The Nature of Urban Design

A New York Perspective on Resilience

Alexandros Washburn

• Editorial: Island Press
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781610915168
• Categoría: Architecture
• Categoría: Architecture General

The best cities become an ingrained part of their residents' identities. Urban design is the key to this process, but all too often, citizens abandon it to professionals, unable to see a way to express what they love and value in their own neighborhoods. In this visually rich book, Alexandros Washburn, Chief Urban Designer of the New York Department of City Planning, redefines urban design. His book empowers urbanites and lays the foundations for a new approach to design that will help cities to prosper in an uncertain future. He asks his readers to consider how cities shape communities, for it is the strength of our communities, he argues, that will determine how we respond to crises like Hurricane Sandy, whose floodwaters he watched from his home in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Washburn draws heavily on his experience within the New York City planning system while highlighting forward-thinking developments in cities around the world. He grounds his book in the realities of political and financial challenges that hasten or hinder even the most beautiful designs. By discussing projects like the High Line and the Harlem Children's Zone as well as examples from Seoul to Singapore, he explores the nuances of the urban design process while emphasizing the importance of individuals with the drive to make a difference in their city.
Throughout the book, Washburn shows how a well-designed city can be the most efficient, equitable, safe, and enriching place on earth. The Nature of Urban Design provides a framework for participating in the process of change and will inspire and inform anyone who cares about cities.

CHAPTER 1

WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT CITIES?

Cities are where we want to be. As Aristotle said, “while coming into being for the sake of living, the city exists for the sake of living well.” The promise to raise our lives above mere existence to the plane of “living well” is the siren call of cities through the ages, and explains why cities have attracted an ever larger share of the world’s population over the course of history. If present trends continue, more than two-thirds of us will choose to live in cities by century’s end. Across the globe, we may complain of those cities as difficult, expensive, overcrowded, yet the attraction remains. Despite the hassles and challenges of urban life, all of us who have tasted life in cities know that what John Updike wrote about New Yorkers also applies to those who live in cities anywhere across the globe from São Paulo to Istanbul to Shanghai. “The true New Yorker,” and by extension, the true urbanite, “secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

Cities are places of living well: Singapore pool 55 stories above the city. (Credit: Alexandros Washburn)

Every month, approximately four million people leave villages and countrysides for the fringes of an already established city.

There is a wondrous attraction of cities, as powerful as our imagination. People so much want to live in cities that their migrations result in forming the equivalent of a city the size of Paris every month. But this is a woefully misleading statistic, which might suggest the monthly unveiling of a lovely new city with cafes, boulevards, art museums, and a great subway system. But the reality of rapid urbanization is nothing of the sort.

Every month, approximately four million people leave villages and countrysides for the fringes of an already established city. These cities grow by bursting at the seams, with sewers, if any, overflowing. In the fastest growing cities, which tend to be the poorest, little planning is done ahead of time. The new arrivals often meet danger and discomfort in what seems like an alien world.

Despite often deplorable conditions faced by new arrivals to cities, statistics show they have probably made the right bet if they are looking for a better life. As a measure of prosperity, the World Bank records economic density—the amount of economic activity that takes place in a given land area—and finds that it correlates with urban density. Cities are indeed the land of opportunity. Today there are just over three billion people living in cities. According to the United Nations, by 2050, there will be three billion more. Pulled by opportunity or pushed by destitution, the half of the world’s people who don’t live in cities but want a better life will move to cities to find it.

The population shift to cities comes with an uncomfortable corollary. People who live in cities as they are currently designed produce more greenhouse gases than people who don’t live in cities—as a global average about three times more. More greenhouse gases, more global warming. More cities, more greenhouse gases. If current trends in urbanization continue and that growth is not managed sustainably, we’re heading for an environmental catastrophe due to global warming. Or the possibility of disaster could be avoided. People in cities, particularly coastal cities threatened by inundation, are waking up to their vulnerability to climate change. They are also waking up to their responsibility. Cities affect climate and climate affects cities. This newly acknowledged responsibility is reflected in new trends in urban design, in newly conceived projects, plans, and standards that try to make cities more sustainable and more resilient in the way they are designed, built, and inhabited.

What does it mean to be “resilient”? The way we design our cities today is not resilient. This is easy to see in the sprawling suburban cities of America that consume fourteen times more energy per capita than the global average. But it is also true of the massive new cities of Asia that are built more densely, but squander the efficiencies of density by dividing neighborhoods with a checkerboard of impassible multilane highways. It is also true of the spectacular growth of the poorest cities in the world, where new neighborhoods are built on dangerous floodplains or muddy slopes without sanitation or other infrastructure. The urban design patterns of the status quo are inefficient, alienating, or unsafe.

Urban design could make cities resilient. A well-designed, well-built city could be the most efficient, safe, and enriching place on earth. It could be a place that can adapt to extreme weather with no more danger to its inhabitants from a storm surge than from a spring shower. It could be a place where the greatest creativity is applied to economic development, education, health, and art. It could be a place where even walking down the street is a spectacle. Resiliency today means living well in a time of climate change.

WHAT IS A CITY?

As Aristotle hinted, cities are where people want to be. As mentioned in the introduction, cities take many forms, from tract houses in suburbia to skyscrapers downtown. Statistically, cities are not just downtowns, they are entire metropolitan areas that include every extreme of density and wealth. And they are very hard to define precisely. Though we have been building cities for more than five thousand years and more than two billion people live in them, there is no consensus definition of “city.”

The United Nations, faced with many different standards of its member states, statistically throws up its hands and admits there is no globally accepted definition beyond a vague sensibility of “bright lights, tall buildings, and traffic jams.” But this misses the full menu of urbanization.

In Iceland, 200 people living together gets you a city. In China, you would need 100,000 to qualify as one. In the United States, there are many statistical gradations that come together to make up the largest measure of city-ness, the metropolitan statistical area (MSA), defined as urban areas and their surrounding counties that have a high degree of integration with the core areas. The subcategories of MSA include urban fringes (unincorporated areas adjacent to urban areas), urban places (incorporated areas with at least 2,500 people), and urban areas (at least 50,000 people and at a density of at least 1,000 people per square mile. The broad variety of the U.S. statistical definitions of “urban” gets at the underlying principle that there are many morphologies of city today, many ways to design and live together, a complete spectrum from farmhouse to penthouse integrated socially, economically, and infrastructurally.

The morphologies of a city today can be as varied as the people who live there. New York is a prime example of the broad diversity in the form and feel of the city. Manhattan, home to the United Nations, certainly fills the bill for “bright lights, tall buildings, and traffic jams.” But my remote corner of Brooklyn also feels like a city, with its old brick warehouses and crumbling docks. There are parts of Queens with suburban homes with driveways and carports. There is even a mobile home park in Staten Island, with trailers in neat rows with potted plants covering their wheel wells. The residents are all New Yorkers.

Yet hard as it might be for a citizen of the five boroughs to say this (you’ve got to be kidding if you live elsewhere, after all), the experience of the city extends into the region around New York City, crossing all manner of political and geological boundaries to form the New York Metropolitan Statistical Area. A shopping mall in New Jersey, an office park in Westchester County, a bedroom community as far away as Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. These places would not have developed without the pull of the city. They are inextricably part of the urban network.

SIZE MATTERS

The diversity of experience available in cities makes them difficult to categorize statistically except by one simple measure: population. If you measure the overall population of their metropolitan areas, cities come in only three sizes: small, medium, and large. If you are in the majority of the world’s population that lives in cities, you live in a city, a metropolis, or a mega-city.

New York arguably became the world’s first mega-city when the population of its five boroughs and immediate suburbs passed the ten million mark in the 1950s. Since then, the number and distribution of mega-cities from Mexico City to Tokyo has become almost commonplace. Asia alone has a dozen such cities.

Before the rise of the mega-city, the metropolis was thought to be the most sophisticated form of city. With over a million inhabitants but less than ten million, the metropolis emerged in the nineteenth century from the wealth of the Industrial Revolution with a binary sensibility as both the city of squalor and the city of light. A metropolis such as Paris or London became the crucible of modern culture. Today, however, a metropolis is no longer the mark of empire. The best, such as Sydney, Australia, with a population of four million, are wonderful places to live, regional capitals of great beauty, diversity, and liveliness. These cities maintain their competitive edge through their connection to other cities globally and their quality of life locally. They try to find a sweet spot between mega-cities and cities.

Though the majority of the world’s urban population will eventually live in mega-cities, the fastest growing and currently most common class of city is that with less than 500,000 people. These cities are at best subregional capitals, and their capabilities for planning and implementing the infrastructure of growth can be relatively weak. As their population grows rapidly, particularly in Africa, they will come under increasing stress with relatively fewer resources than their largest counterparts.

Density in Hong Kong. (Credit: Alexandros Washburn)

COMPARISONS

If we want to compare two global cities, the small, medium, large categorization is of little use. There is an infinitely fine grain to even the largest cities, so a comparison requires being quite precise about what you are comparing and the boundary across which you are comparing. Take, for example, a comparison between New York and Hong Kong. Which city is denser?

Density is a measure of how many people live within a certain area. Within their political boundaries, New York City and Hong Kong have similar land areas and populations: 469 square miles and 8 million people for New York and 426 square miles and 7 million people for Hong Kong. At that scale of comparison, the average density of the two cities is quite similar at around 17,000 people per square mile. But Hong Kong actually limits its built-up area to only 100 square miles, leaving three-quarters of the land as public parklands or public rights-of-way. New York leaves one-quarter of its land for parks and streets. Squeezing similar amounts of development onto less land means the average density of Hong Kong’s built-up area is about 71,000 people per square mile, almost triple New York’s. Hong Kong, therefore, must be the denser city.

But wait! If you ...