The Superblock in the American Psyche

One of my current projects is a historical piece for a book on the Megablock in Chinese urbanism that is being put together by Columbia's School of Architecture. One chunk of the book is going to be on international comparisons, so I'm writing a short piece about the experience of Boston's West End.

The West End is (or was?) a neighborhood on the northwest side of the CBD bordering the North End, the Financial District and Beacon Hill. It was one of the city's densest neighborhoods and had a building stock much like the North End does today. It was a pretty mixed neighborhood ethnically (especially for Boston in the 50s), with big Italian, Jewish, Polish and Albanian populations as well as a small mixture of Blacks and Bohemians (in the Greenwich Village sense, not the Prague sense). As I already said, it was dense, with about a 150 units per acre (the North End today is around 100, a suburb is usually between 2 and 6) and over 70% building coverage. At its height around 1910 there were about 22,000 people living there, although by the 50s this had dropped to around 7000.

And then came urban renewal:

originally uploaded by Nick DeWolf Photo Archive.

Through the 50s and 60s, the neighborhood was demolished and the roughly 1000 3 to 5 story buildings were replaced by about 10 highrise apartment buildings (strangely enough, the number of units stayed almost exactly the same, although they tended to house significantly fewer people). The intricate street grid was replaced by a pair of superblocks. Ever since, the West End has been the example to generations of architects and planners being trained at MIT and Harvard as what not to do as a planner.

To me, there are several stories here. The first is, obviously, the displacement. For Bostonians thinking about the West End, this sociological story is the most important part of what happened. Indeed, I've been working lately with the community in Allston and I don't think it's a coincidence that the West End comes up fairly often in discussions about their own struggle with Harvard's expansion. What's interesting about this is that the West End, as it exists now, is being judged an architectural or planning failure for sociological or political reasons.

When judged by straight up quantitative methods, the West End is pretty successful. The apartments are almost always fully rented. The income levels of residents is higher then the area median. If I was an urban planner from Mars, with no idea of the history surrounding them, I think it's possible that I would accept that they are a successful part of Boston and say that they, in terms of architecture and planning, could be replicated in other parts of the city. Yet, the historical background of displacement makes that sort of statement completely impossible.

Obviously, this isn't just a statement that is true in Boston. Almost every major city in US has had some type of horrible urban renewal story that ended in highrise apartments and superblocks. And so, instead of being a tool that planners can use today, the superblock and highrise apartment housing are persona non grata in American planning.

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Little Boxes on the Hillside...

Suburbs, originally uploaded by corremadrid.

Every now and then a read an article that reminds me just how much American concepts of the urban/suburban divide are deeply ingrained in our collective understanding. This week's Economist has an article about "Black Flight". Now, I don't want to go off on the Economist too much. Although it's center-right, it's one of the better sources of world news out there, certainly better then Time or Newsweek. All of that aside though, the ridiculous misinterpretation of demographic changes in Southern California in this article really bother me.

The article is basically about the move of the black population from central LA to suburban (or, more correctly) exurban locations. OK. That's true. And given numerous reasons, both demographic and economic, that is to be expected. Where the article looses me is it's general theme that the suburbanization of blacks is good, either for society or for the suburbanized blacks themselves. It buys into the simplistic binary of suburb/good-city/bad (and J's been reading Judith Butler lately, so don't even get me started on binaries).

Here's Zakcq's general theory of the world: for a long time now, American cities have been generally opposite of the cities in the rest of the world, that is to say, poor in the middle, rich on the outside. I'd say, for about five to ten years now, we've been in the process of inverting that spatial arrangement. New York, Boston and San Francisco are already completing that change, and many other cities are well into the process. There are a lot of reasons that this is happening. Quality of Life is one, but so are housing prices, access to services, costs of transportation and many other things. What this means, in my opinion, is that blacks moving to the exurbs are not following the American Dream. Instead, they are being relegated to the most marginal land, farthest from job opportunities and, since, make no mistake, most of the low paid jobs will remain in the center city, many of these exurban dwellers will be stuck with insanely long and expensive commutes. blech.

Given these stupid notions of suburban superiority it's of little surprise that our housing is in such a crisis.

And as a afterthought this article is really funny.

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Another Top Ten List

Planetizen has posted their yearly top ten list here. Like I said earlier, I think it was actually a pretty slow year as far as planning books go. There was no High Price of Free Parking that everyone was talking about this year (and yes. I hang out with people who talk excitedly about parking. and it's awesome.) Out of the books on the list, I've honestly only even seen three of them before, and I haven't yet read any, compared with most years where I've read at least a couple and paged through most of the rest. There are a couple of interesting things to note in the list though.

The first is that there seems to be much more emphasis on design in the books that are coming out. Four of the books on the main list and two of the runners up are essentially design books. Compared to the all time top 20 list, where only two books are really design books (plus maybe 2 others that are nominally so), that seems like a major jump. Perhaps that means that there is a general trend towards planners taking a more important roll in design. Or maybe I just hope that's what it means. Either way it's interesting. From the list I think Sustainable Urbanism by Farr will be the first one I pick up.

Second, why in the world is there an anti-planning tirade from the Cato Institute on the list? I mean, come on. I realize there is some value to understanding your enemies, but, like Ann Coulter or Jean Le Pen, some things are so ridiculous that it's better to just ignore them. Sometimes listening just gives strength to a stupid argument. Boo, Planetizen.

Finally, it's nice to see a book about Immigration and the US's aging population. I was starting to think that I was the only one who realized that if you don't have enough workers to pay into social security you'd better start importing some new ones or legalizing the ones that are here.

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Half-past Fifty-Second Street

I'm not really much on repeating things from other people's blogs, but I found this on bldgblog and it seemed cool enough to repeat:

"As it happens, then, Manhattan's mathematically rational street grid is actually rotated 29º off the north-south axis – and this angle has interesting astronomical side-effects... because of the off-center orientation of Manhattan's street grid, you can only see the setting sun "down the middle of any crosstown street" on two specific days of the year: May 28 and July 13. July 13 is, of course, next week – so watch out for it."

This reminds me of both Aztec and Khmer city building, in which cities actually functioned as giant calenders.




If I were in New York, I think I'd throw some kind of party.

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Physical Politics

Before I get into the meat of what I actually wanted to post about, I have a couple of quick things that are off topic. First, J actually has gotten around to posting a couple of times about Thailand, so you should all really go and read those. Second, In the last few days, I've read Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood twice, and I pretty sure it's on it's way to being my favorite book (I need to wait a couple of weeks to see how it weathers to say for sure), so everyone should really read it. Now on to what I really wanted to post about:



I've been withholding my judgement on what I think about Menino's new plan to move the City Hall to the Fort Point waterfront. Mostly, I've been waiting to see if it's just Menino saying something so it looks like he has opinions or if it's something that could actually happen. Well, a few months have passed now and it seems that people haven't forgotten about it, so I figured it's finally time for my grand opinion to come out. So here's what I think... I'm in favor of it, but only if the old building is preserved. I know what you're thinking. Most everyone who has come out in favor of moving the City Hall have done so emphatically and loudly because the city would knock down the old building, and as a student of planning in Boston I obviously have heard (and participated in) numerous bashing sessions against the Government Plaza (which has actually been named one of the worst public spaces in the world, not just the US, the world). I am not, however, one of those people who is unable to resolve the apparent contradiction between hating Modernist planning and loving Modernist architecture. They simply aren't the same thing to me.

So let me try to explain my position. First though, I have to get into some of my general beliefs about cities and architecture. I believe pretty strongly the ideology and social beliefs shape the physical environment. And that goes beyond the obvious cases like Washington, DC being a symbolic tie to classical democracy, for example. Rather, I think pretty much everything is shaped by those forces. What I really mean by this is that I think that, instead of writing the history of the city from the perspective of the forces that shaped it, I think you can "read" the physical fabric of the city and figure out the forces that constructed them.

Let me give some brief examples from Boston. If you look at the earliest colonial maps of the city, most people note how random the layout appears. Especially when you compare it to other contemporary cities, like Utopian Philadelphia or Charleston, SC, you are really struck by how strange Boston is. This probably reflects a high value on individualism in the colony (or maybe not individualism, but rather a general distrust of government). If you look a little further, you'll also notice that the city was lacking in a defined hierarchy of spaces. There are various small squares spread throughout the city, not one central one. Important buildings (churches, government ect) are scattered throughout the city. This is what I call a centrifugal city. If you look culturally at Boston now, you'll still see the social leftovers of this beginning. For example, New Englanders still really, really distrust government. Look at Christy Mihos' (from the perspective of an outsider) completely insane campaign for governor last year. The man's main point was that he was just going to do whatever the hell he wanted but at least he wasn't with a party and people still voted for him. I really don't think there is anywhere by New England where a campaign like that would get a second thought.

Another good example is the creation of the Back Bay in the early to mid nineteenth century. By that time, the randomness of Boston's streets had stopped symbolising individual opportunity and instead were understood as symbolic of the disorder of immigration and Catholicism. What the Anglo-Protestants created for themselves in the Back Bay, by comparison, is the epitome of logic, order and cleanliness. When you look at a map of Boston, you can tell by the fact that that is the only part of the city which is on a grid that there is something different about that neighborhood, both socially and spatially (especially since the Mass Pike cut through and started serving as a "city wall" to protect the Back Bay from the neighborhoods to the south: the South End and Roxbury).



So back to my point: why do I think moving the City Hall is a good idea and why do I think the old one should be preserved? I think the City Hall is also, symbolically, important to Boston's history. It represents the period of authoritarian Boston, when the West End disappeared and the city fell apart over busing and in the worst period of public housing. The building itself, with its brutallist facade raising fortress like over the windswept no-man's land of Government Plaza is a fitting memorial to all of the people who lost their homes or lived in poverty during this period. To remove it would be to give up or gloss over this period of Boston's history, and I think that's wrong. I think we need the building there to remind us what urban governance in the second half of the twentieth century was like. We need to remember Boston's dark age. My personal hope would be something like a Museum of the West End (how cool could that be, with so many residents still living who could contribute), Museum of Boston History, Museum of "Urban Renewal" or something like that. The square itself could still be redeveloped, but with building still intact.

But that doesn't mean that we need to keep the functions of our government there. To me, the movement to the waterfront makes perfect sense in our new post-industrial city. It symbolizes the democratization of space that has come with deindustrialization, namely, the fact that we've now regained the waterfront from its former industrial uses for uses of public space and recreation. Now, there are still a lot of questions that need to be addressed to make sure that the City Hall actually would be public space. For example, transit would need to improve to make sure that everyone can get there. But that's maybe for another post. For me, the idea of a waterfront City Hall perfectly fits into Boston's vision for the future, one that, hopefully, will be a whole lot more participatory then the past.

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