What is urban design?
Well, to me, urban design is the spaces in between. Architecture is about the buildings, and urban design is about the spaces in between. That’s really too simple. But I think it’s a good start. And I think it’s a good starting point, in the sense that the most important thing that urban design does, to my mind, are the public spaces. And those by definition are defined by the buildings around. But I think that urban design could also be at the scale of a whole city, for example. And then in my courses, and I learned this, really from Doug Kelbaugh. I don’t know if he himself would acknowledge this, his influence in my formulating the three analytical categories. So, for urban design, that is plan, fabric, and monument. And, I think it was from Doug, really, that I learned this critical distinction between the fabric of the city, which is essentially how people live their lives day-to-day, which is usually as he points out, formed by what he calls background buildings: types that are repeated or easily understood, versus the monuments which are the exceptions to the normal fabric, either spaces that are carved out from it, or major buildings that, by definition, stand out from the fabric.
What makes your work urban?
Yeah, just a little bit of biography here: I think I got into this through reading Lewis Mumford, who is to my mind, just a wonderfully synthetic figure. Someone like, like him couldn’t possibly exist today in the sense that he was a master of urban design, urban policy, architecture, criticism, and it’s larger sense. When I, I never studied design in anyway, but my interests were in urban history, and when I started out in urban history, it was really what you would call urban social history. It was all about the way different classes and ethnic groups interacted in the city. And often, you could read a whole book and there would be literally nothing about the physical character of the city. So, the Mumford influence was that the physicality of the city was tremendously important. And so I became interested in the kind of people who could define and redefine what urban design is in the broadest sense, starting with three utopians: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. And then moving on to considerations of the suburb, the American suburb as a physical environment. At the time, most of the consideration of the suburb was that you know, first of all, was bad. And second of all, that it was bad because of a certain way of life that was promoted there. And I just wanted to know, how did this archetype that the right way for the middle class to live within a large house surrounded by a large lot, you know, how does that happen? Especially as an urban historian, since I understood that this was not the way cities were formed. That the middle classes had lived in the center of cities in townhouses and relatively dense settlements. So, all of these got me interested in urban design historically. And then it was actually thanks to Doug himself that I was able to come here and actually be part of not a history department but a group of people who really were trying, you know, were teaching urban design and trying to transform urban design.
Who is doing compelling work in urban design right now?
I myself would say that I learned the most, I’ve been most influenced by Peter Calthorpe and his concept of transit-oriented development. Which, when I encountered it, it seemed to be the exact embodiment of this concept that in so many ways, you know, the past is ahead of us rather than behind us. In the sense that what Calthorpe was saying was that we can use the transit system, and the very limitations of the transit system that require walkability, requiring you to be close to a stop, to create a kind of discipline in a world of sprawl. So the transit system, the streetcar suburban effect is both behind us and ahead of us. It’s a system that was developed that worked very well in its time. And is ahead of us in terms of how we can use the understanding of that system to create a complexity in our own design today. I think that what we were taught, you know, that it was kind of assumed that history moved on a kind of single track. And once you left behind an era, it was gone. It was, you know, the past. Whereas for Calthorpe, he saw the street car era as both the past and the future. And, that was very influential to me.
There is another thing, you know, kind of specialized, that I learned and I’ll mention to you is that one of the things that I worked on as a historian was a completely forgotten regional plan from 1920s called the Regional Plan of New York. That was very elaborate, ten elaborate volumes. [Clarence Perry] was just one volume. And there was another, much larger volume by a transit engineer named William Wilgus, who was, among other things, the engineer who was the real designer of Grand Central Station, he had been the New York Central railroads transit specialist. So, he had come up with this amazing, you know, 1920s plan for Regional Rail Transit way ahead of say, the Paris regional and others things that only a few cities have built out. And here it was right in the 1920s. And of course it was never done because Robert Moses comes along with the highways, but looking at those plans, I said, “Yeah, this is really ahead of anything we can conceive today.” It’s just you know, no one today is thinking both so imaginatively, and has such an amazing grasp of transit at the regional scale as Wilgus had in the 1920s. So this is really ahead of us. This is where New York should end up 30 years from now and 40 years from now, and of course it’s been to a very slight degree, some of his ideas have been implemented. But what’s sad to me is that, you know, these ideas, you know, all of this was really kind of coming to the fore in the 1980s and 1990s. And very little of it has actually been done.
What do you try to teach urban design students?
Yeah. Well, I think that one of the things that I think is the biggest challenge for urban design students is that I think most of you, all of you, are going to wind up working in a whole lot of different cities. And that’s just the way the practice is: big firms operating at a global level. Usually applying some very similar templates to cities with very different characters and history. So, to me, one of the pedagogical challenges of getting away from this sort of generic city, as Koolhaas would call it, is for an urban designer to know how to research a city, how to grasp its basic characteristics, its context, its history, without yourselves being historians. And, you know, that’s basically what I’m trying to convey in my course: History of Urban Form. You know, beyond the kind of narrative history since the beginning to the present. Just how do you yourself research a city? How do you learn what is most characteristic of it? And that’s not to say that you have to reproduce it. But, I think that it would be a tremendous advantage for any urban designer to really be able to grasp the city that he or she is working in. So that to me, that you know that, you know, that sense of the uniqueness of each city and how to learn what that uniqueness is, and ultimately, of course, hopefully to respect it in whatever you do design, is the goal.
What is a common misconception about urban design?
Yeah, I mean, I think that people outside of a design school have very little sense of urban design as distinct from architecture or from planning. And the yeah, I agree that-- I don’t, I don’t think it’s so much a sense of correcting misapprehensions. It’s more of people understanding that it’s a legitimate specialization. Because, you know, one of the things that I wish I knew more about, and that’s the negative part of never having been to a professional school of architecture or planning: there’s still a whole lot about the profession that I don’t really understand. You know, how these firms, how these big firms got into the business of urban design. What was the mechanism that, you know, these firms that essentially defined themselves as architecture firms also started doing neighborhood plans, city plans, even regional plans, how that actually happens. And it’s interesting that the people who Doug has worked most closely with and certainly influenced me: Richard Calthorpe Associates and Duany Plater-Zyberk, you know, basically kind of invent themselves. They have a certain philosophy about what a city is, and then they may find a way to make it pay. They find a way to make a firm, to build firms around that. Sometimes working with developers, sometimes working with with cities, sometimes with neighborhood groups, sometimes with with regional authorities. They really have to reinvent themselves. And I’m not sure that’s the case in other countries. As I say, I wish I knew more about the urban design as a profession. But again, it’s very striking that at least these two firms, they basically kind of invent themselves and be sort of charismatic leaders. I mean, no one really asked Peter Calthorpe to start designing, doing TOD. He just had a very strong vision of how a metropolitan region should work. And, you know, he does piece together slowly but surely, a set of clients and so on, until suddenly there was this firm. So, that part again, it’s very, I don’t know, I guess it’s very different from the big corporate architecture firms.
Where do you think urban design is heading?
Well, I mean, I’ll give you two answers to that. One is where I hope it’s going and the other one is where it’s probably heading. Okay, where I hope it’s going is exactly in the Hammarby direction, which is a kind of the Maurice Cox direction. In other words, a sustainable way of building at the edge, which is what, you know, Hammarby the new town, the Swedish new towns are all about. And it’s still a tremendous issue today. I mean, in spite of the return of cities, you know, rebuilding large parts of our inner cities today created various kinds of teams that can put it all together. So, and I have to give Cox credit too, in other words, to put it all together with the public interest at the forefront. Ultimately, I think only a kind of government-type agency can do that. You have, you know, you have someone like Calthorpe Associates, DPZ, and so on, working sort of under contract for different agencies. But yeah, the ultimate payoff would be, an agency that is a set of agencies in every single city, even suburbs, that had the sophistication to be able to really create complex plans and to carry them out. You know, that’s what I’d like to see. And, frankly, except under very lucky circumstances, I don’t see it really happening. I think that the probable direction that we’re in, and something we see happening in this kind of neoliberal, private, privatized world, developers essentially are tasked with a lot of what amounts to urban design. You know, you see this in Hudson Yards and so on but, a really big project is now expected to deliver some public goods. And so, to my mind, what as I fear is inevitable, that the scale of development will be, you know, at a mega scale, because the scale of money is on a mega scale, that there will be a lot of Hudson Yards. And even bigger in the rest of the world already. And then urban designers will wind up, you know, working for developers at this kind of, I don’t know, mega-project scale. It gives it a certain, you know, it can’t be just so many square feet of space, it has to have a sort of public character, public space, and so on. I suspect that will be the area where urban design will, in fact, have its greatest impact, as part of essentially a development team.