Do Cities need to grow or can they shrink to be healthy and prosperous??

In an effort of turning necessity into a virtue, the term "shrinking cities" has not so much become a cry of fear and horror but a battle cry of massively disinvested cities such as Detroit (USA) or  Dessau (Germany) which try via shrinkage to make the city sustainable. "Where buildings fall landscapes arise" is one of the slogans of a German exhibit about shrinking cities. Kent University created an Institute for Shrinking Cities. Detroit has engaged creatives of all stripes to seek benefits of extra space.

However attractive the idea sounds for those who have long doubted that growth can be an everlasting pattern (The Limits of Growth, 1972), can shrinkage coexist with prosperity?

Is a shrinking city the truly sustainable city or is urban farming and landscapes springing from abandoned neighborhoods an anti-urban aberration ultimately promoting sprawl?

Comment here and express your opinions, we will use them at the AIA event on October 12 at RTKL's office on 910 Bond Street in Fells Point.
Urban experts David Dixon, FAIA and Tom Murphy will explore the topic. Dixon most recently racked up plenty of experience in massively shrunk New Orleans when he was instrumental in the rebuilding schemes there. Murphy is a Fellow at the Urban Land Institute and has rescued Pittsburgh as mayor from the brink of irrelevance to become the destination for one of the international G-9 summits.

Hallo Tomorrow (Hello Demain!)

The French appear much less shy to say hello to the future. Progress, innovation and technology is usually embraced. This line of thinking brought about the Parc de Villette in Paris and in it this summer the exhibit Hello Future, hellodemain. This contrasts from the much dimmer view that the Germans often take in consideration of the future, for example in the most recent German TV piece on Smart Cities in which a rather pessimistic static future is predicted because the smart city can read all the trends and desires of its populace and programs itself accordingly.

Parque de Villette

 
While I have visited the Parque de Villette a few years ago and found Tschumi's work quite intriguing I didn't have the opportunity to see this summer's future exhibit there. Instead, I took the virtual tour after seeing the fabric structure that houses part of the exhibit in the latest edition of Fabric Architecture. The orange structure designed by Jacob and MacFarlane architects might be interesting enough but inside the future is reduced to futuristic cars and flickering electronic screens, yet another reminder how poorly we usually do in imagining the future. Most of the time we extrapolate one trend and forget about all the others and "mutations" (paradigm shifts) are all but absent from most predictions.

Things that really determine the future are often social in nature and not technological. This is also why Marx' description of the future did not come to pass, the near crash of the international financial system notwithstanding.
Progress is often just a re-cast of what we know already in a different way. In this sense Madrid, Spain started a very different future this year when it finished its own version of the Big Dig and buried a motorway under a river, created a park and opened a futuristic new pedestrian bridge that connects parts of the city that had been separated for too long.

The shiny new Pasarela-del-Arganzuela is a testament less of a car free city than of a city where priorities have shifted and the car has been de-throned from its dominant position in urban planning. Still there, but relegated to the underworld where until recently pedestrians had to go if they safely wanted to cross. See this blog to appreciate what a scar the expressway along the riverbed had created.

The new bridge is not only a symbol for what shifts we see in urban planning worldwide (for current US freeway tear-down see urbanland.uli.org), it is also an apt expression of architecture that embraces structural engineering to express itself. The tubular steel construction opened up to allow views, air and light but closed enough to create protection from the sun. Designed by Dominque Perrault, who also designed the US headquarters of the the firm that produces the wire meshes that he likes so much and that he helped make a fashionable architectural object. The firm is GKD AG and their building is in Cambridge, Maryland.

Although the recent Baltimore mayoral campaign did not offer sweeping views of a bright future for this city, change is already here, the future can be felt in many places and artists, architects and engineers are an important part of it. Being open to the future (hello demain!) is an important beginning predicting it is another story. Which is Baltimore's bridge? I think I know which  our freeway is that needs to disappear, or maybe I know two!

Dumb Growth in Catonsville. Even Dumber!

Early creation of breaches when it still looked like there
might be some tree protection and only selective cutting.

Clear Cut in December

Clear Cut in December. The tress were not even used for anything,
just a big pile of mulch

 UPDATE 12/12/11: The Development is Approached Even Dumber than Envisioned!

The situation now looks much worse than back in September when the earlier pictures were taken. The developer clear-cut practically the entire development site plus felled all the larger trees along the roadway, presumably to create turn-lanes from what was a very narrow rural forest drive. It makes one weep to see this level of devastation so close to a State Park and in one of the important watersheds feeding into the bay. It is probably safe to say that an individual chicken farmer could hardly be as damaging as a development that mows down acres of trees for suburban lawns which will be fed with fertilizers.
The villages of Columbia, Howard County, some built in the seventies, showed how houses and subdivisions can be nestled among wooded areas without cutting every single tree. They looked instantly mature and pleasant, no need to wait for 40 years for the new little broomstick trees to grow. Why did developers forget how to do this in a time when stormwater management requirements are more stringent and more urgently needed? 

By the way: The "product" (real estate lingo) that will go up here is precisely the one we have already too much of. Precisely the product that created the financial disaster when worthless derivatives based on worthless mortgages based on a superfluous product brought the whole house of cards down. Precisely the non walkable not mixed use "subdivisions" consisting of isolated vinyl boxes that do not create a community and require everybody to drive everywhere. Even if the development is located inside the rural urban demarcation line, it is wrong. Super wrong!

See also SUN paper 12/6/2011


Original Entry based on September visit:

These pictures speak for themselves even if one doesn't know the gory details: Big machinery among big trees, concrete pipes and large logs lying flat on the ground, wood slaughter is obvious. The details are worse: This is a property right adjacent to the Patapsco State Park and on the watershed of the Sawmill Branch, a tributary to the Patapsco River which is struggling and adding considerably to the pollution of the Middle Branch and the Chesapeake Bay.


A local land owner filed a development plan in 2006 and got it approved in spite of the fact that under State law this certainly should be considered a sensitive area and should never be developed. 32 houses, 32 acres of destruction, three cul de sacs. The recession put this atrocity on hold for a few years but now the bulldozers are knocking down the trees and turning the earth. This type of destruction is the main reason why in every large rainstorm thousands of tons of sediment wind up in the Bay and smother the vital underwater grasses there.

From the early stages when there was still a forest
(also below)

 The benefit? A small number of expensive single family homes sitting in isolation on curvy roads looking at the surviving trees which, in their new edge position, will probably fall over in the next big windstorm since they were never exposed like this before.
No amount of buffers, mitigation or stormwater ponds will be able to undo the damage.
It is this kind of local decision that makes it so necessary that there is some State oversight. Those always concerned about local rights and who lament that we are squandering the assets of our children and grandchildren should not only talk about property rights, local zoning and the deficit but also the environment.  There is simply no justification for this type project particularly considering how much already developed land sits fallow, especially in commercial areas.

The B. property adjacent to the beautiful State Park is a glaring example of why private greed, property rights and the market cannot be the only guideposts for how we organize a community.

Negotiated Design

This excellent article in the New York times today How the 9/11 Memorial Changed Its Architect, Michael Arad made me think about "design by committee" (or "negotiated design" as Arad calls it) and the role and image of the architect on construction teams or at the community at large.

If the architect is suspected to be an egomaniac, a lot is Ayn Rand's fault who burnt into the public's mind this image of Howard Roark as the heroic architect. In the "Fountainhead" Roark embodies Rand's image of the entrepreneur and creative maker of things and her idea that those leaders know better and need to force their will on the masses. Consequently Howard Roark fights with everybody to maintain his ideas of design and despises compromise. Thankfully Ted Loos who writes about Arad in the Times never mentions the Fountainhead or Howard Roark.

The Rand book, widely read in high schools and by many remembered as a film with Gary Cooper as Roark, has somehow struck a nerve within the public which has long harbored a love-hate relationships with architects.

On the love side, architects seem somewhat glamorous and this led to many movie makers choosing architects as their protagonists (Brady Bunch, Indecent Proposal). On the hate side, architects appear as narcissistic egotists who think of nothing than their own fame who want to build a monument to their own greatness via the client's money.

Some of the celebrity architects fuel the negative image as they use a lot of "archi babble" (the unitelligable insider language of architects which used to be cultivated in the glossy design magazines) to sell their designs as context-sensitive and unique solutions to unique problems while every child can easily recognize the branded design that appears to be recycled from project to project across continents and different uses.

Michael Arad is not such a case. When he won the 9/11 memorial design competition he was unknown and young. And the design of a  memorial is clearly a more artistic undertaking than the design of a building which can be rather understood as "problem solving" through design. Arad, as a designer who deeply cared about his design, got defensive when aspects of the design were challenged. Be it by bureaucrats, be it by celebrity architects or by the sheer cost constraints. However, and that is what the article is about, unlike Roark, he learned to compromise and even see value in it.

The red line on one side is the one where the essence of a design gets lost. On the other end of the spectrum is a line where intransigence prevents learning and the improvement of a design. An architect always has to move between those two lines which are not at all "red" in daily life and which, in fact, might move several times during the long process towards implementation of a project.

It has been my experience that the first cast of a design, no matter how heartfelt, creative, genial and thorough, is almost never the best that can be done. The complexer a problem, the less likely a lone designer can find the all encompassing solution. Architects almost always work as part of a larger team, even when they design something as small as a single family home. There are engineers, there are contractors and most importantly, there are owners, users or funders. Each will contribute essential aspects that even a genius architect might have overlooked.

Thus, design by committee doesn't need to be bad or lead to inferior results. If an architect is the team leader she has a wonderful opportunity to guide the process of obtaining all the facts and data that are needed for a complete design. But even in a subordinate position, the architect can help to install a process that teases out good design. A great approach is to build consensus on the design problem as such (why are we doing this? Surprisingly often one finds solutions in need of a problem) then find consensus on the objectives (what is it that we want to achieve?) and only then focus on a particular set of design solutions. The problem definition and the goals and objectives will be invaluable tools in evaluating possible solutions and finding the best one.

This process seems tedious and seemingly unworthy of the great artist whom we imagine to "create" out of his gut and spirit. But in a society in which acceptance and consensus is a must for almost any change to the existing environment, it is almost always necessary to "design by negotiation". It is this particular aspect, which is a key ingredient to the definition of "Community Architect".