City Builder Book Club: The End

Big thanks and congrats to the City Builder Book Club.  It has been really great fun sketching along to Death and Life of Great American Cities for the past weeks.

My fave drawings ended up being the ones that make me laugh, like drawing Jane as a street ballerina was just silly and fun. I enjoyed that she also became a re-occurring character in other sketches.  It seems fitting as well, since I have always enjoyed her writing style where she incorporates her personal story and experiences of place into the writing.

Re-reading the book, reminds me how many principles are still relevant some 50 years later, and why she still is on my ‘urbanist heroes’ list.   I love Jane.

I’ve had never seen it before but there is a short note on “Illustrations” in the contents page.  It seems the perfect way to end this drawing activity.  As she writes -

Illustrations - The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us.  For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger, and think about what you see 

City Builder Book Club: Chapter 22

Part 4: Different Tactics

Part 22: The kind of problem a city is

Chapter 22, p 454

In the case of understanding cities, I think the most important habits of thought are these:

(1) to think about processes

(2) to work inductively, reasoning from particulars to the general, rather than the reverse

and (3) to seek for ‘unaverage’ clues involving very small quantities, which revel the way larger and more ‘average’ quantities are operating

 

Chapter 22, p 461

Vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving, and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties.

City Builder Book Club: Chapter 21

Part 4: Different Tactics

Chapter 21: Governing and planning districts

Chapter 21, p 424

Big city government is today nothing more than little-city government which has been stretched and adapted in quite conservative fashion to handle bigger jobs…

Many of these divisions are themselves vertical: the agencies are divided internally into fractions of responsibility, each fraction again applying to the city as a whole. Thus, for example department of parks are apt to have separate lines of responsibility for forestry, maintenance, playground design, recreation programs and so on…

Besides vertical divisions of responsibility, many administrative agencies also have horizontal divisions: they are divided into territorial segments, for gathering information or for getting work done, or both.

…Put them all together in terms of a big city itself and the sum is chaos…

p425

Mazes of coordination, conference, and liaison tenuously connect one another these sprawling and randomly subdivided empires.  The mazes are too labyrinthine even to be kept mapped and open,let alone serve as reliable and sensitive channels of interdepartmental understanding, or channels of pooled information about specific places, or channels for getting things done.  Citizens and officials can wander indefinitely in these labyrinths, passing here and there the bones of many an old, dead of exhaustion.

City Builder Book Club: Chapter 20

Part 4: Different tactics

Chapter 20: Salvaging Projects 

Chapter 20, 407

Reweaving projects back into the city is necessary not only to bring life to dangerous or inert project themselves. It is also necessary for larger district planning….

The underlying principles for bring life to a project site itself and to the borders where it must be rejoined with the district, are the same principles for helping any city area where vitality is low. ..

 

City Builder Book Club: Chapter 19

Part 4: Different Tactics 

Chapter 19: Visual Order: its limitation and possibilities 

Chapter 19, p 386

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life as its most complex and intense,  Because this is so, there is a basic aesthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city can not be a work of art.

 

Chapter 19, p p398

Let us first consider the role of landmarks as announcers and dignifiers of diversity.  One reason a landmark can be a landmark is, of course, that is is in a spot where it shows to advantage.  But, in addition , it is necessary that the landmark be distinctive as a thing itself…

Not all city landmarks are buildings…

The distinctiveness of a landmark depends considerable on the reciprocity between the landmark and its neighbours.

In New York, Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street, is a well-known and effective landmark.  But Trinity would be relatively pallid as an element of city design if it were merely on among an assemblage of churches…

 

Chapter 19, p404

For another family of street unifying tactics, we can exploit the principle that a strong, but otherwise unobtrusive, design element can tie together in orderly fashion much chance detail…

One of the simplest such devices is trees along the stretch to be unified, but trees planted close enough together to give a look of continuity when they are seen close up, as well as when the space between them elided by distance.  Pavement have possibilities as unifiers; that is; sidewalk pavements with strong, simple patterns.  Awnings in strong colours have possibilities.

 

 

 

City Builder Book Club – Chapter 18

Part 4: Different tactics 

Chapter 18: Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles

Chapter 18, p 361

I have been watching how people use pedestrian streets. They do not sally out in the middle and glory in being kings of the road at last.  They stay to the sides…

A certain amount of such inhibition in Boston or in Disneyland may be caused by the fact that we have all been so conditioned to respect the kerbs.  Paving which merged roadbed and sidewalk would probably induce more pedestrian use of the roadbed space….

However, that is apparently only one part of the answer…the only times pedestrians seem to use, or want to use, a street roadbed in this fashion are in case of extraordinary floods of pedestrian, as in the Wall St district..when the offices let out, or during the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue.  In more ordinary circumstances people are attracted to the sides, I think, because that is where it is most interesting.  As they walk, they occupy themselves with seeing – seeing the windows, seeing buildings, seeing each other.

In one respect, however people on the pedestrian streets of Boston, of Disneyland, or of shopping centres do behave differently from people on ordinary city streets heavily used by vehicles.   The exception is significant.  People cross over from one side to the other freely, and in using this freedom they do not seem to be inhibited by kerbs. …

lead me to believe that the main virtue of pedestrian streets is not that they completely lack cars, but rather that they are not overwhelmed and dominated by floods of cars and that they are easy to cross

…to think of city traffic problems is over simplified terms of pedestrian vs cars, and to fix on the segregation of each as a principal goal is to go at the problem from the wrong end.

Chapter 18, p363

Erosion of cities by automobiles entails so familiar a series of events that hardly need describing. The erosion proceeds as a kind of nibbling, small nibbles at first, but eventually hefty bites.

Because of vehicular congestion, a street is widened here, another is straightened there, a wide avenue is converted to one-way flow, staggered-signal systems are installed for faster movement, a bridge is double-deckered as its capacity is reached, an expressway is cut through yonder, and finally whole webs of expressways. More and more land goes into parking, to accommodate the ever-increasing numbers of vehicles while they are idle.