Pruitt-Igoe, St. Louis, 1968

This week I’ll be looking at another of the elements of The Image of the City that Jane Jacobs spends significant time discussing in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: the edge. Five chapters before discussing the limits of visual order, she dedicates a whole chapter to “border vacuums” created by edges - a phenomenon she recognizes in the failings of the modernist and Corbusian housing projects (see example above) and Daniel Burnham’s City Beautiful (see example below).

The White City, Chicago, 1893

I’m finally getting back to a few more thoughts on visual order and Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City after parts 1 and 2 last week.

*

Angkor Wat (c) John McCollumMy hotel room looked straight out the 11th floor onto the rotunda attached to Pittsburgh’s Penn Station. It’s a great Daniel Burnham detail. Being my first time in Pittsburgh, I was unfamiliar with it.

My friend John was convinced that the building was simply for apartments, which is what many parts of the upper floors now contain. I had to get a closer look. The rotunda announced something more.

I did a bad job of trying to explain the question of, “Is it a duck or a decorated shed?” from Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form.

That only gave John an excuse to bring up Angkor Wat. Just imagine the significance these structures announced. Imagine no frame of reference for such permanent and engineered structures, with little of the modern mechanical advantage we use to raise skyscrapers today. And it all would’ve been experienced on foot - ox cart speed at the fastest. It remains impressive at the speed of an automobile and with a frame of reference established by modern engineering and construction.

Thanks to Justin Auciello, The New Wave Planner, (@midwaybeach) for a post referencing a series of photos of Sao Paulo minus the “visual pollution” of outdoor advertising. There’s a good archival article from Business Week about this ban.

Auciello’s question: Does banning outdoor advertising kill urban vibrancy?

My answer: Somewhere between “Yes, but…” and “No, but…”

Urban vibrancy is still there, but area activity is no longer announced through these signs/decoration. Perhaps activity will dissipate over time.

Here’s the “but.” Again, we have a problem of misidentifying the problem.

The speeds we travel through places and urban spaces have increased dramatically over the past 100 or 150 years. The view of Zanesville, Ohio from westbound Interstate 70 reminded me of the impact this has on the urban form as signs rise up to announce the presence of commercial goings-on. The faster we travel, the larger the sign, the more contrast required. Building form can’t announce the building activity. Now we need off-premises signage two miles out.

I chuckle when I see a town that’s limited the size of signage, while doing nothing to limit the speed. The streets are still designed for 35 or 45 mph, buildings spaced and spread out by landscaping requirements, parking, vehicle ingress/egress/storage, etc. Everything but the signs are designed for speed. It’s not a signage ban, but it’s still enough that you might miss your turn. It’s made worse when design codes require specific materials and architectural forms. The McDonald’s or gas station - designed to help be a sign itself - no longer announces anything to us as we speed right on by.

The problem isn’t the size, it’s the speed we’re going that requires such pronouncement. Everything is designed around that speed.

We ought not to be reluctant to make this living collection of interdependent uses, this freedom, this life, more understandable for what it is, nor so unaware that we do not know what it is. “Visual order: its limitations and possibilities,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p391)

But what we have to express in expressing our cities is not to be scorned. Their intricate order—a manifestation of the freedom of countless plans—is in many ways a great wonder. “Visual order: its limitations and possibilities,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p391)

Call it “intricate order;” call it “emergent order.” Those who study systems, such as ecosystems, observe some semblance of order - just as Jane Jacobs describes it in cities.

We’ve all got our own agency - not the organization, but the plan of action. Despite the mess of such a mashup, an order does emerge. To explain this order, Jacobs borrows a bit from her contemporary, Kevin Lynch. Tomorrow I’ll pull in a bit of the language he uses concerning imageability and the five identifiers we use in composing our own cognitive maps. I’ll still be grounding it in Jacobs’ chapter on visual order, as well as more from Norwood, Ohio.

We ought not to be reluctant to make this living collection of interdependent uses, this freedom, this life, more understandable for what it is, nor so unaware that we do not know what it is. “Visual order: its limitations and possibilities,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p391)

*

World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 - Burnham’s White CityJacobs is a bit scornful, again, bringing up the “nineteenth century utopians” in this chapter. That would be Ebenezer Howard and his Garden City gang. She also pulls in Daniel Burnham and his City Beautiful brethren under that moniker. Without getting into the nitty gritty concerning these movements and their influence on modern city planning, suffice it to say that both movements rely on excessive control over individual agency by one or few.

Howard’s agenda is unabashedly socialist - not in itself a bad thing, but horrible when it comes to the systems that make a city develop and operate. You might rebuff me here and state that even capitalist, market-driven economies require a certain degree of control over individual agency, such as protecting property. However, there’s still places in this world where additional flexibility creates forms of emergent order that are worth studying, such as the shanty towns that spring up despite the interests of the property owners of the underlying land.

Burnham somehow manages to be worse than Howard. It’s his definition of beauty - of artificial civic agglomeration at the center of the city - that ignores urban order. Where Howard proposes a vision for new cities, Burnham’s vision claims to cure existing cities.

Perhaps Burnham’s one of those architects who hates cities. Or, perhaps he’s failed to identify the right problem (ask a fruitful question).

I had to take a break from Dark Age Ahead to link to this letter to the Chicago Tribune.

Daniel Burnham hangs heavy over the city of Chicago. This is the centennial year of his grand plan for the city - one of the giant leaps ahead for the planning profession in this country - the first comprehensive plan.

After the 2005 Ohio Planning Conference, a few friends and I dutifully toured Burnham’s stamp on Cleveland. You can see the convention center in the background.

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence. Remember that our sons and our grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.

~Daniel Burnham

Some Chicago residents are tired of that sentiment, and in some of the debate about finishing the lakefront parks Burnham once envisioned, Jane Jacobs enters.

Instead of Burnham, how about a little Jane Jacobs? One of the things that makes cities vital, she proved, is variety in various forms.

Variety of age of buildings, variety of uses of urban spaces throughout the day, economic variety woven into neighborhoods. Rogers Park’s street-end beaches should be preserved if for no other reason than to have a variety of ways in which Chicago’s urban spaces connect to the natural world of the Lake. Sure, it would be great if there were no private beaches, but it’s not the end of the world. That land was private before Rogers Park and Edgewater became part of Chicago; it’s history, not economic perfidy, that created these exceptions.

~Bill Savage

It’s not about order; it’s not about grand visions and diagrams. It’s about life. Small plans can make those lives better. Quite literally, get out of plan view. Only birds, airline passengers, aliens, and Google Earth viewers experience cities that way. Get out on the street.