Thanks for listening! The ThinkND Podcast is brought to you by ThinkND, the University of Notre Dame's online learning community. We connect you with videos, podcasts, articles, courses, and other resources to inspire minds and spark conversations on topics that matter to you — everything from faith and politics, to science, technology, and your career.
Thanks for listening! The ThinkND Podcast is brought to you by ThinkND, the University of Notre Dame's online learning community. We connect you with videos, podcasts, articles, courses, and other resources to inspire minds and spark conversations on topics that matter to you — everything from faith and politics, to science, technology, and your career.
Good afternoon to all, and, welcome. It's an enormous personal pleasure to be introducing, the lecturer tonight. I've known Emily Thelen for more than 30 years. And in very special ways in that, although she has written to be, to become an extraordinary, academic, and chief supporter and critic of inurbanism. At the same time, for 30 years, she's also been a tireless, person at the front lines, and trying to, a degree desperate in some ways among a group of very unruly people who are mostly practitioners, to introduce some degree of, of intellectual integrity and clarity that has something to do. with the standards of the outside world, particularly the standards of research. Professor Talen is, is, now centered at, University of Chicago in, in, as an urbanist in the Division of Social Sciences. And, we're very privileged to have a very close And I hope she, her connection to the school that began with ANTA 5, a little marvelous article, short one, ANTA 5 will continue. I, I was told that I should not speak very long in this introduction and I should really get off the podium rapidly. But, I want to just express to you my admiration for the work that Emily has done over these years, and the way to express it the best, I think, is for her to allow me to read you the list of her books, of which there are about almost a dozen. And to read them not because they are just to be read in the idle, But they're to be written because they are absolutely central and clearly relevant to work that's going on the boards and in courses in this school, day after day. Month in and month out. So I'm going to start from the end to the beginning. Or rather from the beginning to the end, that might be easier. 2005, New Urbanism and American Planning. 2008, Design for Diversity, Exploring Socially Mixed Neighborhoods. 2009, Urban Design Reclaimed. Tools, Techniques, and Strategies for Planners. 2012, How Regulations Affect Urban Form. 2013, with Andres Duany, Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents. 2013, Professor Talen was the editor of the second edition of the Charter for the New Urbanism. 2015, Retrofitting Sprawl, Addressing 70 Years of Failed Urban Form. 2018, Design for Social Diversity. 2018, Neighborhood, a very substantial book, that one. And then 2020, A Research Agenda for New Urbanism. The work is important. The work is deep. The work is critical. the scholarship is superb. It's, A great privilege to have Aimee Littellen be a friend of the school, a friend of this movement and its chief intellectual critic at the same time. Please welcome, her and feel, make her feel, not only at home tonight, but maybe at home here in the long haul. Welcome.
Emily:I have never in my life had such a nice, kind introduction. So thank you so much for that. Stephanos, I don't feel deserving. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me. I can't believe I haven't been here in a few, in many years, and it's just a pleasure to see this new architecture home that you have. usually on a campus, you can pick out the architecture school as the ugliest building on campus, but yours is beautiful, so congratulations on that. Says the planner. okay, so I want to talk to you about my next, upcoming book. do a little sales pitch on my book, and I'm going to be overviewing What I've been working on for the past, I don't know, I think it's something like five years, and it's basically, it's about urban pattern and form and how that might be interpreted. As cities don't just build themselves. Cities are willed into existence, the positions of things, the configuration of places and spaces, sometimes it seems accidental or incidental, but someone at some point made a decision about what was going to go where. Even if something happens out of inertia more than anything else. Or if it seems that there was little forethought, it has the mark of human intention. So behind every city pattern and form, whether for a complete city, a thoroughfare, a small public space, there's a motive capable of being teased out and interpreted, and that's what I'm trying to do in this book. Because I think these patterns and forms reflect our values, they reflect our priorities back to us, And we can learn to understand what they're saying, what they say. Understanding this reveals something of ourselves. As you might have, thought to yourselves, lots of people have done that and that's absolutely true. And so this is a work of synthesis. I feel my contribution here Has been to synthesize a lot of writing and, I wanted to put these meanings and interpretations of places and spaces in one accessible place. And if you know the work of, for example, Spiro Kostov, The City Shaped. The, and his other one, The City Pattern. it's, they're not necessarily that accessible. there's a lot going on there and it's, it becomes very complex and I've, assigned these books to my students over the years with a lot of complaint from these students. a main goal here really was to make these interpretations and what other people have said and what the meanings and motives of things are put that all in an accessible place. I'm interested in this question Because ultimately, I want us to have better arguments about what it is we're doing and what it is we're proposing in the public discourse. Why is one type of pattern or form better than another? By exposing what urban patterns and forms mean and what they mean, What values they hold, how they've been interpreted, what meaning they've had over the centuries, I think we'll be in a stronger position to articulate what kinds of cities we want. Because I think as things stand, often, Arguments for or against a particular city plan or pattern or form are either about strong data analysis, which kind of falls flat for a lot of people, or there's a lot of strong opinion out there. And I think we need to hone something somewhere in between. That's built on a keen understanding of embedded values and meanings, and I think it's somewhat underdeveloped. It exists in many places and in many different kinds of books, but I don't know that we have a good grasp of it all. I'm trying to help with that. There's a lot to unpack here. Cities are the result of, as I said, a wide range of intentional acts. From the minute, to the grandiose, from the desires of a home builder, to those of a despot, city shapes, forms, and street and building patterns are sometimes the product of blueprints, and sometimes the product of violent change even. Sometimes the product of very gradual accretion. They might be reflecting very high aspirations, or they might simply be very utilitarian. Maybe it all boils down to a financial calculus that's often, very much embedded in what we see before us. And we see financial structures in here. case in point, the, the kinds of the ways in which housing finance and capital markets are integrated had an enormous impact on the kind of housing produced. And Europe's major cities like Berlin, the government, their, developers tended to, gravitate toward large apartment blocks because government backed financial institutions favored large scale apartment blocks. In the Anglo American world, at least initially, The financial system was decentralized and involved small depositors taking out loans, which translated to single family homes. What I just said, there's a whole literature on that, but what I, again, what I'm trying to do in this book, and maybe I'll sell a couple of books, is make this accessible for you so that, hey, why are there more large apartment blocks, and what does that mean, in Europe as opposed to the Anglo American world, and maybe I'll, have a nice summary for you that will be accessible. There are a lot of regularities that surface. This is one of, I guess one of my takeaways from everything I've learned and read and explored. The desires of kings and authoritarian figures, it will be no surprise to you, tends to manifest in the form of monumentality and centrality. The money making objectives of landlo landowners tend to prioritize regularized, gridded land division. The desire to instill a sense of communal life tends to result in centralized public spaces. Not only does this imply a certain degree of hard wiring about how motivations pan out, but it also signifies to me that the range of possible forms is not infinite. Sometimes intentions, were simply practical, and we can read cities as just being, products of very practical considerations, and avenues in ancient Chinese cities were based on the width needed to accommodate nine chariots. The width of streets in medieval cities accommodated a single wagon and things were kept tight for financial and security reasons. A town square in England was triangular because it was originally the space where three roads came together to form a marketplace. Interpretations range from more to less obvious. Here are some obvious ones. The 17th century town of Schopenhauvel in Belgium had seven sides. This was done because the number seven is a highly symbolic and religiously meaningful number corresponding to the number of the Virgin Mary's seven joys and seven sorrows. Because of its holy plan, the town was, and still is, a pilgrimage destination believed to bestow healing powers. Dubai has been described as an immense, psychotic assemblage of fantasy kitsch that expresses an affection for money and playtime, not unlike Las Vegas. And Beijing's Olympic Village can be read not just as a collection of landmarks, but as the physical manifestation of a vast exploitable workforce And a state capable of mass evictions whenever it needs to clear land for something. by the way, these interpretations, I, I try to include them all. I have my own opinion about things and, I have, I interject my voice in there for sure. But, I also try to give multiple, often there are multiple interpretations for one particular kind of place, as you can imagine, and I try to present most of them. One might also say that city patterns and forms reveal a society's attitude toward life. If there is great precision and uniformity, every house set back at the exact same distance, for example, there's a financial calculus, of course, that can be read into that, but it also signals an adherence to rules and, Possibly a love of predictability, uniformity, and conformance. City patterns can say something about religious beliefs, too. Venice, with its multitude of churches, can be compared to Amsterdam with comparatively few. Italians, with their love of religious physical expression, in contrast to a Dutch city, where although religious attitudes were often stronger than in Venice, The moral order of Calvinism took the place of churches. A recurrent complexity is that one kind of desire, say for a form that expresses communal values, can have multiple built outcomes. And the same form, on the other hand, can, in different times and places, have more than one interpretation. For example, in the U. S., garden suburbs are thought to be somewhat elitist, at least the early versions of them. In the UK, at least until recently, they were the essence of middle class mediocrity. I'm not going to talk about the grid, but the grid is another really good one for wildly different interpretations. From egalitarianism to capital exploitation, capitalist exploitation. And I think of a point that I grapple with so much, and I know a lot of you have, How detachable are prior motivations for things? Do we need to forever associate Baroque urbanism with despots? Is a circular city designed to be a fortress still so concerned with security? We might be able to make out the will of a tyrant, the whims of an aristocrat, the defensive posture of a medieval town, or the simplicity of puritanical restraint. But what do these forms mean to us now? That has been a really, a tricky thing I've been grappling with. And if a city forum was built through the suppression of people, does that mean that such a place should never be valued? And if you've ever been to Charleston, South Carolina, you might very well have grappled with this complexity. such a beautiful city, such a beautiful layout of historic, planning and, and, Often built on the, in the context of slave labor. Divesting unwanted symbolic content seems especially hard with Baroque form because of its association with imperialism and fascism. Can the monumentalism and grandeur, the axes, the tree lined avenues and vistas, Terminating in landmarks. Be divorced from prior nefarious ends. most often, Baroque elements no longer hold that overt meaning that they might have once had. So it's reasonable to argue that they can be valued in other ways. And I love the quote by Lewis Mumford who talked a lot about The importance of separating the container from the contents. Rome during its empire was a veritable cesspool of human debasement and iniquity. But the container, of course, is absolutely wonderful. We have to make that distinction. Interpretations change is another thing to wrestle with. The dense pedestrian based city was once a symbol of ecological and social crisis, but now it's low density sprawl that is the ecological and social disaster. These changes make it challenging to proclaim the existence of inherent associations. between particular forms and particular meanings. A grid can be equalizing or it can be a tool of social insularity. Curvilinear form enabled social mixing in antiquity, but later facilitated suburban segregation and exclusion. So I arrive at this. It's important to know what the range of possible interpretations might be. There is not one answer for anything. but having a good. A good grasp of what this range is, I think, is important. Where, and speaking of how things change, where, for example, castles once dominated the skyline and kept the population subservient, such as this, castle in Japan, a castle might now simply provide a wonderful connection to the past, a source of continuity and identity, a daily reminder of the of a resident's linkage to their historical roots. The castle complex that dominates Haikon, Japan, for example, has been released from its authoritarian weight and has acquired a new cultural meaning and symbolism. The relics of Narden in the Netherlands, the 17th century warfare defenses, bastioned walls and a double moat, They're now parkland. So the meaning of these forms has obviously changed completely. Current meaning might be nothing more than historical remembrance of what people used to do to protect themselves. This conjures up an age old debate in architecture and urban design worth with one side believing that if the economic and social conditions that gave rise to a particular form no longer exists, Then to replicate such forms in the present is illegitimate. It's better to aim for a contemporary zeitgeist of our time. If new technologies of transportation and mobility emerge, city patterns and forms must change in response. The other side to this argues that there are limits to this because there are universal principles at play that are not dependent on underlying social and economic forces. The general size and structure of the human body is a constant, for example, as are certain preferences related to human scale. So if narrow and crooked medieval street patterns are produced in brand new developments in modern cities, a good example is Malmo's City of Tomorrow development on the left, this is legitimate because it provides a scale related to the human body that people still value. And although the means of production and the form of power that gave rise to medieval patterns are no longer determinative, the forms produced are valued now for other reasons. So that's one of the arguments. This kind of interpretation is possible because the built environment is so loaded with social meaning. Patterns and forms have an impact on so many things. Choice. Access. Opportunity. Interaction. Movement. Identity. Connection. Mix. Security. Stability. Any of which can be the basis of meaning and interpretation. Patterns and forms express power, establish alliances, assert independence. Spaces can be thought of as embodied, gendered, inscribed, contested. I have many lists of these variables and adjectives, but, and they're all there and people have explored them all and it makes for a wonderful, subject, in my opinion, to try to wrestle this all together. I really think we should work at developing our interpretive skill. And this is something that I think really drew me to New Urbanism initially, because I think the New Urbanists We're exactly good at this. They were exactly good at interpreting pattern and form and giving social interpretation. And, and that's immensely valuable and I think, we should try to really, hone our skill at that. how do you do that? I spent a lot of time with, trying to develop a typology because there have been many typologies. There are many typologies out there. There's no standard way of categorizing city pattern and form. there are typologies from Spiro Kostov, Kevin Lynch, Peter Hall. Those were particularly influential for me. I'd say settling on a typology was by far the most difficult part of the book, but in the end, I suppose I simply gave up, and I decided to just focus on what came bubbling up around 35. Distinct city patterns and forms and these topics are not at all mutually exclusive. obviously the chapter on the Baroque and monumentalism are overlapping, but each chapter has a particular focus. There are readings of complete cities and towns where the interpretation of pattern and form is derived from the whole rather than the parts. There are topics related to ways of doing things like urban renewal, sprawl, and then there are chapters devoted to street and block patterns and how to read those. Grids, curved streets, diagonals, super blocks. So what I'm going to do with my remaining time, I'm not going to step through 35 different patterns and forms, you would be really not happy with me. I'm just going to give you some examples, I picked these, somewhat randomly, to just give you some examples of what it is, I try to do here. So medieval towns, for example, what can we say about those? I would put this before a class and ask them, How would you read this? How does this speak to you? what's being said to you here? the Medieval City is dense and tightly packed. I put this in for you, Phil Bess. and, this was the result of needing to be within city walls. Building new walls was a major expensive undertaking. Cities just got denser to accommodate a growing population. New walls were postponed until there was positively no room left. The resulting density and compactness just exuded security. Thus it was not only a surrounding wall that brought safety, but the narrow streets and multi story buildings. So Brugge, Belgium is an excellent example of this. It's now a mecca of tourism, thanks to centuries of economic stagnation because the, it's access to the North Sea. through a canal was silted up and so it no longer had a port and so it was, stagnating for many centuries. So it's a wonderful place to go and learn lessons of how to read medieval cities. We can still see the imprint of the feudal mode of production whereby the houses of villagers were clustered around the lord's castle or a church. In the traditional Islamic city. Irregularity and informality. Give the impression that small scale change is possible here. Large and ordered form does the opposite. It implies control from the top down and therefore less opportunity for incremental change. It also seems here, less static. Roof lines and streets seem to go in every which way, like the whole town is in constant motion. That's how I would read it. Some historians view irregularity as an indicator of slowness in the city building process. So in Fez, irregular street plan and a diversity of building types within the walls supported a slow process of organic growth. It's also read as being better to, a better kind of urban form and pattern for adaptation. What about small towns and smaller cities in other contexts? I have a chapter on small cities. In theory, small size should be better at sustaining face to face communication so that residents stay socially connected. The small city in circular form had a more overtly social meaning. The round patterns of 19th century utopian development, Howard's Garden City model actually is one of those, suggests a desire to draw resident attention inward and toward each other. The added desire for access to nature kept things compact as well as circular. there was something about the round form that kind of had this feeling of a pioneering community where people would come together. And the will to endure. there's also a connection to nature in the fact that it is thought that nature doesn't have straight angles, nature has only curvilinearity. You could also say that this kibbutz in, in Israel is reflecting a very defensive kind of posture. Small cities seem particularly vulnerable, though, in certain contexts. Although they might have the ability to be flexible and adaptable, and therefore resilient, this falls apart if their cores are singularly owned rather than composed of multiple owners and uses, which would make them more adaptable and resilient. For example, if composed of a single commercial megastructure and owner, such as at Cumbernauld, in Glasgow, it signals that there's a great deal of money and centralized authority involved here. With few individual business owners, this makes it more difficult to adjust to changing circumstances if the mega development falls, so does the town. what about big cities? I think the first thing one could say is that if big cities are old and dense, Centuries in the making, they reflect a certain level of resiliency. An old big city reveals itself as a place that has been able to count on at least some people sticking around to help it survive. There's something else revealed by modern cities that have reached a large size. An implicit attitude that there are no limits, that more is better. This was certainly the 19th century view of cities. The bigger the better, because quantity was And so we might interpret a very large city, most likely with vast amounts of surrounding sprawl, as the physical form of an ideology espousing limitless freedom. Another interpretation of big cities is that their sheer size and spread has tended to engender multiple forms of separation. This is paradoxical since big cities with their large populations, are indicative that people want to come together in one place, but at the same time, people form ways of separating themselves. Big cities tend to have districts, such as a central business district, or a warehousing district, or an industrial district. As evidence of adaptation, sometimes the function of these districts changes dramatically. There are many examples of this attempt at district adaptation. But the conversions often represent some kind of loss. At the river's edge in St. Louis, Missouri, Vacant 19th century buildings are a reminder of a formerly thriving working harbor replaced with vacant land that further separates citizens from their waterfront. Finger piers, boardwalks, and high density development along the water's edge in downtown Boston show the transition from using water as a source of livelihood to using water as an aesthetic object to be looked at. It is the commoditization of water views, elite replacing working class conceptions of water and a transition in which the water's exchange value is deemed more important than its use value. There's a whole literature on that. New towns and colonial outposts. these are an early category of whole places that reflect aspirations about how people are supposed to conduct their daily lives. So there's a certain social order being embodied here. Who's supposed to live where, how much land they're supposed to have, how integrated the functions of the town are supposed to be, what level of collective life is imagined. The medieval Bastides, which were new towns developed in the Middle Ages throughout Europe, are an important category of this town founding, and they were highly regularized, and they were highly regularized. Driven by basic functional requirements in order to attract a population. These were the first settlements in Europe no longer attached to a feudal castle. The possibility of living a life apart from serfdom was a huge draw. There was a market square, church, and surrounding walls. But notice that the, church is off of, it's in the upper left corner there, off of the actual marketplace. Another motivation for town founding was religious or cosmological symbolism, and I have a lot of examples of these in the book. They're in the more obvious category, I guess you would say, of how to interpret the meaning of such places. they, sometimes, towns were formed, based on cardinal points, or the movement of the stars. Myanmar, based on planet mythology, the magic of nine squares. The town of Madure, in India, meant to be a model of the cosmos, reflecting symbolic holiness and a way of stabilizing communities on earth so that humans could be given a secure place within it. And then, I love this example in Ohio of a little town, Shunbrun, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that but, in the Christian world, cross shaped towns were a popular design for new towns. For example, this was a little Moravian settlement laid out in the shape of a cross in 1772, and you can still, this is a modern image, and all the images I use are, of current, how the ground looks currently. Since the 19th century, the whole idea of creating a new town from scratch, Has been strongly criticized. It's been said that the new town is rooted in a conscious or unconscious desire to escape from the complexities of our rapidly changing times into a simpler and stable world that never existed and certainly cannot exist today. It's a quote. However, town founding need not symbolize escape or aggression, and in fact, can symbolize hope and aspiration. The Palestinian new town of Rawabi. is a good example, I think, a mark of Palestinian aspirations for middle class security. Located in the occupied West Bank, the town stands for nothing less than a dream of a better future for the Palestinian people. On to Garden Suburbs. The Garden Suburb is trying to merge the best of two worlds, town and garden. There were to be places, these were to be places where people could have access to rural tranquility without having to give up access to the amenities needed for a high quality of life. Country Club District in Kansas City invented its own downtown for this very purpose. and note that the reason it's a garden suburb and not a garden city is that there was a very constrained set of functions here. There was to be no adjoining factory or source of employment. The mixing of uses was limited to a few amenities for residents. This is one reason why Jane Jacobs laid it, labeled them paternalistic. Very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own. I present all sides. The advantage of thinking holistically is that, in this garden suburb context, is that no one element of a settlement is allowed to dominate, theoretically. Not the streets, not the buildings, not the recreational spaces. Planning, architecture, and gardening are united in a real concern with art in shaping the human environment. In Riverside, Illinois, whatever variation there might be, and there is variation in lot size, for example, the plan is completely unified, a singular conception in stylistic terms. This lends an air of permanence and stability. Unfortunately, the coherence of the garden suburb eventually morphed into suburbia, which had no such coherence, as Fishman points out. Fishman is another one I draw from quite a bit, Robert Fishman. the economic system propelling suburbia, instant change, quick profit, was never going to sustain communities of permanence and stability. The desire to be close to all things nature implies that it is possible, by living in a garden suburb, To withdraw from the social, economic, and environmental problems of the city to which it is connected. It implies a quest for leisure. I said I only used images of places actually on the ground. I apologize, this is an exception here. Quest for leisure and freedom from toil. And this is ironic, since this is the exact opposite of what living in the country would actually be like. At least historically, if one were trying to make a living there and needed to work the land. But on the positive side, garden suburbs attempt to cultivate a sense of the collective by way of green space. Each individual home contributes to the illusion of living in a park, and thus the landscape becomes the basis of a communal existence. Each family maintains their own piece of the park. They're doing, they're fulfilling a civic duty in doing that. Starting, oh, modernist urbanism. This was a fun one, starting in the 1920s, but especially after World War II, much urbanism around the globe was constructed under the tenets of modernist urbanism, what we might call modernist urbanism. You guys know the story, segregated uses, extreme uniformity, car dependence, stripped down architecture, rejection of the street, there were attempts to make city building more natural, and this could be done by setting buildings in green space, or by making them look more natural by curving them a bit. as at the Park Hill apartment complex in Sheffield, UK. This was thought to be more organic, but notoriously lacked pedestrian life. Another way to align with nature the Thinking went, would be to replace streets with parks. However, the reality is that fewer streets meant more separation, which translated to more cars. Cars needed to be put somewhere, acquiring a newfound claim to special storage sites, parking lots. Some modernist arrangements, like Dammerstock in Karlsruhe, Germany, were driven by a formulaic attachment to the principles of maximizing exposure to sun and green space. Houses fronted green space rather than streets, and the orientation was north south, To maximize sunlight to every room. In sing, in similar fashion, the attached housing of aluminum city terrace near Pittsburgh reveals that the main consideration here was solar orientation. Attempting to maximize sun exposure is often a really good thing, but for modernist developments, the sun exposure requirement worked out mathematically to dictate the space between buildings. Was prioritized at the expense of social connection, like the creation of enclosed space or the recognition of streets as a setting for social encounter. the socialist city, such as Nowa Huta in Krakow, Poland. And by the way, there's a wonderful film about this if you haven't seen it. it's on YouTube. This was thought to be both, this modernist urbanism, I have it in that category, thought to be both utopian and revolutionary because it's built from scratch. There's no need to constrain to old building patterns and therefore old social structures. They were centered on industrial plants, specifically steel and iron mills. And here the socialist commitment to the collective good could be demonstrated via the provision of schools, libraries, community centers. There's usually a large central plaza fronted by an administrative building. A very unsubtle reminder of the central place of the Communist Party. The plaza is linked by a central boulevard to the factory, directly, giving physical expression to Marxian unity between politics and economics. The rebuilding of Bucharest along socialist lines in the 1970s had the goal of eliminating single family houses. Not only because single family houses represented bourgeois fabric, but because people and single family structures, especially if they were dispersed on winding roads, were less controllable. Diversity of building types and forms was also to be eliminated because it reminded people of former social and cultural values. Which the new regime under Ceausescu was trying to eliminate. So here, modern high rise, buildings surround historic single family houses, creating a pretty awkward, disconnected pattern. Modernist urbanism had other meanings. The agenda of post colonial urban plans, for example, in the, Bulag area of Cairo, was to eliminate traces of colonialism. And so ordered rows of buildings were inserted. to represent a radical departure from Cairo's colonial history. These kinds of gestures tend to represent control more than change. The irony was that the modernist planning models that were used were imported from Western powers. The very occupiers, the Egyptians were trying to reproach. the Baroque, an urbanism of grandeur is called Baroque in a generic sense, the city beautiful in a more American sense. The Grand Manor by Spiro Kostov, each term has peculiarities of definition, but the sentiments are similar. The focus is grandeur, uniformity, specifically classicism and neoclassicism employed on a vast scale. With that, someone or something is being aggrandized. And by the same token, someone or something is being subordinated. since, so Baroque planning's expression of order and control is only possible by way of squashing other ideas. in Charleville, France, we see many of the elements of the Baroque model laid out. Differentiation of minor and major streets, a prominent square, subsidiary squares, careful attention to the facades of buildings lining the squares, the placement of important buildings in relation to the axes of major streets. at termination sites. The Baroque strategy of strong central access focuses attention on a singular idea, ranging from, it could range from collective social life to a singular dominant authority. Williamsburg, Virginia has Baroque elements that one could interpret as being a case of applying the Baroque to collective identity. although there are different interpretations of that. an example of a focus on a dominant authority is Cartavia Path, formerly Kingsway, the east west access of New Delhi. the western point of the access is the Viceroy's House. The movement of machinery, tanks, and other processional vehicles along the access terminated at the prime moving power itself. the Baroque was very well suited to a grand scale, but of course it's not scale dependent. It can be implemented in small communities. There the justification is that Baroque elements instill elegance and culture in what would otherwise be a utilitarian frontier outpost or a boring grid town. This was especially important in the era of civic boosterism in the early 20th century, when there was a need to outshine other towns if one hoped to attract capital successfully. Now to some critics, Baroque patterns in small places is pretentious. This can leave an especially awkward mark where the town is not fully developed, such as at Bawarda, Iran. The pomp seems not to fit the circumstance. there, the, the layout devoid of any civic or public buildings seems to have no reason for existing. The focus on sheer design without purpose becomes theater and emptiness. In Sandusky, Ohio, these, axes in Sandusky of all places, these grand diagonals, Go nowhere and terminate an open space rather than important building sites. And in Hampstead Garden Suburb, very much critiqued for being pretentious, for having overly large, an overly large core of green space that does not serve its collective purpose and is simply out of place. A baroque feature out of place. But here's the positive interpretation to be made, and I don't know about you faculty in the room, but I feel like our job is to equip students with arguments on multiple sides. I guess I would fit in with Indiana and their new law about making sure all sides are presented. a positive interpretation of this. A city with boulevards, uniform classical facades, and grand public spaces can be interpreted as a city that believes enough in itself to invest in its own design. Boulevards and plazas provide a sense of long term commitment and continuity. And as the great Raymond Unwin said, the Baroque simply shows in a positive way power and courage. Another charitable view of the Baroque is that the order and uniformity It imposed, provided a sense of orientation. In some cultures, maybe in Germany, Baroque ordering fit a cultural and behavioral mindset that put a high value on regularizing one's behavior and adhering to the rules. Ordered plans were not compromising, but that suited the culture just fine. And where one comes down on this, I think, is a matter of whether the valuation of Baroque patterns and forms can be disassociated from the originator. Again, that idea from Mumford about Separating the container from the contents, and Leon Krier has made these arguments too about, the need to disassociate. Kostoff, on the other hand, Spiro Kostoff, he doubted that this was even possible. And he said, these compulsive shells of the age of absolutism, With their densely packed imagery and manipulative scale betray their source with modern obliquities. Perhaps the sense of awe that Baroque cities originally intended has worn off, leaving the pedestrian feeling unanchored and isolated. But, of course, we have to look at a place like Paris. Paris's boulevards are the result of monarchical control, Napoleon III and Haussmann. But they are also tree lined and full of pedestrian life and cafe culture, activity that the Baroque boulevard provided a setting for. urban renewal, lots to say about that. I, focus on the, some cases where Very explicitly, urban renewal interventions were designed to separate rich and poor, black and white. and I give these two cases in Chicago. In my own backyard, this development of University Park was inserted to create a blockage between the University of Chicago right here and the poorer African American neighborhood here. If you're familiar with the Gold Coast, Sandburg Village did much the same thing. This was to be a bulwark of protection of the Gold Coast. From the poorer areas, off to the west. Pretty easy to interpret. Pretty obvious, thing going on here. Urban Renewal Projects were conceived as a kind of savior that helped residents escape from the junkyards that cities had become. The Long Island Expressway shows it well. If you've read any of, Urban Marshall Berman, he, he does such a wonderful job of dissecting the meaning of the Long Island Expressway. so I would point you to that. the environments being created here. he makes an interesting point about how work like this in the urban renewal era is what really separated artists, the art world, from the world of urban planning, which was once a little more integrated and connected. Artists and writers. Had to be forced to rely on their own inner space because they could no longer find inspiration from the urban forms being created by urban renewal. Uniformity is another category which has more to do with modes of doing things. Any city or town can be interpreted for its degree of sameness, regularity, uniformity. I might throw symmetry in there as well. Identical houses on identical lots. Identical gridded blocks composed of identical streets. It's often interpreted as the meaning of which is dull, incapable of competing with nature. there's no diversity. Efficiency and uniformity are in service to capital, on a mass scale. but there are more charitable interpretations that I also lay out. especially for a place like Levittown. Might the square miles of essentially homogenous homes foster social connection and communitarianism? Is uniformity a more comfortable and manageable setting for everyday life? As compared to cities composed of housing extremes where inequality rendered in physical form creates an ever present, need to, confront the inequalities of society. Symmetry, in this category of uniformity, I know it's not the same thing, but Burnham thought that symmetry was capable of cementing together the city's heterogeneous elements. The industrial city was confused and formless, a product of greed and a love of expansion at any cost. Symmetry was to be the antidote. in Chicago City Beautiful Era Plans, this is the Ida B. Wells Drive, formerly Congress Parkway, terminates at Buckingham Fountain, and Burnham and Bennett wrote that a city without symmetry was barbarism and a crime against good taste. One possible defense of this seemingly arrogant adherence to symmetry, and over concern for visual uniformity, over other needs, like housing, which is often the critique, is that it was conceived as a way of making sure that commercialism, which most big cities embraced, was kept in check. In the end, however, the strategy didn't hold very well. The goals were inherent, inherently contradictory. Civic beauty as both a rationale for Congress, for commerce, and a critique of commerce. I found that an interesting insight. I have thousands of footnotes in the book. Don't worry. Um, variation, it's easy to spot, city patterns and forms devoted to social sameness. Suburbs of only one housing type, public housing, all of that, there's a lot of uniformity there. But there's also a lot of planned, variation. diversity in housing types, varied lot and block sizes, a mix of public spaces, variegated moving, movement paths. and Yorkship Garden Village. I don't know if this is the best way to express this with this image, but, built during World War I was built on this diversity principle. And so there's assorted architecture and frontage type, there's cul de sacs and closes and non orthogonal street intersections, winding roads. These elements were combined to leave the impression that the community had as much diversity. as nature, the whole rainbow of human existence was meant to be plainly visible. That's the meaning of this. Sprawl is super fun to interpret, you do need to make a distinction between the planned suburb, garden or otherwise, and suburbia as a amorphous blob, nevertheless intentional, spreading out over the landscape. And, I like to pick on places like LA and Phoenix, one distinction is that the planned suburb starts with a strong node, maybe a railroad station around which the suburban development cohered, and creating some kind of unity of design. But in a place like L. A., development is organized around freeways, at this scale of looking at it anyway. I know that Stephanos is going to come out strong in defense of L. A., but, Freeways as the organizing principle as opposed to defining civic cores capable of providing meaning and wholeness to the surrounding milieu. More about sprawl, the, Shopping malls, Victor Gruen, for example, so interesting. Sproul's focus on consumption, acting as a form of exclusion. They were supposed to provide settings for social connection, but there wasn't really collective space, so sociality is strangely guarded. And in Southdale, Minnesota, there is housing here, but it's an example of how social life. was literally contained via parking lots and encircling roads and completely detached from the outside world. The vastness of sprawl at the outskirts of major cities exposes the power dynamics going on. the main players are the banking, construction, and real estate sectors. Kept afloat through government subsidy and tax breaks that mostly benefit white and wealthy Americans. Real estate investment trusts buy and sell sprawl components on Wall Street. And there's no vested interest and no caring about what kinds of places are being pieced together. Extreme speculation. Eats investment without paying any return. And Dolores Hayden called this alligator behavior. Which I think is a really, meaningful term. It can go really badly in the case of a planned, sprawl development like Casa Grande. Outside of Phoenix, it's easy to see the physical result of speculative building gone bust. Plazas and squares. This is my final topic that I take on for this presentation. Plazas and squares have been assigned a wide array of social interpretation. They're the heart of community. They are in service to empire building, according to some critics. They are for collective life or they are for social segregation. They're an essential physical manifestation of civic culture, or they were created. To create hierarchies of space and power. I love the way academics are able to find all these different meanings and things. to me, the square in, in Belfast, seems to be devoted to nothing more than dignifying city hall. but these, this is an interest. This is my final, example. Open space in the city. is often hard to hold on to once the desire to congregate and pressure to density sets in. Look what happened to William Penn's plan for Philadelphia, which had all these open squares, which, some of them were filled in. and a similar encroachment happened to Savannah's reserved open blocks. and, but, the, plazas and squares, often are great examples of the outdoor room, formerly, formally disposed and defined by building frontages. However, London's Wellington Arch was ridiculed for its undignified placement of a square surrounded by traffic, and it was described as a shape that looked like The ill, irregular leg of mutton shapes, and that was very completely different from what Paris, Parisians would have done, which was to make something, very regular and, and. Closing thoughts, knowing what kinds of city patterns and forms we want requires knowing what kind, what city patterns and forms mean to us. as things stands. Arguments for or against a particular city plan fluctuate and are all over the place. I would like to see the public discourse more understanding of this is what this means. This is how I interpret this space. This is what I think is the value being expressed here. This is the priority being expressed here. Patterns and Forms, as I said, as I listed some of the things that I think are reflected. they have an impact on choice. Access, interaction, movement, identity, a whole huge range of things. I'll just close with, when you next encounter a city pattern or form, ask yourself, is, do you think, does, what does it mean to you, do you think it's better or worse for exclusion, social connection, opportunity, identity, stability, what does it mean for quality of life? What is it saying to you? So thank you very much. Any questions?
6:I have a question. as designers, we find ourselves picking up on, on some of these things in our daily lives. sometimes, when bringing them up, the comment could be, that, that wasn't an intention, that wasn't a stated intention. Yeah. but you used the term motive, which could imply that it might be intended, expressly intended or maybe just a behavior. That might be playing out that the people who are actually there aren't even aware of. Do you find yourself sorting along those lines some of these, when you look at these?
Emily:Yeah, and it's often hard to understand what the motive was sometimes. because we're not dealing here with, I started this book actually with, Wanting to know what became of plans, like plans that planners did. In this book, I do not talk about people. I don't talk, there's no Baron Von Hausman or anybody like that in here, only tangentially. I wanted to stay away from big names and big architects and big planner names, and, but understanding motive, if you can get to it, if there's some writing about it, That is just one tool in the shed for under, for helping us understand what it might mean now, but that's a, it's a tricky one because those motive, we shouldn't like anything in Charleston, if we think about motive of, some of the, a lot of the building that went on there, the motive was expression of dominance and, White dominance and, flaunting wealth and flaunting power. And if you get too into the weeds on those kinds of motives, it would be really hard to appreciate our built world now. So that's why I think it's important to try to develop our own language of interpretation and what something means to us now.
8:Thank you so much Emily for a beautiful talk. I'm really looking forward to using this book in a classroom setting, for example, teaching with it. my question has to do with, the, uniformities with which you describe the intentions of these patterns. I wondered if in your book you also find examples of cities that have competing intentions shaping them, right? where different kinds of either resistance to an idea is manifested in the urban fabric somehow, or if there are examples where, these neat packages of 35 categories might, Not be so neatly applied, right? and then I also wanted to ask about, this is a completely second question, but, how issues of resource management might also play into some of these patterns that you described, right? the issues having to do with, resilience, for example. two questions.
Emily:Yeah, on your second one, I think there is a lot of, basis for evaluating the worth of a given type of place or pattern relates to resource use, and things like adaptability and resilience. but on your first question, I think what you're getting at is what about places that don't have, can't 35 things. And they're really showing. multiple things going on at once. I don't think it's so good at that because I think I'm really, I tried to pull out examples that were the essence of these particular dimensions. So I, it might be an interesting exercise for students. to find places that are showing a struggle, and how that struggle is an implicit in the form and pattern would be a good one.
9:Hi. I just had a question. I really appreciate the work that you have here. And I, what I most appreciate is the fact that you have cities and urban areas of varying, scale. Yeah, so you have really large cities like Chicago and then you have much smaller cities like, that one in Ohio that was like eight towns across. But, you talked about it with Boston, I'm from Boston, so I like that, but you had you ragged on it a little bit about the commodification of water, and it just made me think about the, Just like history and how, like all towns are just like on the water and, how as we continue going on in our role as designers and architects. We have a stronger role now, but before it was obscure, we just built where we could live, and that was it. But, in these older, larger cities, really distinct. cultures and personalities within them, but also sometimes in cities, you don't see that, and it makes me wonder how much that urban design and intention plays in creating the character of a city versus maybe, economics, and things like that, exports,
Emily:Yeah. So much can be read, about cities as we can very easily fall into economic determinism for everything. this is all about the financial calculus. And I actually tried to resist that a little bit because I think there's a lot of other things going on. but you're absolutely right that, many of these things boil down to the behavior of developers, the behavior of financial systems, banks, we can see that imprint. And to me that we can say that's in there for sure, and we need to point that out, but it gets a little dry, and I want to know the sexier stuff. I want to know. the town that was trying to build the cross, the seven sided town in Belgium. That's just funner, right?
5:Emily, first of all, congratulations on your new book release. And also, thank you for your presentation today, after all this study that you have done of the 35 types, do you have some entrances that you're taking out that you're suggesting or recommending that say certain things about the evolution of design of urban, city forms?
Emily:That's a really good question. And I don't think I address that very much. Again, because. I'm trying to, isolate these ideas so we can really hone in on them and focus on them. but it's all in flux and it's all changing all the time and I think that's a pretty dominant theme here is our change in interpretation of things. where we once saw, the gridded city as being, horrible and dark and satanic, now it's all the rage and where gentrification is happening. so it's the constant change that, we still, always have to grapple with. But I, if you have examples like that, can you send them to me? Because I tried to read everything I could that had some kind of meaning and interpretation in it. Not of buildings, though. That was the one thing I tried to steer clear of the architecture literature on the meaning of columns and things like that. But, if you have examples, I'm going to need to update for sure. It was
fun.