Sorting out the image of the city (part 3)

I’ve resorted to bulleted lists of items on this topic of sorting out among the city pieces left between the edges. I’m keenly interested in the racial and socioeconomic sortings out, but feel ill equipped to come up with some sort of synthesis—at least not yet.

I’m placing my hopes in economics to connect the physical/functional aspects of edges and the social ones. It could be a couple weeks before I get back to Death and Life.

Here’s some local items on one way my city is trying to mitigate the impact of divisive edges, though the project’s still stuck on the boards:

• Columbus Dispatch: Six I-70/71 caps still on city’s wish list - Cost of overpasses: at least $53 million
• MSI: I-70 / I-71 South Innerbelt Design Enhancement

Sorting out the image of the city (part 2)

The list continues:

• Jane Jacobs on railroad tracks:

Railroad tracks are the classic example of borders, so much so that they came to stand, long ago, for social borders too—“the other side of the tracks”—a connotation, incidentally, associated with small towns rather than with big cities. Here we shall be concerned not with the social connotations of areas demarcated by borders, but rather with the physical and functional effects of borders on their immediate city surroundings. “The curse of border vacuums,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p257, emphasis added)

• Kevin Lynch, introducing edges in The Image of the City:

These edge elements…are for many people important organizing features, particularly in the role of holding together generalized areas…. (p47)

• I keep coming back to the stories of the protectionism that inspired early zoning legislation and protective covenants. That protectionism grew under the Depression-era formation of the FHA underwriting standards and priorities. Another set of lending practices grew out of the depression-era financing undertaken by the HOLC - proto-redlining, perhaps. Here’s what FDR had to say to Congress:

This policy is that the broad interests of the Nation require that special safeguards should be thrown around home ownership as a guaranty of social and economic stability, and that to protect home owners from inequitable enforced liquidation, in a time of general distress, is a proper concern of the Government. (emphasis added)

The story of the suburbs picks up pace somewhere in here, before the end of World War II and the construction of the interstate highway system, as the abridged version of the story goes.

• Redlining’s destructive power appears only as an echo, or rather a shadow. The Community Reinvestment Act, recently scapegoated amidst the recent housing crisis, has been in effect my whole lifetime.
• Balkanized. We’ve got a verb referring to the hostile divisions of the Balkans. I think it’s scalable down to the neighborhood level.

Maybe there’s hope in a bit of synthesis I’m reaching for tomorrow.

Sorting out the image of the city (part 1)

(cc) Cornell University

Bullet points, sans synthesis:

• Some venture to say that the phrase, “the wrong side of the tracks,” has its origins in the pollution generated by early locomotive technology. The prevailing winds blew the pollution on to the “wrong side,” resulting in lower real estate values. This affected what was built where, and, consequently, who lived on either side. That is, lower real estate values, attracts lower class residents, which means the presence of the “wrong” or criminal element. This chain of causation seems much too simple. Fallacious logic, though it could be part of the story.
• Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart, contends that we tend to self-sort—pinpointing a tipping point in such activity as Americans moved away from traditional social institutions around 1965. I’m sure this is the same kind of finger pointing that Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone accomplishes by pointing the decline in civic engagement. That is, engagement in these traditional social institutions. Other theses I’ve seen on this take up the rural to urban transition from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries—that the rise in these institutions provided social structures once found in the relatively homogeneity of small town life.
• I’ve blogged about Putnam’s hunkering thesis:

New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,” Scandinavian Political Studies.

• Researchers Ann Bowman and Michael Pagano take up Kevin Lynch’s concept of the edge in discussing geographic barriers and vacant land

[T]he boundaries and barriers created by vacant land can serve the same kinds of ends that are considered problematic to both the fragmentationists and the consolidationists with respect to political boundaries. That is to say, individuals choose residential locations to maximize their own personal or familial needs, in many cases, the schooling needs of their children. In the process, however, segregation by income and race results. Terra Incognita: Vacant Land and Urban Strategies (p93)

They discuss the formation of microcommunities and neighborhoods by these barriers. Some delineations are productive in non-offensive ways by grouping certain types of land uses; others seem unpalatably racist.

The list continues tomorrow.

Border vacuums and the image of the city (part 4)

In part 3 on the topic of border vacuums, I passed on Jane Jacobs’ explanation of the two types of urban land:

1. General, which is typically publically accessible, and
2. Special, which hosts our places of residence, work, and is not typically open to the passage of the general public

We have to have this special land, but it can create edges in much the same way as a geographic barrier, such as a river, or a limited-access transportation corridor that cuts off other paths, such as limited access expressways or railroads.

So, before we get too far from this topic, it’s time for a bulleted list of strategies to keep in mind to mitigate the impact of edges:

• Keep the scale of these “special-land dead spots” small.
• Vary the intensity of special land. That is, be aware of the special-land-to-general-land ratio. You need both.
• Borders are unavoidable. Be aware of the pool of users and uses that are being separated. A district, if sufficiently diverse (and in Jacobs’ book, that reads as successful), can benefit from smaller size. It improves imageablity.

The trouble arises when districts…are bisected or fragmented by borders so that the neighborhoods sundered are weak fragments and a district of subcity size cannot functionally exist. Frequent borders, whether formed by arterial highways, institutions, projects, campuses, industrial parks, or any other massive uses of special land, can in this way tear a city to tatters. “The curse of border vacuums” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p264-65)

• In large special uses, such as parks, bring areas of activity, or nodes, to the use’s edge. The magnetism invites penetration, helping mitigate the edge. Such a retrofit can improve the edge permeability of universities, mid-20th century highrise housing projects, and the like.
• To convert all borders to seams is impractical. Some of the strategies may only work on a portion, or no distance along the border. In these cases, add what Jacobs calls strong counterforces. In short, increase the diversity conditions, limiting the advance of the border vacuum.

Border vacuums and the image of the city (part 3)

In order to talk about the edges that make border vacuums, Jane Jacobs divides city land into two types:

1. General - allows for public circulation
2. Special - typically does not allow public passage

Special land may or may not be publically owned, may be accessible, but the public goes around or along it.

This land might clearly be some sort of natural geographic barrier, such as a lake or river; it might also be human-made, such as a limited-access highway (interstate).

On the other hand, such special land might simply be a place that contains little of interest to the general public.

An obvious version of the latter might be parts of Central Park at night, where what the place contains creates disinterest from the general public. Less obvious are the single-use use districts or districts that lack enough diversity of uses that people avoid them out of boredom, or simply because they have no business there. Yesterday’s examples of the hospital or university campus may suffer this fate, though it may also befall Monday’s examples of high rise public housing projects and “City Beautiful” civic centers.

If the scale of such special land is sufficiently small, it won’t make much of an edge, or border. Think of a single apartment building. It’s easy enough to walk around it. Streets can provide the general land needed to break up aggregations of special land, which is one of the strategies Jacobs brings up in the discussion of diversity conditions - the need for small blocks.

We have to have special uses. We live in them; we work in them. Those are primary and secondary places for you third place fanatics. Special uses are unavoidable. What Jacobs urges us to avoid is the creation of barriers out of them.

Both Lynch and Jacobs agree that a permeable seam is often preferable to an edge. It’s still a matter of strategy that I’ve managed to put off yet again.