{"id":189,"date":"2011-07-09T19:40:45","date_gmt":"2011-07-10T01:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/interculturalurbanism.wordpress.com\/?p=189"},"modified":"2013-06-28T10:17:00","modified_gmt":"2013-06-28T16:17:00","slug":"people-or-place-in-urban-planning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=189","title":{"rendered":"People or Place in Urban Planning?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In his deservedly well-reviewed book Triumph of the City<\/em> the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser unambiguously opts for people as the key element that determines a city\u2019s success.\u00a0 He argues that a place-centered approach to urban planning\u2014that is, one informed by a \u201cbuild it and they will come\u201d logic that uses convention centers, pedestrian malls, festival marketplaces, light rail systems, and iconic buildings to reinvigorate downtowns\u2014may have been \u201cthe biggest mistake in urban policy of the last 60 years.\u201d \u00a0Put differently, place-centered planning is a prime example of \u201cedifice error.\u201d \u00a0Detroit serves as the textbook example of such folly, as evidenced by the failure of the GM Renaissance Center and the People Mover monorail to enliven the urban core.<\/p>\n

Instead, Glaeser argues for planning strategies that invest in people: small businesses, affordable housing, and education.\u00a0 He does see a role for infrastructure in supporting people-centered strategies, especially the high-rise residential skyscraper<\/a>. \u00a0Building up is perfect for creating the sort of population density that fosters human collaboration and creativity, while also having certain \u201cgreen\u201d virtues.\u00a0 However, efforts to create vertical density are, in Glaeser\u2019s view, too often foiled by other place-centrisms like historic preservation.\u00a0 Too many historical landmark and district designations inhibit commercial development and severely limit the supply of affordable housing that would draw a mix of people back to the city.\u00a0 Preservation can too easily turn urban cores into museums accessible only to well-heeled tourists and the very rich. \u00a0Paris, for all its aesthetic beauty, serves as Glaeser’s prime cautionary tale in this regard.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The other great book about the city to appear in the last year\u2014Makeshift Metropolis<\/em> by\u00a0Witold Rybczynski, a Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania\u2014is a bit more appreciative of place-centered urban planning.\u00a0 Several American cities including San Francisco, Boston, San Antonio, and Baltimore have capitalized on their distinctive locations and histories by combining \u201cnostalgia\u201d with innovative design to produce vibrant downtown centers.\u00a0 In each case the effort was helped by the proximity of water, a love of which is arguably hard-wired into the psyche of human beings (see \u201cEvolution\u2019s City<\/a>\u201d, below).\u00a0 Rybczynski, like Glaeser, notes that iconic architecture has helped spur economic development in some cities\u2014Gehry\u2019s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao<\/a>, Spain is everyone\u2019s favorite example\u2014but has been less successful in far too many others. These include Denver, where Daniel Libeskind\u2019s new wing of the city\u2019s art museum<\/a> hasn\u2019t generated the anticipated number of visitors or dollars.\u00a0 Rybczynski concludes that the widely invoked and analyzed Bilbao “Effect\u201d is more of an \u201cAnomaly,\u201d and that cities should expect only modest success when using the iconic building as a means to urban renewal.<\/p>\n

No anthropologist would dispute that, at the end of the day, the success of a human settlement of any kind depends upon people.\u00a0 But they would never marginalize the role of the built environment in producing civic success.\u00a0 A robust body of theory and cross-cultural empirical research in the area of human \u201cmateriality\u201d has established that people and things are co-dependent.\u00a0 Material objects are crucial to stabilizing individual psychology, regulating social relationships, and transmitting cultural meaning.\u00a0\u00a0 The built environment is particularly important in transforming generic\u00a0space<\/em> into a lived\u00a0place<\/em> with which people can identify and to which they can commit.\u00a0\u00a0 James Brooks, writing about Glaeser\u2019s book in the National League of Cities blog<\/a>, pretty much nails the anthropological view:<\/p>\n

\n

Certainly the factor of human collaboration is the powerful value of the city.\u00a0 Ideas and energy swirl among people in a dense urban space fostering miracles of insight and innovation\u2026But skills and creativity are portable.\u00a0 The talented are footloose.\u00a0 Therefore, what qualities of urban life bind creative and talented people to a particular place?\u00a0 Assuming it\u2019s relatively simple to learn what people want, the next logical question for policy makers is to ask how do you build, rebuild or improve one particular place in order to hang on to the talented people?\u00a0 Put another way, how do you build and sustain a community that people want to remain in rather than drive through?\u00a0 No two things on earth are exactly equal.\u00a0 Not people, nor plants, nor sunsets nor least of all cities.\u00a0 The city as an institution may have several features that transfer across time and place, but the individual cities themselves are as unique as snowflakes.\u00a0 In that uniqueness lies the power of place <\/strong>[emphasis in original].<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Interestingly, Rybczynski also understands that a good urban planning project must \u201cquickly establish that elusive quality, a sense of place<\/em> [emphasis in the original].\u201d\u00a0 And, he understands that drawing on local context and history is important in creating that sense of place<\/a>.\u00a0 Today\u2019s challenge to urban architects, planners and developers is to keep both in mind; to attend to both historical and environmental context in creating not icons but rather settings<\/a><\/em> akin to those that we admire in Paris, London, and other great world cities.\u00a0 Such sensitivity is still in short supply in Denver and may explain why the official selection of Santiago Calatrava\u2019s aesthetically pleasing and iconic bird-winged design for a new Denver International Airport terminal–a choice seemingly intended to signal Denver’s arrival as a global city if not an emerging\u00a0aerotropolis<\/a>–did not, for many locals, measure up to Curtis Fentress\u2019s original terminal evoking (depending on your nostalgic sensibilities) either the Rocky Mountains or a Plains Indian teepee village.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Calatrava Design for new DIA Terminal<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jeppesen Terminal, DIA (by Fentress)<\/p><\/div>\n

In short, \u201cPeople or Place?\u201d is the wrong question, and an unhelpful dichotomy.\u00a0 A high density of people alone is not likely to produce the requisite social capital for generating a successful city. \u00a0Indeed, recent research<\/a> suggests that social capital can also be produced by walkable neighborhoods. \u00a0In either case, as Brooks suggests, you still have to find ways to materially \u201cbind\u201d people to place. \u00a0To give materiality its due is not to embrace a crude architectural determinism, something that Ken Archer worries about in a very provocative piece on Big Tent Urbanism<\/a> (in which he also expresses a preference for people-centered development). \u00a0Rather, it’s to embrace a theory of people-place co-dependence.\u00a0 An intercultural perspective on place and\u00a0built environment that’s informed by a deeper understanding of the great cosmopolitan cities of past and present offers one guide for such a project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his deservedly well-reviewed book Triumph of the City the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser unambiguously opts for people as the key element that determines a city\u2019s success.\u00a0 He argues that a place-centered approach to urban planning\u2014that is, one informed by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[5,8,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-general","category-placemaking"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-33","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=189"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2865,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions\/2865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}