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.

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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)

More missteps in the “Science of Planning” are going to have to wait until tomorrow (and Monday).

Jane Jacobs’ old house is for sale! You could live in the New York City townhouse where she wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It will only cost you $3,500,000.

While I’ve introduced the conditions for diversity that Jane Jacobs outlines in that book, I’ve yet to talk about the self-destrucion of diversity.

The West Village that Jane Jacobs knew and wrote about is gone. The process is simple. Diversity makes for an attractive and popular place. Its success encourages building owners to charge higher and higher rents, encouraging only the narrow selection of uses that can afford such high rents. Diversity disappears.

But things could always cycle back around, eh?

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.

In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies. The ideal of a matriarchy inevitably accompanies all planning in which residences are isolated from other parts of life. “The uses of sidewalks: assimilating children” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p83)

Jacobs skips ahead to one of the city diversity conditions: primary mixed uses. Separation of uses promotes the sexist “separate spheres” for public and private life. Typified by nineteenth century Victorians, men operated in the public sphere of work and daily life outside the home; women operated in the private sphere of the home (at least according to the ideal).

This is probably not the last time I link to The Great Good Place.The “separate spheres” setup forgets the interstitial space. If home is the primary place, work is the secondary place, then other places to meet or connect are “third places” in the parlance of Ray Oldenburg.

On good city streets, populated with all others, male and female, “carrying on other their other pursuits.” (“The uses of sidewalks: assimilating children” The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p82), sidewalks—part of the public right-of-way or public realm—are another “third place,” valuable not only for contact and self-policing, but also supervision and rearing/”assimilation” of children.

Sidebar: Thanks to @gosner for a timely link: The Built Environment: Designing Communities to Promote Physical Activity in Children. The American Academy of Pediatrics ties a direct link between the built environment and children’s health. Unfortunately, they focus on the presence of parks. They do mention walking to school and social norms surrounding how parents allow children to play, but they shy away from Jacobs’ love of sidewalks. They do appear quite worried about asthma.

Orthodox planning is much imbued with puritanical and Utopian conceptions of how people should spend their free time, and in planning, these moralisms on people’s private lives are deeply confused with concepts about the workings of cities. “The uses of sidewalks: safety” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p41)

For years, urban areas formed as a result of the needs, means and behaviors of their inhabitants - urban form as evidence (see Habit - Unaverage Clues). Suddenly shocked by living conditions in overcrowded urban areas around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century city planning took root in the real and pressing need to improve health standards. We got carried away, tricking ourselves into thinking that we knew better - than the city and those forming it:

For the purpose of promoting health, safety, morals, or the general welfare of the community, the legislative body of cities and incorporated villages is hereby empowered to regulate and restrict the height, number of stories and size of buildings and other structures, the percentage of lot that may be occupied, the size of yards, courts, and other open spaces, the density of population and the location and use of buildings, structures and land of trade, industry, residence or other purposes. Standard State Zoning Enabling Act (pdf) emphasis added.

Yes, your city can promote specific morals - even to the detriment of the workings of cities.

If anyone was wondering what I meant by diversity in earlier posts (tagged: diversity conditions), maybe this is a better explanation:

Diversity really means different ways of living a life in the world. And in the most diverse parts of the city, you’ll find a heap of different kinds of buildings, houses, yards, landscapes, stores, etc. You’ll find people using space in entirely contrasting ways. ~Bill Lindeke, twin city sidewalks

Thanks to @SprawledOut, I’ve found another Jane Jacobs devotee - one with a blog that features sidewalks.

His latest sidewalk feature illustrates two of the uses of sidewalks that I introduced last week: safety and contact. Good stuff.

Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow. “The uses of sidewalks: contact” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p72)

Sidewalks are, quite literally, in the public right-of-way. So much of our infrastructure is obviously “purposeful.” Compared to a waterline or a roadway, sidewalks do appear “unpurposeful” or even optional. I hope I can do justice to Jacobs’ case for the purpose of sidewalks.

In the meantime, check out this little tumblelog I set up, after being reminded of this idea after visiting a broken link off the Twin City Sidewalks site:

wherethesidewalkends.tumblr.com