The Evolution of Urban Form

Typology for Planners and Architects

Brenda Case Scheer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351178037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Why are so many of our urban environments so resistant to change? The author tackles this question in her comprehensive guide for planners, designers, and students concerned with how cities take shape. This book provides a fundamental understanding of how physical environments are created, changed, and transformed through ordinary processes over time. Most of the built environment adheres to a few physical patterns, or types, that occur over and over. Planners and architects, consciously and unconsciously, refer to building types as they work through urban design problems and regulations. Suitable for professional planners, architects, urban designers, and students, This book includes practical examples of how typology is critical to analytical, design, and regulatory situations.

Chapter One | A Crisis in the Urban Landscape

We know how to design cities. Designers can whip out attractive watercolor drawings that envision a rejuvenation of our sad urban landscape of strip malls, car dealerships, fast food kiosks, ragged garden apartments, wide parking-dominated streets, and isolated subdivisions. If the new urbanism had not already offered us clear examples of better design, we have but to walk the streets of Paris or Savannah, Georgia, or St. Petersburg, Russia, to breathe in ancient and timeless lessons from our ancestors.

So why is it that for every much-heralded 50-acre new urbanism gesture, there are literally thousands of acres of new strip malls, gas stations, apartment complexes, office parks, subdivisions, and big box stores?¹ Multiscreen theaters, convention centers, soccer stadiums, airports, and shopping malls all resist the good urbanism lessons. Observe the far edge of any city: Why do big box stores proliferate like weeds in a garden, despite the efforts of planners and designers? What is it that we don’t understand that confounds our attempts to change this ubiquitous landscape?

Planners and designers have been searching for the answers for some time, with mixed results. One probable culprit is ordinary land-use regulation, which can prohibit good urbanism.² There is considerable merit in this idea. Twentieth-century building has evolved in unanticipated ways, such that zoning has had a very limited effect on urban form. Zoning is not oriented around a formal plan; rather, a zoning map has blocks of color that describe the perimeters of a regulated area. Land-use and zoning plans indicate none of the apparatus that might constitute an urban design: street layouts and sizes, parcel size and shape, public space, building form, and scale. A land-use plan frustrates urban density and spatial form with its metrics of setbacks and floor area ratios that are driven by the goal to limit intensity and isolate uses. Parking ratios, subdivision regulations, and separation of uses can also prevent a well-designed urban form. A predominant opinion among planners and designers is that if we could change the regulation, we would produce more compact and livable cities.

A second prominent idea is that, as a culture, we have forgotten what is good and we need to be reminded through examples.³ If only we could show people that dense urbanism is attractive and healthy and socially interesting, they would come to demand it everywhere. If only we could all develop a shared ideal about what is livable and good, as people who lived in traditional urban environments apparently did, we would be able to build it.

Both of these answers to the question of why we don’t make cities the way we should—inadequate regulation or lack of appropriate examples— make a leap of faith: The proper, that is, traditional, urban form will blossom, eventually crowding out the strip mall and big box weeds if only regulation can be aligned and better design can be demonstrated to the public. It is assumed that in order to redesign our cities and suburbs according to smart growth principles, our culture will need to produce new building types on a grand scale. For example, big box stores should be replaced by mixed use types, and low-density single-family homes by higher-density types.

In this book, I offer a different perspective, born of research in many different places over time. In any one place, most buildings conform to one or another of a limited set of building types—for instance, a strip mall is an example of a type. These types are used over and over because they align with the conditions of the culture and economy. In other words, they emerge or evolve as a complete resolution of a complex, interwoven set of problems. As long as the conditions that gave rise to the type continue to exist, the type will proliferate, with minor variations. Only when conditions change will these types evolve to respond to the new conditions, with some allowance for natural resistance to change. Changing types on a grand scale so that they emerge naturally is difficult without first creating a corresponding change in these conditions. Thus it is that big box stores, for example, continue to be far more prolific than mixed use retail types.

Managing the dynamic of typological change is an essential skill for planners. Yet most urban design ideas are based on a static understanding of the built environment, and they anticipate an end, when the plan is complete. A master plan is an imagined future environment, a blueprint or framework to get from one point of time to a day in the future. Few plans actually are completed with any fidelity, however, for a variety of reasons. A major one is the simple fact that conditions of the urban economy and culture change too profoundly and too frequently for the master plan to be relevant for a long period of time. A plan that is a singular vision, or which is very precise, may not have the flexibility to be adapted for these changes. This is a confounding problem for planning in general, but especially for urban design, whose pretty pictures can seem laughable 20 years down the road. Like an old science fiction movie, planners’ illustrated visions of the future can seem oddly anachronistic in ways that written documents might not.

This dilemma cannot be easily solved. Design, for designers, has historically meant the creation of an object. Urban design, as practiced, assumes the creation of an object, albeit a rather large and complicated one with multiple parts built at different times. Alternatively, many urban designers now understand urban design less as the creation of a series of specific buildings and open spaces and more as a framework for change that is continuous and ever evolving.

In plotting an urban design strategy, planners can manipulate or limit the conditions that affect and change the physical environment over long periods of time. This requires an understanding of the normal dynamic forces that operate on the built landscape. Some of these forces are obvious to planners: zoning, markets, transportation, and so on. What is not well understood is the mechanism by which these forces work their magic. Why does a big box store happen, or a strip mall? How can we change these places? Often the frustrating answer is that, despite our knowledge of better ideas, we cannot change them; instead, they keep popping up. These ordinary building types are persistent, ubiquitous, and resistant to the planner’s bag of tricks.

Since ordinary building types are the most visible building blocks of the urban landscape, planners must study the naturalized conditions under which they arise, flourish, and change to have any hope of transforming them or the urban landscape that contains them. By understanding types as emergent from culture, we can recognize that it is not possible to invent new types or substantially alter a type solely for the purpose of serving a different kind of urban design idea; these attempts betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how the urban environment creates and recreates itself. Instead, we must see types for what they are: natural adaptations that satisfy a specific set of conditions. It is the conditions themselves that can be manipulated, not the type.

A wholesale change in the urban environment cannot be accomplished without orchestrating this evolution. This book is about understanding how types originate and evolve, so that planners and designers can help to manipulate this change effectively with the tools at hand. Assisting and encouraging the evolution of common types is, in the long run, the only way to ensure that more urban types will be successful on their own terms— that is, that good types will appear more or less spontaneously, without excessive regulation to force them to happen. Manipulation of types requires a sophisticated understanding of building types and their relationship to urban form and the conditions that drive them. Although we can imagine an ideal city, it may not be possible to build it or rebuild our urban landscape significantly unless the complicated processes of typological and urban transformation are understood.

That is not to say that altering the course of urban development is impossible in the long run. In less than a century, the urban and suburban form of the United States was dramatically reshaped by a combination of interrelated forces, including the globalization of the economy (which brought us Wal-Mart, for example); technological shifts in communication, construction, and transportation (cars, jets, electricity, TV, phones, steel, computers); the transformation of education, civil rights, and the role of women; the rise of corporations, governments; and so much more. The reason we do not build cities in the lovely traditional forms that we know from history is obvious: The patterns and types in older cities emerged from completely different cultural, technological, and economic conditions. The dramatic shifts over the past 100 years guaranteed that a new urban landscape would emerge to challenge the traditional form.

That emergent urban landscape is all around us, for better and worse. It reflects our shared values and embodies our expectations, which is why American cities are so similar everywhere. Citizens of older cities also shared similar common expectations of form, if not explicit values about how a city should be. Building types from the 18th and 19th centuries embody those expectations. In the same way, our contemporary building types, like it or not, also embody the habits, values, society, and economics that have lately evolved.

There are good reasons why designers are not satisfied with the types that emerge from cultural processes. Our shared values have serious problems and weaknesses that are worth questioning. Are Wal-Mart and strip shopping centers the best we can do? Are incessant growth and expansion necessary for quality of life? It is worthwhile and perhaps even critical to take on the complicated task of deeply understanding the emergent types that surround us and the conditions that create them. It may even be possible to push evolutionary change to happen more quickly by manipulating the conditions under which these types thrive.

Consumer values and expectations are components of these conditions. Seen in this way, the design and construction of an idealistic new urbanism project does not represent an evolutionary shift but a form of consumer advertising that may slightly influence the slow process of typological change over time.

At present there are many exemplary urban-style projects that are featured in design media. Most of these arise from very particular situations that almost always include massive control of a single large site. These exemplary projects can be seen as leaps, not evolutions. Most exemplary projects give preference to satisfying ideals: The formal and imagistic attributes of a place predominate. As a result, they must often overcome enormous resistance to be built at all. This resistance can take the form of irate neighbors, reluctant bankers, planning regulation, dicey market studies, parking needs, and a host of other cultural and economic barriers. Because they have not emerged or evolved from the crucible of complex cultural conditions, these exemplary projects cannot be expected to proliferate naturally. Although they may be financially successful—our ultimate measure of value in this culture—they are still much riskier than “normal” development.

This book undertakes the task of unraveling the idea of building types as emergent forms that drive most urban development and transformation. By studying types and how they change over time, designers and planners can become connoisseurs of the physical environment, easily recognizing a wide variety of urban patterns and able to classify, date, and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of them.

Building type is an idea that actually has many related but different meanings in architecture. Typologies are classification systems, with important uses in fields as different as linguistics and biology.⁴ In architecture, the most common use of the term describes a loose classification of buildings based on their primary use—library, school, airport, for example. Buildings of the same use-type have the same function but may take many different configurations. Later in this chapter, I will describe use-types and other ideas of building types, but everywhere else in this book the word type will be used to describe formal types. Formal types share characteristics of the same form—for instance, a big box or a row house—but may be adapted easily for many different functions, even though they may be commonly associated with one function and originally derived from that function. Form types are particularly useful because they constitute a way of analyzing and describing the space, shape, density, and many other physical configurations of the built environment. Just as the term land use does not give us much information about the physical configuration of a place, use-types—library, retail, and so on—do not tell us the shape or scale or configuration of buildings.

Formal types, on the other hand, can be used to describe the shape, feel, scale, and configuration of the environment but without being specific about the precise architectural character, building use, or intensity of activities. This opens up an important arena for planners and planning regulation. By describing the existing and future city according to building types and their urban configurations, planners have a tool that is oriented toward creating specific physical configurations of the city rather than—or in addition to— the economic and intensity configuration, or what is known as land use. Using type as a b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: A Crisis in the Urban Landscape
• Chapter 2: The Origins and Theory of Type
• Chapter 3: Typological Transformation
• Chapter 4: Typology and Urban Transformation
• Chapter 5: Legitimacy and Control
• Chapter 6: Typology and the Disordered City
• Chapter 7: Type in Design and Practice
• Chapter 8: Transformation and Imagination
• Graphic Credits
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author