 Sandercock, 1998.
2 Miles and Paddison, 2005.
3 Miles and Paddison, 2005.
4 Evans, 2006; Miles, 2010.
5 Harvey, 1989.
6 Landry, 2000; Florida, 2002.
7 Miles and Paddison, 2005, p. 833.
8 Ulrich Beck’s argument is that the key concepts within the social sciences have gone out of date, i.e.
the basic concepts of classical or foundational social theories. Zombie categories “haunt our thinking,”
he says, and “focus our attention on realities that are steadily disappearing” (Beck and Willms, 2004, p.
19). This goes especially for categories connected with nationalism and social-class movements, and
more generally for ethnocentric Western perspectives on societal evolution (Gane, 2004). All such key
concepts have their origin in what Beck sees as the period of first modernity. Since then society has
moved on to a new phase of second modernity, characterized by massive globalization and
individualization.
9 Agency for Planning and Building Services, information leaflet, August 2008 (my translation).
10 The Lambda project is not yet approved by the City Council of Oslo. Due to shifting political alliances
the project as it now stands (November 2012) seems not to have acquired political support.
11 www.arcspace.com/architects/herreros/munch_museum/munch_museum.html (accessed October 5,
2011).
12 Agency for Planning and Building Services, 2009, p. 23 (my translation).
13 Agency for Planning and Building Services, 2007, p. 4 (my translation).
14 All citations Agency for Planning and Building Services, 2007, p. 4 (my translation).
15 The landowners of Bjørvika are organized as Bjørvika Development Ltd. Bjørvika Development Ltd.,
again, has established Bjørvika Infrastructure Ltd., which was formed with the purpose of having
overall responsibility for all technical infrastructure in Bjørvika, including public areas such as the
designated seven public commons. For more information, see handout from Bjørvika Development
Ltd./Bjørvika Infrastructure Ltd., 2011.
16 Bjørvika Development Ltd., 2011a (my translation).
17 Bjørvika Development Ltd., 2011b (my translation).
18 Gehl Architects has developed specific public space programs for all of the seven public commons in
Bjørvika. All of them are available at the homepage of Bjørvika Development:
www.bjorvikautvikling.no/Byromsprogram/53EBBE5D-6CCE-47FF-B63C-90F9D8DC902E/1.
19 Gehl Architects, information leaflet, 2005.
20 Agency for Planning and Building Services, 2007, p. 12 (my translation).
21 Agency for Planning and Building Services, 2008 (my translation).
22 Oslo Waterfront Planning Office, 2005, p. 3 (my translation).
23 Bjørvika Infrastructure Ltd./Gehl Architects ApS, 2006.
24 Bjørvika Infrastructure Ltd./Gehl Architects ApS, 2006, pp. 20–21 (my translation).
25 Bjørvika Infrastructure Ltd./Gehl Architects ApS, 2006, p. 24 (my translation).
26 Bjørvika Infrastructure Ltd./Gehl Architects ApS, 2006, pp. 24–25 (my translation).
27 Agency for Planning and Building Services, 2009, p. 5 (my translation).
28 Agency for Planning and Building Services, 2009, p. 14 (my translation).
29 Agency for Planning and Building Services, 2009, p. 14 (my translation).
30 Agency for Planning and Building Services, 2008 (my translation).
31 See also Evans, 2006; Miles, 2010.
32 Beck and Willms, 2004, p. 52.
Chapter 11

Philadelphia – The Urban Design of

Philadelphia: Taking the Towne for the
City
Richard M. Sommer

William Penn developed the plan of what is now known as centercity

Philadelphia in the middle of the seventeenth century. Penn’s plan for
Philadelphia, an alloy of Quaker Utopianism and colonial real-estate speculation,
is distinguished not only for its influence as a prototype in the founding of
subsequent American cities, but for the ways in which its basic outlines have
continued to endure in the form of the city’s historical center. Although not
unique among North American cities for having been established with a
deliberate plan, Philadelphia’s evolution over the past three centuries presents an
singularly important case through which to examine the interplay between the
concepts embodied in an originating plan, the material characteristics of the plan
itself, and the historical circumstances that transform, usurp or supersede that
plan.
Prescribing a precise layout of streets, squares and boundaries, Penn’s
scheme sought, but fell short of achieving, an ideal combination of the pastoral
order of a seventeenth-century English gentleman’s country farm with the
market and communal functions of a town. The anomalies and omissions found
in Penn’s plan may be explained by the conflicts of use and spatial
incompatibilities that arise from this somewhat unique attempt at a hybrid urban
settlement. In what follows, the fate of both the ideas and the forms that have
endured from Penn’s plan are taken as a synecdoche for the larger conditions
and urban geographies that have come to characterize Philadelphia today.
Several issues are at play in such a reading. Foremost among these are questions
concerning the interplay between so-called planned and unplanned aspects of
cities; that is to say, the very usefulness of distinguishing between conscious,
comprehensive efforts to project or reform the layout of a city, and the effects of
more piecemeal forms of land development. Also at play is the recurring appeal,
within American culture, of a pre-industrial, pastoral vision of the city.
Two moments stand out as examples of deliberate planning and design in
Philadelphia: the crafting of Penn’s original plan, and planning efforts
undertaken three centuries later that came to fruition in redevelopment projects
led by the city planner Edmund Bacon. In between these two moments, and
during the period of its greatest expansion, Philadelphia grew primarily by
means of laissez-faire commercial development. Along with the extension of
existing suburban patterns, new territories were surveyed and platted in an
entirely perfunctory way. Pressure to plan and manage unbridled growth built up
towards the end of the nineteenth century, following the city’s incorporation of
all of the surrounding county’s townships in 1854. This incorporation made
Penn’s “walking city” just one-tenth of an emerging metropolis.
This study of Philadelphia will concentrate on the symbolic and functional
role that its historical core has come to play within a city whose physical extents
have grown well beyond its original boundaries. For aging industrial cities such
as Philadelphia, whose populations and economic fortunes have been in steadily
decline since the 1950s, the fate of the historical core is especially important.
Such a reading of Philadelphia necessitates retracing the assumptions and
critically accessing the planning and urban design efforts led by Edmund Bacon
during three decades of major transformations in the middle of the twentieth
century. Harking back to the authority of William Penn’s vision for the city –
and the city’s colonial prominence as the “cradle of liberty” – Bacon’s efforts
focused on reinvigorating the historical core by using new projects and
infrastructure to recast implicitly the original figures and boundaries of William
Penn’s plan.
In weighing the hegemony of schemes orchestrated by Bacon in
Philadelphia against both Penn’s founding principles and 250 intervening years
of “unplanned” changes to the form of the city, I hope to explore two
interconnected dilemmas which generally plague the professional practice of
urban design. The first concerns how the goals of urban design are established
relative to the question of what distinguishes a metropolis from a town.1 The
second concerns the analytical means used to establish a methodological ground
to justify such goals, including the ways in which a city’s historical and
contemporary form are framed, evaluated and characterized in the urban design
process. To examine Philadelphia in this context will require a short historical
survey of its founding plan and evolution, an analysis of some of the projects
that prefigured Bacon’s work in the early twentieth century and a rehearsal of
the background, intentions and outcome of Bacon’s work itself.

Philadelphia’s propitious beginning: William Penn’s

plan
In exchange for the settlement of a debt with the estate of Admiral Penn, in 1670
Charles II of England established a charter granting his son William Penn as
proprietor and governor of 26,000,000 acres in the American Colonies. Named
Pennsylvania, the territories granted were in the mid-Atlantic region of the
colonies bordered by Delaware and New Jersey on the eastern coast. Penn had
already gained experience in the planning, development and governance of
colonial cities in the region, having participated in establishing the provincial
capitals of Burlington and Amboy (later Perth-Amboy) in New Jersey.2 The plan
of Burlington presages the general disposition of Philadelphia, but without its
innovations or distinct gridiron. At Burlington Penn employed the most
fundamental of town-making devices, which he would later repeat at
Philadelphia; the establishment of two main crossing roads – in this case a
“high” street and a “broad” street.
While the form of these earlier cities in which Penn participated provides
some insight into the later planning of Philadelphia, they are perhaps more
indicative of Penn’s entrepreneurial skill. He was adroit at establishing colonial
settlements that would attract his fellow Quakers with the combined promise of
commercial opportunity and freedom from religious persecution in England.
Seven months after he received the charter from Charles II, Penn selected
three commissioners to accompany the first group of settlers to Pennsylvania.
Drawing on his previous experience with colonial towns, Penn drew up an
elaborate memorandum for the commissioners that included detailed and
pragmatic directives on how to select a site for the city, taking into consideration
the acreage needed. Penn asked that a site be chosen along the Delaware River
where the rivers and creeks are “sounded” (long and broad) on his side and
where “it is most navigable, high, dry, and healthy; that is, where most ships
may best ride, of deepest draught of water …”3
He then instructed that (my italics):

3d: Such a place being found out, for navigation, healthy situation and good
soil for provision, lay out ten thousand acres contiguous to it in the best
manner you can, as the bounds and extent of the liberties of the said town.4

After the selection of a proper site, Penn also specified the uniform way in which
the streets, parcels and buildings would need to be disposed, asking the
commissioners to “12th: Be sure to settle the figure of the town so as that the
streets hereafter may be uniform down to the water from the country bounds
…”5
Penn’s instructions concerning the placement of houses is perhaps the most
revealing of his intentions for the character of the town:

15th: Let every house be placed, if the person pleases, in the middle of it
plat, as to the breadth way of it, so that there may be ground on each side
for gardens or orchards, or fields, that it may be a green county town, which
will never be burnt, and always be wholesome.”6

Following Penn’s instructions, the commissioners selected a “high and dry” site
where the bank of the Delaware River ran closest and parallel to the banks of
Skulkill River, the main inland tributary in the area. A few Dutch and Swedish
settlers had already established themselves in the area. There is some ambiguity
as to the sequence of events that led up to the completion of a formal plan for the
city in 1683. Penn appointed Captain Thomas Holme as surveyor general, but he
did not arrive until June of 1682, after the site for the city had already been
selected. Holme worked with the commissioners on a plan, of which no record
survives, but it is understood to have only covered an area extending halfway
from the Delaware Bank towards the banks of the Skulkill. What is now
understood as the original plan did not emerge until Penn joined Holme four
months later. Anticipating the success of Philadelphia and “future comers,” Penn
had the city extended to the banks of the Skulkill, allowing for a front on each
river. In a short time Penn and Holme finalized the plans. A survey was prepared
and lots were sold. A year later Holmes published A Portraiture of the City of
Philadelphia with a written narrative and “Plat-form” meant to draw new settlers
(Figure 11.1). Holme’s drawing and narrative describes the pattern of streets and
public squares that still define central Philadelphia:

the City of Philadelphia now extends in Length from River to River, two
Miles and in Breadth near a Mile …
The City (as the model shews) consists of a large Front-street to each
River and a High-street (near the middle) from Front (or River) to front, of
one hundred Foot broad, and a Broad-street in the middle of the City, form
side to side, of the like breadth. In the center of the City is a Square of ten
Acres; at each Angle there are to be Houses for Public Affairs, as a Meeting
House, Assembly or StateHouse, Market-House and several other buildings
for Publick Concerns. There is also in each Quarter of the city a Square of
eight Acres, to be for like Uses, as the Moore-fields in London; and eight
Streets, (besides the High-street), that run from Front to Front, and twenty
Streets, (besides the Broad-street) that run cross the City, from side to side;
all these Streets are of Fifty Foot breadth7

11.1
Plat-form (plan) of Philadelphia in 1682, after Thomas Holme, surveyor (Olin Library, Cornell
University)
Source: As published in John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the
United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965)

The creation of a great “city or town” was central to Penn’s plans for a “Holy
experiment” in the colonies. “Holy experiment” refers to the then novel idea that
adherents of differing religious faiths and political convictions would be free to
settle and live side by side in these new territories. Thus the use of the name
Philadelphia, borrowed from the name of the ancient city in Asia Minor and the
Greek term for “city of brotherly love.”
Penn’s scheme for Philadelphia was founded on the proposition that each
investor in a large rural parcel in Pennsylvania would also receive a “bonus” plot
within a large, new capital city.

“I.: That as soon as it pleaseth God … a certain quantity of land shall be

laid out for a large town or city … and every purchaser shall, by lot, have so
much land therein as will answer to the proportion which he hath bought or
taken up upon rent. But it is to be noted that the surveyor shall consider
what roads or highways will be necessary to the cities, towns, or through
the lands … and V.: That the proportion of lands that shall be laid out in the
first great city or town, for every purchaser, shall be after the proportion of
ten acres for every five hundred acres purchased, if the place will allow it.”8

The linking of large rural tracts to plots in a planned town quickly – and
artificially – established European settlement patterns in Pennsylvania that might
have otherwise taken a century or more to achieve. Unlike earlier (and some
later) colonial settlers, who had to build homes, locate ports, and found markets
in essentially wilderness conditions, investors in Pennsylvania could anticipate a
settlement plot in a well-planned community.

The fate of Penn’s colonial plan

Foreshadowing Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian vision for the United States, Penn
sought to create, through a highly speculative real-estate venture, a pastoral yet
culturally and economically pluralistic town that would balance the effects of
trade with the civilizing effects of a landed gentry. Philadelphia would be a
“wholesome,” “green country town,” serving the ideals of religious freedom
while tempering the barbarous effects of trade. Although many of Penn’s
investors were involved in maritime-based trade, and his instructions for the
selection of a site gave priority to the founding of a port, Penn believed that
profits made from the ownership and management of land were morally more
defensible than those made from trade.
 Penn’s original 1683 Plan is consistent with this desire, as it fluctuates
between an ideal “checkerboard” geometry, the accommodation of local
geographic circumstance and the anticipation of future extensions into, and
annexations of, the surrounding countryside.
The city’s gridiron layout, subdivided into four quadrants by a “broad” and
a “high” street, was fairly typical for colonial towns and had numerous Spanish
and English precedents. Penn and Holmes’ subtle innovation was the placement
of a large, open public square at the crossing of the two main streets, and one
additional square within each of the four quadrants. John Reps has conjectured
that Penn or Holme may have been inspired by Richard Newcourt’s 1666 plan
for the reconstruction of London, which also contains an equal distribution of
five open spaces within a field of regular, rectangular blocks.9 Yet the difference
between these two plans may be as illuminating as their similarities. Despite
being conceived to reorganize both existing areas and the parts of London
destroyed by the great fire in 1666, the Newcourt plan is entirely symmetrical,
with an equal number of blocks emanating from the central square in each
direction. Newcourt also maximized the value of each of the quadrant’s public
squares by surrounding them on all sides with developable frontage (Figure
11.2).

11.2
Design for the rebuilding of London, Richard Newcourt, 1666 (retouched by John W. Reps, from a
reproduction in Towne Planning Review, Vol. 18, No. 3 (1939))
Source: As published in John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the
United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965)

In contrast to Newcourt’s London plan, the Philadelphia plan exhibits some

striking anomalies. The southern half of the Philadelphia plan is similar to the
London plan: platting five blocks to the south of the east–west High (now
Market) Street divide allowed public squares to be positioned at roughly the
center of their quadrants. Yet only three blocks to north of High Street were
platted, leaving the northern boundary of the public squares exposed. There was
also great variation in the size of the rectangular blocks, and their geometry was
at odds with that of the squares. The plan pragmatically places rectangular
blocks with their long face oriented along the north–south streets, maximizing
potential access to daylight. Yet despite the prevailing rectangular geometry, the
public squares are projected as absolutely “square.” The mismatch between the
geometry of the squares and the blocks produces a set of irregular spaces around
more than half the frontages of the squares, without planning for any public
streets between the squares and the parcels (see dashed overlay on Figure 11.1).
The anomalies in the Philadelphia plan aptly illustrate Penn’s struggle to
balance Utopian ideals with the exigencies of real estate and land governance. At
stake was a legal and symbolic connection between the city and its outlying
districts, and the authority of the plan itself to maintain the projected boundaries
and disposition of blocks, parcels and set-aside public squares.
A vast amount of Pennsylvania land was already under contract prior to the
platting of Philadelphia. The promise of a 2 percent bonus city plot would have
been impossible to accommodate within the scale of a sixteenth-century colonial
city (or any city at that time). The planned city, at 1,280 acres, would have
provided roughly less than one-fifth of the needed parcels, all of which would
have exceeded the average seven-acre size of the city blocks. Penn’s first ideas
for Philadelphia included surrounding a compact rectangular town between the
rivers with gentlemanly estates of 80 acres, with the house at the center of each
plot separated by at least 800 feet (Figure 11.3). When the geography of the
surrounding areas made this pattern of development a difficult prospect, Penn
instead, through a questionably legal sleight-of-hand, met his promise to
investors by offering land in the 10,000 acres of “Liberty” lands laid out by his
surveyors adjacent to the city’s northern border. Penn then attempted to
incorporate some of the estate planning principles planned for the outskirts into
the city center, showing many of the blocks as subdivided into regular acre or
half-acre parcels.10 As the recent history of Philadelphia reveals, the perceived
northern boundary of the city continued to be in play well into the twentieth
century. By leaving the northern edge of the city incomplete, it is likely that
Penn sought ambiguously to associate the undeveloped areas of the Liberty lands
with the city proper.11

11.3
Map of the improved part of Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia and vicinity, with an inset plan of
Philadelphia. Drawn by Thomas Holme, published 1720 (US Library of Congress, Map Division)
Source: As published in John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the
United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965)

The platting of the parcels in 1683 plan reflects Penn’s belief that the city
would grow simultaneously from its two river frontages in towards the center.
The city did not comply. Rather, following convention, the city grew into
unplanned areas to the north and south, extending in a low-slung, crowded
pattern parallel to its busy eastern port on the Delaware. During Philadelphia’s
storied period as the American Revolution’s “cradle of liberty,” Penn’s
checkerboard plan could in fact hardly be discerned (Figure 11.4). The broad
city blocks with large parcels that were meant to accommodate large, free-
standing town homes in a green, leafy setting also succumbed to the conventions
of the colonial period. The original 425 by 570 (or 675) foot blocks were
subdivided with narrow alleys within which emerged a dense city fabric of
rowhouses.

11.4
Plan of the city and suburbs of Philadelphia, drawn by A. P. Folie in 1994 (US Library of Congress,
Map Division)
As published in John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United
States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965)

The planned public squares suffered a better fate, and bear out the utility of
Penn’s scheme. After being obscured by eighteenth-century surveys which
document the shifting of Broad Street two blocks west, better to straddle the
highest ridge between the two rivers, the central and two western squares
reappear in altered locations by the early nineteenth century. All five squares
were made subject to new city ordinances, banning their use as dumping
grounds. These new ordinances designated the squares as civic open spaces in
perpetuity, providing financial support for their improvement.12
What logic can be gleaned from the uncoupling, by means of geometry and
placement, of the idealized public squares from the rectangular gridiron of
private development? Perhaps, because of their ideal geometry, the squares were
able to endure (or at least recover) as an idea uncontaminated by the evolving,
speculative form of the grid. The recovered squares were eventually able to
provide relief from a scale and density of development never anticipated by
William Penn. Philadelphia is credited – and blamed – for introducing the
gridiron plan with a main square at its center as a model for establishing cities
throughout the United States. The scheme was duplicated ad infinitum, often on
hilly, less appropriate sites. Nevertheless, the public squares establish an
important precedent for the concept of neighborhood parks taken up by city
planners more than two centuries later. Likewise, the annexing of the northern
liberties, as a semi-planned green buffer zone, anticipated the greenbelt and
garden city concepts.

Nineteenth-century expansion: from town to

metropolis
Philadelphia’s premiere status during the revolutionary period grew out of its
dominance of the political and commercial activities of the day. The city hosted
the Continental Congress, it was the site of both the signing of the Declaration of
Independence and the drafting of the Constitution, and served as the nation’s
first capital after independence was won. During the latter half of the eighteenth
century Philadelphia contained the largest port in the western hemisphere; it was
the largest city in the English-speaking world after London, to which it was often
compared. Penn’s vision of the city as a marketplace and symbolic center for the
vast agricultural production of Pennsylvania, Southern New Jersey and Delaware
had been achieved.
Yet the city did not achieve its iconic form until the middle of the
nineteenth century. Paradoxically, the full realization of the city platted by Penn,
stretching from river to river, coincided with a consolidation of the various
townships in Philadelphia County under one municipality in 1854. Though still
the core, “Old” Philadelphia was now just one-tenth of a vast, expanding
metropolis. Until that time the city had been steadily increasing in population by
an average of 25 percent per decade, growing from 41,000 inhabitants in 1800 to
121,000 in 1850. The incorporation increased the city’s official population
fivefold, to about a half-a-million residents. By 1900 the population had
increased another two-and-a-half times, to 1.25 million.
If the explosive growth spurred by the industrial revolution had multiplied
Philadelphia’s population by 30 times over the course of the nineteenth century,
New York City had grown at twice that rate. Upon the completion of the Erie
Canal in 1825, New York City became the dominant port and commercial center
on the eastern seaboard. In addition to New York City’s geographic advantage
for trade, Manhattan’s linear form, clearly delimited boundaries and industrial-
scale grid all helped to organize and discipline new growth, making it a highly
propitious site for the formation of a distinctive, modern city. The Philadelphia
gridiron laid out by Penn, on the other hand, was not large enough to contain the
amount of new growth in the city. Moreover there was little impetus to
physically integrate, by means of planning, the various adjacent townships that
had been legally consolidated in 1854. In Philadelphia, as in much of the US
during this period, the rush of industrial expansion and the laissez-faire attitude
towards commerce allowed little municipal control over – or even reflection on –
civic planning and land development.
In the period of Philadelphia’s greatest growth and expansion, from the
years 1850 to 1950, existing suburban patterns were extended, roadways were
improved, and new turnpikes and train lines were built. Outside the center, a
robust, but haphazard gridiron pattern of industrial plants and speculative
residential blocks eroded formerly agricultural tracts. Though often containing
the ubiquitous Philadelphia rowhouse, most of these new areas possessed neither
the grandeur of the old downtown, nor its pedestrian scale (Figure 11.5). Though
still prosperous, by 1900 Philadelphia trailed New York and Chicago in size.
New York, by virtue of its physical layout, and Chicago, by virtue of the “The
Great Fire” of 1871, had had the opportunity to expand the physical plan and
profile of their central areas.
The form of Philadelphia’s center continued to evolve well into the early
decades of the twentieth century. At the turn of the century, projects were
undertaken to update the downtown. But it was not until faced with loss of
population and the decaying of historic districts as the city declined in the wake
of the Second World War that the city’s leaders and citizens attempted a
wholesale remaking of was by then simply referred to as “CenterCity.”
11.5
Philadelphia, aerial photograph looking north, 1951

The declining fate of the central city

The narrative of stagnation and decline that defines the recent history of
Philadelphia is shared by a number of other aging industrial cities in the United
States, including Baltimore, Detroit, St Louis and Pittsburgh. Maritime trade
and, later, the railroads necessitated compact, concentrated cities during the
period in which these cities were established and grew. With the advent of the
automobile, mass suburbanization became a possible and often preferred form of
land development. The very highways that planners and engineers promised
would make physical travel between the old city centers and their outlying
regions faster and more convenient facilitated the creation of whole new urban
sub-centers that replaced the goods and services formerly only available in the
old centers. Via FHA mortgages and highway construction, a new, federally
subsidized suburban arcadia of single-family homes also drew business and
industry, eager to shed their old plants and avoid the costs of organized labor and
higher taxes that faced them in the old city centers.
Industrial plants built to support the war effort during the 1940s temporarily
stayed the rates of decline in cities like Philadelphia. These facilities stimulated,
for a time, the city’s economies, levels of employment and population that had
already begun to drop in the 1930s, but following the War the downward trend
resumed. By the 1960s, the desegregation of ethnic minorities within the city
also played a decisive role in the decline of urban centers such as Philadelphia.
Large segments of the white middle-class population had already left the city.
Threatened by the changing (read: “ethnic”) public face of the city they fled
further, a phenomenon that came to be known as “white flight.” Once ensconced
in new, more homogeneous communities, their xenophobia only increased,
further reducing their desire to interact with the old centers.
Although the events that caused a decline in the fortunes of many American
cities in the post-industrial era can be generalized as above, the effects of these
commonly-shared events upon the physical form of the city in each case varied.
Corresponding attempts at redevelopment and revitalization often met with
limited success. Unlike many of the other US cities that have suffered decline,
Philadelphia eventually managed to reinvent its downtown. The very area platted
by William Penn was arguably more vital at the beginning of the twenty-first
century than it was before the loss of population and industry began 50 years
previously. What actions, if any, on the part of citizens, politicians and
designers, contributed to the revitalization of the historic core? How was the
transformation achieved, and at what cost to the rest of the city?

Three phases in the remaking of Philadelphia

I. Public works inspired by the City Beautiful movement
Anticipating the sesquicentennial of the American Revolution in 1926, and
spurred on by the Columbian Worlds Exposition and the City Beautiful
movement, Philadelphia undertook a series of ambitious plans beginning in
about 1904. These included two major projects, the Fairmont (now Benjamin
Franklin) Parkway and the Delaware (now Benjamin Franklin) Bridge. These
projects, while essentially transportation-driven, had the effect of creating two
new monumental entries into the city. Located to the northwest of the city along
the Skulkill River and containing the city’s nineteenth-century quasi-Greek
Revival waterworks at its base, the promontory at Fairmount was already noted
on Penn’s 1683 plan.13 The new parkway was to function as both a traffic artery
and a civic center, with a plaza at its southern edge acting as a gateway from
Fairmount Park and the expanding northern and western suburbs to the heart of
the city. Fairmount itself was to be occupied by an elaborate art museum
complex and linked by a grand diagonal axis slashing through one of the city’s
original squares (now Logan Circle) to Center Square, where the city had built a
new, gargantuan, Second Empire style City Hall, completed in 1901.
The Benjamin Franklin Parkway and Philadelphia Art Museum were
complete by the 1930s. As with many City Beautiful schemes, the full
realization of the Parkway as a civic center was primarily undermined by the
lack of centralized authority to plan, finance and develop urban land. The
economic challenges of the Great Depression and then the Second World War
contributed as well. The beaux arts parkway scheme had been part of a larger
study by Jacques Greber, a French landscape architect. Greber was the primary
designer in charge of the Parkway and the urban planning related to it. He
proposed a network of diagonal avenues bisecting the city’s original squares,
attempting to conjoin them with the city’s new train stations, cultural institutions
and government buildings in the Parisian manner made popular in the nineteenth
century.
While Greber’s city-wide proposal was not as visionary or comprehensive
as Burnham’s plans for San Francisco and Chicago, it does propose a reading
and layout of the city that is provocative in the light of urban design and
planning projects implemented several decades later. Greber’s 1917 “Partial Plan
of the City Shewing the New Civic Centre …” played down the original
northern and southern borders of Penn’s plan, placing particular emphasis on
integrating built-out areas of the Northern Liberties and Spring Garden Districts
into the old downtown (Figure 11.6). The plan projected new development
around the two northern squares, Franklin Square to the east and Logan Square
to the west, fulfilling their potential as open spaces central to their quadrants.
Vine Street was no longer understood as the edge of the city, but as another main
east–west avenue running between Squares, akin to Locust Street on the south
side. The way in which the plan was framed suggested that the city’s center was
shifting north towards Vine Street, a reorientation confirmed shortly after by the
building of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, the second monumental entry into the
city.
11.6
Partial plan of the city showing the new civic center and the connection of the Fairmount Parkway
with the present street system and other proposed radial avenues, Jacques Greber, 1917
Source: From Folio, The Fairmount Parkway (Philadelphia: Fairmount Park Association, 1919)

After more than 100 years of failed attempts to build a bridge that would
span the Delaware River from Camden, New Jersey to Philadelphia, the growing
use of the automobile precipitated the construction of the Benjamin Franklin
Bridge, completed in 1928. Drawing twice as much traffic as anticipated, the
suspension bridge created a sweeping panorama into the early, eastern districts
of the city. The Bridge’s massive landing fell between Race and Vine Street,
ending in a plaza fronting Franklin Square.
Although a movement devoted to the stewardship of the city’s colonial past
had begun to emerge almost 100 years prior to the construction of the Benjamin
Franklin Bridge, completion of the bridge and the celebration of the
sesquicentennial in 1926 brought a new set of concerns to light about the “Old
(re: eastern, colonial) City.” Commercial and business interests that had once
thrived in these areas began to move westward with the construction of the new
city hall at Center Square. The area experienced a slow but steady decline.
Although there were still many buildings of historical value from the
Philadelphia’s colonial period, much of the built fabric had been transformed
during the nineteenth century. Recognition of past and possible future losses
promoted the appreciation of older structures from the colonial period, and in
particular the veneration of the Old Pennsylvania State House. The State House
became the catalyst for a series of projects and studies that eventually led to the
construction of the Independence National Park – and, arguably, to the
wholesale transformation of the “Old City.”

II. Independence Mall: William Penn’s greene country towne writ large
The most hallowed shrine in Philadelphia, perhaps in the United States, is the
site of what has come to be known as Independence Hall and Independence
Square (not one of the original squares laid out by Penn). Originally the
Pennsylvania State House, Independence Hall is the site where the terms of the
American Revolution were forged. The first Continental Congress met at the
State House in 1776, and subsequently drafted, signed and publicly read the
American Declaration of Independence there. Upon winning the War for
Independence, the Second Continental Congress met again there and framed the
Constitution of the United States. Philadelphia and its State House served as the
United States Capitol in the first, formative decade of the county’s existence,
during which the Bill of Rights was amended to the Constitution. Following the
move of the federal government to Washington, DC and the simultaneous
transfer of Pennsylvania’s capital to Harrisburg, the State House housed a
changing series of functions throughout the nineteenth century. These included
Philadelphia’s city government, federal courts and, from 1802 to 1828, the first
public museum of natural history in the United States, formed by the painter
Charles Willson Peale.14 Already in the early 1800s, Peale stated that
Independence Hall would be “a building more interesting in the history of the
world, than any of the celebrated fabrics of Greece and Rome!”15
Only after the much-heralded visit of the Marquis de Lafayette to
Philadelphia in 1824, during which he was received in the State House’s
assembly room redecorated as a “Hall of Independence,” did the site emerge as a
shrine. The re-naming of the State House as Independence Hall precipitated a
series of projects to “restore” the Hall, along with its outbuildings and Square, to
their condition at the time of the American Revolution. The first of these projects
began to mark the centennial of American Independence in 1876. The Daughters
of the American Revolution and the American Institute of Architects undertook
later renovation projects.16
The veneration of the Hall was furthered by the enshrinement of another
relic of perhaps greater symbolic value than the building itself: the old state
house bell, inscribed with the Old Testament words “proclaim liberty throughout
the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.” While no historical records exist to
confirm the Bell’s connection with any of the great events surrounding the
Revolution, its value as a symbol was nonetheless taken up by the abolitionists,
who first coined the term “The Liberty Bell” in the title of an anti-slavery
pamphlet. Only later, through popular songs, children’s books, and extensive
national railroad tours, was the Liberty Bell appropriated as a more generalized
patriotic symbol.
Following the First World War, the surge in patriotism only increased the
status and veneration of the Independence Hall complex and the Liberty Bell
enshrined therein. Temporary viewing stands were often constructed adjacent to
Independence Hall on Chestnut Street to serve the frequent patriotic parades,
pageants and rallies held there. Many found the eclectic language, workaday
uses and decaying condition of the older buildings facing the hall on Chestnut
Street distasteful, and hoped to replace them with a plaza that would more
permanently serve patriotic events.17 Jacques Greber, the designer of the
Parkway, and many of his collaborators and professional colleagues that taught
at the University of Pennsylvania (including the prominent architect Paul Cret)
made proposals for the site over a 30-year period.18
The scheme that most influenced the remaking of this area was not
conceived by an architect, politician or civic leader, but rather by a Professor of
Hygiene at the University of Pennsylvania named Dr Seneca Egbert. His 1928
proposal was apparently a response to a 1925 Philadelphia City Council proposal
to abate traffic congestion at the Benjamin Franklin Bridge Plaza by diverting
traffic from the Plaza to Market Street, through the creation of a grand boulevard
mid-block between Fifth and Sixth Streets. Egbert instead proposed “the
development of a Concourse or Esplanade between Independence Hall and the
plaza at the west end of the Delaware bridge that should serve as a permanent
and impressive Sesquicentennial memorial of the historic events incident to the
founding of the nation.”19
No drawing is known to exist of this scheme, but Egbert did draft an
elaborate report outlining his proposals. Several aspects of the scheme he
outlined were present in the plan finally implemented in the late 1940s. Egbert
justified his boldest proposition, the demolishing of three city blocks stretching
from Independence Hall on Chestnut Street to the Bridge plaza on Race Street –
over 20 acres – by citing a widely-held fear that a fire could at any time consume
one of the area’s abandoned or dilapidated buildings and spread to Independence
Hall or another cherished colonial edifice. His other influential proposals
included the widening of Fifth and Sixth Streets to accommodate increased
traffic from the Bridge, the creation of a central pedestrian esplanade “possibly
as broad as Broad Street,” the creation of a plaza for events fronting
Independence Hall, the accommodation of underground parking, and the
building of a new subway stop.
Most of his proposals for the surface development of individual blocks
were not adopted. Egbert envisioned a scheme in which a building representing
the Pennsylvania Commonwealth would cap the first block at the far end of the
Mall at the bridge plaza. The Pennsylvania building was to be symmetrically
flanked on the next block south by replicas of colonial buildings representing the
other original twelve states of the union. The final block fronting Independence
Hall was to house memorials and a plaza for celebrations.
Perhaps even more influential than the physical proposals made was
Egbert’s supposition that the new Mall would increase tax revenues by
increasing the assessed value of the three cleared blocks – and, ultimately,
increase the perceived value of adjacent properties and the district as a whole.
Egbert chided the city for narrowly promoting development around Center (now
Penn) Square to the west at the expense of the area of the city most associated
with its illustrious history. He also implied that the historical value of the Old
City could be mined to commercial advantage. To achieve a project of this
magnitude, Egbert also foresaw the need for a structure of cooperation between
various federal, city and state agencies. Egbert’s scheme remained unrealized
until world events prompted a reconsideration of his proposal for the Mall.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of the Second World War
brought a renewed resolve to protect Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.
Starting in 1941, Edwin O’Lewis, a charismatic, highly persuasive and well-
connected judge, and president of the Pennsylvania Society of the Sons of the
Revolution, mounted a campaign to build the three-block long Independence
Mall. Mindful of the potential for federal support for the construction and
management of the Mall, the project was conceived as a National Park that
would eventually include the entire complex of buildings associated with
Independence Hall. Roy Larson, a partner of Paul Cret’s who made a proposal
for the site in 1937, prior to the war, which drew liberally on Egbert’s scheme,
was asked to develop a plan for the Mall. It was Larson’s revised plan from
1937, extending three blocks north of Independence Square and two partial
blocks to the east, that was eventually implemented after the National Park was
approved by the US Congress in 194920 (Figure 11.7).
11.7a
Looking east from “Independence Hall” towards the future site of Independence Mall

11.7b
Adopted proposal for Independence Mall, Roy Larson, 1937
Source: From pamphlet, Independence Hall and Adjacent Buildings, A Plan for their Preservation and the
Improvement of their Surroundings (Philadelphia: Fairmount Park Art Association in collaboration with the
Independence Hall Association, 1944)

The construction of the Mall, eventually part of a larger entity known as

Independence National Park, did not proceed without resistance and controversy.
Three blocks of businesses, many of which were (despite statements to the
contrary) still active, were taken by eminent domain. Many fine nineteenth-
century buildings were destroyed, including Frank Furness’s magnificent
polychrome Guarantee Trust Company and the Provident Life & Trust Company
Bank and Office Building. Gaining governmental approval for the project hinged
on the landmark status of the colonial buildings, and having the Park Service
manage the site. Nevertheless, architects, preservationists and historians
associated with the Park Service were critical of the effect the wholesale
clearance of the site would have on the colonial monuments entrusted to them.21
Linking a memorial dedicated to a patriotic theme to an infrastructure-
driven urban renewal project was not unique in the early decades of the
twentieth century, or in previous eras; the roughly concurrent Jefferson National
Expansion Memorial in St Louis was a prime example of the type. However, the
sheer degree to which the Independence Mall and National Historic Park of
which it is part combined an anachronistic, if not reactionary, esthetic project
with a somewhat progressive economic planning model warrants further
examination.
One could simply reduce the esthetic proposition of Independence Mall to a
matter of stylistic fashion, expressive of its historical moment, but this reading
would not fully embrace the profound irony and implications of the project. Here
a crude imitation of eighteenth-century European classicism was deployed in a
plan to transform a once discreet set of colonial buildings and artifacts, prized
for the way their modest form and casual arrangement connoted the humble
beginnings of the American democracy, into a National Historic Park. In the
process, a large piece of the city’s actual history, a dense but often
architecturally rich urban fabric built up over three centuries, was destroyed.
The Mall itself was considered a failure almost from the start. Too vast to
frame the diminutive Independence Hall and too formal to serve as an active city
park, the Mall’s most lauded purpose was as an underground garage serving the
adjacent businesses and institutions in the bureaucratically designed office
buildings that eventually lined it. The necessity of a mall of this size in this part
of Philadelphia is itself questionable, but its form was disastrous. Looking north
but cut off from the northern areas of the city by the landing of the bridge and
later a highway, the mall’s orientation represents a profound misreading of city’s
original morphology; a rectangular grid with its major streets stretching between
two rivers. If interested in celebrating the city’s history with a mall, it would
have had to be positioned east–west, parallel to (or along) Market Street. An
east–west link would have tied Independence Square to the city’s true beginning
point, a landing at the Delaware River, and better articulated a spatial narrative
of the city’s history.22
More connected to the national network of historic parks and related tourist
sites than to the history of Philadelphia, Independence Mall indicates how, at a
time when metropolitan areas like Philadelphia were dissipating into the
suburbs, the esthetic chosen for the symbolic areas at the center was one that put
a premium on cleanliness, easy automobile access and open, verdant vistas. It
was as if Penn’s Greene Country Towne was finally going to be realized with a
vengeance, but at a scale that could only be appreciated from a moving
automobile or as part of a larger tourist’s itinerary.
The Mall’s misguided form follows from the order of priorities that
established it, from the pragmatic to the ambiguously altruistic – that is, first
traffic abatement, then the framing of hallowed shrines, and finally “urban
renewal.” In hindsight, it seems that the radical transformation of this urban site
into a pastoral park was mired in mid-century American politics of national
mythmaking and a seemingly symbiotic relationship between urban divestment,
the restoration of historic structures and re-gentrification.
More generally, the Mall suggested processes by which the city’s historical
form and stock of historic buildings could be leveraged to stimulate both public
and private reinvestment in the old heart of the city. It is in this sense – as an
amalgam of transportation planning, historic “preservation” and commercial
redevelopment, conceived to restore the symbolic capital of a decaying city –
that the plan for Independence Mall presaged not only the larger redevelopment
of Philadelphia’s downtown but also the post-War focus of urban design in
general.
The completion of the three-block Mall took twenty years, from 1949 to
1969, years that almost directly correspond to Edmund Bacon’s highly
influential tenure as Executive Director of Philadelphia’s Planning Commission.
Considering himself a modernist, Bacon was never comfortable with the
anachronistic character of the Mall’s design, which he had inherited, but he
supported the larger planning goals it represented. The massive clearing and
highlighting of colonial architecture set the stage for many initiatives later
facilitated by Bacon, including the gentrification of the surrounding Old City and
its “Society Hill.”

III. The urban design of “Better Philadelphia” under Edmund Bacon

In 1964, a heroic portrait of Edmund Bacon was featured on the cover of Time
magazine, under the banner “Urban Renewal: Remaking the American City”
(Figure 8.8). Now, half a century after Bacon’s planning efforts were initiated,
perhaps it is possible to evaluate his role in the vaunted renaissance of
Philadelphia’s downtown. However, a full evaluation of Bacon’s theories and
work in Philadelphia would not be possible here. Instead I will focus on the
question of how interventions undertaken by the city under Bacon’s direction
can be read, relative to both William Penn’s founding principles and the
multitude of historical forces acting on the form of the city subsequent to its
founding. This will bring to light several interrelated questions. First, for what
purpose were the boundaries of the old, central portion of the city re-inscribed
and what have been the consequences of focusing so much economic, political
and intellectual resources on those areas? Second, how central was the
leveraging of the city’s historical form and stock of colonial buildings to the
downtown’s redevelopment? Third, as urban design did not exist as a distinct
professional activity prior to Bacon’s work – Bacon was essentially an architect
who became a city planner – in what ways can his work in Philadelphia be seen
as constituting urban design practice as it exists today? This last question raises
the issue of the degree to which urban design practice is too much invested in an
historical rather than a contemporary idea of the city – that is, designing for the
town rather than the metropolis.

11.8
Portrait of Edmund Bacon, cover: Time Magazine, November 9, 1964
Source: Time Magazine Archive

John F. Bauman has written an account of an ideological struggle that

occurred during the early 1940s among planners and others concerned with
urban policies that would guide the post-War years. Bauman describes a clash
between those who placed a priority on replacing slums through the rebuilding
of communities spread throughout a metropolitan region, and those who stressed
the remaking of the downtown and central areas of the city. The first group,
emphasizing new housing as the most basic building block of a more humane
city, grew out of the communitarian and reformist politics of the 1930s. Their
position was that the government’s resources should be focused on producing a
variety of housing of a kind and quality that would, through controls over land
use, zoning and utilities, spread density in a planned manner throughout the city,
providing communities that could successfully compete with what was already
being offered in the new suburbs. Fearful that the artificially overvalued cost of
land in the most inner-city areas would undermine programs dedicated to
distributing resources equitably to the greatest number of people, they warned
against an overemphasis on rebuilding the centers.23
The second group, which Bauman called the “houser-redevelopers,” viewed
the provision of new housing as “the handmaiden of downtown renewal.” This
new breed of urbanists put great stock on the symbolic and strategic value of
restoring the vitality of the downtown. They were also more aligned with the
emerging federal policy and housing bureaucracy of the Cold War years, which
resisted any planning policies with socialistic overtones – that is, any policies
that might overly limit or compete with private commercial enterprise.
Although Bauman considered Edmund Bacon to be one of the new breed,
Bacon had at the outset of his career embraced initiatives related to both the
regionalist and downtown-centered positions in Philadelphia. The experiences of
his early career may help to explain both his espousal of design as a tool for
building consensus and the ambiguity of his ideological affiliations. Bacon grew
up in Philadelphia, part of an old Quaker family. He studied architecture at
Cornell in the early 1930s, and then did graduate work as a fellow under Eliel
Saarinen at Cranbrook Academy. Before returning to Philadelphia, he worked in
Michigan as the Supervisor of City Planning for the Flint Institute of Research
and Planning. Bacon was fired from this Institute in 1939 and accused of being a
communist for his advocacy of federal housing subsidies to aid the inconsistent
incomes of General Motor’s workers, who had staged a highly publicized sit-
down strike in 1936–1937.24
The Philadelphia Bacon returned to in the early 1940s was in the early
stages of a political transformation. Once described by the great muck-raking
journalist Lincoln Steffens as “Corrupt and Contented,” Philadelphia and its
physical decline – grimy streets, filthy drinking water, shrinking commercial
venues – reflected the stronghold of an entrenched Republican political machine
dominated by ward bosses and cronyism. Frustrated by the city government’s
resistance to the idea of active city planning, a grassroots movement of young,
reform-minded individuals and civic groups formed the Action Committee on
City Planning in 1939. This group later became a more permanent Citizen’s
Council on City Planning, with several members from its ranks appointed to
important positions on the Planning Commission.25 Bacon had been recruited
back to the city by one of the civic reform groups associated with the Citizen’s
Council to head the Philadelphia Housing Association. In 1947 the Citizen’s
Council on City Planning organized the “Better Philadelphia Exhibition.” Bacon
co-designed the exhibition with Oskar Stonorov (Figure 11.9).

11.9
3-D plan and key, The Better Philadelphia Exhibition, Gimbels Department Store, Edmund Bacon
and Oscar Stonorov, designers, 1947
Source: From pamphlet, The Better Philadelphia Exhibition: What City Planning Means to You, 1947

Installed on the fifth floor of Gimbels Department Store in Center City, The
Better Philadelphia Exhibition coordinated an ambitious, interactive display of
the city and its planned projects with public programs meant to engage and
inform a wide array of citizens. The exhibit was carefully choreographed using
techniques drawn from both Worlds Fair pavilions and the kinds of modern retail
displays found elsewhere in the department store. Heavily promoted through
radio broadcasts, leaflets, newspaper and magazine articles, the Exhibition
attracted over 385,000 visitors.26
The exhibition opened with the presentation of a 22-by 28-foot diorama,
“Vista of a Better Philadelphia,” a bird’s-eye perspective depicting what the city
and its surrounding environs would look like in 1982. Set within a converted
auditorium, the diorama was supplemented by overhead images of past public
works and an introductory text, “Philadelphia plans again.” This narrative
highlighted the ways in which changes to areas within the city’s boundaries
would transform them to be as compelling as the outlying suburbs, with their
efficient highways and commodious industrial parks. A voice-over extolled the
virtues of planning coordinated by local government, and the potential to achieve
the city of civilized greenswards that William Penn had originally conceived.
The city construed by the diorama, and other similar devices within the
exhibition, served to orient visitors to the physical relationships between
particular locales in which they lived and worked, and then, incrementally, to the
larger district, city and region beyond. The exhibition featured displays
explaining the specific benefits planning could offer in terms of the more
everyday amenities that would improve the lives of people in the city’s many
neighborhoods, such as playgrounds, nursery schools, health centers and new
housing.
To make the idea of a revitalized city palpable to the Exhibition’s viewers,
an extensive large-scale mock-up of a typical Philadelphia neighborhood
composed of rowhouses was shown with new public amenities and tenant
improvements to the individual houses and yards. A large section towards the
end of the exhibition was devoted to the display of drawings and models made
by the city’s schoolchildren. Through schoolroom exercises, the students had
been asked to survey their neighborhoods, make assessments of the overall
quality of the environment, and develop, as individuals, an improvement plan for
their part of the city. Students were then asked to work in groups to negotiate a
shared plan, consulting with planning experts and city councilmen on what it
would take to implement their plans. While this level of engagement in a
participatory process would have been possible with a wider segment of the
population, and welcomed by many reform-minded local activists in the city, it
was limited to the schoolchildren’s program.27
The Better Philadelphia diorama and the mock-up of a typical
neighborhood were engaging, but the most promoted feature of the exhibition
was a 30-by 14-foot model of the downtown. It contained a highly animated
display of new developments projected over a 35-year period. Panels on the
model would flipped over in sequence, synchronized with dialogue and spot
lighting, to reveal one new initiative after another, including a series of new
transportation, civic space, recreation, arts and business improvement projects.
Displayed in parts, and not yet given a specific alignment, was a new
expressway surrounding the entire downtown. Also included was the verdant,
three-block long scheme for Independence Mall and a new boulevard between
City Hall and the Main Commuter Train Terminal at 30th Street, replacing the
elevated train tracks, known as the “Chinese Wall,” that divided the
northwestern portion of the city. A consolidated distribution facility replaced the
city’s waterfront food markets, and the spaces were replaced with piers and
harbors for recreation and pleasure boating. The improved automobile access
and open space amenities, while modeled as improvements to the city’s
efficiency, were also linked to new, fashionably modern housing and cultural
facilities.
As Amy Menzer points out in her detailed study of the Better Philadelphia
Exhibition, the spectacle of the downtown model differed in format and content
from many of the other, more pedagogical displays in the exhibition, in the ease
and Madison-Avenue way in which it showed the downtown transformed as if
by a benevolent yet absent hand. This consumerist tone was furthered by another
nearby display, consisting of a conveyor belt with a series of public projects on
it, complete with price tags, under the banner “Progress Must Be Bought and
Paid For.”
Menzer has argued that the Exhibition contained the potential of a radical
“environmental [urban] politics” in its attempt to spur citizen participation in a
vision of the city that could provide a compelling alternative to suburbanization.
She concedes that the exhibition, like much subsequent urban renewal, suffered
from “ambivalences and missed opportunities” typical of the “post-war labor
management consensus, racial and ethnic segregation and discrimination and
anti-communism which undergirded a coalition of largely white male housing
reformers, patrician civic leaders, socialist architects, and representatives of the
chamber of commerce.”28 The Better Philadelphia Exhibition was radical in its
attempt to take the need for visionary planning directly to the citizens,
demonstrating its promise and the virtues of the initiatives it advocated. The
Exhibition’s subtle emphasis on the downtown and its muted take on the social
inequities inherent in the city’s allocation of physical resources also reflected the
source of its funding; three-quarters of the $400,000 cost of the exhibition had
been raised from local businesses by Edward Hopkinson Jr. Hopkinson was a
financier, and, chairmen of the City Planning Commission, which covered the
remaining balance.29 The perhaps unspoken goal of the exhibit was to leverage
the public interest it generated into increased support, stability and power for the
recently revived Planning Commission, still fledgling under the Republican city
government.
The Better Philadelphia Exhibition coincided with a period in Philadelphia
when several discreet groups of civic and business leaders, fearful that the city’s
physical decline and reputation for corruption was beginning to stymie new
business investment, joined together to form “The Greater Philadelphia
Movement.” Charged with the dual purpose of answering to the aroused civic
interest in the city and “preserving the value of business interests,” the group
assembled a trust and combined assets in excess of ten billion dollars to be
devoted to the transformation of the city.30 Around the same time, the
membership of Philadelphia’s chapter of the Americans for Democratic Action –
drawn from local labor unions and members of the community chest – was
organizing independent voters in opposition to the republican regime. In 1952
they helped elect one of their members, Joseph Sill Clark Jr, as the city’s first
Democratic Mayor in 67 years.
A new reform-minded city government and a business community willing
to cross traditional party lines empowered the Philadelphia’s Planning
Commission as never before. Bacon was made Executive Director of the
Commission in 1949. While his direct influence on political decisions
concerning development and redevelopment is hard to assess – for example, he
did not have a seat on the mayor’s cabinet until the last years of his directorship
in the late 1960s – his power seems to have lain in his capacity to stay ahead of
the politicians. Ascribing his effectiveness to the “power of ideas,” Bacon claims
to have “dealt with the future beyond the view of the mayor’s cabinet, and when
they got there, they found me in possession: they found I had staked out the
territory. By the time they became concerned with a problem, I had already
developed a proposal.”31
Almost all of proposals unveiled in the downtown model of the Better
Philadelphia Exhibition were undertaken by the Planning Commission under
Bacon and eventually achieved within the projected 35-year time frame.
Beginning with a discreet set of projects, many of which he inherited, Bacon
eventually developed a comprehensive vision of a revitalized centercity
Philadelphia. The original borders of the city platted by William Penn were to be
re-inscribed with a ring of expressways. New, large-scale building complexes
and greenswards were to be woven into the existing streets, highlighting the
monuments of the Old City (Figure 11.10).
11.10
Comprehensive plan for downtown Philadelphia, 1961
Source: Philadelphia Planning Commission Report, 1961

As with Independence Mall, the accommodation of automobile circulation

provided the initial impetus for planning the city. In 1952, Bacon laid out his
understanding of the important relationship between traffic planning and rational
redevelopment patterns in a lecture given to the College of Engineering at
Rutgers University. Drawing on detailed planning commission studies which
surveyed types and patterns of automobile usage and parking affecting the
downtown, Bacon stressed two aspects of traffic; how to analyze its effects and
patterns in the city, and how to plan for it more efficiently.32
11.11
Origin and destination traffic surveys, 1947. Philadelphia Planning Commission’s Technical Advisory
Commission, 1947
Source: As published in Edmund Bacon, “Highway Development Related to Land Use in an Urban Area,”
Spencer Miller Lecture Series: Landscape Design and its Relation to the Modern Highway (New
Brunswick, NJ; New Jersey Roadside Council/College of Engineering, Rutgers University, 1950–52)

The study Bacon drew on sought to document “desire lines” – where people
were coming from and going to, and what they were doing when they got there
(Figure 11.11). His analysis showed that already at mid-century, a relatively
small percentage of overall auto trips into the city was devoted to shopping, and
that those trips were short in duration. He also showed evidence that although a
much greater percentage of trips into the city was undertaken by those working
or doing business there, they also tended to stay in the city for a much shorter
duration than might be expected – less than three hours.
If the who, what and when of automobile use came first in the approach
taken by Bacon, then the ways to serve more efficiently, and perhaps even
increase circulation into the city followed as a response. Bacon’s empirical
approach to traffic analysis later found expression in plans for the downtown
based on highly differentiated forms of circulation, keying each kind of use to a
specific type of street, parking or mass-transit system. In his Rutgers lecture, he
spoke of the need for the city not only to control road planning, but also to
control the development of property adjacent to roadways through exercising
eminent domain over blighted areas of the city. This coordinated approach
would ensure that future projects would perform in the best possible way from a
“traffic and appearance point of view, but also from a tax point of view …”

… Lombard Street runs along the southern edge of the business center
parallel to Vine Street on the north, and it happens that there is a band of
extremely bad housing between [the] two rivers right along the route of the
proposed Lombard Street highway. We have determined that if the
redevelopment authority condemned all of the land involved and put it all
into one control, the amount of land now occupied by useless little alleys
and streets which criss-cross this area would be roughly equivalent to the
land required for the widening of Lombard street to a six-lane highway….
It would also be possible to prevent use of any of the Lombard Street
frontage for access. All of the access could be from the North–South streets
because the area would be developed as a unit.33

(My own italics.)

Bacon had inherited the highway plan encircling the city from the previous
Planning Director. The cross-town expressway on Lombard Street was
eventually shifted one block south to the original city border on South Street.
Aside from the general goal of better servicing the city with highways, the
specific alignments of the proposed highways to the north and south appear to
follow no formal logic besides the re-inscription of the historical borders. While
ward lines reinforced these historical borders, the zoning patterns tell a
somewhat different story. On the South Street border there was a fairly swift
transition from commercial to residential uses, but to the north there was
primarily commercial and industrial use until Spring Garden Street. Had Penn’s
plan been completed on its northern side, with five blocks extending
symmetrically in each direction from High (now Market) Street, Spring Garden
Street would have been the city’s northern border. Greber’s plan had
acknowledged this in 1917, by figuring Spring Garden Street to terminate
directly into the head of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at Fairmount (Figure
8.6). By implementing the construction of a six-lane expressway on Vine Street
(completed in the early 1980s), Bacon effectively sealed off the northern border,
misreading Penn’s ambiguous plan and forestalling the historically established
tendency of the downtown to drift north.
Having used new expressways to encase the city within the literal
boundaries of Penn’s plan, Bacon then went on functionally to code and
optimize each element of the encased city at the scale of both the immediate
project and of the downtown as a whole. Emblematic projects, separately
addressing office, bureaucratic uses, shopping, and dwellings, were to be linked
by overlapping but discreet networks of automobile, mass-transit and pedestrian
circulation. It is almost as if each of the groups of different downtown “users”
identified in the early traffic studies – shoppers, businessmen, workers, those
seeking arts and leisure – might be given their own circulation network within
the city.
Projects were undertaken to reinforce the hierarchical importance of the two
main arteries within the downtown – Market and Broad Streets – with “super-
block” projects. A roughly six-block parking lot/transit hub straddling Broad
Street was projected as part of the South Street cross-town Expressway. Market
Street projects included the construction of the Penn Center Office Complex to
the west of Penn Square, and later the Market East Shopping Mall to the east.
Each of these (now built) Market street developments incorporated complex,
multi-level circulation concourses. When Penn Center was begun in the late
1950s, it was the largest mixed-use office complex undertaken in the US since
the building of Rockefeller Center in the 1930s. Expressing his frustration with
the difficulty of fully integrating several levels of circulation below and above
the street grade at Penn Center, Bacon noted his satisfaction with the later design
solution developed for the Shopping Mall at Market East (Figure 11.12):
11.12
Sectional perspective, study for Market East Urban Mall, 1960. Drawn by Willo von Moltke,
Philadelphia City Planning Commission, 1960
Source: As published in Edmund Bacon, Design of Cities

The architecture of the buildings which penetrate this space rises clear from
the pedestrian level [note: below grade] to the level above the street with no
expression at the street plane, so oppressively present in Penn Center …
The Vertebrae Structure of the bus terminal and parking garage, an
architectural extension of regional movement systems, asserts itself across
the composition in the background.34

(My own italics.)

Such an abundance and articulation of circulation could only be borne out
by high levels of density, such as one might find in contemporary Asian cities.
The projected 30-year population figures assumed in the traffic studies cited by
Bacon in the early 1950s saw the city’s population increasing until 1970 and
declining slightly thereafter, with the region continuing to grow. Instead, the
city’s overall population stayed stagnant until 1970, and declined precipitously
thereafter – dropping by almost 15 percent between 1970 and 1980 alone – and
losing roughly a quarter of its mid-century population of two million people as
of the Year 2000 census. It is doubtful that, even if the city had gained in
population and managed to maintain a majority of those inhabitants, Bacon’s
duplicitous circulation schemes would have been much warranted.
Bacon’s concern with functionally determining circulation was not limited
to highways and mega-projects. Alongside the “super-sizing” of portions of
Market Street to the east and west of Penn Square, and effectively evacuating
whatever street-life previously existed in these areas, he proposed (and partially
achieved) closing Chestnut Street, one block south of Market Street, to
automobile traffic in order to restore its role as “the great walking street” from
river to river (but proposed a new trolley there for the less hardy). If Market
Street was to act as the modern, infrastructural east–west spine of the city,
Chestnut Street was to serve as the main spine of an alternative, small-scale
pedestrian network linked to the restored Old City, passing directly in front of
Independence Hall, between the new Independence Mall and newly renovated
areas of Society Hill.
Perhaps the development most responsible for changing the perception of
Philadelphia within the city’s general population was the gentrification of
Society Hill. Drawing its name from the Free Society of Traders, an early and
short-lived group given settlement privileges by William Penn, the area is
comprised of roughly 15 blocks southeast of Independence Square. Adjacent to
the heart of the colonial town, Society Hill had been the site of the city’s finest
homes during the colonial and revolutionary periods. The Park Service, which
cleared all but the noteworthy colonial structures east of Independence Square,
saw its strategy extended by the city, as it cleared out the old food markets on
Dock Street and demolished much of the remaining “non-colonial” fabric.
Having taken many properties through foreclosure and eminent domain, they
were then transferred into the hands of the private Old Philadelphia Corporation,
which sold roughly 600 individual houses back to private citizens at very low
prices, with a stipulation that they be restored to their colonial glory. The city,
along with the OPC and other private development interests, undertook the
process of filling in the rest of the demolished areas with sensitively-scaled
townhouse developments and residential parks, making Society Hill an attractive
and affluent enclave by the 1970s.35
Bacon’s landmark project in the area was the construction of Society Hill
Towers, a luxury high-rise and townhouse project designed by I. M. Pei. Built
around the site of the old Dock Street markets, atop a hill formed by a parking
plinth, the composition of the Towers extended from the axis of the restored
colonial market Head House. Among other claims made for this project, Bacon
stated that the vertical proportions of the Tower’s glass and concrete face
recalled the six-over-six windows of the surrounding colonial buildings, despite
the more than ten-fold difference in scale. Bacon’s touting of this project as a
unique and harmonious blend of the (now clichéd) “old and new” is reinforced
by the picture used on the cover of Time and in many other promotions for the
city: Bacon is set against a background made by the abstract grid of the towers
with a colonial light-post in the foreground in-between. The viewer of this
illustration was to infer that Bacon was the medium through which these two
distinct historical periods were bridged (Figure 8.8).
The rapid pace of the transformation of Society Hill produced several
palpable effects that other longer-term projects had yet to yield. Wealthy
Philadelphians were now not only reinvesting in the city through their business
efforts, but were also moving into the Old City. The 1,500 or so new and
renovated residences completed by the middle 1960s formed a relatively small
number compared to the general rate at which middle-class people were leaving
the city’s neighborhoods at that time. Nevertheless, the quaint postcard
atmosphere of Society Hill had a symbolic impact, dovetailing nicely with the
interest generated by the restored shrines of Independence National Park and the
emerging nightlife on South Street. The area quickly began to lure significant
numbers of tourists and suburban visitors eager for an adventurous outing in the
“city.”
By the early 1960s, Bacon’s initiatives were beginning to have
unanticipated effects. Expressways on the city’s north, east and western eastern
edge had been approved, and the long process of demolition and construction
had begun. Although not yet approved, the planned cross-town expressway on
South Street had by the late 1950s begun to depress investment and real estate
values along the expressway’s projected path. The South Street corridor had
historically been an active area that welcomed immigrants to the city. Dominated
by Jewish settlers and merchants from the late nineteenth century onwards, and
later home to a Black community on its western extent, the area began to draw
bohemians in the late 1950s, who were no doubt attracted to its cheap rents,
funky atmosphere and jazz clubs. By 1963, the street’s reputation was summed
up in a line from a popular “Philadelphia Sound” Doo-Wop record, “South
Street” by the Orlons: “Where do all the hippies meet? South Street! South
Street!”
The anti-urban renewal ethos that began to emerge in the 1960s in the wake
of Jane Jacob’s consciousness-raising Death and Life of the Great America City
found its local expression in Philadelphia in a fight concerning the South Street
Expressway. Under the banner “Houses not Highways,” a campaign to block the
expressway was organized by the Citizen’s Committee to Preserve and Develop
the Cross-town Community. The CCPDCC was a coalition of Black residents
living along and south of the proposed highway, affluent white residents from
Rittenhouse Square and the recently gentrified Society Hill to the north, “hippie”
homesteaders, and South Street merchants.
The Black community in particular objected in principle to the racial
discrimination implied by the expressway’s creation of an “effective buffer
zone” between the Central Business District and the (poor) residential areas to
the south. Along with the accusation of not-so-subtle racism, they faulted the
city for its failure to offer a credible plan to re-house the several thousand
residents that would be displaced by the highway. The coalition elicited the
interest of a new generation of planners and architects – most notably Denise
Scott Brown, who, having just undertaken a landmark study of “strip” urbanism
in Las Vegas, was asked to develop a plan to show the viability of a revitalized
South Street corridor. Sensing the political winds in 1967, then-Mayor Tate
withdrew his support for the project and decided to “let the people have their
victory,” despite continuing pressure to build the expressway both from the
city’s chamber of commerce and from Bacon himself.36 It took several more
years’ worth of battles before the expressway project finally died. Tired-out by
the vociferous opposition of the “young liberals,” Bacon retired as Executive
Director of the Planning Commission in 1969.37

The agency of planning and design in Philadelphia

In the critical period of economic and urban transformation that followed the
Second World War, Philadelphia consistently reinvested more in its downtown
than in the extended network of neighborhoods that make up the bulk of the city.
It is difficult to discern the degree to which Edmund Bacon, or the Planning
Commission he directed, would have been able – had they been inclined – to
guide or influence these decisions in another direction. By mid-century,
downtown business and real-estate interests had for years been paying taxes to
the city on properties whose assessments had been maintained at artificially high
levels. By bringing pressure to bear on the city’s planning and redevelopment
efforts, the financial establishment sought not only to reach their broader, long-
term goal of stimulating new, outside investment in the city, but also to recoup
their losses in property values and inflated tax payments.
The visions floated by the Better Philadelphia Exhibition may have stressed
the importance of re-planning the whole city, but the substantial resources
commanded by the backers of the Greater Philadelphia Movement appear to
have been primarily expended on the downtown. Nevertheless, for Bacon and
the group of design and policy professionals empowered by Philadelphia’s
reform-minded democratic city government, the emphasis on the core of the city
surely must have been justified in more altruistic terms. In her assessment of the
Better Philadelphia Exhibition’s attempts at constructing a common ground of
urban interests free of the ideological extremes of conservatism and liberalism,
Amy Menzer refers to Arthur Schlesinger’s roughly concurrent concept of the
“Vital Center.”38 Built upon the supposed understanding of democratic notions
of freedom and liberty shared by a plurality of Americans during the Cold War,
Schlesinger’s Vital Center was a political concept posing a “middle way” of
militant liberalism against the threats of communism and totalitarianism. In 1947
Schlesinger was a founding member of Americans for Democratic Action an
organization that counted among its members many of the reform-minded
politicians, activists and intellectuals that took the mantle in Philadelphia at mid-
century, including Edmund Bacon. It is perhaps not too farfetched to imagine
Bacon and his cohorts conceiving of the downtown’s symbolic potential as a
physical embodiment of the “vital center;” that is, as the common ground of an
entire city’s shared interests.39 If the city’s center could be revived and prosper,
especially considering its historic role as the “cradle of liberty,” then perhaps it
could act as a catalyst for remaking the disparate communities and interests
composing the rest of the city.
The “vital center” imagined by Schlesinger was more an idealistic concept
than a documented, stable consensus of broadly-shared values held across a
range of political constituencies. As the local struggle over the South Street
cross-town expressway revealed, groups with diverging political, economic and
racial interest may temporarily join forces over a shared cause, but such groups
do not necessarily constitute a “vital center.” Moreover, if by the late 1960s the
concept of a “vital center” was giving way to more contentious models of
political organization, a political figure could no longer justify his actions by
claiming to represent what was never more than a fugitive political body.
The question of whether Philadelphia’s downtown was revived at the cost
of the rest of the city cannot be clearly ascertained here, as the factors that would
have to be considered in making such a judgment go well beyond the purview of
planning and design. Moreover, because very few formerly industrial American
cities with profiles similar to Philadelphia’s have been able to stave off
population loss and physical decline, it is difficult to provide analogous
examples of how better planning and design might have overcome the ravaging
of much of Philadelphia outside its downtown. However, the consistent effects
of urban policy in the US notwithstanding, agents of planning and design in
Philadelphia, whether as visionary advocates or mere facilitators, did play a
substantial role in construing the city’s current form.
Bacon credits his success in transforming Philadelphia’s downtown to the
“power of ideas.” Yet once he became Executive Director of the Planning
Commission, Bacon seems to have focused little effort developing new ideas for
the metropolis as a whole, and certainly no ideas with as much potential to
capture the public imagination as those he advocated for the downtown. Early on
in his directorship Bacon took a principled stand against the over-large, a-
contextual format of federally-funded housing projects, opting instead to support
programs to reinforce existing neighborhood patterns through the renovation of
existing housing stock and the development of scatter-site housing. Although
Bacon sought out high-caliber architects, including Louis Kahn, to do this work,
and some laudable “model” projects were built, he never achieved his scatter-site
scheme in any substantial way.
Today, faced with many sparsely populated neighborhoods and thousands
of abandoned buildings that are literally falling down, Philadelphia’s Planning
Commission has undertaken an ambitious program selectively to clear many
parts of the city deemed to be obsolete remnants of the city’s industrial past.
Harking back to the emphasis of the regionally-focused, social equity planners at
mid-century, the commission is studying and implementing new, more suburban
(or at least lower-density) block and settlement patterns. Unfortunately, the
financial resources available at mid-century are now gone, along with the city’s
broader tax base. This financial circumstance has forced the planning
commission to explore schemes that might have helped unify the city in the
relatively more flush times at mid-century. In order to facilitate the reduction
and redistribution of public amenities such as health centers, schools, libraries
and public safety infrastructure, planners have begun to think beyond the
boundaries of historically established neighborhoods and reconceive the city as a
network of services shared across many communities.

Taking the towne for the city: the purview of urban

design
Edmund Bacon’s work followed a period of unprecedented urban expansion and
modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the
fundamental nature of cities, Philadelphia included, had changed. The concept of
urban design emerged in the late 1940s as a way for the professional apparatus
of architecture better to address these changes. As the director of Philadelphia’s
Planning Commission, and later as the author of Design of Cities, Bacon played
a seminal role in establishing urban design as both a discipline and an actor in
the shaping of cities in the mid-twentieth century.
Bacon conceived urban design as a means to recover the civilized form of
the European city within the modern metropolis, bringing the new scale and
complexity of modern architecture and development under the discipline of a
more humanistic order. This attitude is well-illustrated in Bacon’s Design of
Cities, where a majority of the examples are drawn from a western tradition of
city building, in which Renaissance Florence is taken as the great paradigm. In
Design of Cities and many public statements about his work in Philadelphia,
Bacon devotes much rhetoric to the importance of “public process,” “feedback
mechanisms” and “democracy in action.” Yet he states that city making is “an
act of will,” and draws inspiration from the harmonious design of cities executed
by mostly monarchic or papal authorities. Was the “will” Bacon referred to his
own, or that of the “the people,” transfixed by “power of ideas?”40 Certainly,
prior to the reform movement that brought him into power, no clear public
authority existed in Philadelphia, where almost since its inception private,
patrician interests and commercial enterprise had shaped the city.41 That most of
great public works and monuments in Philadelphia’s downtown are named after
figures from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – William Penn and
Benjamin Franklin are the most numerous – speaks not only of the way in which
the city’s colonial past provides the sustaining mythology of the city’s
importance, but of the reticence on the part of Philadelphia’s citizens to put their
own mark on the city in the intervening years.
Bacon’s recourse to William Penn is neither innocent nor inconsequential.
Rather than contend with the physical 300-year history of Philadelphia – a
speculatively driven, redbrick, mercantile city – Bacon instead chose to focus on
a reification of Penn’s original plan for a “green county towne.” An early
scheme related to the Penn Center development epitomizes both Bacon’s attitude
toward the built history of the city that preceded him and his use of Penn as a
symbolic figure. Finding fault with the inefficient traffic patterns produced by
the diagonal of Greber’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway (Bacon planned to replace
the Parkway’s function as a gateway into the city with the Vine Street
expressway), Bacon terminated the Parkway two blocks before Penn Square,
“restoring” the surrounding rectilinear blocks. Linked to this reorganization of
traffic patterns was a proposal to tear down the imposing City Hall on Penn
Square, another “inefficient” nineteenth-century structure, leaving only the tower
at its center (Figure 11.13).
11.13
Model, proposal for Penn Center and altered City Hall, Redevelopment Area Plan, Philadelphia
Planning Commission, 1952
Source: Redevelopment Area Plan, Philadelphia Planning Commission, 1952

Conceived in an allegorical mode by Alexander Milne Calder, along with

other sculptures depicting the history of the city and state, a 37-foot-high bronze
statue of William Penn, Philadelphia’s great patriarch, sits atop the tower of the
massive City Hall.42 The statue of Penn faces northeast, towards Penn Treaty
Park, the supposed site of a treaty signing between Penn and the Lenni Lenape
Indians. The Charter of Pennsylvania is held in Penn’s left hand. Following the
erection of the statue in 1894, a “gentleman’s agreement” emerged among
planners and real-estate developers, prohibiting buildings in the centercity from
surpassing the brim of Penn’s hat in height.43 When Bacon proposed to remove
all of City Hall, except the tower and Penn’s statue, he was not only reinforcing
the importance of Penn’s control over the height of buildings in the city and the
symbolic function of his backward glance, but also revealing two other biases.
First, it showed his distaste for everything the City Hall stood for; its decadent,
Second Empire style would have been anathema to a mid-century modernist
such as Bacon, and redolent of the corrupt city government that had built and
occupied the building in its first 50 years of existence. Perhaps more critical was
the desire to manifest Penn’s most enduring physical legacy in the city – the
green public squares – by returning an open space to Central (now Penn) Square,
thereby linking the figure of Penn to the very open space he had envisioned.
 By using Penn as the animating figure for the urban design of the city,
writing the “old” into the “new,” Bacon was also working in an allegorical
mode. Invoking the moral authority of the colonial age inaugurated by Penn, and
the rather puritanical character of its architecture, he attempted to erase as much
as possible the detritus of 200 years of urban speculation. In so doing, he hoped
to kindle a rebirth of the city with a puritanical urbanism characterized by
discreet circulation, structural clarity, visual transparency and pastoral open
space. Egbert’s 1928 scheme for Independence Mall had contained the entire
formula: eliminate, as much as possible, all but the colonial structures, whose
established historical significance and small scale made them entirely accessible
to a suburban population increasingly less inclined to dense, complex forms of
urbanity; optimize access, first by automobile and then by mass-transit; and
finally, leverage the restored “history,” new transportation infrastructure and
open space to promote new commercial development – the only truly bankable
form of rebirth (Figure 11.14).

11.14
Illustrative plan for downtown Philadelphia, 1961
Source: Philadelphia Planning Commission Report, 1961

While the allegory of the old colonial city giving birth to a new modern city
appealed to the city’s chauvinism, it was destructive in the way that it ignored
those aspects of the city that had emerged during the intervening years,
particularly the bulk of the city built in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Thus the colonial allegory failed to provide a historical idea or
sustaining myth that encompassed the whole city, as opposed to focusing
selectively on its old center.
Louis Kahn, Bacon’s contemporary and Philadelphia’s most esteemed
architect of the period, gave the theme of defending the old center above all else
its most potent and explicit expression. During the period 1947–1962, Kahn
developed a series of studies and proposals that addressed many of the same
issues and assumptions as those undertaken by Bacon and the Planning
Commission. Highly enigmatic and romantic in flavor, Kahn’s ideas influenced
many of the more seemingly sober schemes that were adopted. Most famous
among Kahn’s many studies for Philadelphia was one from 1953 addressing the
reorganization of traffic in the centercity. Attempting to reunify the downtown
through a new “order of movement,” Kahn redefined streets in the existing grid
by referring to the kinds of “activities” or traffic they would serve – bus,
pedestrian, automobile, etc. The new order of movement was to be held in
balance by encircling the original bounds of Penn and Holme’s plan with large
expressways. Monumentalizing the planning commission’s traffic scheme, Kahn
likened the expressways to the fortifying walls of the medieval city at
Carcassonne, only now understood as “viaducts” channeling automobile traffic
around the city. Kahn even replicated the architecture of fortifications with large,
cylindrical parking towers lining the edge of the expressways. The parking
towers were to act as great lithic gates to the city, keeping the hordes of
automobiles from entering the city and disrupting its pedestrian life – a scheme
not unlike those later adopted in pre-industrial European city centers ill-suited to
automobile traffic. Anticipating Bacon, but perhaps drawing more inspiration
from an Ur-city of ancient roman ruins than from Bacon’s Ur-colonial city,
Kahn shows the existing centercity reduced to historical monuments, circulation,
and swaths of open green space (Independence Mall). Having taken the
reification of the city’s historic form to a greater extreme than Bacon, Kahn then
reinhabited the city with space-frame-like buildings that projected a new,
progressive image for the city. In one highly evocative bird’s-eye perspective
sketch of this scheme, the only existing building depicted is Independence Hall
(Figure 11.15).
11.15
Sketch, Louis Khan study for Philadelphia, 1953
Source: Kahn Collection, Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Gift of Richard Saul
Wurman

Bacon and Kahn, both highly influential figures within their respective
professional communities, aimed their efforts in Philadelphia towards the
retrieval of a more humanistic, pre-industrial city, as embodied in the potential
of the physical layout of the old center. Kahn’s rendering of the old city as a
defensive fortress revealed what may have been a widely held sentiment among
architects and urbanists; a fear that the old city, with its grand institutions and
high culture, was going to be lost to decentralization and the growing popularity
of suburban life. The fact that the new city walls created by the expressways
corresponded to boundaries that defined well-established race and class
distinctions within the city speaks two things: either these architects were naive
in refusing to see that their plans materially solidified spatial, political and
economic cleavages in the city, or they were acquiescing to the political and
economic power of their sponsors – or both.44 Certainly the question of who
gained and who lost in the transformation of the city overseen by Bacon and
imagined by Kahn is easy to answer. Downtown business interests, those
wealthy enough to invest in real estate within the centercity, downtown arts and
educational institutions and tourism, hospitality and restaurant industries all
gained. With a few exceptions, everyone outside the downtown area lost in terms
of investment in infrastructure, city services and declining land values.
The urban design of Philadelphia in the post-war period can be taken as
constitutive of the historical viewpoint and methods that define urban design as a
practice. The most frequent justification for concentrating on the city centers was
that the centers offered a level of authenticity and dynamism that could provide
an attractive counter to the lure of the suburbs. Yet the attribution of authenticity
to “place” in a society characterized by mobility and change may be as fleeting
as the attribution of “newness.” Where the redesign of Philadelphia’s center was
concerned, it is certainly ironic that the monuments supposedly contributing to
an authenticity of “place” were framed by an infrastructure of mobility.
The reactionary posture taken by many of the founders of urban design
practice towards the new city is an aspect of their nostalgia for an historical form
of city and a corresponding aversion to the “vital messy-ness” found in the
“difficult whole” of the contemporary city.45 Their nostalgia was inspired by the
European cities they may have experienced as soldiers or as tourists, or perhaps
by way of the European “masters” that they studied under, or conceivably was
based on a longing for an apocryphal small-town America. Predisposed by their
nostalgia against the seemingly endless, unbounded extents of the new
metropolis, and lacking the analytical and representational tools to read the
physical and programmatic patterns of these new spaces, they focused on the old
centers. Urban design, as Bacon conceived it, still understood the city in static,
historical terms as a center with discreet subsidiary districts. By the mid-1960s,
research by figures such as Melvin Weber revealed that large cities like
Philadelphia had already become something else; a complex, multinucleated
network of commercial, industrial, domestic, recreational and cultural uses
linked by rapidly evolving transportation and communication technologies.
William Penn had conceived of Philadelphia as a modern city, where an
experiment with religious tolerance and town planning was to be financed by the
selling of bonus plots to investors in Pennsylvania land. Cities were not in need
of fortification by the seventeenth century, and Penn clearly foresaw an
advantage in the open, ambiguous boundaries of the city. By cauterizing the city
within its historical boundaries, and concentrating too much on the literal
dimensions of Penn’s plan, the schemes brought to fruition by Bacon overlooked
the larger lessons that can be taken from Philadelphia’s historical development
as the outcome of Penn’s broad vision. Taking Penn’s scheme for Philadelphia
literally, one would start by understanding the city as a center of cultural and
economic exchange for a vast region. Given that the region has continued to
grow exponentially since the colonial period, it follows that for the city to
continue to function as not only a symbolic but also a substantive center, it too
would have to expand exponentially in both scale and in the diversity of its
programs and inhabitants.46 Instead of envisioning this new metropolis, those
entrusted with the urban design of Philadelphia consistently mistook the towne
for the city.
Notes
1 Distinctions between a town and a metropolis would typically hinge on considerations such as
population size, geographic extent and other factors, including physical density and the cultural
diversity of inhabitants.
2 Reps, 1965, pp. 152–153.
3 Bronner, 1962, pp. 81–82.
4 Bronner, 1962, p. 85.
5 Bronner, 1962, p. 87.
6 Bronner, 1962, p. 87.
7 Meyers (ed.), 1959, c.1912, pp. 261–273.
8 Bronner, 1962, pp. 97–101.
9 Reps, 1965, p. 161.
10 Bronner, 1962, p. 102.
11 By 1850, just prior to the incorporation of Philadelphia county, the population of the city’s adjacent
liberty lands, which came to be know as the Northern Liberties district, was, combined with the more
westerly Spring Garden district, approximately 100,000 people, making this area alone the sixth largest
city in the U.S.
12 Reps, 1965, p. 172.
13 Penn has considered building his own house on the site.
14 At this, the country’s first public, popular museum, Peale combined his portraits of luminaries from the
American Revolution with paleontological finds, including the mastodon from Newburg, New York,
which Peale advertised as “the great incognitum.” Constructing a pre-historic lineage for America,
Peale’s museum reflected late-eighteenth-century efforts to legitimize the American project in the light
of natural history.
15 Green, 1993, p. 197.
16 Currently the site is overseen by the National Park Service, whose renovation projects on the site
continue into the present. See National Park Service, 1994, pp. 11–20.
17 National Park Service, 1994, pp. 22–28.
18 Among approximately twelve proposals developed made between 1915 and the adaptation of a plan in
the mid-1940s, Paul Cret’s was perhaps the most sophisticated. Clearing a half block of buildings north
of Chestnut Street to Ludlow Street (one of the built-up secondary alleys), Cret proposed two similar
schemes, the first with a semicircular plaza and the second with a square plaza. Cret’s schemes kept the
plaza small and located a flight of steps below-grade, a gesture that would have limited long views
toward the diminutive colonial statehouse, thereby increasing the perception of its scale. See National
Park Service, 1994, pp. 27–28.
19 National Park Service, 1994, pp. 29–32.
20 National Park Service, 1994, p. 63.
21 For an account of opposition to the wholesale clearance of the mall site on the part of the Park
Service’s architect, Charles E. Peterson, see Greiff, 1987, pp. 49–58; Mumford, 1957.
22 Extending the logic of the easterly portion of the National Park, Edmund Bacon later developed a
meandering route to the eastern riverfront through a series of leafy, inter-block pedestrian walks.
23 Bauman, 1983, pp. 174–176.
24 Barnett and Miller, 1983, pp. 5–7.
25 Constance Dallas, as quoted in the “The Philadelphia Story,” American Planning and Civic
 Association, 1953 pp. 13–16.
26 See “Philadelphia Plans Again,” Architectural Forum, 1947, pp. 65–68.
27 For a detailed account of the programs associated with the exhibition, see Menzer, 1999, pp. 112–136.
28 Menzer, 1999, p. 115.
29 Menzer, 1999, p. 118.
30 Constance Dallas, as quoted in the “The Philadelphia Story,” p. 15.
31 Bacon, as quoted in Barnett and Miller, 1983, p. 7.
32 Bacon, 1950–1952.
33 Bacon, 1952, p. 56.
34 Bacon, 1974, p. 126.
35 Neil Smith has made a detailed study of the collusive political and business relationships that allowed
the gentrification of Society Hill. He has shown how wealthy individuals appointed to commissions
overseeing initiatives in the environs of the Center City were, at the same time, directing local banking
and financial institutions making loans and guarantees in the area. Some of these same individuals were
then able to buy property as private citizens at greatly reduced prices, and reap great profits after
renovating them. See Smith, 1996.
36 For an account of the fight over the expressway, see Clow, 1989.
37 Bacon, as quoted in Barnett and Miller, 1983, p. 4.
38 Schlesinger, 1949.
39 Amy Menzer has argued that the Better Philadelphia Exhibition was an attempt to empower a process
through which a vital political and physical “center” for the whole city could be engendered. Yet
subsequent to the exhibition, the downtown, by virtue of the planning and investment processes
actually undertaken, became, as a site and an idea, the de facto center.
40 Bacon, as quoted in Barnett and Miller, 1983, p. 9.
41 See Bass Warner, 1987.
42 Philadelphia’s City Hall is the largest single municipal building in the U.S.
43 The agreement to not build above Penn’s Hat was not broken until 1986.
44 I use the word sponsor as opposed to the larger public body design professionals are typically assumed
to represent.
45 These quoted terms refer to concepts of urbanity first advocated by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown in the 1960s.
46 The reform of Philadelphia might have concentrated on expanding the boundaries of the center to at
least include the areas north of Vine Street – areas that were once the center of the city’s residential
population, but are now devastated.
Chapter 12

San Francisco – San Francisco in an

Age of Reaction
Mitchell Schwarzer

In San Francisco, the movement toward self-realization has reached such heights
of indulgence that it is leveling the creation of inspiring urban design. Since the
early 1980s, in a city that celebrates individualism, the collective discipline of
architecture has taken a pounding. Here on the western shores of the North
American continent, the American dream has taken a turn into activism bred on
affluence and adversity. San Francisco’s public planning process is lousy with
naysayers. At the initial whiff of a new project, opponents spring up like oxalis,
a prolific weed with yellow flowers that carpets the ground here after the first
winter rains. These not-so-laidback Californians, who stymie architectural
innovation in this once innovative city, defend a medley of values premised on
history, esthetics, cultural politics and, most of all, an impossible-to-generalize
set of self-interests. They fight to keep precious vistas and exclude new
buildings – new building that add cars to the streets, new buildings that look
different, any structure of monolithic stature, steely materials, odd angles.
Strange that in a place distinguished by progressive politics and an artistic spirit,
the reactionaries stand out when it comes to urban design.
If you’re going to San Francisco, the best new architecture you see might be
the International Terminal (2001) at the SFO airport, about eight miles south of
city limits. Designed by Craig Hartman of Skidmore Owings and Merrill, its
soaring flights of trusses and space, foregrounded by a minestrone of freeway
and parking-lot structures, would likely have been grounded by the municipal
planning process had the building been located in the city proper. Practically the
only place within San Francisco where far-out architecture has been realized of
late is the Yerba Buena Redevelopment Area, a new downtown district of
convention centers, museums, hotels, and entertainment spots built atop what
was once skid row. Yet Mario Botta’s eyepopping San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art (1995) or James Polshek’s functionally expressive Center for the
Arts Theater (1994) might never have risen outside redevelopment jurisdiction.
Swarms of opponents would have massed like the birds in Alfred Hitchcock’s
film, lining up ominously at meetings and cackling that the museum’s faceted
brickwork and sliced cylindrical tower had no local precedents, or that the
theater’s collage of cubic volumes and vivid colors wasn’t consistent with the
historic materials and textures of the area.
Just about the only thing that flocks of people can agree on is that San
Francisco is worth fighting for. The city dons a wardrobe of arresting visages.
San Francisco, gridded, whitish, wooden and stucco, rolls up and down over 40
hills, the building-enhanced last dance of the California Coast Ranges as they
shoot down to the sea. Many valuable struggles have been undertaken in the
name of these beauties and intricacies – against billboards that mar the skyline,
chain stores that put local stores out of business, and unfair tenant evictions that
force poorer people out. Yet some San Franciscans are loving a traditionalist
esthetic vision of the town to death.
Love is often blind. Because many of San Francisco’s vocal citizenry came
to this city from elsewhere, and because they came here not by accident but by
intention, they hold particularly strong attachment to early impressions,
memories of youthful romps from bay to breakers, and carefree days spent in
small cream-colored flats that rented for pittance. Proposed changes threaten
people’s core identities. If San Francisco doesn’t look the way it did, they too
will have changed. The love of older architecture and hatred of the new
expresses a fear of aging and the loss of one’s lodestar. Someday the city might
be looked at as a museum to the region’s cult of perpetual youth, just as Venice,
Italy, has become a museum of Renaissance coloratura. And as in Venice, in
San Francisco tourism sways the urban design process. San Francisco holds
greater claim (through frequent use) to the nickname “America’s Favorite City”
than any other place. In the media, million-dollar images treat the city as a cable-
car ride to the stars or a spin under the Golden Gate Bridge. Not only do famous
sites like the bridge, Transamerica Pyramid or Coit Tower hold court; ridges of
Victorians and Edwardians also file out peaked, turreted, and reliably
recognizable rhythms. Alas, postcard San Francisco makes it hard for the real
city to grow. Through mass exposure in magazines, films, and television, San
Francisco is immediately and spectacularly identifiable, branded, marqueed, a
reel of appetizing scenes. The success of tourism encases “Baghdad by the Bay”
in imagistic scaffolding that blocks deeper visual grains.
12.1
A steely prototype for the narrow lot, 1022 Natoma Street, Stanley Saitowitz architect
Photo by Pad McLaughlin

12.2
The bane of the bay window, recent condominiums, 16th and Missouri Streets
Photo by Pad McLaughlin

While tourism has been a part of San Francisco’s mix since the nineteenth
century, the city’s architectural vision turned from the future to the past during
the 1970s – the decade during which tourism once and for all eclipsed shipping
and manufacturing as the number one industry. Nowadays, factories,
warehouses, dry docks, and bridges embody a little noticed industrial San
Francisco. Despite their showcasing in movies, like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty
Harry series, such structures hardly figure in public debate about the city’s
architectural identity. The Eastern Waterfront is left to rot, a vast memory-tomb
of the city’s former working classes and mechanical innovations. Out of benign
municipal neglect, some innovative architecture has been built in these coarser
warehouse and factory barrens. In particular, Stanley Saitowitz’s loft projects
propose an inventive typology of continuous living space expressed through
large clear-span windows and assertive industrial materials. However,
implausible as it sounds, even amid the decaying hulks of manufacturing and
shipping some other designers sweeten their facades with Victorian finery and
lace. In a Potrero Hill complex completed in 1999 bay windows protrude out of
a loft, despite the fact that the nearest residential building with bay windows is
several blocks away and the immediate surroundings stare back corrugated
metal, cracked cement, and clumps of anise weeds. If architecture that expresses
contemporary lifestyle and historical industry can’t be built here, then where?
Certainly not in the other new city district – besides Yerba Buena – of the
past twenty years, South Beach, located along what had been a working
waterfront of piers and warehouses south of downtown. Past the palm-lined
Embarcadero, South Beach revels in patent-yuppie historicism. When the San
Francisco Giants baseball team decided to build a new ballpark (completed in
2000) there, the architectural team, Hellmuth Obata and Kassebaum, looked for
inspiration to nearby brick warehouses and not nearby concrete warehouses. In
spite of the fact that brick bearing wall construction makes no sense in
earthquake country and was abandoned after the 1906 earthquake, brick veneer
covers most of the ballpark’s forceful concrete and steel skeleton as well as other
new buildings in the vicinity. Along with fake stone copings and a clock tower,
Pacific Bell Park (while a wonderful place to watch a baseball game) looks from
the outside like any other retro ballpark or a Rouse festival marketplace, a neo-
Baltimore by the San Francisco bay.
Two major urban design controversies of recent years stand out. In 1999,
needing to replace their seismically-damaged building, the M. H. de Young
Museum proposed a new building for its site in Golden Gate Park. With great
foresight, the museum’s trustees chose the firm of Herzog & de Meuron. Known
for their approach to building skin as an urban-scale screening room, the
architects unveiled a façade of glass and dimpled/perforated copper that would
generate intricate textures playing off light and nearby flora. Nonetheless, the
feat of getting their proposal for a new de Young approved by the city has
approached the magnitude of Hercules’s fifth labor cleaning the Augean Stables.
Through several seasons of public meetings, opponents argued that the design
didn’t harmonize with the natural context of the park, even though no building
presumably could meet that demand, and despite the fact that the park’s tall
cypress, pine, and eucalyptus trees are themselves an artificial terrain, planted
during the nineteenth century atop an unglamorous landscape of shrubs, grasses,
and sand dunes. Some citizens loudly advocated resurrecting the Museum’s
former Spanish Revival design on the grounds that its historicism better matched
the traditions of the city, and ignoring the fact that such period revivals bring
back to life architectural symbols of colonialism offensive to some Latinos and
Native Americans. Finally, their arguments faltering, diehards settled on battling
the education tower proposed by Herzog & de Meuron. Incredibly, after several
millennia of cultures around the world erecting towers so that they could be
viewed from long distances and provide a focal point for a place, the diehards
felt the only appropriate tower should be one that can’t be seen from afar.
Eventually, the museum was forced to cut the height of the tower from 160 feet
to 144 feet.

12.3
Bring me back to the old ball game, Pacific Bell Park, Third and King Streets, Hellmuth Obata
Kassebaum architects
Photo by Pad McLaughlin

In 2002, a second controversy came to a close. After a long planning

process, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center opened on
Market and Octavia Streets. Designed by Jane Cee and Peter Pfau, the building’s
polychrome glass curtain walls brilliantly express the different shades of the
LGBT community as well as their travails and triumphs. Unfortunately, only
part of the center as originally proposed was built. Because a Victorian occupies
the corner lot, the city’s preservation community rose up in arms at the first
mention of its possible demolition. Though the three-story wooden building has
no striking architectural or historical features, and hundreds like it grace the
streets, preservationists argued that it forms a unique trapezoidal response to
Market Street’s diagonal clash with the grid. A photo that shows the building
standing at the edge of devastation caused by the 1906 fire also stirred emotions.
These appeals worked, and the building was given landmark status. The
architects had to forsake the far grander possibilities of using the corner, and
instead settle for the mid-block lot. Together the two buildings look separated by
more than just a century. They embody the city’s quibbling march to the future.
Given all that has been said so far – the power of tourism, tradition, and all
the trimmings – it’s no wonder that the preservation of modernist architecture
has been a low priority. In 1996, the Red Cross Building by Gardner Dailey, one
of the city’s leading mid-century architects, was demolished with little
opposition. In 2001, the same fate befell the Daphne Funeral Home, designed by
the noted Los Angeles firm of Jones and Emmons. Even though the Daphne –
the only small-scale public example of an open plan in the city – was a far more
important work of architecture than the LGBT’s corner Victorian, the battle to
save it went down to defeat. The reason has to do with the fact that for
preservationists, modernism has long been the enemy. Despite the current rise of
worldwide interest in a revamped architectural modernism, postmodernism still
reigns in San Francisco.

12.4
Building a diverse community, Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center, Market and Octavia
Streets, Jane Cee and Peter Pfau architects
Photo by Pad McLaughlin

How did this reactive state of affairs acquire such tidal force? To
understand the anti-modernism of the past twenty years, one has to go back
several decades. In the late 1950s, San Francisco was the first American city to
begin dismantling plans to throw a spaghetti-jumble of freeways atop the small
46-square-mile city. During the early 1970s, the term “Manhattanization” came
into vogue as part of an attack on highrise towers. Referendums were held, and
allowable building height and bulk came down. No downtown skyscraper would
ever again approach the heights of the Bank of America (779 feet) or
Transamerica Pyramid (853 feet), completed respectively in 1969 and 1972. Nor
would historic buildings, like the lost Montgomery Block (a longtime artistic
haven) or City of Paris Department Store, be demolished any longer. Plans for
slab, super-block urban renewal similarly shrank in scale, even though areas like
the Western Addition had already been severely torn apart. As elsewhere, the
autocratic ways of modernist urbanism brought about citizen reactions and urban
design re-evaluations. More than elsewhere, the San Francisco counterattack
hardened into dogma.

12.5
The great ornamental leap backward, apartment building, 21st Street and South Van Ness Avenue
Photo by Pad McLaughlin

The Urban Design Element of the city’s Master Plan has been the bible of
San Francisco’s architectural philosophy since its completion by the City
Planning Department in 1971. Boldly, it shifts the focus of architectural design
from issues of art, structure, and function to those of historic and geographic
context. Much of the plan makes sense. For instance, architects are encouraged
to preserve the city’s precipitous landforms by grouping towers on the tops of
hills instead of on their sides, where they would flatten the topography.
However, the costs outweigh the benefits. Architects are pushed to replicate the
contextual features of adjacent buildings in any new design. Even though most
new buildings are far larger than their Victorian or Edwardian predecessors, the
plan encourages that their massing be broken up to match the small lot sizes in
vogue a century ago. But should transitions between old and new buildings
reduce the latter’s design to dull reiteration? Are visually strong buildings that
contrast severely with their surroundings such a bad thing? If these policies had
been followed earlier in the city’s history, they would have prevented any
serious architecture. San Francisco would never have seen the likes of Willis
Polk’s Hallidie Building (1918) – one of the world’s first glass curtain walls – or
Timothy Pflueger’s 450 Sutter Street building (1930) – a streamlined appliqué of
glass and terracotta Mayan ornament onto a steel frame.
After more referendums, a subsequent planning document, the Downtown
Plan (1985), extended the use of design guidelines. A highpoint of the plan is its
strict preservation of over 500 significant historical buildings, setting a national
standard. The Downtown Plan also mandates several conservation (or
preservation) districts, intended to prevent new buildings whose scale and
composition would overwhelm older structures. The plan goes too far, however,
by telling architects how to compose, forcing them to clad steel frames with tops
and veneers that cause new tall buildings to look all too much like wedding
cakes. In their zeal to bring back the good old days of skyscrapers, the planners
overlooked the fact that their model era, 1906–1933, wasn’t any longer than the
age of modernism, 1945–1975. In reality, the city’s urban design policies
regulate not as much on the basis of context – for the modern context is routinely
excluded – but on preferred temporal style.
This postmodern ideology leaves out the critical post-war period of San
Franciscan cultural ascendancy. In almost every artistic arena, from poetry to
architecture, San Francisco came into its own after the Second World War – not
before it. No reasonable San Franciscan would disavow such local post-war
painters as Clyfford Still, Elmer Bischoff, Jay DeFeo, and Joan Brown;
photographers like Minor White and Ansel Adams; poets such as Kenneth
Rexroth, William Everson, and Michael McClure; independent filmmakers
including James Broughton, Bruce Baillie, Bruce Connor, and Sidney Patterson;
and landscape architects like Thomas Church and Lawrence Halprin. Why, then,
should the debate on the city’s architectural identity omit the important
contributions of William Wurster, Joseph Esherick, Moore Lyndon Turnbull and
Whittaker, Anshen and Allen, and Skidmore Owings and Merrill, all of whom
built important buildings in the city and vicinity between the war and the 1970s?
Why, moreover, should forceful engineering structures not be considered part of
our urban design heritage? Eliminating modernism from the municipal debate on
urban design cuts San Francisco off from its own artistic legacy, the great
international works of the past century, and the most vital contemporary
architectural discourse.
Since the 1980s, forward-thinking architectural discourse has been
noticeably absent in San Francisco planning. After a history of proposing
Utopian schemes and then retrenching into downzoning and design guidelining,
the city has practically given up on long-range planning. Instead of moving
forward and adjusting the reactive strictures of the 1970s and 1980s, instead of
realizing that the reaction to modernism was as extreme as modernism itself, city
planning in San Francisco has shriveled to permit processing and a regulatory
scholasticism. One local architect compares going to the Building or City
Planning Departments for permit approval to Franz Kafka’s description of K.’s
dealings with the authorities of The Castle.
In large part, as mentioned above, the planners are merely responding to
vocal activists. Before the 1970s, San Franciscans were so preoccupied with
their dream city, they didn’t have time to wallow in details. Yet nobody in his or
her right mind would say that the city of late hasn’t cultivated a weighty self-
image. San Francisco’s gentrified neighborhoods are hotbeds of opposition to
architectural innovation or densification, masters of the arcane detail – whether
architectural, historical, or legal. Merely mentioning the Telegraph Hill Dwellers
or Noe Valley Neighbors is enough to strike fear into the heart of any
progressive architect. Paradoxically, in such neighborhoods (and there are lots of
them in the city) the disconnect between exuberant interior lifestyle and stolid
exterior expression couldn’t be greater. Gobs of money are spent on kitchen and
bathroom remodeling, but, thanks to planning policies and neighborhood
activists, gut-rehabbing homeowners go to great lengths to keep facades familiar.
Maybe living lavishly indoors induces people to pretend, at least from the
outside, that all’s as modest as it was 100 years ago. Or possibly those San
Franciscans who have cut ties to tradition and family find it more comforting to
live behind traditional facades, the same look of building that their faraway
families inhabit.
Sometimes planning shortsightedness has no neighborhood activist to
blame. In 1999, the Prada Company hired Rem Koolhaas to design a flagship
building on the corner of Grant Avenue and Post Street, in one of the Downtown
Plan conservation districts. At a meeting of the San Francisco Planning
Commission to approve the project in 2001, the City Planning Department,
citing its interpretation of the guidelines for the conservation district,
recommended disapproval. The basis for their negative recommendation? The
proposed building didn’t copy the compositional strategies of its older
neighbors, cornice line for cornice line. Even worse, they stated that the
proposed building stood out in excess of its public importance – whatever that
means. Effectively, the planners were saying that new architecture in a
conservation district established because of its prior architectural inventiveness
must not be inventive or conspicuous. They couldn’t see that Koolhaas’s design
actually advances the creative energies of its context. For starters, the Prada
building’s height and shape, and its articulation into a frame, fit squarely in the
mainstream of the district. But Koolhaas wouldn’t settle for meek replication.
His proposed stainless-steel façade is composed of transparent holes and opaque
discs that would create fantastic light effects on the interior and variable clouds
of luminosity on the exterior. What makes these urban design gestures successful
is that they ramp up the tradition of innovative illumination on Grant Avenue.
During the district’s reconstruction after the 1906 earthquake and fire, tone-
setting buildings had simple facades and large square windows that responded to
needs for illumination and exhibition. In sync, Koolhaas’s unusual fenestration
plays off today’s different needs for retail pomp through architectural spectacle.
12.6
Towards a new shopping, proposed Prada Store, Grant Avenue at Post Street, Rem Koolhaas
architect

Amazingly, in a city drowning in process and regulation, decades of

planning can be tossed aside when powerful interests intrude. Atop Potrero Hill,
the view north toward downtown San Francisco is the stuff car commercials are
made of. Steep streets cut straight sightlines toward gleaming skyscrapers. While
tall buildings make the panorama exciting, if a local government official has his
way no further monuments of architecture will spoil the prospect. In March of
2002, with little more than a few telephone calls, State Senator John Burton
stopped construction of a planned 17-story dormitory for the new University of
California at San Francisco’s campus at Mission Bay. No matter that the 700-
bed dormitory would have helped to ease a drastic affordable housing crunch.
No matter that the proposed building’s 160-foot height met the guidelines of the
Mission Bay Plan, approved in 1998 after 15 acrimonious years in the making.
How could the desires of one politician and a few hill residents for an
unchanged view trump the greater need for affordable housing? Why should the
planning process make it so difficult to build challenging architecture? Have
earlier struggles against historic demolitions, freeways, urban renewal, and
skyscrapers carried over to a permanent war against anything new and different?
While few San Franciscans dispute the sentiment that the city possesses an
incomparable landscape and that architecture and engineering have improved
this physical setting in the past, its citizens seem incapable of agreeing on how to
enhance it in the future.
Such indecisiveness proves costly. From 1996 until 2001, dot-coms, dot-
commers, and their martini-and-loft lifestyle overtook large parts of the city. San
Francisco, along with nearby Silicon Valley, was ground zero for the Internet
revolution, and as the economy boomed, the city underwent one of its most
traumatic periods of upheaval. Ironically, in a city that thought it had regulated
large-scale change out of existence, an economic gale blew into town and
brought about as much dislocation as the great urban renewal efforts of the
1960s.
As the dot-com boom has busted, San Francisco’s pivotal urban design
challenge is to overcome the climate of opposition. Over the past twenty years,
in any given situation, the naysayers have never held great numbers. Thanks to
the city’s exhaustive neighbor notification program and permit appeals process,
even a single opponent can generate considerable hurdles. The problem has
always been that the few people with an axe to grind are far more dogged than
those in support of a project. Yet in some of the recent urban design
controversies, an encouraging development has begun to manifest itself.
Increasing numbers of citizens are fed up with design mediocrity, and are
becoming more vocal. The long wave of architectural conservatism may have
crested. The Herzog and de Meuron museum is proceeding, in part because of
the intervention of local artists and architects. Despite the planners, the more
visionary ordinary citizens who sit on the planning commission approved
Koolhaas’s Prada Building. International architects like Thom Mayne, Renzo
Piano, and Daniel Liebeskind are in the final stages of designing significant
museums and public buildings. Downtown, several elegant glass-curtain-wall
skyscrapers have risen in the past few years, including Gary Handel’s sleek Four
Seasons Hotel (2001). Hopefully, in a few years time, the new wealth of world-
class architecture might cause more San Franciscans to see their city in a new
light, as a place of the future as well as of the past.
After all, the city doesn’t have a long history. Founded only a century and a
half ago, San Francisco’s reactive preoccupation with its visual image might be
understood as a momentary (although two-decade long) crisis in selfconfidence.
The climate for urbanistic experimentation is better in newer cities, like Houston
or Phoenix, that don’t dwell too much on their past identity. It’s also better in
older cities like London or Paris, where any new building joins an architectural
assemblage impossible to generalize, centuries of building activity that defeat
any idea of a singular urban image. In both cases, youthful and mature, the urban
climate accommodates new ideas and appearances. By contrast, San Francisco
has seemed lately like an overly responsible 30-something, all too eager to cut
off its wild years for a static ideal of ancestral foundations.

12.7
Curtain walls for our time, Four Seasons Hotel, Market Street at Grant Avenue, Gary Handel
architect
Photo by Pad McLaughlin
 In retrospect, the age of reaction has been as severe as the preceding age of
progress. From the late 1940s till the early 1970s, proponents of Utopian
modernism cast their vision of the city in bi-polar terms like blight vs renewal, or
outdated vs new. Then, from the mid-1970s onward, reactive postmodernists
similarly used oppositional frameworks like small vs large, or harmonious vs
contrasting. The past was seen by modernists as an impediment to the future,
while postmodernists turned the tables to recast the future as an impediment to
the past. Ultimately, aren’t these visions opposite sides of a coin? The modernist
highway to the future and the postmodernist detour to the past each offer limited
and exclusionary understandings of the city.
Struggles against new architecture discussed in this article point out the
dark side of urban design in conditions of affluence. For all that San Francisco’s
recent confrontational design politics (with its potent use of adjectives) suggests,
what it yields really is the ethos of individualism. The neighborhood activist’s
view of the city is of a neo-city, nurtured not by a love of density,
monumentality, and change, but by a power to control swathes of space, the
signal quality of American suburbia – not social interest but defense of private
interest, not people caught up in their desires to participate in a city but in their
fears of the city intruding upon them. The activists see San Francisco as a
patchwork of neighborly villages, yet in reality the city they envision is infected
by a romantic sense of timelessness, a city without change, the same tomorrow
as today, lovely, tidy, a closed canon. Do San Francisco’s fringes, its non-
traditional families, lifestyle experimenters, and counter-cultures add up to a
reduction when it comes to urban design, the hot life chilled in reports, meetings,
referendums, the protocols of mediocrity and resignation? Does the sum of
individuals equal nothing more, nothing new?
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, one can do no better than
expose this predicament of reactionary urban design. A city’s context can never
be a closed canon – indeed, the idea of canonical thinking is inimical to urban
growth and vitality. If San Francisco’s individuals truly want to build out from
the city’s context, they must acknowledge its complexity, volatility, and
frequently severe contrasts. San Francisco’s visual appeal has never rested on
smooth transitions or steady repetition. Compare the stylistic and textural jumble
of buildings on Russian Hill with the smooth monotonies on Sunset District
streets. The glorious moments of the city abruptly contrast water with land, grid
with topography, valleys with heights, nature with building, and buildings with
each other.
 The crux of architectural reaction in San Francisco can be traced to a
narrow and superficial definition of urban design context. While the city’s
Urban Design Element takes into account pre-war architecture and topography,
it ignores post-war design, infrastructure, technology, economics, and society.
The energies that can inform the design on any given parcel of land extend far
beyond issues of façade and massing conformity. Urban contexts are like
individuals before they congeal into the norms of identity, when they are still
open to multiple affiliations, experiences, and energies. Urban contexts must be
sought out in the moment like scents, the pungencies of San Francisco’s natural
environment, food culture, ethnic diversity, hi-tech economy, and complex
history – Victorians and Moderns, tourist landmarks and neighborhood nooks,
walking streets and driving streets. For example, the idea of the regional context
has long been over-simplified. In the past, Bay Region architectural movements
looked closely at local materials such as redwood and cedar trees. Yet the city of
San Francisco never had such trees. Its native flora, nonetheless, offers other
inspirations for design: looking at the chaparral alone – and its associations with
fire, sand, wind, cool sea air, serpentine soil, and drought inspires a wide range
of colors, shapes, and patterns. San Francisco, as its internationally recognized
food culture demonstrates, can realize original style out of the cornucopia of
local substance. What’s more, the city’s population, to an unprecedented extent,
represents all corners of the globe. What’s local is most likely an import from
somewhere else. But why aren’t the visual symbols and design strategies of
Asia, where over one-third of the city’s residents trace their origin, or Latin
America, where the largest group of Californians trace their ancestry, a larger
part of the debate on the city’s architectural identity? How long must we recycle
the same Victorian or Colonial details? San Francisco, as the Internet revolution
in communication shows, needs to search for other images, forms, and
dispositions of itself.
12.8
When structure mattered, Battleship Gun Crane, Hunters Point Naval Shipyard
Photo by Pad McLaughlin
12.9
The unseen landmark, Sutro Tower
Photo by Pad McLaughlin

How refreshing it would be to re-imagine the city through its lesser-known

industrial monuments. The most notable of these is certainly the unloved Sutro
Tower (1968), a 977-foot television and radio tower. Perched atop a hill (and
thus reaching 1,390 feet in the sky), the steel colossus dominates the city. Since
it looks like the mast of a galleon, the Sutro Tower could symbolically guide San
Francisco over the stormy seas of self-interest to new collective design
destinations. Another striking and unrecognized landmark is the re-gunning mole
crane (1947) at the Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard, at one time the world’s
mightiest hoisting machine. Visible from much of the southern part of the city
and especially the bay front, the cantilever arms of the 200-foot steel-truss crane
once lifted the turrets of guns onto the largest Second World War battleships. It’s
tempting to think of how the crane’s power could be used metaphorically to raze
bureaucratic gridlock and raise the city from its urban design doldrums.
Chapter 13

San Diego/Tijuana – An Urbanism

Beyond the Property Line
Teddy Cruz

A central urban crisis facing us today is inequality. Any discussion on

architecture and urbanism that does not begin by engaging the asymmetry of
urbanization today between enclaves of wealth and sectors of marginality would
simply perpetuate the powerlessness of design. The context of pressing socio-
political realities worldwide and the conditions of conflict have redefined the
territory of intervention. It is unsettling, in fact, to witness some of the most
“cutting edge” practices of architecture rush unconditionally to China and the
United Arab Emirates to build their dream castles, and in the process reduce
themselves to mere caricatures of agents of change, camouflaging, as they do,
gentrification with a massive hyper aesthetic and formalist project. I certainly
hope that in the context of urbanism’s and architecture’s euphoria for the
“Dubais” of the world in recent years, and the seemingly limitless horizon of
design possibilities they inspired, we now can be mobilized by a sense of
dissatisfaction, a feeling of “pessimistic optimism” that can provoke us to also
address, head on, the sites of conflict that define and will continue to define the
cities of the twenty-first century.
One of the primary conflicts in our time is the one generated by the current
gap dividing institutions of Urbanization and the Public. “Where is the PUBLIC
today?” is a fundamental question that must frame the point of departure to
revitalize our conversation about the future of the city. The shrinking relevance
of the public has become evident mainly since 2008 when the public bailed out
the architects of the economic crisis only to receive as repayment millions of
foreclosures in addition to unprecedented spending cuts in education, housing,
and infrastructure.
While this anti-public agenda is nothing new to the politics and economics
of urban development in the construction of the city, so are the periods in history
when the search for a collective imagination has been central to the formation of
institutions of urbanization. While there are similarities between the economic
downturns of 2008 and 1928, the decades following the Great Depression years
witnessed the emergence of the New Deal and with it new institutional synergies
across government, philanthropy, and civil society, which represented a
collective commitment to investment in public housing, infrastructure,
education, and services with the goal of generating a more equitable distribution
of economic and civic resources. Our current period of crisis has been defined by
exactly the opposite. The consolidation of power today is not only economic but
also political, changing the terms very dramatically by polarizing institutions and
publics in unprecedented ways.
So, because I do not think FDR will come back any time soon, and the
restoration of a topdown Public Project is unattainable in today’s political
climate driven by de-taxing of the wealthy and institutional atrophy, we must
begin this conversation by imagining other publics and their operational
dimension in the context of today’s inequality. As the concentration of resources
has been diverted, once more, so dramatically from the many to the very few, the
essential question is, what do we do in the meantime? As architects, we cannot
continue perpetuating the notion of a “free imagination” as our creative
prophylactic, keeping us at a “critical distance” from the crisis of the public and
the institutions in today’s conflicts. What we need is an “urgent civic
imagination” provoked by a “critical proximity” to the very conditions that
produced the crisis in the first place. How to intervene in the gap between the
topdown and the bottom-up while reconnecting art to the drama of the socio-
economic and political realities shaping the city today is an essential task, as an
anti-immigration, anti-taxes, anti-public, anti-infrastructure society today
continues to blindly defend a strange version of democracy as the almighty right
to be left alone.
What follows is a discussion in two parts: first, a general outline of the
border conditions that define the San Diego/Tijuana nexus and, second, a
discussion of what might be done to address the inequities so central to this
nexus to impart an understanding of the city through a discussion of practice.
The camouflaging of crisis: 60 linear miles of local
transborder urban conflict
“There is no such thing as a natural disaster,” the landscape architect and theorist
Anudartha Mathur has declared often, in the context of her work on the
Mississippi River. Disasters, she declares, happen when the logic of natural
systems is encroached on by stupid urban development. Every disaster yielding
human loss, socio-economic and environmental degradation, and political strife
can be traced to collisions provoked by either institutional idiocy or
discrimination, as topdown forces of urbanization and/or militarization clash
with bottom-up natural and social networks.
Much of my research on the transborder urbanisms that inform my practice
began as a desire to critically observe and trace the specificity of such conflicts
inscribed in the territory of the border between San Diego, in the US, and
Tijuana, Mexico, one of the most contested borders in the world. This
observation has not only enabled a practice of research, a sort of projective
forensics of the territory, but has also revealed the need to seek expanded notions
of architectural design. The revelation was simple: without retroactively tracing
and projectively altering the backward exclusionary policies that have guided the
construction of this territory over recent years, our work as architects will
continue to be a mere camouflaging (decorative at best) of selfish, oil-hungry
urbanization from China to Dubai to New York to San Diego.
Moving from these broad conceptual meditations to the specificity of the
San Diego–Tijuana border, one oscillates back and forth between two radically
different ways of constructing a city. At one pole we find in San Diego some of
the wealthiest communities in the world. At the other pole and barely 20 minutes
away we find some of the poorest settlements, which have emerged in the many
informal settlements that dot the new periphery of Tijuana. These two different
types of suburbia are emblematic of the incremental division of the
contemporary city into enclaves of megawealth surrounded by rings of poverty. I
am interested in processes of mediation that can produce critical interfaces
between and across these opposites, exposing conflict as an operational device to
transform architectural practice. Critical observation of this border region
transforms it into a laboratory in which we can trace the current politics of
migration and citizenship, labor and surveillance; the tensions between sprawl
and density; the contrasts between formal and informal urbanisms, and wealth
and poverty. All these elements incrementally characterize the contemporary city
everywhere. Border areas such as the Tijuana–San Diego region are the sites
where the forces of division and control produced by these global zones of
conflict are amplified and physically manifested in the territory, producing, in
turn, local zones of conflict.

13.1
Radicalizing the local: 60 linear miles of transborder conflict (installation on the façade of the US
pavilion, 2008 Architecture Venice Biennial). A 60-linear-mile cross-section, tangential to the border
wall, between these two border cities compresses the most dramatic issues currently challenging our
normative notions of architecture and urbanism. This transborder “cut” begins 30 miles north of the
border, in the periphery of San Diego, and ends 30 miles south of the border. We can find along this
section’s trajectory a series of collisions, critical junctures, or conflicts between natural and artificial
ecologies, topdown development and bottom-up organization

A 60-linear-mile cross-section, tangential to the border wall, between these

two border cities exposes the most dramatic issues challenging our normative
notions of architecture and urbanism. We can find along this section’s trajectory
a series of collisions, critical junctures between natural and artificial ecologies,
topdown forces of urban development and bottom-up organizational systems, all
anticipatory of territorial crises. These conflicts are made spatial as a large
freeway and a military infrastructure collides with watershed systems, gated
communities with marginal neighborhoods, formal urbanization with informal
economies, and dense slums with sprawling enclaves. This transborder cut
begins 30 miles north of the border, on the periphery of San Diego, and ends 30
miles south of the border, at the point where the fence sinks into the Pacific
Ocean.

+30 miles: San Diego

The only interruptions along an otherwise continuous sprawl, 30 miles inland
from the border, occur where the military bases that dot San Diego’s suburbs
overlap with environmentally protected lands. This produces a strange montage
of housing subdivisions, natural ecology, and militarization. The conflict
between military bases and environmental zones has been recently dramatized in
mock Afghan villages, equipped with hologram technologies to project Afghan
subjects, now being erected here as vernacular military-training sites.

+25 miles: San Diego

A large freeway and mall infrastructure runs the length of coastal San Diego,
colliding with a natural network of canyons, rivers, and creeks that descend
toward the Pacific Ocean. A necklace of territorial voids is produced out of the
conflict between large infrastructure and the watershed. As the politics of water
will define the future of this region, the recuperation of these truncated natural
resources is essential to anticipate density.

+20 miles: San Diego

Topdown private development has instantiated a selfish and oil-hungry sprawl of
detached McMansions everywhere. The conflict between masterplanned gated
communities and the natural topography flattens the differential landscape of
San Diego’s edges and encroaches on the natural cycles of fire-prone areas. This
archipelago of beige tract homes also exacerbates a land use of exclusion into a
sort of apartheid of everyday life.

+15 miles: San Diego

San Diego’s downtown has reconfigured itself with exclusive tax-revenue,
redevelopment powers, becoming an island of wealth delimited by specific
zoning and budgetary borders. Luxury condos and hotels, stadiums and
convention centers, surrounded by generic commercial franchises, compose this
stew of privatization from New York to San Diego. The proximity of wealth and
poverty found at the border checkpoint is reproduced here in the conflict
between powerful downtowns and the neighborhoods of marginalization that
surround them. It is in these neighborhoods that cheap immigrant labor
concentrates, conveniently becoming the service sector that supports
downtown’s massive project of gentrification.

+10 miles: San Diego

The conflict between the formal and the informal emerges as immigrants fill the
first ring of suburbanization surrounding downtown, retrofitting an obsolete
urbanism of older, postwar detached bungalows. Informal densities and
economies produce a sort of three-dimensional land use that collides with the
one-dimensional zoning that has characterized these older neighborhoods.

0 miles: San Diego–Tijuana

At the border itself, the metal fence becomes emblematic of the conflict between
these two border cities, re-enacting the perennial alliance between militarization
and urbanization. This territorial conflict is currently dramatized by the
hardening, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, of the border wall that
divides this region, incrementally transforming San Diego into the world’s
largest gated community. As we cross the border into Mexico, we immediately
see how the large infrastructure of the Tijuana River clashes with the border
wall. This is the only place where an otherwise continuous metal fence is pierced
and opened as the river enters San Diego. A faint yellow line is inscribed on the
dry river’s concrete channel to indicate the trajectory of the border. But as the
channel moves beyond the fence and into San Diego’s territory the concrete
disappears, and the channel becomes the Tijuana River estuary, a US ecological
reserve, which frames the natural ecology of the river as it flows freely to the
Pacific Ocean. What dramatizes this conflict between the natural and the
political is the fact that the border checkpoint is at the exact intersection of both,
punctuating the environmentally protected zone with a matrix of border patrol
vehicles, helicopters, and electrified fences.

-10 miles: Tijuana

Many of the sites of conflict found in San Diego are reproduced and amplified in
Tijuana. As Tijuana grows eastward, for example, it is seduced by the style and
glamour of the masterplanned, gated communities of the US, and builds its own
version – miniaturized replicas of typical suburban southern California tract
homes, paradoxically imported into Tijuana to provide “social housing.”
Thousands of tiny tract homes are now scattered around the periphery of
Tijuana, creating a vast landscape of homogeneity and division that is at odds
with this city’s prevailing heterogeneous and organic metropolitan condition.
These diminutive 250-square-foot (23-square-meter) dwellings come equipped
with all the clichés and conventions: manicured landscaping, gatehouses, model
units, banners and flags, mini setbacks, front and backyards.

-15 miles: Tijuana

The conflict between the formal and the informal is re-enacted here, as these
mini tract homes quickly submit to transformation by occupants who are little
hindered by Tijuana’s permissive zoning regulations. While the gated
communities of southern California remain closed systems due to stringent
zoning that prohibits any kind of formal alteration or programmatic
juxtaposition, residents in Tijuana fill in setbacks and occupy front and
backyards and garages with more construction to support mixed use and provide
more usable space.

-20 miles: Tijuana

These mini American-style masterplanned communities are intertwined with a
series of informal communities or slums, and both surround enclaves of
maquiladoras. The conflict between cheap labor and informal housing is
produced here as these factories extract cheap labor from nearby slums without
contributing any support for dwellings. As these favela-like sectors grow ever
larger, they encroach on the natural ecology of Tijuana’s delicate topography,
also re-enacting the conflict between the informal and the natural.

-30 miles: Tijuana

As we reach the sea on the Mexican side of the border territory, the metal border
fence sinks into the Pacific Ocean. As the poles of this militarized artifact
descend into the depths of the water, the site is simultaneously strangely poetic
and hugely tragic, physically manifesting the contradictions that characterize the
border landscape and amplifying the most dramatic of all territorial collisions
across this 60-mile section: the conflict between the natural and the
jurisdictional.
It is in the midst of these metropolitan and territorial sites of conflict that
contemporary architectural practice should reposition itself. Each of these
physical junctions needs to be unfolded to reveal hidden institutional histories,
the missing information that can allow us to piece together our anticipatory
research, enabling the reorganization of the fragmented and discriminatory
policies that have created this archipelago of division. In other words, no
meaningful intervention can occur in the contemporary city unless we first
expose the conditions, the political and economic forces (of jurisdiction and
ownership), that have produced these collisions in the first place.

Practices of encroachment: post-bubble urban

strategies where urban waste moves Southbound,
illegal zoning seeps into North
By zooming further into the particularities of this volatile territory, traveling
back and forth between these two border cities, we can expose many other
landscapes of contradiction where conditions of difference and sameness collide
and overlap. A series of “off the radar” two-way border crossings – North–South
and South–North across the border wall – suggest that no matter how high and
long the post-9/11 border wall becomes, it will always be transcended by
migrating populations and the relentless flows of goods and services back and
forth across the formidable barrier that seeks to stop them. These illegal flows
are physically manifested, in one direction, by the informal land use patterns and
economies produced by migrant workers flowing from Tijuana and into San
Diego, responding to a demand for cheap labor in Southern California. But,
while “human flow” moves Northbound in search for dollars, “infrastructural
waste” moves in the opposite direction to construct an insurgent, cross-border
urbanism of emergency.
South to North suburbs made of non-conformity:
Tijuana’s encroachment into San Diego’s sprawl
The shifting of cultural demographics in American suburbs has transformed
many immigrant neighborhoods into the site of investigation for our practice,
challenging the politics of discriminatory zoning in San Diego. Our research and
work in the US has focused, in fact, on the impact of immigration in the
transformation of the American neighborhood, arguing that the future of
Southern California’s urbanism will be determined by tactics of retrofit and
adaptation.
13.2
Border research.
Transborder informal urban dynamics: as illegal zoning seeps into the North to retrofit the large with
the small, urban debris flows Southbound to construct a housing urbanism made of waste

North to South suburbs made of waste: San Diego’s

Levittown are recycled into Tijuana’s slums
As people move North, the waste of San Diego flows southbound to construct an
urbanism of emergency, as one city recycles the “left over” of the other into a
sort of “second-hand” urbanism. Our research in San Diego/Tijuana has perforce
studied the relationship of shanty towns, emergency housing, and the politics of
cheap labor, as maquiladoras (NAFTA factories) settle in the midst of these
slums.
Our research suggests a double project of retrofit by which the recycling of
fragments, resources, and situations from these two cities reveals new ways of
conceptualizing housing and density. The research of these transborder
urbanisms that have informed our practice at the San Diego–Tijuana border has
inspired the rethinking of the role of architecture within geographies of conflict.
Different conceptual procedures are needed to straddle two radically different
ways of constructing the city. Most emblematic of this contrast has always been
the thought that, as far as I know, at no other international junction in the world
can one find some of the wealthiest real estate, such as that found in the edges of
San Diego’s sprawl, so close to some of the poorest settlements in Latin
America, manifested by the many slums that dot the new periphery of Tijuana.
These two different types of suburbia are emblematic of the incremental division
of the contemporary city and the territory between enclaves of megawealth and
the rings of poverty that surround them. We are interested in processes of
mediation that can produce critical interfaces between and across these
opposites, expose conflict as an operational device to transform
architectural/urban practice.
This has led us to focus on the micro-scale of the border neighborhood,
proposing it as the urban laboratory of our time. The forces of control at play
across the most trafficked checkpoint in the world has provoked the small border
neighborhoods that surround it to construct alternative urbanisms of alteration
and adaptation, searching for a different meaning of housing and public
infrastructure. Fostering experimental collaborations with community-based
NGOs such as Casa Familiar in San Ysidro and Alter Terra in Tijuana, our
practice has fostered a small-scale activism that alters the rigidity of
discriminatory urban planning of the American metropolis, and searches for new
modes of sustainability and affordability. Through this practice we have come to
understand that the future of the city should not be framed in terms of objects
like buildings but by the fundamental reorganization of socio-economic
relations, and that architects have a role in designing alternative institutional
protocols. In other words, our current crisis can inspire ways of imagining
counter-spatial procedures and political and economic structures that can
produce a new civic imagination. Without altering the exclusionary policies that
have facilitated a selfish, oil-hungry urban development in the last years,
architects will continue being subordinate and remain mere decorators of
exclusionary urbanization. This suggests the pressing need for expanded notions
of architectural practice that can engage the shifting socio-political and
economic domains that have been ungraspable by design.

San Ysidro: the neighborhood as a socio-economic

and political unit
The micro-urbanisms that are emerging within small communities across the
city, in the form of non-conforming spatial and entrepreneurial practices, are
defining a different idea of density and land use. It is from the particularities of
these issues that a different idea of participation and representation emerges. Our
work has engaged with the question, how can the human capacity and creative
intelligence embedded in communities be amplified as the main armature for
rethinking sustainability? We contend that the tactics of adaptation and retrofit
across many immigrant neighborhoods in the US are the DNA for the
transformation of discriminatory zoning and exclusionary economic
development in the contemporary city.
The exhausted recipes of global urban development based on exclusionary
topdown economic models, discriminating homogeneity and privatization need
to be redefined in order to transform the very political and economic institutions
responsible for the current crisis. In the process of rethinking the topdown
financial frameworks that have caused today’s economic crisis and the spread of
uneven urban development in the last years, our practice has been researching
new interfaces between topdown recipes of urbanization and bottom-up socio-
economic relations.
13.3
An urbanism of co-existence: designing political and economic process

13.4
Designers of political process, part 1.
The multi-color “confetti” of Tijuana’s compacted land uses seeps into San Diego, altering the
homogeneity of the large exclusionary colors of Southern California’s zoning.
A migrant urbanism deposits itself in many older California neighborhoods, where mono-use
parcels are transformed into complex micro socio-economic systems. Citizenship is a creative act that
transforms and reorganizes existing spatial and institutional protocols.
While the global city became the privileged site of consumption and display, the immigrant local
neighborhood remains a site of production, of new cultural and socio-economic relations
 This is why we need to focus on the translation of the socio-cultural and
economic intelligence embedded in many marginal immigrant neighborhoods in
order to propose more inclusive land use and economic categories that can
support new forms of socio-economic sustainability. The hidden value (cultural,
social, and economic) of these communities’ informal transactions across
bottom-up cultural activism, economies, and densities continues to be off the
radar of conventional topdown planning institutions. It is in the context of these
conditions where a different role for art, architecture, and environmental and
community activist practices can emerge, which goes beyond the metaphorical
representation of people, where only the community’s symbolic image is
amplified instead of mobilizing its socio-economic entrepreneurship to produce
new models of urban development. These marginal communities’ invisible urban
praxis needs artistic interpretation and political representation and this is the
space of intervention for our architectural practice.

13.5
Designers of political process, part 2.
Besides designing buildings, architects can also collaborate in constructing new political and
economic processes.
The future of urbanism will not be led by buildings but by the reorganization of socio-economic
relations. We need to move from the neutral notion of the public to the specific rights of the
neighborhood.
Casa Familiar in San Ysidro: neighborhood-based community non-profit organization becomes
micro-developer, translating invisible socio-economic entrepreneurship into economic value.
The tactical distribution of diverse housing building types within a small infrastructure of
collective spaces allows the choreography of temporal socio-educational and economic community
programming
programming

In other words, behind the façade of poverty that characterizes the marginal
communities, such as San Ysidro, on both sides of the border, there is a more
complex idea of housing, a complexity we need to translate and make accessible
to produce new urban policy. Across these neighborhoods, housing is conceived
not as generic units of dwelling thrown in the territory, but as a relational system
grounded on social organization. A new paradigm can emerge here about
sustainability, threading environmental, economic, and social issues, where
housing can become the main armature to construct public culture and
infrastructure. In fact, a main pursuit of our practice has been to act as
facilitators of a different conception of density that is less abstract and more
specific, moving from a paradigm that measures density as an amount of “units–
people” per acre into one that enables it as an amount of socio-economic
exchanges per acre. Also, from the neutrality of the “public” into the specificity
of rights – to the neighborhood.
In this context, one of the most important issues underlying our research
has been to produce new conceptions and interpretations of the informal. Instead
of a fixed image, we see the informal as a functional set of urban operations that
allow the transgression of imposed political boundaries and topdown economic
models. We are interested in a practice of translation of the actual operative
procedures behind the informal into new tactics of urban intervention. We see
the informal not as a noun but as a verb, which detonates traditional notions of
site specificity and context into a more complex system of hidden socio-
economic exchanges. Primarily, because of our work in marginal neighborhoods
in San Diego and Tijuana, we see the informal as the site of a new interpretation
of community and citizenship, understanding the informal not as an aesthetic
category but as praxis. This is the reason we are interested in the emergent urban
configurations produced out of social emergency, and the performative role of
individuals constructing their own spaces.
Through our research-based practice we have been forwarding the notion of
citizenship as a creative act that reorganizes not only stagnant institutional
protocols but the spaces themselves in the city. All of this desire amounts to a
redefinition of the architect-citizen and the citizen-architect, defined less by a
professional identity, and more by the willingness to construct a course of action,
a political will to produce new critical interfaces across divided institutions,
jurisdictions, and communities. We are interested in a practice of mediation
intervening in the debate of the public and public debate: how to construct a new
civic imagination? A public culture that builds the city from the ground up,
across tactical small gestures, emphatic and persuasive enough to have large,
strategic urban implications: from the scale of the parcel in the neighborhood we
can reimagine a region. For us this has meant enabling expanded models of
urban pedagogy and practice that mediate the large and the small, the topdown
and the bottom-up.
Our work has been inspired by the realization that no advances in housing
design can be accomplished without advances in housing policy and economy.
Also, by the need to expand existing categories of zoning, producing alternative
densities and transitional uses that can directly respond to the emergent political
and economic informalities at play in the contemporary city. It is, in fact, the
political and cultural dimension of housing and density as tools for social
integration in the city that has been the conceptual armature of our work. How to
enable an urbanism of transgression beyond the property line, a migrant, micro-
urbanism that can alter the rigidity of the discriminatory public policies of the
American city? The effort has been to create a participatory practice that can
enter into the politics of information and public debate in the border cities: what
do we mean by density? What is the meaning of affordable housing? How do we
re-energize the American public to embrace the notion of the Public itself, so
that public housing is not a forbidden construct in the US?
Also, one pressing challenge in our time, primarily when the paradigm of
private property has become unsustainable in conditions of poverty, is the need
to rethink existing conditions of ownership: the transformation of the mythology
of the American dream in the context of home-ownership. This means redefining
affordability by amplifying the value of community participation: more than
“owning” units, residents, in collaboration with community-based, non-profit
agencies, can also co-own and co-manage the economic and social infrastructure
around them. In other words, how to amplify the value of social capital (people’s
participation) in urban development, enhancing the role of communities in
producing housing. Housing configurations that enable the development and
emergence of local economies and new forms of sociability, allowing
neighborhoods to generate new markets “from the bottom up,” within the
community (i.e. entrepreneurial efforts that are usually off the radar of
conventional topdown economic recipes), as well as to promote new models of
financing to allow unconventional mixed uses.
We have articulated this research not only as a form of discourse that has
enabled new critical conversation and debate across different constituencies,
from academics to activists and politicians, but into tangible processes of
collaboration with community-based non-profit organizations and physical
interventions in neighborhoods on both sides of the border. In recent years, the
work has been shaped by promoting creative collaborations with community-
based non-profit organizations on both sides of the border. The most important
collaboration that serves as a case study for our practice unfolded through our
work with Casa Familiar, a community-based non-profit organization in the
border neighborhood of San Ysidro, on the US side. This collaboration has been
grounded on researching and enacting alternative political and economic
frameworks that can generate tactical housing projects inclusive of these
neighborhoods’ informal patterns of mixed use and density. This has resulted in
the design of micro-political and economic protocols with Casa Familiar as the
foundation for housing.
This collaboration has brought to our attention the need to produce new
corridors of knowledge exchange between the specialized knowledge of
architectural practice and the ethical knowledge of communities. To act as
facilitators of this bottom-up intelligence means mobilizing the ethical
knowledge specific to a community into new communicational systems, urban
pedagogy, and micro-political and economic armatures: an urbanism at the scale
of the neighborhood and community as political and economic unit. Our process
with Casa Familiar transformed the neighborhood of San Ysidro into a site of
experimentation, to investigate actual economic and spatial tactics in order to
mobilize dormant sources of funding and blur certain obsolete boundaries
separating public and private resources. A tactical new zoning policy was
proposed to the city of San Diego that would pertain to this neighborhood as a
site of exception, expanding limited, existing categories of land use. This is one
of the reasons this collaboration has been recognized internationally: it
forwarded the possibility that in times of crisis, experimentation must be enabled
at small scales and that zoning must be conceived as a generative tool to
organize activity rather than a punitive tool that prevents socialization.
This process has led to the tactical design and organization of a series of
community dialogues and workshops, which in turn generated the idea of a
micro-zoning policy, providing the fertile political ground from which
alternative hybrid projects and their sources of funding could emerge. This
presented the possibility to the City of San Diego for the necessary partnerships
and interfaces with local non-profit organizations to enable them to co-own the
resources of development and become the long-term choreographers of social
and cultural programming for housing. In other words, this opened a process that
intensified the role of the community-based as local experts and sources of
innovation. The foundation of the Casa Familiar Micro-Policy was the
proposition to seek a new role for many NGOs in neighborhoods to develop
housing. These are the mediating agencies that translate otherwise invisible
neighborhood dynamics: they can connect tangible housing needs to specific
community participants, and support and generate new economies that emerge
from the community itself and enhance social service capabilities to be plugged
into housing. Agencies like Casa Familiar can mobilize the internal
entrepreneurial energies and social organization that characterize these
neighborhoods toward a more localized political economy latent in these migrant
communities. These socio-economic agendas can be framed by particular spatial
organization.
The micro-policy for San Ysidro included the proposition to San Diego’s
municipality that Casa Familiar become an informal City Hall, capable of
facilitating and distributing information, permits, financing, and services to the
community. A few of its main parameters include the documentation of all
stealth illegal additions and small informal economies sprinkled through the
neighborhood in order to legitimize their existence, enabling the approval of a
new affordable housing overlay zone for the neighborhood. The second part of
the policy included the partnership of Casa Familiar with property owners who
cannot afford to sustain their own properties – the production of social contracts
within the community to produce a new form of shared ownership and insurance
is essential here. Then, Casa Familiar will be enabled by the City to pre-package
construction permits to replace the precarious existing illegal dwelling units as
well as tax credit subsidy-based proformas to support their designation as
affordable housing.
Since tax credit subsidies do not currently support small development, Casa
Familiar also proposes the pre-bundling of all proposed small housing units
sprinkled throughout the neighborhood into one affordable housing proforma,
enabling the breaking apart of large tax credit subsidies, pertaining to equally
large housing buildings, into smaller loans with social guarantees to support the
retrofitting and new building of incremental density for San Ysidro. This
facilitation of entitlement and lending amplifies the notion that marginal
communities need political and economic representation by agencies like Casa
Familiar. This opened up a small-lot ordinance process in San Diego, seeking to
infill transitional and suburban areas of the city, while enforcing an incremental
densification and supporting community-led small development.
The affordable housing prototype Living Rooms at the Border emerged
from this micro-policy and has served as an architectural prototype to enable
Casa Familiar to further transform zoning regulation for the border city of San
Ysidro. Both the micro-policy and this small architectural project convey to the
San Diego municipality the need to foster the relationship between socio-
political and economic strategies and specific spatial tactics in order to shape a
new notion of affordability. The main aspiration of this project was to convey
housing beyond shelter and conceive it as an economic engine for the
community: the neighborhood as a site of production, a small urbanism of co-
existence. After nine years, we have finally secured the funding and the zoning
variances that will enable the construction of these projects in San Ysidro in
2013.

Living Rooms at the Border frames the following

principles:
1 Density is no longer sustainable as an amount of objects per acre; density
must be redefined as an amount of social exchanges per acre and housing as
a system of economic and cultural interactions.
2 Housing is more than units only: it needs to be plugged with economic and
cultural support systems.
3 Housing is embedded within an infrastructure of flexible social and
pedagogical spaces: open frames are equipped with electricity, collective
kitchens, and movable urban furniture; Casa Familiar injects them with
specific cultural and economic programming.
4 Small parcels are conceived as small infrastructures that mobilize social
entrepreneurship into new spaces for housing, cultural production, and
political participation.
5 Other modes of property are enabled by activating small lots into economic
and social systems.
13.6
The neighborhood as a site of production.
Located in the border neighborhood of San Ysidro, community-based NGO Casa Familiar has
evolved from social service provider into alternative developer of affordable housing. Estudio Teddy
Cruz’s collaboration with Casa Familiar has conceived the neighborhood as producer of new housing
policy and economy, focusing on designing parcels as small infrastructures that mobilize social
entrepreneurship into new spaces for housing, cultural production, and political participation.
a
Casa Familiar acquired a large parcel with an old church and then subdivided it into smaller slivers,
anticipating a finer pixelation of property and circulation
b
The church is retrofitted into an incubator of cultural production where Casa Familiar will generate
new categories of socio-economic programming. For Casa Familiar, housing is not sustainable as
units only. It needs to be plugged with economic and cultural support systems
c
Open frames, conceived as social rooms, are equipped with electricity, collective kitchens and
movable urban furniture. Casa Familiar injects them with specific cultural and economic
programming. The church, social rooms, collective kitchens, and community gardens are the small
infrastructure for housing
d
Here, the void is more than open space for private housing growth, it is the site made available for
injecting specific collective programming to support informal economies and social organization. This
tactical programming enables new interfaces with the public, across time: Thursdays, new
community workshops; Saturdays, framing informal markets; every day: collective kitchens –
supporting entrepreneurship
e-f
Housing type 1: young couples; single mothers with children. More than just renting or owning units,
dwellers are participants in co-managing socio-economic programs
g
Housing type 2: Live–work duplex for artists. The exchange of rent for social service: artists and
Casa Familiar choreograph pedagogical interfaces with children and families, plugging education
and other resources
h
Integrating artists toward new models of financing, social contracts, and unconventional mixed uses:
artists engage urban pedagogy as well as partner with dwellers as co-producers
i
Housing type 3: large families with grandmothers. Housing equipped with shared kitchens to support
two small extended families. Casa Familiar partners with families, promoting economic
entrepreneurship
j
Housing type 4: accessory buildings as alternative housing. Small sheds become flexible spaces for
extended families: for example, a nephew studies at local community college, rents studio and living
space; a niece, recently married, rents a studio temporarily and uses a small shed for office space; or
Casa Familiar subsidizes a room for the gardener who collaborates with dwellers to maintain
vegetable beds
k–l
Casa Familiar: the performance of a small parcel – a social infrastructure of small buildings and
spaces produce a gradation of housing economies and social interactions, activating small lots into
economic and social systems

6 Small building envelopes and open spaces produce a gradation of housing

economies and social interaction, from individuals to collectives, public to
private uses.
7 Residents are not customers, they are participants and co-managers of
socio-economic programs.

Epilogue: designers of political process?

The evolution of our work in recent years has occurred in tandem with the need
to question our role as architects within geographies of conflict, searching for a
more meaningful socio-political role for architecture, in terms of advocacy and
activism in the US. Through these projects we seek the design of political and
economic processes and systems toward the democratization of development:
can a neighborhood be the developer of its own housing?
It is clear that no advances in building design can occur without
reorganizing the existing political structures, economic resources, and social
relations that can promote alternative systems of cohabitation. Architecture can
mutate from the designing of buildings or environments as ends in themselves
(the normative task of architectural practice) into a more meaningful creative
process that transforms them into relational social systems.
The urgency to transform our own creative procedures during these times of
crisis inspires this last reflection: ultimately, it does not matter whether
contemporary architecture wraps itself with the latest morphogenetic skin,
pseudo neoclassical prop or LEED-certified photovoltaic panels, if all of these
approaches continue to camouflage the most pressing problems of urbanization
today.
Chapter 14

Shenzhen – Topology of a Neoliberal

City
Adrian Blackwell

Estimates in 2010 place the population of Shenzhen at 15,250,000 people. Not

only is it one of the most populous cities in the world, it is also the largest
municipality in the world’s biggest urban agglomeration – the Pearl River Delta
(PRD) – whose population of just over 50,000,000 lives in one contiguous band
of urbanization, a horseshoe-shaped megalopolis.1 Even more astonishing than
its world-historical scale is the speed with which it was constructed. In China,
“Shenzhen tempo” once referred to its unprecedented speed of construction –
one floor of an office building every 2.5 days – but it can equally be applied to
the pace of urbanization itself.2 Shenzhen grew from an urban and rural
population of 300,000 living in fishing villages and small towns to its current
population in just over 30 years; this amounts to an influx of approximately half-
a-million new people every year and requires a development and construction
industry designing and building structures to accommodate them. Shenzhen is an
unprecedented event in the history of urbanization, but it has also played an
important role in the transformation of architectural theory.
In 2005, the architectural historian Jianfei Zhu wrote an essay that
instigated an intense debate among both Chinese and non-Chinese architectural
theorists, historians, and practitioners. “Criticality in between China and the
West, 1996–2004” argued that the flow of architectural ideas between China and
Europe and North America functioned as a two-way exchange, through which
the incredible pace of development in China was exported as a model for
operational and projective practices in the West, while critical theory was
imported to China as way to develop and position its emerging architectural
practices. Zhu’s essay was a brave intervention into existing discussions about
Chinese architecture, challenging stereotypes about its derivative character. The
key players in Zhu’s revalorization were Chinese architects Yung Ho Chang and
Ma Qingyun. Zhu argued that they imported architectural theory to China, while
Rem Koolhaas exported new ways of studying and theorizing the city to the
West.3

14.1
Shenzhen urban growth 1975–2004
Source: Google historical aerial imagery; drawing Song Deng/Adrian Blackwell

The first iteration of the Harvard “Project on the City,” Koolhaas’s teaching
and research program, was called Great Leap Forward and focused on the
urbanization of the PRD. Zhu points to this work as the tipping point of a
significant change in the study and practice of architecture and urbanism.4
Koolhaas’s research on China almost entirely abandons the still historical mode
he used in his 1995 text, “Singapore songlines,” attempting instead to theorize
the city through a synchronic analysis of the radical transformation of territory.5
Koolhaas’s stated aim was to develop a new starting point for the theorization of
the unrecognizable subject of contemporary urbanization. The unprecedented
development of the PRD was the stimulus he used for this move.
In his response to Zhu’s essay, George Baird has argued that the late 1990s
marked a change in the tone of Koolhaas’s writing, a moment when the heroic
timbre of a contemporary Le Corbusier, audible in his earlier texts, gives way to
a more ambivalent, first-person narrative style.6 But this period also marks a real
turn outward for Koolhaas’s work, as if the concept of “Bigness” that anchored
S,M,L,XL, and represented the apotheosis of Koolhaas’s longstanding interest in
architecture as a surrogate for the city, had given way to a curiosity about a
potential beyond architecture: the actual processes of urbanization themselves.7
This move in Koolhaas’s thinking paved the way for projective practice,
landscape urbanism, and the larger geographical turn within architectural
education.8 It is to Zhu’s credit that he localizes this shift not in Koolhaas’s
oeuvre as a whole, but at the specific moment when he began his research on
Shenzhen, where the ironic internalization of the city within the architectural
artifact is abandoned in favor of a more pragmatic engagement with the problem
of urbanization.9
14.2
Cover of Koolhaas et al. (eds.), Great Leap Forward (Harvard University Graduate School of
Design/Taschen, 2001) Shenzhen, capital of neoliberalism

Koolhaas’s 1997 contribution to the exhibition and catalog of Documenta X was

a text printed over a set of images of the Pearl River Delta. It was a first draft for
the longer glossary of concepts published four years later in Great Leap
Forward and was used to describe a new historical process of urbanization.10
The most important of this rich series of concepts is “City of Exacerbated
Difference,” which opens the Documenta text, forms the conclusion of a longer
essay published in 2000’s Mutations, and is the title of his succinct introduction
to Great Leap Forward.11 Certainly it is a powerful term to describe the new
cities developing in the PRD in the 1990s, but in Koolhaas’s texts the concept’s
incisive charge is diffused as a simple description of the different functions of
the cities that circle the PRD. However, the “City of Exacerbated Difference”
points to a much more significant problem, one that is paradigmatic of
contemporary urbanization – the exacerbation of differences in the value of labor
between constrained markets. What is so important about Shenzhen as an urban
experiment is that it represents the most extreme design of this difference in
labor value, at the foundation of capitalist production in general, and the
intensification of class differences specific to contemporary neoliberalism.
Despite its apparent semi-peripheral status in the network of global cities,
Shenzhen is the neoliberal city par excellence, the city that has innovated most
intensively in its urban strategies of economic differentiation.
In The New Imperialism, David Harvey argues that neoliberal ideology has
sanctioned a renewal of primitive accumulation, or what he calls “accumulation
through dispossession,” a process of labor and resource expropriation designed
to recentralize wealth in the hands of the capitalist class.12 While neoliberalism
appears to favor the reduction of government and the privatization of public
resources, it also involves the apparently contradictory process of state
rebuilding and expenditure. In their 2002 essay “Neoliberalizing Space,”
geographers Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell argue that mature neoliberalism is a
Janus-faced regime of market regulation, under which the state is “rolled back”
to privatize resources, while at the same time new state institutions are “rolled
out” to manage the inequality produced by privatization.13 Hui Wang
recontextualizes this phenomenon within China in his book, China’s New Order,
explaining that there is no contradiction between neoliberalism and neo-
authoritarianism and in the process offering an explanation for the incredible
success of the reforms of the socialist market economy over the last 20 years.
Wang argues that neoliberalism became hegemonic on a global scale in the wake
of the massacre of June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square and that its proliferation
was the result of this severe repression more than the spirit of market
liberalization promoted by some of the protesters.14 Economist Minqi Li, a
participant in those demonstrations who was imprisoned for two years as a result
of his activism, argues that for much of the twentieth century China acted as one
of “the last strategic reserves” of the world economy and that its reintegration
into the capitalist market has acted as the foundation for the neoliberal
resurgence of capitalism as an enormous new economic frontier.15 A close
relationship to Western neoliberalism can be seen in four specific dimensions of
China’s reform period: first, the temporal coincidence of their birth in the late
1970s and mutual acceleration in the early 1990s after the fall of the Iron
Curtain;16 second, the emergence of an immense new labor force in China that
has helped to drive down global wages for industrial work; third, China’s over-
production of commodities that has driven down consumer costs, allowing an
increasingly impoverished working class in the rest of the world access to cheap
commodities; and finally China’s trade surplus that has been invested in US
bonds, allowing the US economy to coast forward on easy credit.17
The urbanization of Shenzhen holds a special place in this history. In 1979
the Party Central Committee announced its intention to initiate the creation of
four “Special Export Zones” in the south of China, and by August 1980, it had
established three “Special Economic Zones” (SEZs) in Guangdong; of these
three Shenzhen was by far the largest, with an area of 327.5 square kilometers.18
The function of these SEZs was to attract foreign direct investment, especially
from wealthy Chinese investors living outside the People’s Republic of China
(PRC), so each was carefully located adjacent to capitalist economies in Hong
Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. This proximity was crucial and explains why
Shenzhen was the most successful of the SEZs, located as it was directly
adjacent to the world financial, manufacturing, and logistics center of Hong
Kong.
14.3
Rem Koolhaas’s drawing of the “City of Exacerbated Difference” from Great Leap Forward, image
courtesy of OMA Shenzhen takes its place as the preeminent neoliberal city for two principal reasons: first,
it really is the “City of Exacerbated Difference,” the location of the greatest coincidence of separation and
proximity between a capitalist class in Hong Kong and a ready supply of cheap labor and land in the PRC;
and second, with its minimal indigenous population, all its workers live in the greatest possible state of
precariousness, in temporary accommodation hundreds of kilometers from their home villages. It is at once
a city where inequality is heavily structured by urban form and at the same time it relies on the most radical
contingency. In this sense it is entirely organized along the axis that connects two tendencies of
contemporary capitalism: neo-authoritarianism and neoliberalism. What follows is a topological description
of Shenzhen, through four coupled neoliberal urban forms: borders and migration, axes and infrastructures,
work camps and urban villages, and fakes and creative industries. These seemingly contradictory vectors of
the neoliberal city are in fact its complementary technologies, tools to produce the “City of Exacerbated
Difference.” They are apparatuses to design a city oriented away from itself, for production, not
reproduction, a city without citizens.
14.4
Key map of Shenzhen showing sites discussed in this chapter, drawing Song Deng/Adrian Blackwell
Regulating the population: borders and migration

The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone bears a striking similarity to Koolhaas’s

thesis at the Architectural Association: Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of
Architecture.19 The walled district he proposed in the center of London served as
a prototype for his investigation of the islands that populate Delirious New York,
from the actual islands, Manhattan, Roosevelt and Coney, to the autonomous
blocks in the Manhattan grid, to the contrasting floors of the Downtown Athletic
Club.20 Exodus served as a first architectural manifesto for a “City of
Exacerbated Difference.” Like it, Shenzhen was designed as a space with
specific privileges and restrictions. Workers flowed into Shenzhen to work for
higher wages than elsewhere in China, but in exchange for this privilege they
were met with a new system of labor management. The 1980 document
“Regulations on Special Economic Zones in Guangdong Province” states: “staff
and workers employed by enterprises in the special zones are to be managed by
the enterprises according to their business requirements and, when necessary,
may be dismissed.”21 While this sounds like business as usual today, it is
important to recall that China was still a communist state in 1980, so this
legislation was complete reversal of China’s “iron rice bowl,” in which industrial
workers were its privileged citizens, guaranteed jobs for life and comfortable
homes. The jobs in Shenzhen could not compete with the secure living
conditions of China’s working class, but they provided new possibilities for
ambitious young peasants and university graduates willing to risk the
vicissitudes of the market system, and over time they undermined the communist
covenant with labor.
Shenzhen’s unique history is a direct result of its three borders and their
distinct histories. It was designated as a Special Economic Zone in 1980 because
of its location on the border between the PRC and the British territory of Hong
Kong, and although Hong Kong is now part of China, this remains the first and
most important of the three, because it structures the proximate differential
between capital surplus and labor supply. In 1984, the Chinese government
completed the construction of an 86-kilometer “second border” between the SEZ
and the rest of China.22 This 2.8-meter-tall security fence with multiple
checkpoints was ostensibly built to control the flow of black-market goods from
the SEZ to the rest of China,23 but it also functioned to control the two-way flow
of labor in and out of the zone, restricting entry to those selected by the
government’s labor management bureau, or to those who passed examinations
set by foreign-owned companies. By controlling access to Shenzhen’s jobs
through special work permits, the government collaborated with the foreign-
owned enterprises to discipline a migrant labor force.24 Although the second
border was progressively decommissioned between 2003 and 2008, and today
remains as a physical remnant of earlier policies,25 the control over the flow of
labor that it pioneered has been universalized through the hukou system. This
household registration system ties all citizens to their home towns, while
dividing all citizens into one of two categories – peasants and urban residents –
and requiring all migrant farmers to acquire temporary work permits in order to
work in urban areas. China and Hong Kong were unified in 1997 after the expiry
of the British lease on the New Territories, so the Hong Kong border became a
third Chinese border, creating three distinct economic regions within one
country directly adjacent to one another: the Special Administrative Region of
Hong Kong, the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, and the rest of China,
including Shenzhen’s own counties of Bao’an and Longgang. These three zones
each have different roles to play in the regional economy, with Hong Kong as a
global city of financial, management, and logistics expertise, the periphery of
Shenzhen and adjacent Dongguan as the epicenter of global export-oriented
production, and the SEZ as an interface between the other two, housing high-
tech manufacturing, as well as being the mainland base for the creative,
financial, and logistics sectors. The “City of Exacerbated Difference” was
initially produced through the construction of three physical borders that
functioned to control the flow of labor, turning it on and off as required.
Since 2005, artist and curator Ou Ning has made a sequence of works that
examine Shenzhen’s border zones for the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Biennale of
Urbanism/Architecture. In “City: Open Door,” the inaugural 2005 event, Ou
presented Border, Illegal Zones & Urban Villages, a three-screen projection just
inside the entrance to the main exhibition hall. The piece, one of the most
powerful works in the exhibition, focused on Shenzhen’s internal and external
edges – its double border, informal and black-market economies, and high-rise
urban villages in the central city. While the exhibition was designed to celebrate
the urban experiment of Shenzhen, Ou’s work made it clear that Shenzhen’s
doors were not simply open, rather the city was topologically complex, bounded
at its edges, but with holes throughout its surface. For the second biennale, Ou
collaborated with an animator, Lei Lei, to produce The Border Project, which
focused exclusively on the near obsolete border between the SEZ and the rest of
Shenzhen. The artists produced hand-animated videos describing seven
checkpoints along the border. Each starts by showing the checkpoint as it
currently functions and then transforms it to accommodate new urban uses that
reflect the illegal zones and urban villages that Ou examined in his earlier work.
Informal housing, markets, and new public spaces are built on and around the
obsolete checkpoints. Finally, in 2009 Ou was chosen as the chief curator for the
third biennale, which he titled “City Mobilization.” In his introductory essay he
described the way the border zone incites movement through the story of his
little sister, who was drawn to Shenzhen to work in the service and
manufacturing industries. Her story highlights the complementary face of border
urbanism – migration.26
14.5
Shenzhen’s first and second borders, drawing Song Deng/Adrian Blackwell

The differences produced by the three borders described above set in

motion not only large sums of investment from Hong Kong into China, but also
the movement of millions of workers from other parts of China to Shenzhen.
This migration has been unprecedented, creating a city made up mostly of non-
citizens. The 2000 Shenzhen Statistical Yearbook counts 74 percent of Shenzhen
residents as temporary workers, but because temporary workers are likely to be
missed in the census, their actual percentage may be much higher.27 Most of
Shenzhen’s permanent residents are also strangers to the city, so up to 95 percent
of the city’s population is made up of migrants.28 Shenzhen is indeed a city of
exodus. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the authors of Empire (2000), use the
word exodus to describe contemporary migration as a form of revolt or escape
from specific burdens of capitalism. “A specter haunts the world and it is the
specter of migration. All powers of the old world are allied in a merciless
operation against it, but the movement is irresistible.”29 In her 2005 book Made
in China, sociologist Ngai Pun echoes this observation, applying it to the
Shenzhen context by arguing that the migration of female peasants to the
factories of Shenzhen is an active choice, not a simple case of deception.
“Attempts at transgression, such as escape to the city for work, or refusal to go
back home for marriage, worked to challenge the patriarchal power of the family
and submissive images of Chinese women.”30

14.6
Ou Ning and Lei Lei, still from The Border Project, image courtesy of Ou Ning The result of this influx
has been the incredible cosmopolitanism of Shenzhen, with foreigners arriving from outside China to
manage factories, creative industries and financial services, but more importantly an incredibly diverse
workforce arriving from across China, speaking many dialects, eating diverse food, and coming from very
different living situations. Jia Zhangke’s 2003 film, The World, portrays the lives of migrants working in a
theme park in Beijing. The film was inspired by its star Zhao Tao’s experience working in the Window on
the World theme park in Shenzhen for a year before becoming an actor.31 While on the one hand the film
illustrates the confined lives of temporary workers, without access to the world outside the park, its title also
confirms the way in which China itself is a world, with vast differences between its regions, comparable to
those between countries in Europe. Shenzhen is typical of the cosmopolitanism of many global cities in
which productive complexity is in fact deeply divided by class, creating an image of hybridity atop a deeply
segmented social and economic structure.32

City of lines: axis and infrastructure

In his analysis of OMA’s proposal for the French new town of Melun-Sénart,
Alejandro Zaera-Polo points out that every contemporary approach to the city
must acknowledge its essential linearity; it is dispersive and infrastructural, not
centralized.33 Despite this, contemporary urbanization does not embrace
dispersion tout court, it also practices a complementary recentralization within
newly gentrified commercial, financial, and residential centers.34 The Chinese
city is no exception in this regard, developing numerous pedestrian shopping
streets, new Central Business Districts (CBDs), and cultural clusters. However,
one of the most distinctive strategies of recentralization in China has been the
production of ceremonial central axes. This practice is especially clear in the
three largest cities in the Pearl River Delta: Guangzhou, Dongguan, and
Shenzhen.35 In each city a new axis has been deliberately planned away from the
city’s historical center in order to provide a new vector for real estate
speculation, while at the same time allowing for the production of an urban form
powerful enough to assert state control in the midst of market chaos. The axis is
one example of what architect and professor Zhou Rong calls “a nostalgia for
utopia” in contemporary China, through which three different utopias are often
confused: the ritual utopia of classical Chinese capitals, the monumental utopia
of Soviet realism, and the utopia of modernization.36 As a sign, the axis refers
seductively to both Chinese and Western forms of power. While it appears in
plan to mimic Chinese imperial architecture, such the forbidden city in Beijing,
Zhu Jianfei makes it very clear in his analysis of Tiananmen Square that the
open visual form of these contemporary axes are much more closely allied with
a modern European tradition of perspective and visibility than to the Chinese
Imperial spaces in which the opacity of the emperor was paramount.37 The axis
is more closely indebted to urban plans of the Italian Baroque, seventeenth-to
nineteenth-century France, American City Beautiful, and even to postmodern
plans for sites like La Défense in Paris.
Shenzhen’s central axis, located in Futian district, six kilometers west of the
city’s historic core in Luohu, is the young city’s primary symbolic space and a
crucial expression of government power within the spectacle of the capitalist
city. Futian was designated as the future municipal center in the early 1980s by
the Shenzhen Urban Planning Bureau. In 1989 the municipal government
initiated a more detailed planning process, specifying the form of an axis in a
collaborative process involving local, Hong Kong, and Singaporean consultants.
It was finally given its signature form in 1996, when John M. Y. Lee/Michael
Timchula Architects of New York City won an international competition to
design it.38 The axis begins on a large hill at its north terminus.39 At its top is a
statue of Deng Xiaoping, striding toward Hong Kong, leading the charge for its
repatriation. Deng looks out toward the swooping roof of the Shenzhen Civic
Center designed by John Lee.40 Between the hill and this structure is a square
lined with cultural institutions, on the west side is the Shenzhen Cultural Center,
a library and concert hall designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, and to
the east a childen’s palace and the still unfinished Museum of Contemporary Art
and Planning Exhibition Hall, won by Coop Himmelb(l)au in a 2007
competition. South of the Civic Center is a vast open square and park bounded
by the city’s new CBD to the west, residential buildings to the east, and an
immense conference hall at its southern end.
The axis produces centrality as a vector, directing motion, which is why it
is a fundamentally modern solution to the problem of urbanization. In Shenzhen
the axis is over-coded with symbolic functions. Clearly, its north–south
orientation refers directly to the tradition of imperial capitals, and to Beijing
specifically. However, the popularity of the governmental axis in southern cities,
especially those built up from almost nothing, like Dongguan and Shenzhen,
may also be explained by the national axis of power that runs from the north to
the south. If all the SEZs were designed to be as far from the country’s political
center as possible, the axis can be seen as a project of symbolic reintegration,
monumentalizing the famous southern tour (Nanxun) Deng made in 1992.
Finally, in the local context the axis also refers to the repatriation of Hong Kong
into the PRC. Formally Shenzhen’s axis is a pre-emptive cut in the urban fabric.
The axis represents the force of urban and economic planning to intervene in a
contingent world. Through these layered meanings the axis functions as a line
through time from the ideological justification of the past toward a knowable
future.

14.7
Model of Shenzhen at the Shenzhen Civic Center, photo Adrian Blackwell

If the north–south axis is the symbolic and geographic center of the new
metropolis, its metropolitan infrastructure began with a perpendicular vector of
linearity. Since its inception Shenzhen has had four masterplans, in 1982, 1986,
1996, and 2007. The first concentrated development in 30 square kilometers
between the first industrial development in Shangbu and the border crossing at
Luohu. The second 1986 plan proposed the city’s innovative linear development
along Shennan Avenue connecting six urban clusters parallel to the Hong Kong
border: Qianhai, Nantou, Overseas Chinese Town, Futian, Luohu-Shangbu, and
Shatoujiao.41 This plan was revolutionary in China, departing radically from the
concentric developments of historic planned cities. Celebrated by professors and
professionals and referred to as “clustered linear planning,”42 the city formed a
dense urban corridor following the east–west axis of Shennan Road and bounded
by the Beihuan expressway to the north and the Binhai/Binhe expressway to the
south. The third masterplan in 1996 extended the concept of linearity to the
districts of Bao’an and Longgang, which were amalgamated into the
municipality in 1994. This “Network Model” was based on three new north-to-
south axes of development – western, central, and eastern – planned to
rationalize and contain the industrial sprawl being built outside the boundaries of
the SEZ.43 A key aspect of the western axis was a toll expressway financed by
Hong Kong developer Gordon Wu. Built as a raised structure floating above the
territory, it connected the Hong Kong border in Futian with Guangzhou,
stimulating an explosion of industrial development in Northern Bao’an and
Dongguan in the 1990s, turning this zone outside the SEZ into the world’s
largest factory territory.44 The highway now includes a ring that encircles
Guangzhou and extends down the western side of the Delta. The last segment of
Wu’s plan, a cross-delta causeway that would turn the PRD from a “U” into a
ring, is still in the planning stages. Inside the SEZ Metro lines one and two were
planned in 1998 and opened in 2004.45 The latest masterplan, Shenzhen 2030, is
“polycentric” and aims to emphasize regional connectivity, around an equally
large green infrastructure of recreational and ecological spaces that form the core
of the plan. It proposed far-reaching improvements to the Shenzhen Metro
system, including lines three, four, and five, which had all opened by 2011,46
and new commuter lines designed to connect two centers, Qianhai and Futian,
with five subcenters located in Bao’an, Longgang, and Yantian.47

14.8
Statue of Deng Xiaoping Striding to Hong Kong on top of Lotus Mountain, photo Adrian Blackwell
But the city’s infrastructural systems are not simply city-building tools; they are also the crucial prerequisite
for the circulation of commodities. Shenzhen’s status as the factory of the world has been contingent on the
production of a dense logistics network from Shenzhen to the rest of the world. As Wu’s highway already
suggests, this network is fundamentally outward-looking, it is ungrounded and involves not only the rail and
road networks mentioned above, but also air and sea networks. Shenzhen’s Bao’an International Airport is
currently the fifth busiest in China, and the city is planning to double its size with a new terminal designed
by Fuksas architects. Planned to open in 2012, the airport is an example of parametric design at an
unprecedented scale. Reminiscent of Norman Foster’s immense Beijing airport, Fuksas’s structure has a
much more complex skin whose scales vary parametrically at different sections of the building, modulating
the smooth space of this transit non-place. Shenzhen’s three ports, Yantian, Shekou, and Chiwan, make the
city the third largest container port in the world, behind only Singapore and Shanghai. In 2010 the PRD was
already the world’s largest shipping hub with 58.76 million TEUs, far larger than the Yangzi Delta (42.47
million) or Singapore (28.43 million).48

14.9
1986 plan for Shenzhen within the Special Economic Zone, image courtesy of the Shenzhen Center

for Design

14.10
1996 Shenzhen municipal plan, image courtesy of the Shenzhen Center for Design
14.11
2007 Shenzhen municipal plan showing major axes of development, image courtesy of the Shenzhen
Center for Design In 1996 Manuel Castells argued that the PRD was a megacity that was “not yet on the
map” and that “is likely to become the most representative face of the twenty-first century.”49 It seems
clear 15 years later that his predictions are substantively true – not only is the inner ring of the PRD the
world’s largest urban conurbation, but it is also the most important strategic location in the contemporary
global economy. He makes two crucial points about the PRD: first, it exists as a megacity insofar as it looks
away from itself, a city for production before consumption; and second, it is an “interdependent unit” in
which its different parts require one another, a fact that makes it distinct from Jean Gottman’s
characterization of the northeastern US seaboard as a megalopolis.50 The resonance with Koolhaas’s “City
of Exacerbated Difference” is clear here. However, the violent reality of neoliberal infrastructures are
perhaps best described by Stephen Graham, whose work on splintering urbanism calls out the cold logistics
spaces of contemporary margins as the physical monuments of our contemporary political and economic
paradigm.51

14.12
The new Shenzhen airport by Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas Architects, image courtesy of
Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas Architects Peripheral urban forms: worker camps and peasant villages

What this distant examination of the city’s infrastructure has missed is the
resolutely industrial nature of Shenzhen in its piecemeal patterns of development
outside the SEZ. Just over a decade ago this zone was primarily a rural area
filled with fish farms, and even after its intense urbanization and integration into
the fabric of Shenzhen, it remains a zone of indistinction between urban and
rural space. This vast territory is dominated by two urban forms: factory
compounds and farmer’s villages, with only occasional shopping malls, hotels,
night-clubs, or government buildings interrupting their monotonous repetition.
This peripheral urbanization houses most of Shenzhen’s population. It is a city
of migrant youths who have come to make money and escape the farm villages
where they grew up. Its built form is a strange mixture of top-down and bottom-
up development, in which foreign firms build highly structured factory
compounds to accommodate single workers in dormitory housing, while the
village collectives develop their land into high-rise apartments to rent to married
migrant families. The factory/dormitory camps are rigidly planned and tightly
controlled, with walls, gates, guards, and curfews, while the villages seem open
and self-organizing by comparison.

14.13
Building types found in the Factory Territory, drawing David Christensen/Adrian Blackwell

14.14
Typical composition of building types in the Factory Territory, drawing David Christensen/Adrian
Blackwell Ngai Pun and Christopher Smith have called the industrial urbanism that dominates this territory
a “dormitory labour regime,”52 as its compounds combine spaces of both production and reproduction.
These compounds bear a superficial resemblance to the communist work units that acted as the base units of
urbanization in China from 1949 until the end of the 1970s, but are radically different in architectural
intention and actual functioning. The danwei53 of the communist period were designed to actualize the
revolution’s goal of improving people’s lives and though they provided only modest accommodation, it was
modern in comparison to the housing that had been ravaged by a half-century of war and instability. In
contrast, the dormitory labor regime has been introduced to fulfill a very different function. It houses
migrant workers who are interpellated as peasants according to the hukou system, and are considered
temporary guest workers in cities like Shenzhen. As a result, dormitories provide the absolute minimum
requirements for the worker’s reproduction: a bed to sleep in and cafeteria to eat in. A single dormitory can
house hundreds or even thousands of workers, often living in bunk beds, with 12 or more workers to a
room.

This regime has been one of the key features of Shenzhen’s urbanism since
the region was tapped as an SEZ. A widely published photograph of the first
industrial development on Huaqiangbei Street in 1981 shows factories and
dormitories that are typologically identical to contemporary examples, with 5–7-
story factory buildings sitting next to dormitories of a similar height.54 This form
is one of Shenzhen’s unique contributions to the history of urbanism, yet it
seems to have arrived fully formed. While dormitories have been used to house
seasonal workers in rural industries since capitalism began, their application in
urban spaces has been less common. Smith sees the origins of their use in urban
areas within emergent Japanese capitalism. In the 1920s the Japanese introduced
a system of “board apprenticeships” to China in order to house rural female
workers. This system allowed for the substitution of more expensive or
rebellious workers with cheaper and more precarious ones; women replaced
men, and farmers replaced urban residents.55 As Smith points out, the secret of
the dormitory is its specific combination of mobility and immobility. It allows
workers to move easily into a new work environment in the city, but then ties
their accommodation to work, making it very hard to leave the job and giving
employers close surveillance over their workforce.56
This vernacular urban form is so completely driven by pragmatic concerns
that it has been almost entirely beyond the influence of innovative urban
designers. However, in 2000 Yung Ho Chang, of Atelier Feichang Jianzhu,
designed a municipal building in Dongguan that takes the ubiquitous paired
slabs of the dormitory and factory to create an asymmetric building with a
covered porch between its two wings. Like many projects by his firm, the
building modifies everyday precedents to create architecture for new programs.
In a brilliant critique of the “nostalgia for utopia” criticized by Zhou Rong, the
project models the most honorific structure in the territory on the repetitive
forms that surround it.

14.15
Street between Factory/Dormitory compounds in Houting Village, Bao’an District, photo Adrian

Blackwell

14.16
Atelier Feichang Jianzhu, municipal building in Dongguan, image courtesy of Atelier Feichang
Jianzhu; photo Shu He Architectural Photography Studio In contrast to the disciplinary structure of the
dormitory factory complexes, the endogenous development of rural villages has played a complementary
role in the urbanization of the delta. The communist legacy of the strict division between urban and rural
space has created conditions in which rural villages have little government support but strong land use
rights. In most places the villager’s control over rural land provides only the minimal security of
subsistence, but at the fringes of large cities, where land values are quickly increasing, land use rights have
allowed some farmers and village collectives to make money developing land. Rural land is allocated to
farmers in two forms: farm land can be expropriated by paying six to ten times the average income
produced on it over the last three years, but house land is more difficult to expropriate, because of its higher
value and the necessity to provide replacement housing.57 During the process of land development inside
the SEZ, farm land was quickly expropriated for urban use while houses were left untouched, so that village
fabric was quickly swallowed into the city. Resourceful peasants, unable to transfer their rights or change
the use of their properties, leveraged the capital gained from selling their farmland to add floors to their
homes. When the government attempted to control this process through a series of laws, villagers often
responded by breaking them. Each new law precipitated an acceleration of transgressions that were
tolerated because the villages provided the only accommodation available to migrant families, absolving the
state of its responsibility to construct affordable housing. Through this process some buildings reached
heights of 20 stories, and most villages were built far too densely for sufficient light, ventilation, or fire
safety.58 The resultant phenomenon has been called Chengzhongcun (village in the city).

14.17
Gangxia Urban Village, Shenzhen, image courtesy of Urbanus Architecture & Design Outside the
central cities, villages have also controlled the development of much of the industrial land in Shenzhen.
This practice has its roots in the Maoist division of labor. Mao attempted to solve the deep economic divide
between the countryside and the city by bringing industry to the countryside, rather than allowing farmers to
migrate to the city. One of the key policies of the Maoist period encouraged rural communities to start small
factories, called “commune and brigade enterprises,” which allowed villages to diversify their economies
and make use of seasonal farm labor. After the opening of the special economic zones in the early 1980s it
was these small industries (renamed “town and village enterprises” (TVEs)) that formed a beachhead for
foreign capital. Peasants in Shenzhen and Dongguan entered into a relationship of sanlai yibu, literally,
“three supplies and one compensation,” with family members living in Hong Kong.59 The Hong Kong
investor would supply material, equipment, and plans to the local enterprise, which would provide labor,
land, and infrastructure. When the product was manufactured the investor would compensate the TVE for
its work. As products became more sophisticated and the economy more developed, the TVEs became less
competitive and new joint ventures and foreign-owned enterprises pushed them out, so the village
collectives turned their attention from industry to land development. Planner John Friedmann has called this
dispersed and decentralized pattern of urbanization “endogenous development,” emphasizing the self-
organizing character of the Chinese state’s economic miracle.60 George C. S. Lin has described the pattern
of urbanization as “urbanism from below.”61 But this particular city from below is also a profit-making
machine for local farmers who develop property for migrant housing and transnational industries, and in a
refrain that seems all too common in the neoliberal city, the informal sector is called upon to replace basic
functions provided by the state during the Fordist period.

In 2005 Urbanus Architects made three theoretical proposals to renovate

villages within the boundaries of the SEZ. All three called for the preservation of
the bulk of the built form in the village, and the superimposition of a new
infrastructure on top, or alongside them. This strategy flew in the face of
mainstream planning, which argued that the villages were crime-ridden and
blighted neighborhoods that needed to be torn down and rebuilt. Urbanus’s
embrace of the complexity of urban form in these spaces provided a strong
critique of the over-scaled streets, buildings, and open spaces of official
urbanism in Shenzhen. In a catalog essay for the 2009 Shenzhen Biennale, Ou
Ning related his experience of living in the village in the city: I found that these
communities, built by the original residents on their own land, formed a world
that was independent and open, where they accepted outsiders, but also
maintained autonomy, using their own wisdom to create a kind of inexpensive
and convenient, but also rich and rowdy street life.62
14.18
Proposal for a new apartment building in Xinzhou Village, in Futian District, image courtesy of
Urbanus Architecture & Design So, despite its non-utopian realpolitik, the village in the city still acts as a
model for a different kind of city, one that privileges the everyday practices and lives of people over a
purely economic logic.

The persistence of modes of production: from

shanzhai to creative industries and financial services
In 2007, construction was completed on a museum designed by Urbanus
Architects in Dafen in Longgang district, a village with a unique export
economy based on hand-painted copies of famous and obscure paintings from
around the world. The village employs roughly 8,000 migrant workers in 500
companies, producing five million paintings each year and generating total
revenue of 300 million RMB.63 The museum functions as gallery and
community center for the village’s cottage industry. Its ground floor houses a
painting market and auditorium for public events; its second floor contains a
sequence of galleries dedicated to the exhibition of “original” paintings; and the
top floor, modeled on the gridded form and dimensions of the village in the city,
consists of a set of studios, workshops surrounding outdoor public spaces.64 If
art is still understood as a practice of subjective creativity, then an art gallery in
an industrial village specializing in forgeries appears at first as a contradiction,
and it is precisely this coincidence of copies and originals that seems to most
confound the European imagination in contemporary China. But Chinese culture
has a very long history of mass production and as a result places a very different
value on productive repetition. In Ten Thousand Things, Lothar Ledderose
argues that the modularity of characters in the Chinese written language
facilitated a way of thinking that allowed for the mass production of cultural
objects that have been the basis of Chinese export production for centuries.65

14.19
Art Museum in Dafen Village, Longgang District by Urbanus Architecture & Design, image courtesy
of Urbanus Architecture & Design When Shenzhen was founded as an industrial city earmarked for
export processing, it was clear that the expertise would be foreign, and that the local villagers would only
supply labor and real estate. Industries began by repetitively assembling cheap products, such as toys and
clothing, using tools and machines and designs imported for this purpose. Deng Xiaoping was clear from
the beginning that the SEZs were designed to function as “a window of technology, management,
knowledge and foreign policy,” stating: “we can then import technology and learn various kinds of
knowledge including management techniques.”66 Over a 30-year process of technology transfer, Chinese
manufacturers have learned to run the plants, build machines, and design products themselves. 2005 was a
benchmark year in the successful process of technology transfer, when the Lenovo Group bought out IBM’s
personal computing department.67

Today when entering Shenzhen from the Hong Kong subway, visitors pass
through the Luohu Commercial Center, which sells counterfeit products made in
the PRD. The fabrication of fakes (shanzhai) has certainly served an important
role in this process, allowing factories contracted to make brand products to
continue production when their orders dry up and new factories without
contracts to open shop.68 But under Postfordism it has also become more
difficult to point to an “original.” The world’s largest computer and phone
manufacturers are not brand name companies, but subcontractors such as
Foxconn, Hon Hai Precision, Quanta Computer, and Compal, each of which has,
or has had, large manufacturing centers in Shenzhen, and each of which is
currently moving at least part of its operations either inland to Chongqing or
Chengdu, or outside China to Vietnam.69 These Taiwanese giants make products
for multiple brand name companies, and each brand contracts multiple
subcontractors to manufacture its products. Finally, the subcontractors are not
only responsible for manufacturing, but also for research and development. So in
this context copying is not the opposite of invention but its necessary
complement.
Despite the fact that modern architecture emphasized the multiple, the copy
and the fake seem to be tied to postmodern fashions in architecture and urbanism
and they have proliferated in Shenzhen, just as they have in North America and
Europe. Theme parks have almost become a theme of the city itself. Their
greatest density can be found in Oversea Chinese Town (OCT), a district
developed by the OCT Group to accommodate foreign investors and managers
working in Shenzhen. OCT is serviced by a one-way monorail circuit. Starting
from the Crowne Plaza Shenzhen, “the first international Venetian style hotel in
China,”70 the tiny train passes Window on the World, Splendid China Miniature
Park, China Folk Culture Village, and the amusement park Happy Valley. In
2007 OCT East opened in Yantian district with three new theme parks: Knight
Valley, Tea Stream Valley, and Wind Valley. Each of these parks is constructed
of copies of existing buildings from around the world.
Throughout the downtown of Shenzhen one can also find fakes, or shanzhai
architecture, where ideas borrowed from other buildings around the world come
to life.71 This is Photoshop urbanism, designed by the renderer as much as by
careful design. In his glossary of the PRD, Koolhaas lists Photoshop as a key
concept of contemporary urban design: “The facility that allows PHOTOSHOP
to combine everything into anything – uncritical accumulations of desire – is
applied literally in the PRD as urbanism.”72 Like in the world of industrial
production, the copying of foreign and Chinese buildings and the production of
contract documents for designs by foreign firms are two practices that have been
used by outsiders to illustrate the backwardness of the Chinese architecture and
urban design industries.73 However, in this context, Koolhaas’s argument is
refreshing for its lack of moralism. As his 2001 essay “Junkspace” illustrates,
uncritical repetition is by no means a Chinese phenomenon, but a universal
condition, practiced with a special verve and intensity in the Chinese context.74
In this situation, as in many others, Shenzhen is not just one step ahead in China,
but one step ahead of the rest of the world.75 While Koolhaas famously valorized
the incredible productivity of Chinese designers, his analysis did not explain the
intention and results of this process, which has been to learn through practice,
resulting in an exponential increase in the quality of Chinese architectural
culture in the past decade.76
Since the turn of the new millennium, Shenzhen has undergone a cultural
and financial turn. Like China as a whole, the municipality is now focusing on
cultural and creative industries in the hope that it can diversify its successful
industrial economy. In November 2008, UNESCO appointed Shenzhen China’s
first “City of Design.” The report cites a list of Shenzhen’s characteristics as
justification for its new status: its diversity,77 its proximity to Hong Kong, its
early industrialization, its leadership in high-tech industries, fashion and
software, its renowned designers and architects, and its progressive
environmental policies.78 The shift can be seen in the fabric of the city itself.
The city boasts 20 creative industry clusters. One of the best known is OCT-
LOFT, the site of the first two Shenzhen/Hong Kong Biennales of
Urbanism/Architecture. The former factory complex was converted into
galleries, event spaces, and office space for creative businesses between 2003
and 2005 by Urbanus Architects, who now have their Shenzhen offices there.
This renovation was a pioneering project of adaptive re-use in China, in which
factory buildings were overclad and reroofed, and the entrance to a multi-story
factory was transformed with surgical interventions.79 In 2009 Urbanus
collaborated with OMA to win a competition to renovate the vast square south of
its Shenzhen Civic Building. Named “Crystal Island,” their project proposed a
circular pedestrian path floating above the square. The ring would connect a
sequence of creative clusters: design administration, tourism center, design
retail, design campus, and a leisure park. Within the ring the city’s ceremonial
square would be preserved, and at its geometric center, on an island in Shennan
Avenue, would be the site and infrastructure for a future design expo.80
As Fredric Jameson argues in his writing on postmodernism, a cultural turn
always follows a financial turn, which provides the surplus capital for the luxury
of culture.81 Nowhere is this relationship more evident today than in Shenzhen.
Since 1978 the city has been transformed from an industrial hinterland for Hong
Kong into a financial center in its own right. There are only two stock exchanges
in China, in Shanghai and Shenzhen. Both opened in the fall of 1990, and by the
first half of 2011 both cities were ranked in the top 15 financial centers in the
world by the Global Financial Centres Index.82 Shenzhen’s neighbor, Hong
Kong, is currently considered the third pillar of the global financial system along
with London and New York City.83 Combined, Shenzhen and Hong Kong
constitute one of the most formidable sites of financial services in the world.84
Jameson goes on to argue that real estate speculation is simply the effect of
the financial turn on urban space.85 This has been illustrated through the short
history of Shenzhen’s development. It was the first city in China to sanction a
land market in 1987, and its rapid development has made real estate one of its
primary industries.86 Today, development is more challenging because of
scarcity of land, and as a result it is also more lucrative. Important new
residential developments are currently being planned in Guangming New Town,
Qianhai, Dameisha in Yantian, and the new CBD. The 2007 competition for
Guangming New Town was won by a young Austrian firm, Rainer Pirker
ArchiteXture. Rather than fill the city with high-rise buildings, their proposal
calls for a series of clustered towers up to 300 meters tall, floating in a sea of
medium-density fabric.87 The Dutch firm MVRDV was the competition’s
runner-up with “Superwindow,” a “Park Avenue” of tall buildings, surrounding
the central park, with medium-rise fabric filling in the rest of the town. Both
firms will contribute to the final design.88 The competition for Qianhai proposed
an immense development area of 4,500 acres and 1.5 million people, ringing a
bay facing east across the delta. It was won in 2010 by Field Operations, whose
project, “Creating the Water City,” organized development between a series of
radiating tributaries into the bay. These park spaces will function to
accommodate and clean storm-water runoff, while also greatly extending the
water frontage and real estate value.89 Dameisha, in Yantian, is the home of
OCT East, but it is already famous in the architectural press for Steven Holl and
Li Hu’s horizontal skyscraper, a multi-pronged mixed-use structure floating 9–
14 meters above the ground. Finally the most developed of these new zones is
Shenzhen’s new CBD, located on the west side of the central axis in Futian.90
Planned by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill in the late 1990s, the CBD is now
nearing completion. Its most important building, located on the corner closest to
the civic centre and on the intersection of the city’s two main axes, is
Shenzhen’s new stock exchange, which will be finished at the end of 2011.
Designed by OMA, the project is based on a very simple idea: to illustrate both
the speculative nature of finance in general and the virtual form of Shenzhen’s
exchange, OMA decided to float the trading services in a podium 36 meters
above the ground, creating a public plaza at grade and clearly signifying the
deterritorialized and ungrounded nature of finance capital.91

14.20
OCT East Factory Area Rehabilitation by Urbanus Architecture & Design, image courtesy of
Urbanus Architecture & Design
14.21
Shenzhen Eye/Crystal Island, cultural center by OMA and Urbanus Architecture & Design, image
courtesy of Urbanus Architecture & Design In 30 short years, Shenzhen has completed an arc that took
New York City almost two centuries: from nascent industrialization to a Postfordist economy of
speculation. However, this progression is not a simple case of succession; rather, as Paolo Virno observes in
The Grammar of the Multitude, under contemporary capitalism “the production models which have
followed one another during this long period (of capitalist development) represent themselves
synchronically.”92 It is not that Shenzhen was Fordist in 1980 and finally neoliberal today, but that its
industrial rise was as much a part of neoliberalism as its emergence as a world city is today, and its
exemplary status as a neoliberal city lies precisely in this complex uneven development. The exacerbation
of differences that Shenzhen’s first and second lines produced in its early days has been internalized within
the municipality itself, so that Shenzhen has managed to maintain its preeminence as a locus of proximate
differential within labor markets.
14.22
Masterplan for Qianhai Bay by James Corner Field Operations, image courtesy of James Corner

Field Operations

14.23
Shenzhen Stock Exchange by Office for Metropolitan Architecture, image courtesy of OMA Shenzhen
time

If neoliberal urbanism runs in two directions, from liberalization to a new

authoritarianism, neoliberal time is organized along a line that runs between
poles of permanence to absolute contingency: from the incontrovertible arrest of
Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no alternative” and Francis Fukuyama’s “The End
of History,” to the absolute flexibility of its mode of production and the
precarious instability of its labor force. But what alternatives exist to this double
bind of the present? What time might organize Shenzhen after neoliberalism?
American economist Giovanni Arrighi has charted the historical periodization of
capitalism in relation to the rise of China. The trajectory of his investigations
offers us a framework in which to consider three possible urban futures for
Shenzhen: first, a regressive time that travels backwards, shrinking the city;
second, a new stasis of Chinese domination; or third, the political time of urban
revolution.
In The Long Twentieth Century (1994), Arrighi writes the history of
capitalism as a sequence of cycles of systemic accumulation, each governed by
different states: Genoa, the Dutch United Provinces, England, and the US. These
four long centuries have each consisted of two phases: the first in which
hegemonic power is built through the territorialization of wealth in fixed assets
required for production, a period of growth and expansion that always eventually
ends in over-production and falling profits; and a second in which wealth is
deterritorialized as finance capital, creating a new surge of wealth that has
always eventually led to the waning of the state’s political and economic
power.93 Neoliberalism is simply the name we use for this second stage in our
current cycle of American dominance. According to this scenario, Shenzhen’s
financialization will also usher in its decline; the once formidable “window on
the world” will be rendered obsolete as a manufacturing center and all its largest
and most profitable manufacturers are now deterritorializing, leaving abandoned
industrial areas in their wake. Philipp Oswalt’s Shrinking Cities exhibition and
publications powerfully reflected on this situation in four regions, Detroit,
Manchester/Liverpool, Halle/Leipzig, and Ivanovo.94
Arrighi opens up a slightly different possibility in his final book, Adam
Smith in Beijing (2007), arguing that the US turn toward financialization in the
late 1970s led to the current decline of its economy, the impossibility of a “New
American Century,” and the emergence of China as the center of the global
market economy. But for Arrighi the prospect of a long Chinese century
suggests a very different world market. He makes a clear historical distinction
between China’s dominance during the 500-year peace of the East Asian market
system between 1428 and 1894 and the militarism of Europe’s competitive
nation states during the same period,95 and he hopes that the contemporary rise
of a Chinese market economy will learn from this past in order to distinguish
itself from capitalism in four ways: “self-centered market-based development,
accumulation without dispossession, mobilization of human rather than non-
human resources, and government through mass participation in shaping
policies.” Arrighi concludes that our most optimistic hope for the future lies in
the possibility of Chinese global leadership faithful to these principles, arguing
the rise of the Asian market economy may evolve to function more equitably
than capitalism as we now know it.96 As the locus of China’s emergence within
Western capitalism, Shenzhen could become a key command and control center
in the transition to the new dominant center of the world market system.
Koolhaas’s ambivalent work on the PRD and OMA’s recent projects in China
both seem to begin from this position.
However hard Koolhaas and many of the practices that have followed in his
wake have worked to describe the world, when the situation of contemporary
urbanism appears as dire as it does in Shenzhen, the point is not simply to
maintain the status quo, but to change it.97 Not only has Koolhaas distanced
himself from this responsibility but, despite their seduction, his analyses of
contemporary urbanization have been less illuminating than they might at first
seem. On this count, his most incisive critic has been the geographer Matthew
Gandy, whose analysis of The Harvard Project on the City’s research on Lagos
points to the methodological limits of Koolhaas’s ahistorical perspective.98
Gandy cautions that it is naive to valorize the desperation of an informal
urbanism as ingenious, when it was generated through the violence of the World
Bank and IMF restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s.99 The Great Leap Forward
suffers from similar problems. In its description of incredible urban vitality, it
fails to acknowledge the production of the dormitory labor regime as the engine
of the city’s unprecedented growth. In his spirited critique of Jianfei Zhu’s
“Criticality in between China and the West,” Tao Zhu dismisses many of
Koolhaas’s assumptions about the PRD.

Unchecked “market forces” have constituted an agonizing lesson for China

during this period of development; today in order for Chinese society to
survive at all, there has to be a set of intervening, if not to say “critical,”
forces mediating between the unrestrained impulses of exploitation, the
authoritarian power structure, all-too-limited natural resources and the
vulnerable public sphere.100

In a third scenario that builds on Arrighi’s research, Minqi Li analyzes

global capitalism from a position less sympathetic to the Chinese state, arguing
that China will not become the new global hegemon, but that the current rise of
China will instead lead to the end of the capitalist world economy. Not only will
expansion into the Chinese labor and consumer market be capitalism’s last great
spatial fix, but the emergence of an enormous consumer market will test the
Earth’s environmental capacity.101 In a posthumously published essay, co-
written with Beverly Silver, Arrighi concurs, arguing that the next systemic
cycle will necessarily be truly global and integrate the real costs of reproduction
“of labour and of nature,” within its operation.102 In this scenario, Shenzhen’s
future will hinge on the ability of its inhabitants to contest the exacerbated
differences that until now have been the foundation of its urban development. So
it is the social forces of the city that threaten to have the greatest impact on both
its temporality and spatiality. Between January and May 2010, 13 workers at
iPhone manufacturer Foxconn’s Bao’an plant attempted or committed suicide.
This unprecedented and tragic refusal of work had concrete effects on the
situation of labor in Shenzhen’s industrial districts. Foxconn increased the base
wage to 1,200 RMB a month in June 2010, still only 9 percent above Shenzhen’s
minimum wage. At the same time Foxconn strategically accelerated its plans to
relocate one-third of its Shenzhen workforce of 450,000 to Chongqing.103
Beverley Silver and Lu Zhang have documented recent workers’ protests in
China, calling the country an “emerging epicenter of labour unrest.”104 Second-
generation workers are becoming less tolerant of the exploitation of the
dormitory labor regime. Their resistance will radically change patterns of
development in the delta, opening up possibilities for new architecture and
urbanism, organized along a different temporal frontier than neoliberalism’s
horizon of eternal precarity.
14.24
Foxconn factory complex in Bao’an District, Shenzhen
© 2012 Google/Digital Globe
Notes
1 Demographia, 2011, p. 13.
2 Campanella, 2008, p. 37.
3 Zhu, 2009, pp. 129–146.
4 See Koolhaas et al., 2001.
5 Koolhaas et al., 1998, pp. 1009–1091.
6 Baird, 2009, pp. 147–149.
7 Aureli, 2011, pp. 218–219.
8 See Jameson, 1984; Corner, 1999; Gissen, 2008; as well as the Harvard-based journal New
Geographies.
9 Koolhaas et al., 1998, pp. 2–21; see also Koolhaas, 1978.
10 Koolhaas and Mau, 1997, pp. 556–592.
11 Koolhaas and Mau, 1997, pp. 557–558; Koolhaas et al., 2000, p. 334; Koolhaas et al., 2001, pp. 27–28.
12 Harvey, 2003, pp. 145–152. See also Duménil and Lévy, 2004.
13 Peck and Tickell, 2002, p. 389.

No longer concerned narrowly with the mobilization and extension of markets (and market
logics), neoliberalism is increasingly associated with the political foregrounding of new modes of
“social” and penal policymaking, concerned specifically with the aggressive reregulation,
disciplining, and containment of those marginalized or dispossessed by the neoliberalization of the
1980s.

14 Wang and Huters, 2003, pp. 43–45.

15 Li, 2008, pp. 12–13.
16 There is a close coincidence between Deng Xiaoping’s initiation of market reforms in China at the third
Plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress in December 1978 and the first moves of neoliberalism in the
West – the election of Conservative Margaret Thatcher as prime minister of Great Britain in May 1979,
Jimmy Carter’s appointment of Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve in August 1979, and
Reagan’s election as president of the US in January 1981. See Harvey, 2005, p. 1.
17 Li, 2008, pp. 67–92.
18 Vogel, 1989, pp. 126–127; Li 1995, p. 200.
19 See Koolhaas and Mau, 1997, pp. 2–21.
20 Koolhaas, 1978.
21 http://novexcn.com, 2011.
22 The border was later expanded to 130 kilometers. Zeng, 2006, p. 3.
23 Lai, 1985, p. 74; Vogel, 1989, p. 148; Zeng, 2006, p. 3.
24 Lai, 1985, pp. 76–78; Zhong, 2009, pp. 165–166.
25 Business Alert China, Shenzhen, 2003.
26 Ou, 2009, pp. 70–72.
27 Kaiming Liu, 2007, p. 27.
28 Kaiming Liu, 2007, p. 32.
29 Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 213.
30 Pun, 2005, pp. 63–65.
31 Young, 2005.
32 For a description of this phenomenon in Toronto, see Goonewardena and Kipfer, 2004.
33 Zaera-Polo, 1998, pp. 404–407.
34 Sassen, 1992.
35 This concept of axial development was developed in many conversations with Tsui Kin, a professor of
art history at the Sichuan Art Profession College.
36 Zhou, 2006, pp. 44–47.
37 Zhu, 2009, pp. 75–104. See also Zhu, 2004, pp. 28–44 for a description of the Beijing city plan as
ideology.
38 Cartier, 2002, pp. 1523–1525.
39 The axis of the Forbidden City in Beijing is bounded to the north by Jingshan Hill, and this is a typical
feature of Imperial Capitals, as well as the contemporary axes in Guangdong.
40 Cartier, 2002, p. 1523.
41 Bruton et al., 2005, p. 231.
42 Zacharias and Tang, 2010, p. 217.
43 Ng, 2003, pp. 438; Zacharias and Tang, 2010, p. 218.
44 Koolhaas et al., 2001, pp. 479–487.
45 Koolhaas et al., 2001, p. 236.
46 Shenzhen Post, 2009.
47 Lu, 2009, p. 2, see diagram “Urban Spatial Structure Plan 2009–2020.”
48 World Shipping Council, 2011.
49 Castells, 1996, pp. 436–439.
50 Castells, 1996, p. 439.
51 Graham, 2004, pp. 162–183.
52 Smith and Pun, 2006; Pun and Smith, 2007.
53 Danwei means “work unit” in Mandarin. For an excellent description of this system of planning, see
Bray, 2005.
54 Urban China, 2007, p. 58.
55 Smith, 2003, p. 338.
56 Smith, 2003, p. 339.
57 Tian, 2008, p. 285.
58 Wang et al., 2010, pp. 960–964.
59 Lin, 2006, p. 37.
60 Friedmann, 2005, pp. 38–51.
61 Lin, 2006, pp. 50–51.
62 Ou, 2009, pp. 73–74.
63 Wong, 2010, p. 30.
64 Elsea, 2008; Wong, 2010, p. 31.
65 Ledderose, 1998.
66 Ng and Tang, 2004, p. 192.
67 Chuanzhi Liu, 2007, pp. 573–577.
68 Feng et al., 2011, pp. 74–80.
69 Culpan et al., 2011.
70 OCT Hotel, 2003. From the description of the Crowne Plaza Shenzhen on the OCT Hotels website.
71 Campanella, 2008, p. 36. Shenzhen’s first skyscraper, the International Foreign Trade Center, was the
tallest building in China at 53 floors when it was finished in 1985. Topped with a revolving restaurant,
it was modeled on Gordon Wu’s Hopewell Center in Hong Kong and it in turn became the prototype
for copycat towers in many other Chinese cities including Guangzhou and Beijing.
72 Koolhaas and Mau, 1997, pp. 560–561.
73 Muynck, 2006.
 74 Koolhaas, 2001, pp. 408–421.
75 One Step Ahead in China is the title of Ezra Vogel’s history of Shenzhen in the 1980s.
76 UNESCO, 2009, p. 3. The report argues that through this process, modern Chinese design was born in
Shenzhen.
77 See UNESCO, 2009, p. 2, “Admire creativity, Encourage diversity and Be tolerant of failure.”
78 UNESCO, 2009, pp. 2–5.
79 Urbanus Architecture & Design, 2005.
80 Archdaily, 2009.
81 Jameson, 1998, pp. 136–161.
82 The Z/Yen Group, 2011.
83 Overholt, 2011, p. 9; The Z/Yen Group, 2010.
84 William H. Overholt points out that Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Shenzhen consistently outpace all
global exchanges except NASDAQ in their primary function, the ability to raise capital. Overholt,
2011, p. 3.
85 Jameson, 1998, pp. 162–190.
86 Ng, 2003, p. 434.
87 Rainer Pirker ArchiteXture, 2007.
88 Liauw, 2008.
89 Archdaily, 2010.
90 Steven Holl Architects, 2006.
91 OMA, 2006.
92 Virno, 2004, p. 105.
93 Arrighi, 1994.
94 See Oswalt, 2005.
95 Arrighi, 2007, pp. 309–350.
96 Arrighi, 2007, 389.
97 Scott, 2007, pp. 265–266.
98 Gandy, 2005, p. 42.
99 Gandy, 2005, p. 46.
100 Zhu and Zhu, 2007, pp. 199–203.
101 Li, 2008.
102 Silver and Arrighi, 2011, p. 67.
103 Chan and Pun, 2010.
104 Silver and Zhang, 2009, p. 174.
Chapter 15

New Urbanism
Edward Robbins

Some critical ideas that have shaped our cities are the product of our experience
of actual physical forms and designs rather than self-conscious design principles:
Las Vegas and Los Angeles come to mind. Others often are the result of a
judicious mix of actual design and the writings that accompany them:
Hausmann’s Paris and Cerda’s Barcelona are examples. Still others are
movements better known for their writings and organizational activities and the
effects these have had on the larger discourse about urbanism rather than the
projects that they have brought to fruition. The New Urbanism is just such a
phenomenon. Since its founding in 1993 as the Congress of the New Urbanism,
the New Urbanism has addressed a whole range of challenges posed by
contemporary urbanism: the automobile, connectivity, growth, sustainability,
sprawl, regionalism, and equity, among others. From the beginning it has been a
movement dedicated to: “The poetics of small town life, the virtues of
sustainable communities, and the appeal of environments that emphasize the
pedestrian over the automobile.”1 Few, though, of the many and different
projects New Urbanists claim as theirs have been fully realized and none have
met the goals set out in their various charters and written texts.
Nonetheless, any discussion about urban design and the city in the early
twenty-first century would be incomplete if it did not include the “New
Urbanism.” It has taken center stage as the most discussed architectural response
to the plight of our cities in the last few decades and has grown from a relatively
small movement to one that today has over 3,100 members in 20 countries and
49 states. Among its proponents can be found mayors, federal cabinet
secretaries, and state governors. The architecture critic of the New York Times
called the New Urbanism “the most important phenomenon to emerge in
American architecture in the post-Cold War.”2 At the same time it has been
argued that “this emperor may have no clothes.”3 While the New Urbanism has
expanded its horizons, moving from more small-scale to more regional design
and planning, its reputation and its influence still primarily rest on its initial
formulations laid out in the Charter of the New Urbanism (2000).4 What follows
is just such a discussion of this foundational perspective, its relation to earlier
thinking about urban design, and a critical analysis of why the New Urbanism
has received so much attention and whether it has or can deliver on its promises.
Along the way, I will also briefly address some of the newer interests and ideas
set forth in the many discussions of the CNU.
Conceptual roots
While there is much that is unique and new about the New Urbanism, it owes
much to older approaches to urban design. The New Urbanists, most crucially,
are directly bound to their forebears by their faith in their own all-encompassing
vision for the design of a better world. It is, in their view, the only answer to the
critical problems that our contemporary cities face. If Le Corbusier argued that it
was either “architecture or revolution” (that is to say, his architecture), Leon
Krier, one of the heroes of the New Urbanism, has argued similarly that “If the
United States is to solve its social and environmental problems in the future, it
must revise the whole national philosophy of settlement, the very notion of civil
society.”5 That whole new philosophy is embedded within the Charter of the
New Urbanism, which New Urbanists argue “provides a powerful and enduring
set of principles for creating more sustainable neighborhoods, buildings and
regions.”
The design of housing and the residential landscape has been associated
throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially in the US and UK,
with the development of better citizens and a better society as much as it has
been concerned with the design of commodious and aesthetically pleasing
residential developments. Like so many urban designers before them, the New
Urbanists “speak of community and neighborhood as physical rather than social
activities, as if community resulted from the built form rather than from people
who inhabit it”.6 As Gwendolyn Wright writes: “For centuries Americans have
seen domestic architecture as a way of encouraging certain kinds of … social
life.”7 In England, too, from at least the middle of the nineteenth century,
commentators like Friedrich Engels and Samuel Kingsley linked housing with
the moral state of its inhabitants.8 As Kingsley argued as early as 1857, the
social state of the city depends on its moral state and that, in turn, depends on the
“lodging of its [the city’s] inhabitants.”9 In the twentieth century, too, architects
as different as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, Tony Garnier and the
designers of failed developments like Thamesmead in England and Pruitt–Igoe
in St. Louis, have offered their design visions as the singular answer to the social
and cultural problems of urban life. The legacy of Patrick Geddes, Ebenezar
Howard, Raymond Unwin,10 and German town planners of the 1920s looms
large in the work of New Urbanists. What binds these designers is a “belief in
the scale and spatial organization of the traditional town as the basic building
block for human settlement.”11 The New Urbanist emphasis on density and
compactness also echoes the 1940s fondness of British planners for dense old
villages and small towns. It was felt that these kinds of dense and enclosed
spaces fostered community and more energetic urbanity; the desire for active
streets with mixed use, greater density, and neighborhood coherence was the
order of the day long before the New Urbanists came on the scene.12
In their search, the New Urbanists have been strongly influenced by Werner
Hegeman and Elbert Peets and their taxonomy of different types of urban places,
plazas, intersections, and gateways, and road arrangements that provide a sense
of the civic scale and civic art.13 So too did the New Urbanists borrow the notion
of the relatively self-contained neighborhood as a critical scale of design from
planners such as Clarence Stein, at Radburn among other places, and Clarence
Perry. They, like the New Urbanists, placed great importance on and gave new
life to the idea of the neighborhood and the priority of the pedestrian over the car
in order to make a social and hospitable community. As Perry argued as early as
1929: “By some sociologists the automobile has been regarded as a destroyer of
neighborhood life … Thus the automobile menace has set up an imperative
demand for a definition and standardization of the neighborhood district.”14 The
New Urbanists’ strong emphasis on the streetscape and street use is part and
parcel, as well, of a long and continuous concern with street life15 that re-
emerged again in the 1960s. In the work of Jane Jacobs, the Smithsons, Gordon
Cullen, and, more recently, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown there is a
strongly stated desire to return to an emphasis on life in the street in contrast to
the thinking of modernists like Le Corbusier.16 For these commentators, the
street is critical to urbanity and community, even if the streets to which each
architect saw us returning varied from the building corridors of the Smithsons to
the strip of Venturi and Scott Brown and the nostalgic main street of Cullen.
In many ways, though, the most influential urban design movement is,
ironically, the one that the New Urbanists most vilify, that is, modernism.
Modernism and the New Urbanism
The New Urbanists acknowledge their legacy from, even their connection to, the
modernists, at least in part. They readily admit that “In important ways the
Congress for New Urbanism is modeled on CIAM [The Congress of Modern
Architecture] … Our methodology is the same.” But they also emphasize that
they offer a critical antidote to the errors of modernist thinking about city
making. As one of the founding fathers of the New Urbanism has succinctly put
it, “Our ideology is different.”17
New Urbanism has borrowed the structure of CIAM and adapted it to
contemporary circumstances. Mirroring CIAM practices, there are annual
congresses where members discuss and debate old and new approaches to the
task of urban design and renew their allegiance to the general principles of the
New Urbanism. There are working groups to discuss and report on particular
issues. Most notably, proponents of the New Urbanism have produced a
founding Charter of the New Urbanism (2000), which has much in common with
the Charter of Athens (1933) so central to the work of CIAM. The charters of
both groups address similar issues such as reforming the chaos of existing cities,
linking physical with economic and social issues, and providing clear guidelines
on how to proceed in practice. Both set out to create community and social good
through their designs. In practice, members of the CNU, similar to CIAM, work
assiduously to influence government agencies and other important groups central
to the development of urban projects. Also like CIAM, they have produced more
publicity, more publications, and more interviews and programmatic statements
than projects that have been realized.18
Unlike CIAM, which limited its membership to architects and designers
and remained relatively small, the CNU is open to anyone who wants to join and
receive their publications and participate in their work. At CNU gatherings one
will find students, developers, community organizers, politicians, and city
administrators along with architects, urban designers, and planners participating
actively in both the official and informal discussions and activities. There is an
active effort to capture the press and broadcast media by inviting them to CNU
events and programs. The CNU accepts much of the organizing principles of
CIAM but rejects its elitism.
Even though New Urbanists insist that their thinking and approaches
critically contrast with those of modernism, they share many substantive ideas
with it as well. Indeed, as John Dutton points out so succinctly: “The irony is
that the New Urbanism is in many ways a resurrection of modernism but cloaked
in the dress of the pre-modern era.”19
The CNU, like CIAM, focuses not only on design but also on reforming the
building industry to get it to understand the advantages and superiority of their
design approach in comparison to more conventional design. Similar to CIAM
there is also a strong belief in the efficacy of standards, codes, and written
conventions. Like the modernists, the New Urbanists also are willing to work
with big developers in realizing their goals but at a scale of design that is less
monumental than that of the modernists. New Urbanists also share with CIAM
an interest in the making of community through the design of town centers, and
like many members of the MARS group, an offshoot of CIAM, they believe that
urban design has to address the design of the street. And, it bears repeating, like
CIAM, the CNU has a fundamental and almost evangelical belief in the role of
design not only in forming a better city but also in shaping a better society.
Still, it is clear that in many ways the New Urbanism is a rejection of
modernist approaches to urban design. Unlike CIAM and other modernists, the
CNU seeks to work with people who are not professional architects but who are
willing to join in the effort to realize the New Urbanist project. New Urbanists
also repudiate the notion central to modernist ideology that one single
architectural genius is and should be responsible for the design of the totality of
any project, be it at the scale of a house or of a whole city like Le Corbusier’s
Plan for Algiers.
Most crucial to the popularity of New Urbanists among many of its
followers and the media, New Urbanists eschew the modernist aversion to
popular taste and traditional building types. They reject the reliance on a single
masterplan that works from universal ideas about the city, often ignores, even at
times obliterates, the traditional urban fabric, and makes no reference to the
surrounding street grid and adjacent buildings. In contrast, the New Urbanists
have looked to the particular and local because:

Each community shared a local vision and language of how to build their
world … They shared common customs and culture that led them to create
places that were a part of a larger, coherent, ordered and intrinsically
beautiful whole.20

How do they do it?

Contemporary urbanism for New Urbanists is characterized by urban sprawl,
placelessness, the domination of the automobile, and mediocre urban design21
that create suburbs that are noteworthy not only as aesthetic failures but also “as
civic environments [that] … do not work.”22 New Urbanists promise to remedy
this condition through their own good design principles and practices and to
reintegrate dwelling, working, schooling, worshipping, and recreating, and to put
an end to the domination of the automobile. In the place of the classic suburb –
less a community in their eyes than an alienating agglomeration of houses – the
New Urbanists assure us that their design principles will create a sense of place,
which will re-engage the spirit of the traditional American small town and
reinvigorate urban community.23
Vision will be made reality if one follows a set of design approaches central
to New Urbanist thinking and practice. At its core is a series of scales that New
Urbanists believe essential to the generation of good urban environments – the
region, the neighborhood, and the street – and a set of town-making principles
and an architectural lexicon that provide a methodology for practice.

The region, neighborhood, and street

New Urbanists contend that it is essential that designers and planners engage the
regional scale if they are to address the problems of air quality, water, issues of
economic equity, urban decay, sprawl, social segregation, and the growing
importance of the metropolitan culture in general. Without a regional plan, for
example, neighborhood-and village-scaled developments can create the very
sprawl and social segregation that should be prevented. Nonetheless, designers
have as yet “no framework for this new reality, no handle to guide it.”24
Although it is continually alluded to, the region is not rigorously defined by
New Urbanists. It may be bounded by topography, watersheds, coastlines, river
basins and other natural features of the landscape, or may be described as
consisting of cities, towns, and villages; regions may also defined by reference to
economic, political, and cultural attributes. There are, however, a number of
principles that derive from addressing the region.
For the New Urbanists, designers should respect the edges of the metropolis
so that sprawl and development do not replace agricultural and natural
landscapes. With this in mind, they place great emphasis on infill development
within existing areas rather than development of marginal or peripheral areas to
the core city.
 Where possible all development should be contiguous with existing urban
boundaries. Noncontiguous development should be designed as towns and
villages with their own employment, civic, and cultural base rather than as
bedroom communities to avoid sprawl. Development should respect the local
historical patterns of urbanism and the physical organization of the region should
be supported by a transportation structure that provides for mass transit,
pedestrian movement, bicycles, and any other means of transportation that
lessens the use of the automobile.
The neighborhood for New Urbanists is the essential element of
development and redevelopment in the metropolis. It is critical that
neighborhoods be compact, pedestrian friendly, and provide for mixed use.
Neighborhoods are to be designed and to be seen as coherent wholes. Districts,
though, within a neighborhood should emphasize a single use as a civic or
commercial center, for example. As many activities as possible, shopping,
schooling, using parks and local governmental facilities, should be accessible by
walking, especially by the young and the old. Other desirable features of a
neighborhood are easy access to mass transit, codes that provide guidelines for
building, and the dispersion of parks, ballfields, gardens, and such throughout
the neighborhood rather than being concentrated in one single-use area.
It is also important that within neighborhoods a broad range of housing
types, from single family to multi-family, from more to less expensive, be made
available so that people of diverse backgrounds and incomes can find a place to
live within the development. But to make a neighborhood work, it is crucial that
the streets that make up a neighborhood be designed to allow for the elements
that need to be accommodated and in an aesthetically pleasing way.
For the New Urbanists, whether correctly or not, the “fault line between
Modernism and traditional urbanism” is in the respect that traditional design and
the New Urbanism show for the street.25 Any designer that thinks that “urban
squares are obsolete, or that traditional, figural spaces clearly shaped and defined
by buildings are somehow irrelevant” has another think coming.26 A primary
task of architecture and urban and landscape design, according to New
Urbanists, is to ensure that streets are designed as places of shared and mixed
use. These streets should be designed seamlessly with their surrounding streets,
and not as isolated pods so common to contemporary design. Local context and
precedent should always be taken into account and the design of any street
should be undertaken in relation to the overall plan.
Streets should be designed to be safe and secure without the use of overt
signs of policing. Rather, such things as human presence through elements such
as front porches and windows facing the street and street dimensions and scales
that encourage congeniality are better ways to create a sense of security.
Visibility, good lighting, well-maintained public spaces, and the legibility with
which one street or neighborhood site connects with another are other ways to
make people comfortable with using what they will sense to be secure and
inviting streets.
Clearly, New Urbanists are aware that cities have to accommodate the
automobile. But in neighborhoods, the use of the automobile must be made to
respect the pedestrian. This implies the use of such elements as on-street parking
to protect the pedestrian from auto noise, traffic calming devices that slow the
auto in densely used pedestrian areas, narrow street widths, and fewer traffic
lanes, among other things.

Town-making principles, codes, and lexicon

There is at the heart of New Urbanism a professed set of town-making principles
as a guide to town design. These, they claim, are based on observations of
patterns revealed by looking at traditional American communities. The
principles describe the fundamental physical elements that embody community,
although the principles are flexible in relation to local landscapes and
programs.27
At the core of any urban design is a masterplan; a composite drawing that
includes all the critical information needed to develop a town plan. It attempts to
exemplify the patterns of what the New Urbanists claim to be the typical
American town: a geometrically located town center surrounded by an
interconnected street network. The town is made up of, in the parlance of the
New Urbanists, a series of “neighborhoods and villages”; in effect smaller
quarters that connect to create a whole. In larger towns, the plan will also
account for the ascending scales of urban development: the neighborhood, the
village, the town, and the region.
Commercial activity and workplaces are concentrated in the town center.
Civic spaces and buildings like schools, parks, and community centers are
distributed throughout the neighborhoods. Each neighborhood, mirroring the
earlier work of designers like Clarence Perry, is planned so that from edge to
center is a quarter-mile or a five-minute walk.
Street size, depth, and length are developed so that building lots front the
street and traveling distances are reasonable. All the streets, at least all that are
possible, should connect and the street layout should allow for connections to
new streets so as to create a regional network of streets. Along with streets there
should be pedestrian paths that connect civic spaces as well as, where possible,
alleyways that also provide alternative pedestrian routes through the
neighborhood. The street section provides carefully detailed building heights,
parking lanes, and street landscapes to ensure that the scale of the elements that
surround the street make it attractive to pedestrian use.
It is also crucial that dwellings, shops, civic uses, and workplaces be in
close proximity to each other and that squares and parks be distributed
throughout the neighborhoods. Civic buildings should be prominently sited to
serve as nodes or landmarks and as terminating places. The goal of all these
design principles is to encourage active social use of the streets and other spaces
of the neighborhood.
What the New Urbanists hope by the instantiation of their town-making
principles is that issues of growth, traffic, and affordability are addressed
through physical design: traffic by the design of streets, affordability by
preventing large-scale, single-income tract housing, and encouraging homes over
stores, garage apartments, and other forms of mixed use usually prohibited by
the design of most new suburban tracts.
The town-making principles are embedded within a series of codes that
regulate and ensure that the principles embodied in New Urbanist town making
are implemented. Much of suburbia is already the product of codes and
conventions. The New Urbanism rewrites these codes and conventions to
restructure the nature of urban and suburban development. New Urbanist codes
are a series of ordinances that regulate everything from the masterplan to the
streetscape, the building types and distribution to the architectural design of all
building types.
There are five basic documents that lay out the codes. The Regulating Plan
sets out the terms of the masterplan in detail, and outlines where residences,
civic spaces, and commercial activities are to be located. What are called Urban
Regulations delineate such things as how much of a building must be on a
common frontage line and where parking is allowed, encourage such elements as
porches and stoops, and provide for rentable outbuildings. It tends to be
prescriptive rather than proscriptive. Architectural Regulations set out such
things as materials, methods of construction, and acceptable architectural
elements to insure that there is harmony among the building types. They vary
from strictly deterministic to more open-ended, depending on the development.
Street Types and Landscape Regulations set out the rules that govern everything
from street widths and alignments to encouraged street plantings.
The codes do not set out the design in exact detail; they are guidelines and
limits to design within which architects can work. They are used to control the
shape and the social reality of neighborhoods by providing not only boundaries
for what is allowable but also strong suggestions about what is considered
admirable and complementary to the neighborhood as a whole.
In 1999, to provide a more exhaustive guide for the analysis of urban space
and to create standards for a common urban language, Andrés Duany and
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, central figures in the New Urbanist movement,
developed what they called a Lexicon of the New Urbanism.28 It sets out a
taxonomy of urbanism and provides a terminology with which to describe the
form of the city and its structure from the regional scale to the building type. The
Lexicon also provides a strategy for implementation and ideas about how best to
represent urban plans.
More recently, there has been a discussion about the scale at which New
Urbanists should work. For some New Urbanists there has been a turn to more
regional planning and what they call the “Transect,” which is a categorization
system that organizes all elements of the urban environment on a scale from
rural to urban. While according to the New Urban News it was developed by
Andrés Duany and DPZ,29 the Transect is rooted in earlier planning thinking for
in many ways it is a play on the Valley Section of Patrick Geddes. For these
New Urbanists there needs to be a critical shift away from the more local and
small-scale Lexicon of the New Urbanism to the Transect. As Andrés Duany is
quoted as stating:

I am convinced that the Transect will do the job, not The Lexicon as we
thought…. The Lexicon has advocates, but I have come to realize that it is
wrong. The Lexicon is too specific and complete to be a standard. The real
matrix, I believe, is the Transect.30

More recently, it should be noted, there have been efforts among New
Urbanists to link with other urban planning movements that address issues of
sprawl, sustainability (e.g. LEED), equity, and other contemporary urban
challenges. It should also be noted that as New Urbanists shift their interest, the
tone and direction of their discourse does not become more modest. Rather, even
as doubts arise about this or that approach, the confidence in their new
approaches as the answer remains as strong as ever. And even as the movement
shifts in one or another direction and creates new and different links, its core
philosophy as expressed in their charter remains. It is what makes the New
Urbanism at its core a movement and what makes it unique.

Whence the popularity/why the criticism?

Whether the combination of scales, town-making principles, code, lexicon, and
Transect works in practice and what kind of world it is creating are the issues
that are most often debated about the New Urbanism. It is noteworthy that these
are usually debated in the abstract, with pieces of various projects, often unbuilt,
used as examples of this or that point in favor or against the New Urbanism. In a
way, it is arguable that the New Urbanism both benefits and suffers from the fact
that it has not been systematically adopted anywhere and consists of a number of
different and independent projects. They vary from pattern books to block-long
projects, from whole towns or villages to single mixed-use developments, from
slum-renewal projects like HOPE VI to high-end shopping malls, and from
projects that have been realized to projects that are still only broad suggestions.
Even with this range of projects, New Urbanist schemes make up only a small
percentage of worldwide building development. What the New Urbanists do
produce are many texts, guides, discussions, and publicity for their theories.
What we need always to keep in mind when speaking about the New Urbanism
is that it claims so many different approaches to the city in its name – everything
from brownfield development to clearfield development – that what constitutes a
New Urbanist project is at best elusive.
It is thus difficult in a sense to come to any general understanding about the
success or failure of the New Urbanism on the basis of any one or another
particular project. The most written about projects associated with the New
Urbanism are at best problematic as archetypes for critical review. Seaside,
celebrated or denigrated, depending on your point of view, in the movie The
Truman Show, is a vacation development and not an everyday community.
Celebration, built by Disney, is not strictly speaking a New Urbanist community
in the way it was created and designed even though it has become one of the
icons of the movement in the popular press. Other “iconic” projects, as we shall
see, also raise serious issues about just what New Urbanism is and why one or
another development is New Urbanist. Nonetheless, the New Urbanism is not
without its strong support and equally strong criticism. What this debate revolves
around for the most part are the core beliefs and suggestions of the New
Urbanism as defined in its Charter and Lexicon: it is that which is sui generis
about the New Urbanism. Other arenas that New Urbanism addresses, such as
sprawl as a general phenomenon and urban renewal, are not specific to the New
Urbanism and debates about these issues do not focus on New Urbanist ideas
alone. Thus it is to the core beliefs that I will turn, with some brief comments on
other areas where appropriate.
The support
There are many reasons for the apparent celebration of the New Urbanism
among designers, developers, and the wider public. For some proponents, the
New Urbanism, as the former mayor of Milwaukee John O. Norquist points out,
is a significant part of the resistance to continued urban sprawl and
fragmentation.31 New Urbanism provides a voice for those fed up with inner-city
decline, the social alienation produced by conventional suburbs, and a world that
seems to be increasingly dominated by the automobile. The call for towns and
neighborhoods that build community suggest a regional order less dependent on
the car and more amenable to pedestrian traffic; it serves as an anodyne to the
prevailing planning and development practices responsible for our current plight.
For many people, the apparent concern New Urbanists have with
community voices and attitudes is a salutary alternative to the often dictatorial
and unresponsive design strategies of many urban designers and planners of the
modernist and also bureaucratic mode. In an attempt to include local visions and
languages, New Urbanists often try to work with the local community in design
charrettes to develop a contextual solution grounded in local circumstances and
attitudes. Whether this is a marketing strategy or a genuine attempt to include
locals in developing the design or a bit of both is open to question. That it is an
attractive element of New Urbanist practice and ideology is not.
For those developers that support the New Urbanism, it is not only an
answer to sprawl and reliance on the automobile, it allows for, indeed
encourages, development of sites that, previous to the New Urbanism, would
have had fewer units in the same size tract. Real estate developers embrace the
New Urbanism in the name of community development but, as Norman
Blankman, writing in Real Estate Finance Journal, makes clear,

The single most important thing that should be done to bring affordable
housing within reach for millions of people is to change zoning laws to
permit more compact development. The first steps have been taken by a
nationwide movement [i.e. the New Urbanism] to reform US urbanism.32

Also, as one CEO of an important development firm once told me, the New
Urbanism, by providing more restrictive building codes, alleviates many of the
problems of customer choice associated with new suburban development and the
complications and increased costs that such choice generates. It simplifies the
developer’s design process. Issues of access, house type, lot and street
configurations, front door location, and other such decisions are limited and as a
result so are the ensuing problems that this often causes between potential
neighbors, as well as between customers and the developers of new suburban
and urban tracts.
There may be a more profound explanation for the New Urbanism’s
popularity and the support that it appears to engender. Throughout the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, architects and urban designers, whether modern or
postmodern, radical or conservative, have tried to realize an Enlightenment
dream to forge a satisfactory city through the cauldron of design and thereby
produce good citizens.33 One continually reappearing vision in that quest is that
of a tidy, small, and genteel urban place, which in the words of Prince Charles
would “nurture human life and imbue people with a sense of … community.”34
As David Harvey so aptly puts it:

Faced with the innumerable problems and threats that urban life poses,
some analysts … have reached for one simple solution – to try and turn
large and teeming cities so seemingly out of control, into urban villages
where, it is believed, everyone can relate in a civil fashion to everyone else
in an urban and gentle environment.35

The New Urbanism in a sense makes a kind of Freudian trade-off.36 Freud in his
Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) argues that civilization provides freedom
from fear and guarantees what he calls in German Sicherheit in exchange for
accepting certain constraints on the self and individual liberty. Sicherheit, as
Zygmunt Bauman suggests, is more than just “security.” It also refers to
“certainty and safety.”37 Security guarantees us that what we have gained or
possess will retain its value and that the world, and how we have learned to act
in it, will remain dependable. Certainty provides us the knowledge that the
distinctions between, let us say, useful and useless, proper and improper will
allow us to act in ways we will not regret, will tell us what is a good life and
what is not. Safety is the awareness that if we behave correctly we will
experience no danger or threats to our bodies, our property, our home, or our
neighborhood.
In a critical way this is precisely what the New Urbanist vision offers many
people. It proffers security by establishing a set of limits that helps to establish
and guarantee the value of the home that has been purchased. The restrictions
that are set by the codes also appear to guarantee that the community will not
change its physical form and appearance. New Urbanism sells a vision of
community, rooted in our nostalgic memory of small-town life, that sets out a
notion of the good life and provides assurances that this life will be maintained.
It also sets out to make us feel safe through the notion of the eyes on the street,
the familiarity with our neighbors, and the bounded, if not gated, form of the
neighborhood letting us know who belongs and who doesn’t. The emphasis on
traditional house types and urban aesthetics that signifies memories of a certain
and controllable past suggests that this world can be resurrected. The assurances
that tradition seems to convey also appear to provide a place for safe investment
in a neatly bounded universe in a world that is increasingly diverse and
threatening.
In exchange for Sicherheit, the New Urbanists ask that as a member of their
development one accepts strict codes and conventions. These strictly limit
individual freedom to use and design a house and property in any way an owner
might see fit and insist on a number of standards that prescribe what your
neighborhood can look like and on the necessity of a strong sense of
neighborhood control – albeit often informal – over public practices. In some
New Urbanist developments, when and how one could place political signs and
how often one could have garage sales are among the regulations set for the
community. In other New Urbanist projects, the color of houses, the type and
height of fences, the range of ornament for homes, even the types of curtains one
could have are regulated by codes. As the architect Robert Stern put it:

In a free-wheeling Capitalist society you need controls – you can’t have

community without them. It’s right there in de Tocqueville; in the absence
of community of an aristocratic hierarchy you need firm rules to maintain
decorum. I’m convinced these controls are actually liberating to people. It
makes them feel their investment is safe. Regimentation can release you.38

This is a statement with which so many of the residents of New Urbanist

developments could agree or, if not agree in principle, in which they could at
least find some comfort in practice. For critics though, such sentiments raise
serious questions about whether the New Urbanism is worthy of the praise it has
received.
The critiques
The questions about the New Urbanism revolve around a number of issues both
technical and ideological and in many ways go to the heart of so much
discussion about contemporary urbanism as a physical and social reality. If for
no other reason, it is why the New Urbanism has been so central to architectural
debates.
Most often voiced within the architectural community is a critique of the
traditionalist architectural bias of the New Urbanism. For many architecture
critics the nub of the matter is what they see as a tacky populist reliance on
traditional house types and a spurning of more modern and adventurous housing
and architectural forms. New Urbanism’s greatest sin in this view is that it is
boring, commonplace, and without any formal or aesthetic merit. The criticism is
easily shrugged off by the New Urbanists as the ramblings of an elitist minority
without concern for the larger issues that face people in their everyday lives in
the city. But there are criticisms that are not as lightly rejected.
There are a number of critics who do not challenge the architectural and
aesthetic qualities of the New Urbanism but argue that what the New Urbanists
propose cannot alleviate the very problems they claim to solve. So far, these
critics contend, the New Urbanism offers more in rhetoric than reality. And their
rhetoric holds a number of assumptions that stands in want of serious
questioning.39
Few, if any, projects built by the New Urbanists provide all that they
promise. In one of the most publicized, Kentlands (which has gone belly-up a
number of times), the village relies on a conventional mall, which is based on
regional automotive traffic for its economic survival and to which the residents
of the Kentlands go to shop for necessities like food. Laguna West has neither its
promised commercial center nor its rapid transit link to Sacramento; residents
still drive to work and shop. Visits to New Urbanist developments suggest that
driving is still an important aspect of living in those communities. Seaside
finally has its commercial center in place but it is dependent on tourism based on
the automobile. On the way to Seaside, the highway is littered with poor copies
of Seaside that increase not decrease sprawl. Certainly, the New Urbanists
cannot be held responsible for weak imitations. Seaside, Kentlands, and Laguna
West, among others, remind us, however, that the New Urbanists have as yet
been unable to deliver the kind of regional plans they promise. They have yet to
integrate the proliferation of small pedestrian-based places in a way that does not
also produce sprawl, fragmentation, and the domination of the automobile.
The failure of Kentlands and Laguna West to “concentrate commercial
activities, including shopping and working, in town centers”40 and the regional
traffic problems that Seaside poses are not accidents. Nor is the failure of the
New Urbanists to take a critical look at these problems. Such commercial centers
are not viable. Communities of 5,000–10,000 people cannot support
economically feasible town centers that will adequately serve the shopping needs
of its populace. At best, they might provide centers for the sale of convenience
goods and personal services. The densities of population needed for a serious
shopping street or center are simply not possible if one designs a community
based on single-family dwellings in today’s commercial market, as studies by
the Urban Land Institute make clear.41 Also, a typical catchment area for a
general convenience shopping area is usually about 3–6 miles, which is far
outside conventional walking distances. Such pedestrian-based commerce is
more likely in a city with higher densities, large multi-family buildings, and
larger populations.
Developing places where people would walk to work is just as problematic.
Even in neighborhoods and cities with the densities to support a jobs/housing
balance, it is unlikely that people would work where they live. Robert Cervero
has illustrated that even where counties develop a job/housing balance, two-
thirds of those who work in such counties live elsewhere and two-thirds of those
people who live in those counties work elsewhere.42 In my own city of Boston,
one of three cities with more jobs than people, 31 percent of its citizens work
outside its municipal boundaries. Clearly, many people cannot or would not
choose to live and work in the same place. Even if people could be persuaded to
work walking distance from where they live, unless one divided a metropolitan
region into company-based towns, the possibility of designing such relationships
is questionable at best.
For argument’s sake, let us say that such pedestrian-based communities
could be built. There are still questions begging answers: How do the New
Urbanists plan to guarantee work for a community’s residents near where they
live? Do people have to move if they change jobs to employers that are not
within walking distance of their homes? What are families with two working
adults to do if the firms for which they work are far apart? How do the New
Urbanists plan to guarantee homes to new employees if a company grows and
people who have changed employers or retired do not move? Design principles
are clearly not enough. What would be needed is a frightening scenario of an
almost “1984-ish” control of residential choices and management of economic
practices.
Just as the New Urbanists cannot make thriving commercial centers or
guarantee that there will be enough jobs within walking distance for residents
even if they wanted to walk to work, they cannot provide sufficient civic,
religious, and recreational facilities within easy walking distance for residents.
But, let us assume for the moment that the New Urbanists had succeeded in
building the suburban metropolitan region following their principles. A region of
a million people would have 200 neighborhoods of 5,000 or so people. A region
of five million would have 1,000 such communities. If each community housed
only five denominational churches that would be 1,000 churches in the first
metropolitan region and 5,000 churches in the second. (The Boston/Cambridge
area of over 600,000 residents and a nearby region of another 2.4 million
residents has 532 churches representing over 50 denominations.) These
hypothetical cities would have 200 to 1,000 swimming pools, health clubs,
movie theaters, libraries, and sports fields, among other things. Even this would
not prevent auto traffic, unless one assumed that use patterns and social
interactions were limited to the community in which one resided. Picture such a
regional plan, and then think of the sprawl as 200 to 1,000 separate communities
each with its own town center spans the metropolitan landscape. In effect, as
Robert Bruegmann points out, the New Urbanists have created not so much an
anodyne to urban deconcentration but “really just a kind of more attractive
sprawl.”43
Even if the New Urbanists do not meet all their goals, they might still
succeed, as Vincent Scully argues, “in creating an image of community” that
will overcome the social dissolution that, he and other New Urbanists claim, is
plaguing our society.44 The New Urbanist belief that it is through neotraditional
design that their developments can resurrect a lost sense of community has come
under significant criticism. At the core of New Urbanist thinking and design
practice is

The presumption … that neighborhoods are in some sense “intrinsic,” and

that the proper form of cities is some “structure of neighborhoods,” that
neighborhood is equivalent to “community,” and “community” is what
most Americans want and need.45

It is a presumption that is open to serious question. Many Americans love living

in the anonymous suburbs as well as in urban towers. Effective community can
be and has been created by people who live in different neighborhoods, and even
different cities through mutually shared interests. It is especially noteworthy that
the members of the CNU, a community of like-minded designers from all parts
of the country, have through their shared efforts created a major force in the
American, indeed, international discussion about urbanism. As Thomas Bender
points out, trying to recapture community by imputing it to locality-based social
activity regardless of the quality of human relationships is misleading. And, “if
community is defined as a colonial New England town” or as some other
nostalgic vision of small-town America, as it is by the New Urbanists, “then the
prospect for community today is indeed dim.”46 It trivializes the complex and
sensitive mix of social cultural practices and attitudes that go into making a
community and it assumes that community should be or must be place-based.
What few studies of New Urbanist developments there are suggest that
community is no more likely to develop there than in other types of
developments and urban and suburban places.47
Even where community is created, it may not always be the cure for urban
problems. It might be useful in a time of increasing fragmentation, conflict, and
a fast-growing dual economy to ask whether creating small well-designed places
built around their own commercial and social center, whether in the urban core
or periphery, is the best way to deal with our urban condition. This is especially
important as ever more community groups are beginning to reach out for more
citywide strategic planning rather than mere community-based development.
The need for ties between communities is growing in a world in which bigness at
the corporate and political level is growing.
New Urbanist design militates against the notion of broad-based
community alliances. Even in the way they visualize their developments
suggests a fully bounded and singular community that is not represented as part
of the wider world. This is unlike, for example, the representations of
neighborhood design by such as Clarence Perry, where the neighborhood is
represented as part of an almost infinite urban region. Moreover, so many New
Urbanist designs, if they are not gated, have monumental entrances, clearly
demarcating their setoff from the urban context that surrounds them. If
boundaries set out who and what we include in our world and who we are
appearing to reach out to and encourage being with us, then New Urbanist
designs and representations appear to suggest exclusivity.
Creating “urban villages,” even if it were possible to do so, may create
more problems in our cities than it would solve. There are questions about how
best to insure cultural and social diversity. Commentators and citizens alike
argue about whether it is better to mix peoples of different ethnic and racial
backgrounds or to work within social enclaves to maintain tradition. While most
of us would criticize creating islands of class privilege and underclass misery, it
is not obvious that intermixing people of upper-middle-class backgrounds in the
same place as the poor will either create community or overcome privilege.
More crucially, creating such a mix does not simply come about as a result of
good design principles. The minimum price for a house in Kentlands, outside
Baltimore, is over $150,000, more than ten times the median income of people in
Baltimore.48 In Seaside the prices are significantly higher. This does not augur
well for the notion of economic diversity.
In Kentlands as well the number of minority residents is significantly lower
than for the region at large.49 Although Andrés Duany suggests that it is the aim
of the New Urbanism to create diverse communities, there is little evidence that
they have done so. He also has said that he is not interested in designing
communities that will not be built. Thus, diversity not only would appear to
threaten their market, as Gerald Frug has argued, it ironically runs counter to the
American small town they yearn for with its clear social divisions and class and
racial segregation.50 It is of note that even as the New Urbanists call for class
and economically mixed communities, they also brag that house prices in their
developments invariably are higher than in surrounding developments not based
on New Urbanist design.
The more recent suggestion of the Transect is one way the New Urbanists
might argue they are facing the problem of fragmentation. While the Transect
might set in place a plan for a regional system that organizes all elements of the
urban environment on a scale from rural to urban, it does not really address the
issue of the smaller communities and how they would deal with the
conditionalities suggested above. It sets out a regional plan but at a relatively
abstract level and as a result simply sidesteps the critical issues that the core
New Urbanist philosophy raises. The love of the small town or village has
recently been re-emphasized. In a recent talk, Andrés Duany was reported to be
trying “to push the body of planners and architects toward a small-town America
that more closely resembles pre-1850 America than pre-1950” with his call for
an “agrarian urbanism.”51 At its core the original concerns that critics have with
the New Urbanism remain.
Also, it should be noted that the concern of critics and commentators like
John Kaliski that the New Urbanism is, after one moves away from the Charter
for the New Urbanism, an amorphous set of concerns with a strong institutional
frame is still apt. If one examines the more recent CNU Congress one sees the
vast range of issues that the New Urbanists claim to command, issues that are
neither unique to the New Urbanists – for example, Smart Growth and
sustainability – nor ones to which, other than their suggestions for village-based
design and such abstract notions as the Transect, they have little more to offer
than anyone else concerned with these issues.
Finally, the most telling criticism has been that the New Urbanists, like so
many architectural practitioners and theorists before them and especially the
modernists whom they scorn, are guilty of a kind of designer hubris. The New
Urbanism, like modernism, can be accused of a kind of essentialism, in which all
aspects of the complex and diverse urban world is reduced to a set of singular
and authoritative principles summarized in a set of simple statements and
strategic visual and verbal discourses. Even more arrogant, in the view of critics,
is the belief that these principles and discourses are crucial to, indeed
determinative of, better social and cultural practices; a questionable assumption
at best. Finally, at its core is an authoritarian sensibility similar to that of the
modernists. The New Urbanist belief that their design solutions are the one and
only answer to the problems that beset us is not only a conceit but a dangerous
conceit. In their unquestioned belief in their own good works, New Urbanists try
to close off discussion of alternative visions of urbanism and urban design. They
try to limit the range and diversity of the discourse about a subject that can only
be strengthened by more rather than fewer potential approaches to what has
become an increasingly intractable problem: what to do about our cities and
suburbs.
Conclusion
The New Urbanists have raised many critical issues facing our cities both
publicly and successfully. They have, unlike so many of their postmodern
brethren in design, not walked away and refused to face substantive problems to
which design may be able to offer a solution. They have not hidden behind an
apolitical relativism and elitist poetics but rather have been willing to join some
of the most political and quotidian realities facing people today. Like the
modernists, they are relevant and important, they are engaged and energetic. In
many ways they have made discussions of urban design a crucial part of the
larger discussion of whither the city, and urbanism. Their contribution to the
debates about the city should not be underestimated or go unappreciated.
But the opportunity opened by the New Urbanists should not force all those
concerned with the future of urbanism to get on their bandwagon. It should
generate a critical debate about new solutions for what have been and still are
seemingly intractable and complex problems. Designers should learn from their
past that there are no singular solutions to our urban problems and that no single
one-dimensional approach to urban design can or should shoulder such a
monumental and intractable task. Rather the hubris of the New Urbanists, like
the hubris of the modernists, should teach designers to approach the problems of
our cities open to a range of ideas and approaches to urban problems, which will
provide the basis for flexible, creative, and appropriate responses to the urban
condition.
Notes
1 Kaliski, 1999, p. 69.
2 Quoted in Anderson, 2001, p. 102.
3 Robbins, 1997, p. 61.
4 Charter of the New Urbanism, 2000.
5 Krier, 1991, p. 119.
6 Southworth, 1997, p. 43.
7 Wright, 1981, p. xv.
8 Engels, 1958.
9 Kingsley, 1880, p. 187.
10 Geddes, 1915; Howard, 1898; Unwin, 1909. For an insightful overview of their work, see Hall, 1988.
11 Krieger, 1991, p. 12.
12 See, for example, Glendinning and Muthesius, 1994.
13 Hegeman and Peets, 1992.
14 Perry, 1929, pp. 31–32.
15 For an elucidating discussion of the street in design thinking and practice, see Vidler, 1978.
16 Jacobs, 1961; Cullen, 1968; Venturi and Scott Brown, 1977. See Glendinning and Muthesius, 1994, for
a discussion of the Smithsons’ notion of streets.
17 Duany, 1997, p. 48.
18 Duany, 1997, p. 48.
19 Dutton, 2000, p. 31.
20 Bothwell, 2000, p. 51.
21 See Kunstler, 1993, for an energetic, at times even vitriolic polemic against the American city and
suburb and its design.
22 Duany and Plater-Zyberk, 1992, p. 28.
23 Duany and Plater-Zyberk, 1992.
24 Calthorpe, 2000, p. 15.
25 Solomon, 2000, p. 122.
26 Solomon, 2000, p. 123.
27 Lennertz, 1991, p. 21.
28 It is discussed and reproduced in Dutton, 2000.
29 Steutville, 2000.
30 Better Cities and Towns, 2000. “Transect applied to regional plans,” September, 1.
31 Norquist, 1998.
32 Quoted in MacCannell, 1999, p. 109.
33 For a discussion of this effort see Vidler, 1978.
34 Quoted in Donald, 1997, p. 182.
35 Harvey, 1996, p. 424.
36 The discussion that follows borrows heavily from a brilliant discussion of public space by Bauman,
1999.
37 Bauman, 1999, p. 17.
38 Quoted in MacCannell, 1999, p. 112.
39 For example, see Robbins, 1998, from which much of what follows is taken.
40 Duany and Plater-Zyberk, 1994.
41 Urban Land Institute, 1985.
42 Cervero, 1996.
43 Bruegmann, 2005, p. 153.
44 Scully, 1994.
45 Harvey, 2000, p. 171.
46 Bender, 1982, p. 4.
47 For discussions of the extent to which New Urbanism leads to community, see Andersen, 2001; Frantz
and Collins, 1999; A. Ross among others. For a more detailed analysis of community and design, see
Robbins, 2000.
48 Harvey, 2000.
49 Andersen, 2001.
50 Frug, 1997.
51 Lindsay, 2010.
Bibliography

Introduction
M. de Certeau, 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press.
T. Gieryn, 2000. A place for space in sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 463–496.
H. Lefebvre, 1991. The Production of Space. Basil Blackwell.

Chapter 1 Abu Dhabi and Dubai – world city doubles

Mohammed Al-Fahim, 1995. From Rags to Riches: A Story of Abu Dhabi. The London Center of Arab
Studies.
Essam Al Tamimi, 2003. Setting up in Dubai. Cross Border Legal Publishing.
Frederick F. Anscombe, 2003. An anational society: eastern Arabia in the Ottoman period. In:
Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf (Madawi Al-Rasheed, ed.), pp. 21–35. Routledge.
Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts, and Retort, 2005. Afflicted Powers: Capital and
Spectacle in a New Age of War. Verso.
Fernand Braudel, 1992. The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century.
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Mike Davis, 2005. Dubai: sinister paradise. Mother Jones, July 14. Online:
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Peter Hall, 1971. The World Cities, McGraw-Hill.
Frauke Heard-Bey, 2004. From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates: A Society in Transition. Motivate
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Sulayman Khalaf and Saad Alkobaisi, 1999. Migrants’ strategies of coping and patterns of accommodation
in the oil-rich Gulf societies: evidence from the UAE. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 26(2),
271–298.
Roland Marchal (ed.), 2001. Dubai, cité globale. CNRS.
Roland Marchal, 2003. Dubai: global city and transnational hub. In: Transnational Connections and the
Arab Gulf (Madawi Al-Rasheed, ed.), pp. 93–110. Routledge.
Robin Moore, 1976. Dubai. Doubleday.
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Saskia Sassen, 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton University Press.
Chapter 3 Barcelona – re-thinking urbanistic projects
Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1983. Barcelona: espais i escultures. Publicacions Ajuntament.
Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1983. Barcelona: La segona renovació. Publicacions Ajuntament.
Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1983. Plans i Projectes 1981–82. Publicacions Ajuntament.
Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1987. Barcelona: Plans cap al 92. Publicacions Ajuntament.
François Ascher, 1999. Metrópolis: ou l’avenir des villes. Odile Jacob.
Eve Blau and Monika Platzer, 2000. L’idée de la grand Ville. Prestel.
J. Borja, 1989. El espacio público: ciudad y ciudadanía. Diputación.
Fernand Braudel, 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philipp II.
University of California Press.
Joan Busquets, 1992. Barcelona: Evolución urbanística de una ciudad compacta. Mapfre.
Joan Busquets and J. L. Gómez Ordóñez, 1983. Estudi de l’Eixample. Publicacions Ajuntament.
Joan Busquets and J. Parcerisa, 1983. Instruments de projectació de la Barcelona suburbana. Annales
ETSAB.
Joan Busquets et al., 2003. The Old Town of Barcelona: A Past with a Future. Publicacions Ajuntament.
Gianfranco Canniga, 1979. Composizione architettonica e tipologia edilizia. Cluva.
Ildefonso Cerdà, 1992. Cerdà y Madrid, Cerdà y Barcelona. Facsímil. Ajuntament de Barcelona + MOPT.
Ildefonso Cerdà, 1995. Trabajos sobre Cerdà. MOPT.
Fabián Estapé, 1971. Teoría General de la Urbanización. Instituto Estudios Fiscales.
Fabián Estapé, 1977. Cerdà 1876–1976: Construcción de la Ciudad.
Jole Garreau, 1991. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. Doubleday.
David Harvey, 2000. Spaces of Hope. University of California Press.
Patsy Healey et al., 1995. Negotiating Development. Spon.
Laboratori d’urbanisme, 1978. Ensanches I y II. Publicacions UPC.
Laboratori d’urbanisme, 1992. Trabajos sobre Cerdà y Barcelona. Ajuntament de Barcelona + MOPT.
Aldo Rossi, 1982. Architecture of the City. MIT Press.

Chapter 4 Brasilia – city as park forever

Robert W. Berger and Thomas F. Hedin, 2008. Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles under Louis
XIV. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Ítalo Campofiorito, 1989. Brasília Revisitada. Revista do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional, 7, 36–
41.
Le Corbusier, 2006. Le Logis, prolongement des service publics. In: Conférences de Rio: Le Corbusier au
Brésil – 1936, pp. 118–138. Flammarion.
Lucio Costa, 1995. Registro de uma vivência. Empresa das Artes.
Osvaldo Peralva, 1988. Brasília: Patrimônio da Humanidade. Ministerio da Cultura.
José Pessôa Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, 1958. Nova Metrópole do Brasil. Imprensa do Exército.
Martino Tattara, 2011. Revendo a Memória Descritiva do Plano Piloto. In: Seminário: Lucio Costa,
Arquiteto, pp. 69–84. Casa de Lucio Costa.

Letters and decree laws

Lucio Costa to Oscar Niemeyer, undated. Casa de Lucio Costa Archives, Rio de Janeiro, III.B.04–03362.
Lucio Costa to Oscar Niemeyer, undated. Casa de Lucio Costa Archives, Rio de Janeiro, VI.A.01.
Lucio Costa, 1987. Brasília Revisitada, Anexo I of Decree Law No. 10.829/1987. Brasilia: Federal District
Government.
Federal District Government Decree-Law #10.892, October 14, 1987 and IPHAN Portaria # 314, October 8,
1992.
Hugo Gontier to Le Corbusier, telegram, June 2, 1955. Fondation Le Corbusier Archives, Paris, I1.1.XX.7.
Juscelino Kubitschek to Rodrigo Mello Franco de Andrade, June 15, 1960. Casa de Lucio Costa Archives,
Rio de Janeiro, III.B.11–00692.
Oscar Niemeyer to José Aparecido, October 4, 1989. Oscar Niemeyer Foundation Archives, Rio de Janeiro.

Chapter 5 Chicago – superblockism: Chicago’s elastic

grid
James Silk Buckingham, 1842. The Eastern and Western States of America. Cited in John Reps, 1965. The
Making of Urban America. Princeton University Press.
Bureau of Land Management (Washington, DC), 1947. The Manual of Surveying Instructions of 1947.
Chicago Plan Commission, 1945. Chicago Looks Ahead: Design for Public Improvements. Chicago Plan
Commission.
Alan Colquhoun, 1971. The Superblock. Reprinted in: Colquhoun, 1985. Essays in Architectural Criticism:
Modern Architecture and Historical Change. MIT Press.
Carl Condit, 1973. Chicago: 1910–29. University of Chicago Press.
Sigfried Giedion, 1944. Need for a new monumentality. In: New Architecture and City Planning (Paul
Zucker, ed.). Philosophical Library.
Bertrand Goldberg, 1985. Marina City. In: Goldberg on the City (Michel Ragon, ed.). Paris Art Center.
Bertrand Goldberg, 1985. The critical mass of urbanism. In: Goldberg on the City (Michel Ragon, ed.).
Paris Art Center.
Homer Hoyt, 1933. One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago: The Relationship of the Growth of
Chicago to the Rise of Its Land Values, 1830–1933. University of Chicago Press.
Jane Jacobs, 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage.
Hildegard Binder Johnson, 1976. Order upon the Land: The U.S. Rectangular Land Survey and the Upper
Mississippi Country. Oxford University Press.
Rem Koolhaas, 1984. Delirious New York. Monacelli Press.
Katherine Kuh, 1971. The Open Eye: In Pursuit of Art. Harper & Row.
Phyllis Lambert (ed.), 2001. Bas-relief urbanism: Chicago’s figured field. In: Mies in America. CCA and
The Whitney Museum of American Art.
Kevin Pierce, 1998. IIT at a crossroads. Competitions, 8(2).
Albert Pope, 1996. Ladders. Princeton Architectural Press and Rice School of Architecture.
John W. Reps, 1965. The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States.
Princeton University Press.
Ron Shiffman, 2002. Quoted in: Lynne Duke, 2002. A wellspring of grief and hope. Washington Post,
September 9.
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1901. Home in a prairie town. Ladies’ Home Journal, February 18.
Alfred B. Yeomans, 1916. City Residential Land Development: Studies in Planning. University of Chicago
Press.
Chapter 6 Detroit – Motor City
Michel de Certeau, 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press.
Ze’ev Chafets, 1990. Devil’s Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit. Random House.
Chicago Tribune, 2000. Census should show if Detroit is successful in its comeback. June 5, pp. A1, 10.
City of Detroit City Planning Commission, August 24, 1990. Detroit Vacant Land Survey.
The Economist, 1993. Day of the bulldozer. May 8.
Michael Hays, 1995. Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject. MIT Press.
Jerry Herron, 1993. AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History. Wayne State University Press.
Ludwig Hilberseimer, 1945. Cities and defense, 1945. Reprinted in: In the Shadow of Mies: Ludwig
Hilberseimer, Architect, Educator, and Urban Planner (Richard Plommer, David Spaeth, and Kevin
Harrington, eds.). Rizzoli/Art Institute of Chicago.
Ludwig Hilberseimer, 1949. The New Regional Pattern. Paul Theobald & Co.
Dan Hoffman, 2001a. Erasing Detroit. In: Stalking Detroit (Georgia Daskalakis, Charles Waldheim, and
Jason Young, eds.), pp. 100–103. ACTAR.
Dan Hoffman, 2001b. The best the world has to offer. In: Stalking Detroit (Georgia Daskalakis, Charles
Waldheim, and Jason Young, eds.), pp. 48–56. ACTAR.
Sanford Kwinter, 1994. Mies and movement: military logistics and molecular regimes. In: The Presence of
Mies (Detlef Mertins, ed.). Princeton Architectural Press.
Sanford Kwinter and Daniela Fabricius, 2000. Contract with America. In: Mutations: Rem Koolhaas,
Harvard Project on the City, Stefano Boeri, Multiplicity, Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, Hans Ulrich
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Metropolis, 1998. Dismantling the Motor City. June.
Richard Pommer, David Spaeth, and Kevin Harrington (eds.), 1988. In the Shadow of Mies: Ludwig
Hilberseimer, Architect, Educator, and Urban Planner. Rizzoli/Art Institute of Chicago.
Witold Rybczynski, 1995. The zero density neighborhood. Detroit Free Press Sunday Magazine, October
29.
Joseph Rykwert, 1988. The Idea of a Town: An Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the
Ancient World. MIT Press.
Patrick Schumacher and Christian Rogner, 2001. After Ford. In: Stalking Detroit (Georgia Daskalakis,
Charles Waldheim, and Jason Young, eds.), pp. 48–56. ACTAR.
Thomas Sugrue, 1996. The Origins of the Urban Crisis. Princeton University Press.
Andrey Tarkovsky, 1986. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. The Bodley Head.
Paul Virilio, 1986. Overexposed city. Zone, 1–2.
Charles Waldheim, Jason Young, and Georgia Daskalakis (eds.), 2001. Stalking Detroit. ACTAR.

Chapter 7 Hong Kong – aformal urbanism

Peter Reyner Banham, 1976. Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past. Thames & Hudson.
Mike Davis, 2004. Planet of slums: urban involution and the informal proletariat. New Left Review, 26, 5–
34.
Christopher DeWolf, 2011. A sleepy area caught between slow gentrification or mass development. South
China Morning Post, March 27.
Adam Frampton, Jonathan Solomon, and Clara Wong, 2012. Cities without Ground, Oro Editions.
Government Property Agency, Audit Commission, Hong Kong, 2008. Commercialization and utilization of
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Fredric Jameson, 1984. Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. New Left Review, 146
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Hidetoshi Ohno, 1992. Hong Kong: alternative metropolis. Space Design, 330 (March), 55–77.
John Portman, 2010. Peachtree Center. In: Workbook: The Official Catalog for Workshopping – An
American Model of Architectural Practice, the US Pavilion for La Biennale Venezia, 12th International
Architecture Exhibition. Princeton Architectural Press, the High Museum of Art, and 306090.
James C. Scott, 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
Failed. Yale University Press.
Barrie Shelton, Justyna Karakiewicz, and Thomas Kvan, 2010. The Making of Hong Kong: From Vertical
to Volumetric, Routledge.
Jonathan Solomon, 2010. Learning from Louis Vuitton. Journal of Architectural Education, 63(2) (March),
67–70.
Jonathan Solomon, 2011. Looking for megastructure: a partial archeology of the present. In Banham in
Buffalo (Mehrdad Hadhigi, ed.). ORO Editions.
Jonathan Solomon, 2012. It makes a village. In: Aspects of Urbanisation in Asia (Gregory Bracken, ed.).
Amsterdam Press.
Zaiyuan Zhang, Stephen Lau Siu Yu, and Lee Hoyin, 1997. The central district of Hong Kong: architecture
and urbanism of a laissez-faire city. Architecture and Urbanism, 322 (July), 13–16.

Chapter 8 Los Angeles – between cognitive mapping

and dirty realism
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 1994. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Continuum.
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Marco Cenzatti, 1993. Los Angeles and the L.A. School: Postmodernism and Urban Studies. Los Angeles
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Dana Cuff, 2000. The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism. MIT Press.
Mike Davis, 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Vintage Books.
Mike Davis, 1998. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. Metropolitan Books.
Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise, 1996. Preface. In: Rethinking Los Angeles (Michael
Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise (eds.). Sage Publications.
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Works. The Images Publishing Group.
Umberto Eco, 1987. Travels in Hyperreality. Picador.
Nan Ellin, 1999. Postmodern Urbanism. Princeton Architectural Press.
Robert M. Fogelson, 1967. The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930. University of California
Press.
Hal Foster, 1996. The Return of the Red: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century. MIT Press.
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William Fulton, 2001. The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles. Johns
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Mario Gandelsonas, 1996. X-Urbanism: Architecture and the American City. Princeton Architectural Press.
Sir Peter Hall, 1998. Cities in Civilization. Pantheon.
Dolores Hayden, 1995. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. MIT Press.
Anthony Heilbut, 1998. Exiled in Paradise: German Refuge Artists and Intellectuals in America from the
1930s to the Present. Viking.
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Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region. University of California Press.
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Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press.
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Charles Jencks, 1993. Heteropolis: Los Angeles, the Riots, and the Strange Beauty of Hetero-Architecture.
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Norman Klein, 1997. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. Verso.
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Geoff Bennington and Brian Masumi). University of Minnesota Press.
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Giroux.
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Monacelli Press.
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Michael Sorkin, 1992. Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space.
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Chapter 9 New Orleans – ecological urbanism
Leon Battista Alberti, 1988. On the Art of Building in Ten Books (trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and
Robert Tavernor). MIT Press.
Alan Berger, 2006. Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America. Princeton Architectural Press.
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Jeffrey Hou, 2006. Hybrid landscapes: toward an inclusive ecological urbanism on Seattle’s central
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Mohsen Mostafavi, 2007. Ecological urbanism. In: Intervention Architecture: Building for Change (Aga
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Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty (eds.), 2010. Ecological Urbanism. Graduate School of Design,
Harvard University/Lars Müller.
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Charles Waldheim (ed.), 2006. The Landscape Urbanism Reader. Princeton Architectural Press.
Raymond Williams, 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University Press.

Chapter 10 Oslo – the triumph of zombie urbanism

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Agency for Planning and Building Services, 2009. Oslos bærekraft og vekst. Overordnet arkitekturpolitikk
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Ulrich Beck and Johannes Willms, 2004. Conversations with Ulrich Beck. Polity Press.
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Chapter 11 Philadelphia – the urban design of

Philadelphia: taking the towne for the city
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Chapter 14 Shenzhen – topology of a neoliberal city

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics denote figures

abstract space 135

Abu Dhabi 7, 10, 11, 11–12, 13, 15–18, 20; as cultural/educational center 16; freehold property 13;
Guggenheim museum 16; labor conditions 17–18; land grants 12; Louvre museum 16; Masdar City 16;
oil 10; Saadiyat Island 16, 17–18, 20; Sheikh Rashid Road 14; tourism 16; Tourism Development and
Investment Company 17
Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company 16
accumulation through dispossession 281
Adorno, Theodor 133, 137, 162
aformal urbanism 111–12; Hong Kong 112–30
agrarian urbanism 329
airports: Atlanta 23; San Francisco 243–4; Shenzhen 292–2
Al Maktoum, General Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid 14
Al Maktoum, Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid 10, 14, 16, 18–19
Al Maktoum, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed 11, 13
Al Nahyan, Sheikh Zayed Bin-Sultan 11, 12, 13
Al Qasimi, Sheikha Lubna 16
Alberti, Leon Battista 180, 181n3
Alter Terra 268
Althusser, Louis 137
American Institute of Architects 216
Americans for Democratic Action 115, 233
Amsterdam School 70
Anderson, Paul Thomas 162
Angeles National Forest 138
Anshen and Allen 251
anti-modernism 249, 251
Aparecido de Oliveira, José 59, 66–7
Arabian Railway 16
Architectons 30
architects, role of 28
architects’ offices, Atlanta 27, 28
architecture 27–8, 161; formal/informal in 112; modernist 33, 70, 76, 79, 249, 251; New Urbanism 320,
325, 327; postmodern 28, 132, 132–3, 134–5, 300–1; shanzhai 301
Armour Institute of Technology see Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)
Arrighi, Giovanni 306, 307
arson, Detroit 94, 95
artificial islands, Dubai 15, 20
Ascher, François 36
Ashley, F. M. 152
Aspen, Jonny 182–200
Assemblage 163
associative sector 35
Astana, Kazakhstan 19
Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo 188
Atelier Feichang Jianshu 295
Atlanta 23–31; airports 23; architects’ offices 27, 28; center-periphery shift 24; downtown 24–5, 26;
highway system 24; landscaping 29; Northpark 30; Peachtree Center 123–4, 124; skyscrapers 29; zoning
law 24
Atlanta Marriott 26
atriums 25–6
Austin, John C. 152
autobahns 100
automobiles 312, 314, 316, 318, 322
axis production: Barcelona 42; Shenzhen 288–90
Aymonino, C. 33

Bacon, Edmund 202, 220–32, 233, 234, 235, 238, 240

Baird, George 279
Baltimore 212
Banham, Reyner 122–3, 140, 150
Bank of America building, San Francisco 249
Barcelona 32–58, 312; axes 42; beaches 49; Carrer de Prim 42; Centre de Cultura Contemporània 43; Cerdà
Plan 38, 43–7; Ciutat Vella (old town) 40, 42–3, 46, 49; Communications Tower 50; Diagonal 45;
Diagonal Park 42; districts 40, 58n10; downtowns 47–8, 49–50; Eixample 40, 43–7, 54; El Besòs 42; El
Clot 41; empty spaces 47–8, 49; Escorxador 41; España Industrial 41; gardens 41, 42; Gran Via 45; L’Illa
49–50; Moll de la Fusta wharf 49; Montjuic 42; Museu d’Art Contemporani 43; Nou Barris 42; Olympics
42, 49, 53; Paral-lel 45; Parc de Collserola 50; parks 41, 42, 50; Pegaso 41; PERIs (Internal Renovation
Plans) 41; port 49; Port Vell 49; public transport 47; Renfe-Meridiana 41; Ronda ring roads 48, 49; sports
amenities 42; squares 41; street layout 42, 45; suburbs 40; traffic flow 45, 47, 48; universities 43; Vall
d’Hebron 42; Via Julia 42; waterfront 39, 42, 49, 57, 55, 56, 57
Barcode project, Oslo 187
Baudrillard, Jean 134, 149, 162, 166, 167n38 and 52
Bauman, John F. 221, 222
Bauman, Zygmunt 323
Baumeister, R. 44
beaches: Barcelona 49; South Beach, San Francisco 247
Beck, Ulrich 184, 198–9, 200n8
Bell, Daniel 164n3
Bender, Thomas 327–8
Benjamin Franklin Bridge, Philadelphia 213, 215, 217
Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia 213, 214, 228, 235
Bentham, Jeremy 152
Berger, Alan 176
Berlin 53
Berman, Ila 176
Bjorvika area, Oslo 186, 187, 188–95, 186, 187, 190, 191, 192, 196
Blackwell, Adriann 278–311
Blade Runner (film) 133, 162
Blankman, Norman 323
Blucher, Walter 81
Bohigas, O. 49
Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles 109, 134, 137
Boogie Nights (film) 162
The Border Project (animation) 286
Borges, Jorge Luis 152
Borja, Jordi 35
Botta, Mario 244
Boys N the Hood (film) 147
branding 196
Brasilia 59–68; Cultural Sector 63, 64, 65, 64, 65; Espaço Lucio Costa 59, 60, 61; Ministries Esplanade 63,
64; as a park city 62, 63–8; Pilot Plan 60, 62, 63–8, 61, 62; Superquadra 63, 64, 66, 66; Three Powers
Plaza 59, 63–4, 64–5; as World Heritage Site 59, 67
Braudel, F. 34
Brazil: Fundaçao Nacional Pró-Memória (FNPM) 67; Secretària do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico
Nacional (SPHAN) 66, 67
Brecht, Bertolt 133
bridges: Delaware (Ben Franklin) Bridge, Philadephia 213, 215, 217; see also footbridges
British East India Company 7
Broadacre City 30
Brown, Denise Scott 232
Bruegmann, Robert 327
Buchanan, Colin 112
Buckingham, James Silk 71
Buford, Bill 161, 162
Burj Dubai (Burj Khalifa) 20
Burle Marx, Roberto 62, 63
Burlington, New Jersey 203
Burnham, Daniel 76, 79, 214
Burnham, J. D. 52
Burton, John 253
Busquets, Joan 32–58

Calder, Alexander Milne 236

Caldwell, Alfred 103
Camp Pendleton naval base 138
Campofiorito, Italo 67
capitalism 306–7; late 164n3
Carrer de Prim, Barcelona 42
Casa Familiar 268, 273–5, 276
Castells, Manuel 292
Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles 143
Cee, Jane 248
Celebration community 322
center-periphery 29; Atlanta 24
Centre de Cultura Contemporània, Barcelona 43
Century City, Los Angeles 154–5
Cerdà, Idefons 38, 43–7, 58n15; Monografía estadística de la clas obrera (Statistical report on the working
 class) 44; theory of urban development 44
certainty 323, 324
Certeau, Michel de 3, 96
Cervero, Robert 326
Chan Krieger Sieniewicz 177
Chang, Yung Ho 279, 295
Charles, Prince of Wales 323
Charter of Athens 315
Charter of the New Urbanism 313, 315
Chater Road, Hong Kong 112, 113
Chestnut Street, Philadelphia 230
Chicago 211, 214; City Club 73; Civic Center 76–80, 77, 78, 79; downtown 76; Federal Center 80; Fort
Dearborn Project 79, 80; grid system 70–1, 71–4, 86; housing 84–6; Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)
80–4; Marina City 84–6, 85; Near South Side 80; park system 74; platting 70, 71, 74; Quarter-Section
Plan (Wright) 73–6, 75; superblocks 69–88; Western Avenue 72–3
Chicago Plan Commission 76
China 278–9, 306–7; Hukou (household registration) system 285, 294; market economy 281–2, 306; mass
production 300; Special Economic Zones (SEZs) 282, 289, 297, 300; Special Export Zones 282;
technology transfer 300; Tiananmen Square massacre 28; town and village enterprises (TVEs) 297–8
Chinatown, Los Angeles 144
Chinatown (film) 133
citizenship 262, 272
City Beautiful movement 213–15, 288
City Club, Chicago 73
“City of exacerbated difference” (Koolhaas) 293, 283
City of Paris Department Store, San Francisco 249
city-states 6
Ciutat Vella, Barcelona old town 40, 42–3, 46, 49
civil defense infrastructure 100
Clarke, Joseph Sill Jr 225
climate change 169, 180
climate management, Hong Kong 130
clustered linear planning 289–90
cognitive maps 136–9, 163
Colquhoun, Alan 86
Comedia consultancy 184
Communications Tower, Barcelona 50
communicative action 35
community 313, 314, 316, 322, 324, 327–8
community-led development, San Diego–Tijuana border 273–7
Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) 315, 316
Congress of the New Urbanism (CNU) 312, 315, 329
Connaught Road, Hong Kong 112, 113
conservation districts, San Francisco 251, 252
contiguous development 317
Coop Himmelb(l)au 288
Coop Zimmer project 98–9
copying 299, 300, 301
cosmopolitanism, Shenzhen 287
Costa, Lucio 59–60; Brasilia Pilot Plan 60, 62, 63–8, 61, 62; Brasilia Revisitada 67; detail of a Brasilia
 Superquadra 66; Memória Descritiva 60; sketch for Brasilia’s Cultural Sector 64; sketches for Espaço
Lucio Costa 61
creative cities 183, 184, 185, 198, 199
creative industries, Shenzhen 299–300, 301–2
Cret, Paul 216, 218, 241n18
critical theory 278–9
Cruz, Teddy 260–77
The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon) 157–9
Crystal Island, Shenzhen 302, 303
Cullen, Gordon 314
cultural diversity 328
cultural sector 35
culture, Abu Dhabi as center of 16
culture-led redevelopment 183, 184, 185, 188–9

Dameisha, Shenzhen 303, 304

Daphne Funeral Home, San Francisco 248–9
Daughters of the American Revolution 216
Davis, Mike 19, 112, 134, 135, 149, 154
De Jarnatt, Steve 147
de Klerk, Michel 70
debt, Dubai 20
decentralization 96, 101; Detroit 89, 94, 103
Deichmanske Library, Oslo 188
Delaware (Benjamin Franklin) Bridge, Philadelphia 213, 215, 217
demolition programs, Detroit 94–5
Deng Xiaoping 288, 300
density 92, 96, 100, 104, 133, 230, 240n1, 263, 268, 269, 271–2, 273, 276, 314, 326
depopulation 100, 101;
Detroit 90, 91
Detroit 89–108; arson 94, 95; City Planning Commission 89–90; decentralization 89, 94, 103; demolition
programs 94–5; depopulation 90, 91; greenfield development 104–5; housing 101–4; Lafayette Park
101–4, 102, 103; social unrest 100–1
Detroit Vacant Land Survey 90, 91, 94
development companies, United Arab Emirates (UAE) 18
Deverell, William 153, 156
Diagonal, Barcelona 45
Diagonal Park, Barcelona 42
digitilization of cities 198
Dirty Harry (film) 246
Dirty Realism 31n3, 136, 160, 161–3
Discobolus 151
Disney 322
Disneyland 160
disurbanism 31n1
diversity, social/cultural 328–9
Dongguan 288, 295, 297
downtowns: Atlanta 24–5, 26; Barcelona 47–8, 49–50; Chicago 76; Los Angeles 136, 146, 150, 151;
Phildelphia 211, 220, 221, 222, 224–5, 228, 229, 232–4, 239, 242n39, 226, 237; San Diego 264; San
Francisco 244, 250–1
Dronning Eufemias Street, Oslo 187
drosscape 176
Duany, Andrés 320–1, 328, 329
Dubai 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14–15, 16, 19; artificial islands 15, 20; Burj Dubai (Burj Khalifa) 20; debt 20;
Emaar city 18; freehold property 13; hotels 14, 15; Jebel Ali Port 14; labor conditions 17–18; Labour
City 17; malls 15; mega-projects 14, 15; metro system 17; Palm Island 15, 20; Sheikh Zayed Road 14;
skyscrapers 14; tourism 10, 20; World archipelago 15, 20; as world capital 7, 16; World Trade Center 14;
Zayed Military City 21
Dubai Holding 20
Dubai Internet City 15
Dubai (Moore) 8–9, 10, 17
Dubailand 15
Dutch East India Company 7
Dutton, John 315

Easterling, Keller 6–22

Eco, Umberto 134, 160
ecological urbanism 168–9, 179–80, 181n2
edge cities 36
education, Abu Dhabi as center of 16
Egbert, Seneca 217–18, 237
Ehn, Karl 70
Eixample, Barcelona 40, 43–7, 54
El Besòs, Barcelona 42
El Clot, Barcelona 41
el-Dahdeh, Farès 59–68
El-Khoury, Rodolphe 1–5
Emaar city, Dubai 18
Emaar company 18
empty spaces, Barcelona 47–8, 49
The End of Violence (film) 152
Engels, Friedrich 313
entrepreneurial city development 183–4
environmental sustainability 169
equity 312, 317, 321
Escorxador, Barcelona 41
Esherick, Joseph 251
Eskew + Dumez + Ripple 177
España Industrial, Barcelona 41
ethnic minorities: Oslo 198; Philadelphia 213, 232
export processing zones (EPZs) 7, 13
expressways: Philadelphia 224, 226, 228–9, 231–2, 233, 236, 238, 239; Shenzhen 290
extreme weather events 169

Fain, William 136, 156

Fairmont (Benjamin Franklin) Parkway, Philadelphia 213, 214, 228
fakes 300, 301
Falling Down (film) 162
Farrell-Donaldson, Marie 90
Field Operations 304
financial centers 6, 302; Shenzhen 302, 304
financialization 306
Fitch and Chung 119, 120
Fjord City project, Oslo 182, 185–7
Florida, Richard 184
footbridges, Hong Kong 111, 127, 113
Ford, Henry 89, 93, 101, 104
Fordism 91–2, 94, 96, 100
Forester, John 35
formal/informal in architecture 112
Fort Dearborn Project, Chicago 79, 80
40–acre module 72
Foster, Hal 160
Foster, Norman 16, 50
Foucault, Michel 134, 152
Four Seasons Hotel, San Francisco 254, 255
Foxconn factory, Shenzhen 308
Franco de Andrade, Rodrigo Mello 66
Franklin Square, Philadelphia 215
free trade zones (FTZs) 7, 12, 13, 19
Freud, Sigmund 323
Friedmann, John 298
Frug, Gerald 329
Fuksas architects 292
Fukuyama, Francis 305
Furness, Frank 219

Gandelsonas, Mario 136, 145–6

Gandy, Matthew 307
Garden Cities 63, 69, 70, 210
gardens 318; Barcelona 41, 42
Gardere, Jeffery 173
Garnier, Tony 314
Garreau, Joel 36
gated communities 265; San Diego 263
Geddes, Patrick 314, 320
Gehl Architects 190, 194, 195
Gehry, Frank 16
German autobahns 100
ghettos 2
Giedion, Sigfried 78
Gieryn, Thomas 2
Gilliam, Terry 154
Ginzburg, Mosei 70, 84
Global Financial Centres Index 302
globalization theory 6
Goldberg, Bertrand 84, 86
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco 247, 248
Gottman, Jean 293
government 50–1
Graham, Stephen 293
Gran Via, Barcelona 45
Great Depression 261
Great Leap Forward (Koolhaas) 279, 281, 307, 280
Greater Philadelphia Movement 225, 233
Greber, Jacques 214, 216, 228, 235
greenbelt 210
greenfield development, Detroit 104–5
Greenwald, Herbert 101, 103
Greenway Plan, Los Angeles 156
grid system: Chicago 70–1, 71–4, 86; Philadelphia 206–8, 210, 211
Griffith, Griffith J. 153
Griffith Park, Los Angeles 136, 152–5, 161
Griffith Park Observatory 152, 154, 153
Gropius, Walter 81
growth, New Urbanism 312, 319, 329
Guangming New Town, Shenzhen 303
Guangzhou 288
Guarantee Trust Company building, Philadelphia 219
Guggenheim museum, Abu Dhabi 16

Hadid, Zaha 16
Hallidie Building, San Francisco 250
Hancock, Henry 144
Handel, Gary 254
Hardt, Michael 287
Harey, David 323
Hargreaves Associates 177
Harland Bartholomew and Associates 156
Hartman, Craig 243
Harvey, David 37, 183, 281
Haussmann, Baron 45, 150
Heald, Henry 81, 83–4
Healey, Patsy 35
Hegeman, Werner 314
Hellmuth Obata and Kassebaum 247
Herreros architects 188
Herzog & de Meuron 247–8, 254
Heteropolis 135
Heterotopia 135, 152
Heung Yuen Wai Border Crossing Facility, Hong Kong 128, 128
highway systems 100, 212; Atlanta 24
Hilbersheimer, Ludwig 81, 99–100, 103; and Lafayette Park, Detroit 103, 104; settlement unit concept 103
Hise, Greg 153, 156
“historic” planning projects 38
Hockney, David, “Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio” 154, 155
Hoffman, Dan 96
Holl, Steven 304
Hollywood 154
Holme, Thomas 204–5
home ownership 273
Hong Kong 6, 7, 109–31, 282, 284, 285, 286, 289, 297, 302; aformal urbanism 112–30; Central Market
Oasis 130; Central and Midlevels escalator 114–15, 115, 127; Chater Road 112, 113; climate
management 130; Connaught Road 112, 113; footbridges 111, 127, 113; Heung Yuen Wai Border
Crossing Facility 128; International Financial Center (IFC) 110–11; Kai Tak Park 129; Langham Place
130; Lockhart Road Municipal Services Building 116, 120, 122, 130, 121; malls 109–10, 119–20, 127,
130; markets 120, 122; Mong Kok East 111; pedestrian networks 110–11, 112–16, 118; Queensway
Plaza 116, 118–20, 118, 119; Shun Tak Center, Sheung Wan 116, 118, 117; Times Square
Expresscalators 115; waterfront 129
Hopkinson, Edward Jr 225
Hotchkiss, Willard 80
hotels: Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles 109, 134, 137; Dubai 14, 15; Four Seasons Hotel, San Francisco
254, 255
Hou, Jeffrey 181n2
housing 183, 313; affordable 273, 274–5, 319, 323; Chicago 84–6; Detroit 101–4; New Urbanism 318, 319,
325; Philadelphia 221–2, 231, 234; San Diego–Tijuana border 264, 265, 268, 271–3, 274–5, 276, 277;
scatter-site 234; Shenzhen 293–5, 296–7, 303–4
Howard, Ebenezer 314
Hu, Li 304
Human Rights Watch 17
hygienic city 44, 45
hyperreal 160
hyperspace 109, 134, 137

idealism 161
L’Illa, Barcelona 49–50
Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) 80–4
immigration, Los Angeles 133
Independence Hall, Philadelphia 215, 216, 218
Independence Mall, Philadelphia 215–20, 224, 237, 238, 218
Independence National Park, Philadelphia 215, 219, 231
inequality 260, 261
infill development 317
informal in architecture 112
infrastructures 33–4, 100, 183; Los Angeles 133; military 96, 98, 99, 100; Shenzhen 289–92
Ingraham, Catherine 135
Instituto Brasileiro do Patrimônio Cultural 67
International Financial Center (IFC), Hong Kong 110–11
International Foreign Trade Center, Shenzhen 310n71
International Labour Organization 17
Investment Corporation of Dubai 20
Isaacs, Reginald 81
Isozaki, Arata 288

Jackson, Helen Hunt, Ramona 143, 166n24

Jackson, Mick 147, 148–9
Jacobs, Jane 69, 232, 314
Jameson, Fredric 109, 134, 135–6, 136–7, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164n3, 165n14, 302
Jebel Ali Port, Dubai 14
Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, St Louis 219
Jefferson, Thomas 206; Northwest Ordinance 71, 72
Jerde, Jon 130
Johnson Fain Partners 156–7, 158, 159
Jones and Emmons 249
Jones, Victor J. 168–81
“Junkspace”, (Koolhaas) 301

K + Z project, Rotterdam 53
Kahn, Louis 234, 238, 239
Kai Tak Park, Hong Kong 129
Kaliski, John 329
Kazakhstan, Astana 19
Kelly, Edward 76
Kentlands 325, 326
Khartoum 18
King Abdullah Economic City, Saudi Arabia 18
Kingsley, Samuel 313–14
Kleihues + Schuwerk 188
Klein, Norman 155, 160
Knowledge Cities 184
Koolhaas, Rem 23–31, 122, 279–80, 280, 307; “City of exacerbated difference” 293, 283; Exodus, or
Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture 284; Great Leap Forward program 279, 281, 307, 280; Harvard
“Project on the City” 279, 307; “Junkspace” 301; Los Angeles County Museum of Art 147; Prada
Building, San Francisco 252, 254, 253; Zeebrugge Terminal 161
Kramer, Ferd 81
Krier, Leon 30–1, 313
Kubitschek, Juscelino 66

L.A. Story (film) 148–9

La Brea tar pits, Los Angeles 136, 146–7, 149, 148
LA School 133
labor, dormitory housing, Shenzhen 293–5
labor conditions, United Arab Emirates (UAE) 17–18
labor flows, Shenzhen 284–5
Labour City, Dubai 17
Lafayette, Marquis de 216
Lafayette Park, Detroit 101–4, 102, 103
Laguna West 325, 326
Lambda building, Oslo 188
land grants, Abu Dhabi 12
land market, Shenzhen 302–3
land ownership, Los Angeles 144
land use rights, Shenzhen 296
Landry, Charles 184
landscape 34, 168; as urbanism 104–5, 106; waste 176
landscape urbanism 169, 180–1n1, 280
landscaping, Atlanta 29
Langham Place, Hong Kong 130
Larson, Roy 218
Las Vegas 312
late capitalism 164n3
Latrobe, Benjamin 172
law 37–8
Le Blond de la Tour, Pierre 170
Le Corbusier 33, 60, 63, 70, 74, 96, 313, 314, 316
Le Moyne de Bienville, Jean-Baptiste 170
Ledderose, Lothar 300
Lee, John 288
Lefaivre, Liane 31n3, 161
Lefebvre, Henri 135
Lehan, Richard 145, 158–60, 161
Lei Lei 286
Lewis, Peirce F. 170
Li, Minqi 282, 307
Liberty Bell, Philadelphia 216, 218
Liebeskind, Daniel 254
Lin, George C. S. 298
linear city 146–51
Lisbon 35, 53
Logan Square, Philadelphia 215
logistics, Shenzhen 291–2
London 206, 207
Los Angeles 132–67, 312; Angeles National Forest 138; Bonaventure Hotel 109, 134, 137; Cathedral of
Our Lady of the Angels 143; centers 136; Century City 154–5; Chinatown 144; chronological “surges”
165–6n20; County Museum of Art 147, 149; downtowns 136, 146, 150, 151; European immigration 133;
film depictions of 133, 147–9, 162; Greenway Plan 156, 159; Griffith Park 136, 152–5, 161; Griffith Park
Observatory 152, 154, 153; historical development 137, 139–43; Hollywood 154; infrastructure 133; La
Brea tar pits 136, 146–7, 149, 148; land ownership 144; Little Tokyo 144; Mulholland Drive 154; Olvera
Street 136, 143–4, 166n24; open spaces 152–7, 158; Pershing Square 143; postmodernism 132–3, 134–5,
136, 145, 160; pueblo 139, 141–2, 144–5; San Gabriel Mountains 138; Sunset Boulevard 149, 162;
Territorial Grid (Gandelsonas) 145–6; tourism 156; Wilshire Boulevard 146, 149, 150, 151, 150
“The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire” (Ruscha) 147, 149
Louisiana State University, Urban Landscape Lab 174
Louvre museum, Abu Dhabi 16
Lynch, David 153, 154
Lynch, Kevin 137
Lyons 35, 53

M. H. de Young Museum, San Francisco 247–8, 254

Macau 282
Machado, Rodolfo 160
McHarg, Ian 172
McPhee, John 154
macrogeography 34–5
Madrid 150
Maki, Fumiko 124, 125
Malevich, K. S. 30
malls: Dubai 15; dumb-bell 109–10; Hong Kong 109–10, 119–20, 127, 130; Philadelphia 229, 229
Mandel, Ernest 164n3
Manhattan 71, 72, 139, 211, 284
Manhattanization 249
Mao Zhe Dong 297
Marina City, Chicago 84–6, 85
Market East Shopping Mall, Philadelphia 229
market economy 306; China 281–2, 306
Market Street, Philadelphia 229, 230
markets, Hong Kong 120, 122
MARS Group 316
Martin, Steve 148
Marxism 37
Masdar City, Abu Dhabi 16
mass production, China 300
masterplans 316, 319, 320; gated communities 263, 265; Shenzhen 289–90
Mathur, Anudartha 262
Mayne, Thom 254
Medieval Park, Oslo 188
mega-projects, Dubai 14, 15
megastructure 122–3
Menzer, Amy 224–5, 233, 242n39
mercantile cities 6
metro systems: Dubai 17; Shenzhen 290
Meyer, Hannes 98–9
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 80; Federal Center, Chicago 80; Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) 80–4;
and Lafayette Park, Detroit 101, 103
migration: San Diego–Tijuana border 262, 266; Shenzhen 284–5, 286–7; see also immigration
Miles, Steven 184
military infrastructure 96, 98, 99, 100; San Diego 263
Miracle Mile (film) 147
Mission Bay Plan, San Francisco 253
Mississippi River 170, 171, 176
Modernism 33, 70, 76, 79, 104, 183, 249, 251, 329; and the New Urbanism 314–16; Utopian 258
modernity 30
Moll de la Fusta wharf, Barcelona 49
Moneo, José Rafael 143
Moneo, R. 49
Montgomery Block, San Francisco 249
Montjuic, Barcelona 42
Moore Lyndon Turnbull and Whittaker 251
Moore, Robin, Dubai 8–9, 10, 17
morphologies 32–3
Mostafavi, Mohsen 179, 181n2
motorways 33; see also autobahns; expressways
Moule, Elizabeth 136, 139–43, 145, 166n22
MRVD 303
MTR Corporation 118
“Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio” (Hockney) 154
Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles 154
Mulholland Drive (film) 153
Mulholland, William 154
multiculturalism 36–7; Oslo 198
Mumford, Lewis 69, 70
Munch and Stenersen Museum, Oslo 188
Murphy, C. F. 80
Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona 43

Nagin, C. Ray 172

Nakeel company 18, 20
natural resources, San Diego 262; see also oil
Navi Mumbai 19
Negri, Antonio 287
neighborhoods 3, 313, 314, 317–18, 327, 328; as social-economic and political units 269–75
neo-authoritarianism 282
neoliberal time 305–8
neoliberalism 281–2, 305, 309n13
networks 34
Neutra, Richard 133
New Deal 261
New Orleans 168–81; Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB) Commission 172, 174; Flood Control areas 173;
French Quarter 170, 171; historical background 170–2; Hurricane Katrina 169; shrinking the footprint
recommendation 172–3; Viet Village Urban Farm 170, 174–6, 180, 175, 176; Village de L’Est 174;
waterfront 170, 176–80, 177, 178, 179; zoning 172–3
New Songdo City, South Korea 19
New Urbanism 312–31; Charter of the 313, 315; codes 320, 324; critiques of 325–30; growth 312, 319,
329; housing 318, 319, 325; Lexicon 320–1; and Modernism 314–16; streets 316, 318, 319, 320; support
for 322–5; town-making principles 318–20; traditionalist bias 325, 327; Transect 320–1, 329
New York City 139, 211, 284; Manhattan 71, 72, 139, 211, 284; population 211; World Trade Center 69
New York University (NYU) 16
Newcourt, Richard 206, 207
Niemeyer, Oscar 59, 62, 64, 65; sketch for Brasilia’s Cultural Sector 65; sketches for Espaço Lucio Costa
60
noncontiguous development 317
Norquist, John O. 322
Northpark, Atlanta 30
Nou Barris, Barcelona 42
Nouvel, Jean 16

OCT Group 301

OCT-LOFT, Shenzhen 301–2
oil 7, 10, 12, 18
Old Pennsylvania State House, Philadelphia 215
Old Philadelphia Corporation 231
O’Lewis, Edwin 218
Olmsted Brothers 156
Olvera Street, Los Angeles 136, 143–4, 166n24
Olympics, Barcelona 42, 49, 53, 143–4
OMA 304, 307
open spaces: Los Angeles 152–7, 158; see also gardens; parks; squares
Ord, E. O. C. 144
Oslo 182–200; Agency for Planning and Building Services 189, 194; architectural policy 196–8; Astrup
Fearnley Museum of Modern Art 188; Barcode project 187; Bjørvika area 186, 187, 188–95, 186, 186,
 190, 191, 192, 196; cultural institutions, development of 188–9; Deichmanske Library 188; Dronning
Eufemias Street 187; ethnic minorities 198; Fjord City project 182, 185–99; harbour promenade 193–5,
196; Lambda building 188; Medieval Park 188; as multicultural city 198; Munch and Stenersen Museum
188; Museum of Cultural History 188; National Opera and Ballet building 186, 187, 188; public places
189–95, 196, 197; Sørenga Pier 187; Tjuvholmen 186, 188; waterfront 185–99; zoning 185
Oswalt, Philipp 306
Otaka, Masato 124, 125
Ou Ning 285–6, 298
Ouro Preto 68
Oversea Chinese Town (OCT), Shenzhen 301
ownership, home 273

Pacific Bell Park, San Francisco 247

Paddison, Ronan 184
Palm Island, Dubai 15, 20
panopticons 26, 152
Paral-lel, Barcelona 45
Parc de Collserola, Barcelona 50
Paris 44, 45, 150, 160, 312; La Défense 288
parking 318
parking towers, Philadelphia 238
parks 318, 319; Barcelona 41, 42, 50; Chicago 74; Golden Gate, San Francisco 247, 248; Independence
National Park, Philadelphia 215, 219, 231; Los Angeles 136, 152–5; Medieval Park, Oslo 188
Peachtree Center, Atlanta 123–4, 124
Peale, Charles Willson 216
Pearl River Delta (PRD) 278, 279, 281, 292–3, 307
Peck, Jamie 281
pedestrian-based communities 326–7
pedestrian networks: Philadelphia 230; Shinjuku Station, Tokyo 124, 125
pedestrians 312, 322
Peets, Elbert 314
Pegaso, Barcelona 41
Pei, I. M. 29, 231
Penn Center Office Complex, Philadelphia 229, 235, 236
Penn Square, Philadelphia 213, 215, 217, 237
Penn, William 201–2, 203–10, 211, 230, 235, 236, 237, 240
Perry, Clarence 314, 319, 328
Pershing Square, Los Angeles 143
Pfau, Peter 248
Pflueger, Timothy 250
Philadelphia 201–42; Art Museum 214; Bacon era 220–32, 233, 234, 238; Better Philadelphia Exhibition
223–6, 233, 242n39; Black community 232; Broad Street 229; Central (Penn) Square 213, 215, 217, 237;
Chestnut Street 230; Citizen’s Committee to Preserve and Develop the Cross-town Community
(CCPDCC) 232; Citizen’s Council on City Planning 222–3; and City Beautiful movement 213–15; City
Hall 213, 215, 236–7; decline 211, 212–13; Delaware (Benjamin Franklin) Bridge 213, 215, 217;
downtown 211, 220, 221, 222, 224–5, 228, 229, 232–4, 239, 242n39, 226, 237; Egbert scheme 217–18;
ethnic minorities 213, 232; expressways 224, 226, 228–9, 231–2, 233, 236, 238, 239; Fairmont
(Benjamin Franklin) Parkway 213, 214, 228, 235; Franklin Square 215; Greater Philadelphia Movement
225, 233; gridiron layout 206–8, 210, 211; Guarantee Trust Company building 219; housing 221–2, 231,
234; Independence Hall 215, 216, 218; Independence Mall 215–20, 224, 237, 238, 218; Independence
 National
Park 215, 219, 231; Independence Square 215; Liberty Bell 216, 218; Logan Square 215; Market East
Shopping Mall 229, 229; Market Street 229, 230; Natural History museum 216, 241n14; nineteenth
century expansion 210–11; Old Pennsylvania State House 215–16; Old Philadelphia Corporation 231;
parking towers 238; pedestrian network 230; Penn Center Office Complex 229, 235, 236; Penn plan
201–2, 203–10, 211, 240; Planning Commission 222, 225–6, 234; platting 202, 207, 208, 209, 210, 213,
226; population 211, 213, 230, 241n11; Provident Life & Trust Company building 219; Society Hill 230,
231, 242n35; South Street 231–2, 233; squares 206, 207–8, 210, 213, 215; superblocks 229; tourism 239;
traffic planning 226–9, 238; Vine Street 215, 228–9, 235–6; waterfront 224; “white flight” phenomenon
213; zoning 228
Philadelphia Housing Association 223
Photoshop 301
Piano, Renzo 254
Pinheiro, Israel 62
Pitt, Leonard and Dale 166n23
Pittsburgh 212
placelessness 316
Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 320
platting: Chicago 70, 71, 74; Philadelphia 202, 207, 208, 209, 210, 213, 226
Polanski, Roman 133
Polk, Willis 250
Polshek, James 244
Polyzoides, Stefanos 136, 139–43, 145, 166n22
Pope, Albert 74
popular culture 162
population: New York City 211; Philadelphia 211, 213, 230, 241n11; Shenzhen 278; see also depopulation
Port Vell, Barcelona 49
Portman, John 25, 29–30, 30–1, 109, 123, 134
ports 34; Barcelona 49; Shenzhen 292
postindustrial society 164n3
postmodernism 28, 302; Los Angeles 132–3, 134–5, 136, 145, 160; San Francisco 251, 256; Shenzhen
300–1, 302
Potrero Hill, San Francisco 246, 253
poverty 273; San Diego–Tijuana border 262, 263, 264, 268
Prada Building, San Francisco 252, 254, 253
private sector 35, 50, 51
privatization 281
property ownership, UAE 13
Provident Life & Trust Company building, Philadelphia 219
Pruitt-Igoe, St Louis 314
the Public, and institutions of Urbanization 260–1
public sector 35, 50–1
public space 5, 39, 50, 198, 199; Oslo 189–95, 196, 197; see also gardens; parks; squares
Pulp Fiction (film) 162
Pun, Ngai 287, 294
Pynchon, Thomas, The Crying of Lot 49 157–9

Qianhai, Shenzhen 303–4, 304

Qingyun, Ma 279
Queensway Plaza, Hong Kong 116, 118–20, 118, 119
Radburn, New Jersey 69, 314
railways: United Arab Emirates (UAE) 16–17; see also metro systems
Rainer Pirker ArchiteXture 303
Ramona (Jackson) 143, 166n24
Real Estate Finance Journal 323
real estate speculation 302
realism 159–61; dirty 31n3, 136, 160, 161–3; hyperreal 160
Rebel Without a Cause (film) 167n38
Red Cross Building, San Francisco 248
region state 6
regional plans 317
Renfe-Meridiana, Barcelona 41
Reps, John 206
Retort group 19
retrofitting 264, 266, 268, 269, 275
Richter, Dagmar 136, 137, 154–5, 163, 165n18 and 19
ring roads, Barcelona 48, 49
road systems: Barcelona 48, 49; see also autobahns; expressways; highway systems; motorways
Robbins, Edward 1–5, 312–31
Rockefeller Center 80, 229
Rogers, Beth 156
Roman cities 98, 143
Rome 53
Rossi, A 33
Rotterdam, K + Z project 53
Rowe, Colin 149
Rubiloff, Arthur 79
Ruschca, Ed, “The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire” 147, 149
Russian Hill, San Francisco 256
Rykwert, Joseph 98

Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi 16, 17–18, 20

Saarinen, Eliel 222
safety 323, 324
St Louis 212; Jefferson National Expansion Memorial 219; Pruitt-Igoe 314
Saitowitz, Stanley 246, 245
San Diego 138; downtown 264; gated communities 263; military bases 263; natural resources 262; zoning
266, 274
San Diego–Tijuana border 260–77; Casa Familiar NGO 268, 273–5, 276; community-led development
273–7; formal/informal urbanisms 262, 263, 264, 265, 272; housing 264, 265, 268, 271–3, 274–5, 276,
277; Living Rooms at the Border 275, 277; migration 262, 266; militarization of 264; San Ysidro
neighborhood 268, 269–75; slums 265, 268; wealth/poverty 262, 263, 264, 268; zoning 264, 265
San Francisco 214, 243–59; 450 Sutter Street building 250; anti-modernism 249, 251; Bank of America
building 249; Center for the Arts Theater 244; City of Paris Department Store 249; conservation districts
251, 252; Daphne Funeral Home 248–9; downtown 244, 250–1; Downtown Plan (1985) 250–1; Four
Seasons Hotel 254, 255; Golden Gate Park 148, 247; Hallidie Building 250; Hunter’s Point Naval
Shipyard crane 259, 257; International Terminal 243–4; Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community
Center 248, 249; loft projects 246; M. H. de Young Museum 247–8, 254; media images of 244–5;
Mission Bay Plan 253; Montgomery Block 249; Museum of Modern Art 244; opposition to new building
243, 244, 248, 251–2; Pacific Bell Park 247; postmodernism 251, 256; Potrero Hill 246, 253; Prada
 Building 252, 254, 253; Red Cross Building 248; Russian Hill 256; skyscrapers 152, 249, 254; South
Beach 247; Sunset District 256; superblocks 249; Sutro Tower 259; tourism 244, 246, 248; Transamerica
Pyramid 249; University of California campus 253; Urban Design Element 250, 256; waterfront 246,
247; Yerba Buena Redevelopment Area 244
San Gabriel Mountains 138
San Ysidro 268, 269–75
Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah Economic City 18
scatter-site housing 234
Schindler, Rudolf 133
Schlesinger, Arthur 233
Schwarzer, Mitchell 243–59
Scott, 165–6n20
Scott Brown, Denise 314
Scott, James C. 112
Scott, Ridley 133
Scully, Vincent 327
Seaside 322, 325, 326
security 323–4
segregation 317, 329
Sert, J. L. 42
settlement unit concept 103
Shenzhen 278–311; airports 292–2; axes 288–90; Bao’an district 290; borders 284, 285–6; Central Business
District (CBD) 303, 304; Chengzhongcun (village in the city) 297; City of Design 301; clustered linear
planning 289–90; cosmopolitanism 287; creative industries 299–300, 301–2; Crystal Island 302, 303;
Cultural Center 288; Dafen village Art Museum 299–300, 299; Dameisha 303, 304; expressways 290;
factory/dormitory labor 293–5, 307, 308, 295; financial center 302, 304; Foxconn factory 308; Futian
district 288–9; Guangming New Town 303; housing 293–5, 296–7, 303–4;
infrastructure 289–92; International Foreign Trade Center 310n71; labor (dormitory 293–5, 307, 308, 295;
flows 284–5; unrest 308); land market 302–3; land use rights 296; logistics network 291–2; Longgang
district 290, 299; Luoho Commercial Center 300; masterplans 289–90; Metro System 290; migration
284–5, 286–7; Museum of Contemporary Art 288; as neoliberal city 281–2, 305; OCT-LOFT 301–2;
Oversea Chinese Town (OCT) 301; population 278; ports 292; postmodernism 300–1, 302; Qianhai
303–4, 304; shanzhai architecture 301; as Special Economic Zone (SEZ) 282, 284; stock exchange 302,
304, 305; theme parks 300–1; urbanization 278, 282; villages 296–9
Shinjuku Station, Tokyo 124, 125, 126
Shun Tak Center, Hong Kong 116, 118, 117
Sicherheit 323
Silver, Beverly 307
Silvetti, Jorge 160
simulacra 134, 149, 160, 163
Singapore 6, 7
Singley, Paulette 132–67
Ski Dubai 15
Skidmore Owings and Merrill 243, 251
skyscrapers: Atlanta 29; Dubai 14;
San Francisco 249, 251, 254
slums 2; San Diego–Tijuana border 265, 268
Smith, Christopher 294–5
Smithson, Alison and Peter 314
Snøhetta 186
social diversity 328–9
social justice 37
social segregation 317, 329
social unrest, Detroit 100–1
Society Hill, Philadelphia 230, 231, 242n35
socio-economic sustainability 270, 271
Soja, Edward 134, 164–5n6, 165–6n20
Solà-Morales, M. 49
Solomon, Jonathan D. 109–31
Sommer, Richard M. 201–42
Sorbonne 16
Sorenga Pier, Oslo 187
Soria y Mata, Arturo 150
Sorkin, Michael 162–3
South Korea, New Songdo City 19
South Street, Philadelphia 231–2, 233
Soviet Union 70
space: abstract 135; empty, Barcelona 47–8, 49; hyperspace 109, 134, 137; see also open spaces; public
space
Spackman, Mossop + Michaels 174
Special Economic Zones (SEZs) 4, 7, 13; China 282, 284, 289, 297, 300
Special Export Zones, China 282
Spence Robinson 116
sports amenities, Barcelona 42
sprawl 176, 312, 316, 317, 321, 322
squares 319; Barcelona 41; Philadelphia 206, 207–8, 210, 213, 215
Stalker (Tarkovsky) 106, 107
Steffens, Lincoln 222
Stein, Clarence 69, 70, 314
Stern, Robert 324
Stonorov, Oskar 223
street life 2, 314
street design/layout: Barcelona 42, 45; New Urbanism 316, 318, 319, 320; see also grid system
streetscape 314, 320
Stübben, J. 44
suburbanization 212
suburbs 316; Barcelona 40
Sudan 18
Suisman, Douglas 136, 137, 144, 145, 149–51, 165n16
Sulayem, Sultan Ahmed bin 14
Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles 149, 162
Sunset District, San Francisco 256
superblocks 69–87; Philadelphia 229; San Francisco 249
Superquadra, Brasilia 63, 64
Superwindow 303
sustainability 312, 321, 329; environmental 169;
socio-economic 270, 271
Sutro Tower, San Francisco 259
symbiosis 37
Taiwan 282
Tange, Kenzo 124
Tarantino, Quentin 162
Tarkovsky, Andrei, Stalker 106, 107
Taylorism 91
technology transfer, China 300
TEN Arquitectos 177
Thamesmead, England 314
Thatcher, Margaret 305
theme parks, Shenzhen 300–1
Three Powers Plaza, Brasilia 59, 63–4, 64–5
Tickell, Adam 281
Tijuana 138; see also San Diego–Tijuana border
time, neoliberal 305–8
time factor 51–2
Tjuvholmen, Oslo 186, 188
Tokyo, Shinjuku Station 124, 125, 126
tourism: Abu Dhabi 16; Dubai 10, 20; Los Angeles 156; Philadelphia 239; San Francisco 244, 246, 248
town and village enterprises (TVEs), China 297–8
townscape 3
traditional design, New Urbanism 325, 327
traffic 319; calming 318
traffic flow: Barcelona 45, 47; Philadelphia 226–9, 238
Transamerica Pyramid, San Francisco 249
transbirder urbanism 5
Transect, New Urbanism 320–1, 329
transport 34, 317; Barcelona 47; see also automobiles; metro systems; railways
Trucial States 9, 10
The Truman Show (film) 322
Tulane City Center 174
12 Monkeys (film) 154
Tzonis, Alexander 31n3

UNESCO 301; World Heritage Sites 59, 67, 68

United Arab Emirates (UAE) 7–21, 260; development companies 18; freehold property 13; labor conditions
17–18; offset ventures 12; oil 7, 12, 18; railways 16–17; see also Abu Dhabi; Dubai
universities: Barcelona 43; see also names of individual universities
University of Berlin 103
University of California campus, San Francisco 253
University of Montana, Environmental Studies Program 174
Unwin, Raymond 44, 314
urban form 52
Urban Land Institute (ULI) 170, 172, 173, 180, 326
urban urbanism 39
urbanism 31n1, 96, 99–100, 152–3, 161; agrarian 329; from below 298; ecological 168–9, 179–80, 181n2;
formal/informal, San Diego–Tijuana border 262, 263, 264, 265, 272; landscape 169, 280; landscape as
104–5, 106; neoliberal 281–2, 305; postmodern 134–5; zombie 186; see also aformal urbanism; New
Urbanism
urbanization 176, 280, 281, 287, 298; institutions of 260, 261; Pearl River Delta (PRD) 279; Shenzhen 278,
282
Urbanus Architects 298, 299, 302
utopia, nostalgia for 288, 295
Utopian modernism 256

Vall d’Hebron, Barcelona 42

Van Toorn, Roemer 162
Varnelis, Kazys 133
Venice 244
Venturi, Robert 314
Via Julia, Barcelona 42
Viaplana-Piñón 49
Vienna 38
Viet Village Urban Farm, New Orleans 170, 174–6, 180, 175, 176
Village de L’Est, New Orleans 174
villages, Shenzhen 296–9
Vine Street, Philadelphia 215, 228–9, 235–6
Virno, Paolo 304–5
Vital Center concept 233–4
Volcano (film) 147, 148

Wagner, Otto 38
Waldheim, Charles 89–108, 180–1n1
Wang, Hu 281
waste landscapes 176
waterfronts 34; Barcelona 39, 42, 57, 55, 56, 57; Hong Kong 129; New Orleans 170, 176–80, 177, 178,
179; Oslo 185–99; Philadelphia 224; San Francisco 246, 247
wealth, San Diego–Tijuana border 262, 263, 264, 268
Weber, Melvin 240
Wender, Wim 152
Western Avenue, Chicago 72–3
“white flight” phenomenon, Philadelphia 213
Whiting, Sarah 69–88
Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles 146, 149, 150, 151, 150
Wilshire, Gaylord 146
Wirth, Louis 81
World archipelago, Dubai 15
World Heritage Sites: Brasilia 59, 67; Ouro Preto 68
World Trade Center: Dubai 14; New York 69
The World (film) 287
Wright, Frank Lloyd 30; Chicago Quarter-Section Plan 73–6, 75
Wright, Gwendolyn 313
Wright, Henry 69
Wu, Gordon 290
Wurster, William 251

Yale University 16
Yerba Buena Redevelopment Area, San Francisco 244

Zaero-Polo, Alejandro 287

Zayed Military City, Dubai 21
Zeebrugge Terminal 161
Zhang, Lu 308
Zhangke, Jia 287
Zhou Rong 288, 295
Zhu, Jianfei 278–9, 280
Zhu, Tao 307
zombie concepts 184–5, 193, 195, 196, 197–8
zombie urbanism 186
zoning 183, 272, 323; Atlanta 24; discriminatory 269; micro-274; New Orleans 172–3; Oslo 185;
Philadelphia 228; San Diego 266, 274; San Diego–Tijuana border 264, 265