Making the Metropolitan Landscape

Standing Firm on Middle Ground

Jacqueline Tatom, Jennifer Stauber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135232061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The American landscape is an extremely complex terrain born from a history of collective and individual experiences. These created environments, which all may be called metropolitan landscapes, constantly challenge students and professionals in the fields of architecture, design and planning to consider new ways of making lively public places. This book brings together varied voices in urban design theory and practice to explore new ways of understanding place and our position in it.

PART ONE
TOWARDS A METROPOLITAN LANDSCAPE

The essays in Part One introduce conceptual frameworks to describe, represent and interpret the landscape of contemporary American cities. These frameworks support the understanding of cities as metropolitan landscapes presenting complex heterogeneous patterns of development that stretch from the city core to an agricultural or wilderness hinterland. They propose interpretations of the morphology of American cities, along with conception narratives that assume a progressive agenda of change. The descriptions and interpretations are both empirical and poetic. The chapters examine the American cultural context and political economy as well as the specific physical characteristics of American cities. They also address the dominant cultural narratives that inform American urbanism and scholarship on American urbanism.

Peter Rowe provides a quantitative overview of metropolitan development in the last century, while situating American urbanization in the context of global urbanization. The legacy of the “middle landscape” is tested as an interpretive construct.

Jacqueline Tatom builds on the morphological description by proposing comedy as a necessary complement to the epic and pastoral narratives. Comedy serves as a vehicle of interpretation for the metropolitan conditions of today’s cities, notably with regard to the environmental challenges that they face.

Charles Waldheim examines the pastoral inclination in detail with a discussion of American agrarianism and its continued relevance given the deep rooted cultural predilections of Americans for this founding myth. The study emphasizes the necessity to achieve a more complex understanding of the relationship between rural and urban landscapes.

Eric Mumford calls for a historical account of American urbanism that re-establishes continuity between pre-modern, modern, and post-modern urbanization. This account assists in overcoming the commonly expressed divide between pre and post industrial landscapes.

Anne Vernez Moudon and Chanam Lee investigate how the use of digital data and empirical methods can support urban morphological studies. They illustrate how quantitative methods can help to represent, measure, and analyze the impact of contemporary metropolitan development on behavior.

CHAPTER 1
The spatial transformation and restructuring of American cities

Peter G. Rowe

Since early last century, transformation of the overall form of many American cities has involved progression from ‘monocentric’ to ‘polycentric’ configurations, sometimes described as the ‘bundled deconcentrations’ of expanding metropolitan regions. Indeed, mid-sized communities within many metropolitan areas now enjoy considerable independence of function and spatial identity. Other distinguishing features include an emphasis on ‘points’ and ‘lines’ in a ‘field’ and a largely two-dimensional pattern of settlement. Moreover, this pattern also has a sprawling mosaic-like quality, often depending upon when and where a particular locale was developed. At a lower level of spatial discrimination, modern patterns of development are primarily due to commercial and private real estate practices, as well as to a managerial view of cities. Prevalent throughout are symbolic proclivities towards a traditionalist perspective coinciding with pastoral idylls and the celebration of old, familiar, and venerable periods of America’s past, as well as a more contemporary view coinciding with a modern technical temperament, a technological way of making things, and scientific interpretations of people and their world. Also prevalent are commitments to majoritarian as well as pluralistic concepts of social organization and value, often pitting the will of a majority against claims of special groups, minorities, and individuals. In these and other regards, a distinction is often made with ideas of European and other foreign cities, and while there is certainly considerable truth to such comparisons, nowadays these distinctions hold less weight than they did half a century ago. Nevertheless, the spatial configuration and underlying processes of the contemporary American city, to the extent that one can make such broad generalizations, are a particular regional or local form of modernization, albeit early and influential, and not necessarily a universal outcome or prescription. Moving forward, probably the most compelling view of American metropolitan cities should remain largely process-oriented rather than adhering to particular images. At best they can be regarded as somewhat self-organizing systems of spatial events and relationships, where apparent system openness, fungibility, and a status of ‘becoming’ rather than being entirely ‘made’ will likely continue to appeal most to the expectations of hopeful inhabitants. That being said, advantage can and should also be taken of continuing spatial restructuring to address persistent, as well as emerging, social and environmental costs.

Towards multi-centered metropolitan regions

The year 1920, or thereabouts, marked a watershed in American life, as the majority of Americans became urban dwellers for the first time in history. The urban population, which had stood at 39 percent of the total only two decades earlier in 1900, had now reached over 51 percent. This was also the moment at which most Americans entered the modern era. Domestic electrification, for instance, with all its significant side effects upon household appliances and social communications, became a reality for most Americans. Moreover, well before the turn of the century widespread improvements in public transportation had pushed urban development out into the countryside. This trend was to continue even more forcefully and, as a consequence, cities began to decentralize. One result of this process was the transformation of the countryside by trolley lines that produced the typical radial ‘ribbon development’ of what became known as ‘taxpayer’ commercial strips, with residential development following behind. By the 1920s this form of development was to be found in most urban areas of the United States.¹

At roughly the same time the use of private automobiles was also becoming widespread. Vehicle registration, for instance, rose from a paltry 2 million in 1914 to over 26 million well before 1930.² This rapid rise in popularity of the private automobile was due to the combined factors of decreasing cost and increasing technical reliability of the cars themselves, as well as the sheer disorganization and resulting decline of streetcar services in most metropolitan areas. These transportation improvements, combined with an intensified period of home building that reached a new level approaching 1 million units annually in 1925 – or around 7 units per 1,000 population, a benchmark among western nations between the wars – gave rise to the automobile suburb with its characteristic array of residential streets lined with single-family houses.³ The practice of comprehensively zoning land uses also became fully institutionalized at this time, resulting in primary protection for the single-family residential environment and a separation among different property uses. The overall geographic result of this phase of urban development was a proliferation and decentralization of suburban areas, conforming to a spatial distribution featuring a downtown commercial core at the center, ringed by residential suburbs generally of decreasing density. It was the so-called ‘monocentric model’ for the spatial distribution of urban functions and became the subject of considerable study by urban ecologists, geographers, and planners.⁴

Not long after World War II – by 1960 to be more precise – another watershed was reached as America became predominantly a nation of suburb-dwellers. The United States had become an urban nation for the first time a scant 40 years earlier in 1920, but during the 1950s emerging metropolitan areas found themselves being transformed again in the direction of their earlier rural origins. In fact, today the suburban proportion of metropolitan development stands above 60 percent, and around 80 percent of the nation’s entire population resides in metropolitan statistical areas, of which 29 percent live in metro areas with populations in excess of 5 million inhabitants.⁵ As at other times in America’s past, it was technology and transportation improvements that gave a significant impetus to suburban development, only this time it was in the form of high-speed freeways, turnpikes, and interstate highways. Finally, after a 25-year effort to simply improve existing road conditions, a task only half-completed by 1940, transportation planners and public officials could now turn their attention towards radically improving service and towards extensive inter-urban travel.⁶ By the 1950s, America had well and truly entered the automobile age, with about one car per family. This shift was also to produce public works and new urban artifacts that would transform the American landscape substantially in the years to come. It also brought an unprecedently high dependence on private automobile use as almost the only means of transportation.⁷

Relatively cheap land on the urban periphery, which now became accessible, was rapidly developed largely as residential tracts. Generally at this time, local governments went out of their way to extend services in the wake of development. What was good for development, it appeared, was good for all. Furthermore, a revamped housing industry, now backed by federal government loan guarantees and tax write-offs for homeowners, quickly recovered to the 1925 production levels of 1 million units annually by 1947, of which 80 percent were in the form of single-family dwellings. One of the most notable residential developments of the period was Levittown, New York – built between 1948 and 1950 – which, with its look-alike settlement of Levittown, Pennsylvania, produced thousands of houses annually, each selling more or less as soon as it became available. Geographically, the ‘great reshuffling’ of population, as it is sometimes called, stimulated by post-war shifts of industrial and service production within the nation, also intensified the demand for housing and suburban development.⁸ Incidentally, housing production in the United States has rarely dipped below 1 million units annually since 1949, and peaked at 2.3 million units annually in 1973, for an extraordinary normalized rate of 11 per 1000 population.⁹

At first, the geographic result of the post-war suburban boom was a continued outward expansion of metropolitan areas, particularly in the form of what widely became known as suburban sprawl. This was also a period of white, relatively affluent flight from central cities and a significant loss of population within traditional urban areas, which were largely abandoned to become minority ghettos.¹⁰ During a third phase of development, however, geographic dispersal continued, but now with a reconcentration of urban functions within what were once low-density outlying areas. Commercial firms, adjusting to the new realities of employee locations and the new operating efficiencies of the improved roadway system, began locating away from traditional downtown cores and out into the urban periphery. In the case of Boston, for instance, a dispersed pattern of metropolitan development formed. Spurred on by major highways, like the circumferential Route 128 and the radial Massachusetts Turnpike, firms, now relocated on the well-serviced outskirts, could physically take advantage of improved transportation accessibility to both markets and labor forces. Indeed, in the short space of 5 years – from 1955 to 1960 – some 100 firms were located along Route 128 around Boston, of which 70 were formerly located within a 4-mile radius of the downtown center. One result of this pattern of suburbanization was new types of development, such as the office park and shopping mall. Another result was an orientation away from suburbs as commuter sheds and towards more differentiated patterns of land use and the emergence of the idea of metropolitan regions replacing the usual urban–suburban dichotomy.¹¹

In many a rapidly growing Sunbelt city, at least at the time, decentralized development was even more exaggerated, producing a truly multi-centered spatial form for the metropolis, or urban region. There, several large commercial centers provided employment opportunities with reasonable access to nearby residential areas. Consequently, subcenters, or so-called ‘urban realms’ and ‘urban villages,’ began to form within the broader metropolitan region. In Houston, for instance, the City Post Oak was the most significant subcenter. Development there began with the Galleria Complex in the 1960s, about the same time as the circumferential highway – Loop 610 – was completed. Today this center, among others, rivals the traditional downtown in terms of employment opportunities and leisure-time and retail commercial functions.

Similar phenomena have occurred in other cities, perhaps most notably in New York, Los Angeles, and other parts of Southern California.¹² In short, what has transpired quite dramatically in many metropolitan areas during the past 30 years or so is a shift in basic spatial structure from the earlier ‘monocentric model’ to a ‘polycentric model’ of urban development, with numerous centers made up of relatively independent urban realms, often with socio-economic characteristics similar to the original center of the region of which they are now a part. ¹³ In fact, today something like 45 such separate metropolitan configurations exist in the United States, each with populations in excess of 1 million inhabitants.¹⁴ Seen from the explanatory vantage point of processes of ‘bundled deconcentration,’ a qualitatively new form of settlement space seems to have emerged. It is a fully urbanized, culturally fragmented, and functionally differentiated region. Of the 1 million people employed today in Orange County, Southern California, for instance, 70 percent are located outside of the three largest cities. There is also a full complement of industry, commerce, and agriculture, as well as first-rate cultural facilities rivaling those of nearby Los Angeles.¹⁵ From a more technical standpoint, the expected distribution of population exceeds statistical measures of centralizing tendency, such as Zipf functions, for these types of circumstances, especially in the medium range of community size. Among other things, this immediately indicates considerable independence among these communities across the greater Los Angeles area.¹⁶

Prevalent development practices

Apart from the unprecedented capacity for horizontal expansion brought about by the modern automobile system, contemporary patterns of American metropolitan development can be directly attributed to several prevalent commercial and real-estate development practices. First, many inward-turning and self-contained forms of building persist in an effort to minimize entrepreneurial risk, especially with regard to the often uncertain disposition and potentially unsightly development of neighboring properties. Second, there is the creation of the sense of another world inside the inward-turning projects in pursuit of a distinctive and, therefore, marketable architectural image. Third, rising demand on the part of users for risk-free environments actively promotes enclave-like physical developments, favoring, among other things, high levels of security. Unfortunately, these exclusive design practices can also lead towards a long lurch into fantasy and kitsch, where the focus on material consumption becomes pervasive at the expense of redeeming social values. Furthermore, differentiation of products in the marketplace can also lead to an escalating spiral of stylistic eclecticism. And, while there is certainly nothing wrong with either visual variety or eclecticism as such, extreme and incongruous cases can lead to a breakdown altogether in the urban architectural conventions and shared senses of a place by which we understand our metropolitan areas.

On a broader scale, public land-use zoning practices, which have both guided and provided a supposedly secure basis for many developments, have usually discouraged a freer mixing of uses and served to maintain large homogeneous precincts within many cities. Very much in a similar vein, there is also the all-too-common practice of holding back...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Photo Essay AUTHENTICITY IN THE MIDDLE GROUND
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s note
• Introduction
• Part One TOWARDS A METROPOLITAN LANDSCAPE
• Part Two TOWARDS A METROPOLITAN URBANISM
• Part Three MAKING THE METROPOLITAN LANDSCAPE
• Part Four PROGRAMS FOR A METROPOLITAN URBANISM
• Notes on contributors
• Figure credits