Good Urbanism

Six Steps to Creating Prosperous Places

By Nan Ellin

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Nan Ellin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-374-4

Contents

Acknowledgments,
1 Inroduction,
2 Urban Desiderata: A Path toward Prosperity,
3 The Tao of Urbanism: Rendering the Latent Manifest and the Possible Inevitable,
Case Studies: The High Line, Canalscape,
4 Co-Creation: From Egosystem to Ecosystem,
Case Studies: Civic Center, Envision Utah, BIMStorm and Onuma System,
5 Going with the Flow: The New Design with Nature,
Case Studies: Open Space Seattle 2100, The CEDAR Approach, University of Arkansas Community Design Center,
6 The Art of Urbanism: A Practice Primer,
Case Studies: Sunrise Park, Groundwork,
7 From Good to Great Urbanism: Beyond Sustainability to Prosperity,
8 Sideways Urbanism: Rotating the Pyramid,
9 Conclusion,
Appendix A: Themes/Features of Good Urbanism,
Appendix B: Good Urbanism Is,
Notes,
References,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

A house I once lived in came with a potted grape ivy. I watered the plant regularly, but oddly, it never grew. It didn’t die, but during the two years I lived there, it never changed shape or sprouted a leaf. Leaving this grape ivy behind for the next inhabitants, it became emblematic for me of so many places that, while they may be surviving, are clearly not thriving.

For most of human history, we built habitats that supported us more than they challenged us. As industrialization began shifting the scale and logic of urbanization, however, we veered off course and became the only species to build habitats that are not sustainable. Over the last several decades, we have been making concerted efforts to get back on course and construct places that support humanity more optimally, places that sustain us rather than strain us.

Thanks to these efforts, there is now a virtual consensus among planners and urban designers about what constitutes good urbanism. This consensus holds that networks of quality public spaces should be lined with and punctuated by vital hubs of activity. Stated inversely, urban regions should be comprised of mixed-use cores (large hubs and smaller nodes) connected by corridors of transit, automobile, and bicycle routes as well as other quality public spaces to ensure walkability. These public spaces include outdoor places—for circulation, recreation, and preservation of natural landscapes—as well as indoor cultural institutions and gathering places. Good urbanism honors the past by preserving historic fabrics and adaptively reusing existing structures. It also honors the future by celebrating creativity through supporting new and innovative architecture, public art, and entrepreneurship at all scales. Good urbanism offers a full spectrum of housing options, accommodating a wide range of household types and income levels, comprising a diverse community that is actively engaged in shaping and managing its future.

Key to good urbanism is the connective tissue: infrastructure, public space, and community engagement. Whether retrofitted or new, for practical purposes or pleasure, infrastructure is integrated with public spaces and both are multipurpose, technologically advanced, attractive, and harmonious with natural and cultural settings. Community building and engagement occur spontaneously in the quality public space as well as more deliberatively through interesting and fun initiatives sponsored by municipal organizations, community groups, or businesses. In sum, good urbanism is vital, vibrant, safe, comfortable, legible, accessible, equitable, efficient, elegant, convenient, walkable, sustainable, beautiful, distinctive, and dynamic.

While there are numerous iterations with a range of foci, most recommendations converge on these principles. Along with this knowledge of the component parts of good urbanism, we also have the will, the tools, and the resources to achieve these desired ends. Nevertheless, their actual delivery remains challenging and all too rare. Good urbanism still eludes in far too many instances; hence the continued proliferation of prescriptions for healing ailing places.

We know where we want to go, but cannot reliably get there. Why not? With the intensified division of labor regarding the built environment over the last century, it can be difficult to identify the sources of dissatisfaction with our places and thereby address them. For example, in search of authenticity and identity, jurisdictions and institutions sometimes turn to branders, usually from another city or even another country, who ironically tend to stamp similar marks of “identity” (brands) wherever they go. In search of distinction and status, “starchitects” may be commissioned who typically have priorities other than serving the greater good. In search of vitality, made-to-order “lifestyle centers” are dropped onto greenfield sites. Stakeholder meetings are convened to obtain buy-in, rather than feedback. And so on.

Having lost our compass, the quest to improve places for all people is too often estranged from the places and communities themselves. Consequently, an untold number of excellent proposals are never realized or unfortunately compromised, while many suboptimal ones are implemented. As a result, valuable resources (human, economic, political, and environmental) are squandered as our towns, cities, and regions suffer the consequences.

We have, to some extent, buried our instinctual capacity to create habitats that support us most fully, places where we may thrive. This book asks what exactly has been lost and describes a path for uncovering this buried urban instinct, dusting it off, and updating it to serve us today.

Anyone can walk this path, professionals in the field of urbanism—planners, urban designers, architects, or landscape architects—and others alike. The only precondition for stepping onto the path is a willingness to let it take us someplace we’ve never been before. In other words, a prerequisite for good urbanism is knowing what (or that) we don’t know. The job of the professional urbanist includes directing people toward the path and providing some assistance along the way.

The next chapter, “Urban Desiderata” (chapter 2), clears the way toward this new territory by describing six steps along the path to better places. Chapter 3, “The Tao of Urbanism,” explains how this path renders the latent manifest and the possible inevitable by building on personal and collective assets to build on the strengths of places. The fourth chapter, “Co-Creation,” delves more deeply into collective and place prospecting. “Going with the Flow” (chapter 5) describes how to polish the gemstones mined during personal, collective, and place prospecting and how to craft transformative place proposals through urban acupuncture, the five qualities of integral urbanism, and learning from ecosystems.

Chapter 6, “The Art of Urbanism,” offers a handy guide for following the six steps along the path, as well as recommendations for effectively communicating place proposals and recovering our urban instinct. The seventh chapter, “From Good to Great Urbanism,” limns the contours of an emergent paradigm, moving beyond sustainability to prosperity. “Sideways Urbanism” (chapter 8) demonstrates how this new paradigm operates in a way that is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but sideways. The concluding section (chapter 9) provides an overview of what it takes to be a good urbanist.

Case studies at the end of chapters 3 through 6, primarily from the United States, illustrate various aspects of good urbanism in practice. Learning from these examples and others, this book sets forth a process for imagining best possibilities and realizing them, with suggestions for navigating potential blind spots and potholes along the way. It instructs, incites, and inspires all to enhance the health and well-being of places and communities. It also contributes to the efficacy and relevance of the professions dedicated to these goals by adding a few essential items to the planning and urban design toolkits.

The pair of eyes in the “Good Urbanism” artwork evokes the two types of vision that are key to this approach: seeing the present and past clearly while envisioning better futures. The wink is a reminder to planners, urban designers, architects, and landscape architects that good urbanism is the goal of our endeavors, not joining or starting a camp and competing against others for supremacy. The wink also refers to the enso embedded in “Good,” a Japanese symbol for strength and elegance. In Zen Buddhism, the enso expresses the moment when the mind is free to let the body and spirit create, an opening that reveals a connection with something larger and an opportunity to participate in the co-creation of an always incomplete and imperfect world. The child-like rendering of the Good conveys the inherent simplicity and authenticity of this approach.

CHAPTER 2

Urban Desiderata: A Path toward Prosperity

We use strong words when we talk about places, proclaiming our “love” or “hate” for a city, neighborhood, house, or other building. Indeed, we probably use these words more often with regard to place than people. Needless to say, the places we love support us, while the places we hate strain us.

What moves us to proclaim our “love” for a place? Usually, we feel connected when we’re there. We may feel connected to ourselves, others, the place itself, nature, a higher being, the past, or the future. When we realize these bonds, we feel a sense of meaning, harmony, purpose, interest, excitement, distinction, dynamism, safety, security, civility, mutual respect, and/or generosity of spirit. We often describe these places as “authentic” or “genuine.” The less we feel connected in a place, the less we tend to like it.

Good urbanism fosters these connections in order to make places livable and lovable. We do not need more prescription lists or manifestos about what constitutes a good place. We need the ability to envision and manifest better possibilities for specific places that allow us to realize these bonds. How can we recapture this capacity to cultivate good ideas for making livable and lovable places while rallying the resources to realize them?

Learning from exemplary practices and applying insights from organizational learning, psychology, the philosophy of pragmatism, grounded theory, and wisdom traditions, I’ve developed an approach for uncovering the urban instinct to enhance human habitats. This “Path toward Prosperity” consists of six steps: prospect, polish, propose, prototype, promote, and present (figure 2.1, plate 1).

The first step along the path is excavation to prospect for buried gems. Prospecting involves listening to self, others, and places. Listening to self, or personal prospecting, begins with self-reflection about a particular project and the expression of initial ideas in words and images. This step recognizes important hunches that might otherwise be overlooked, honoring our individual perspectives and intuitions and helping us understand any biases and motivations. Personal prospecting is also essential because, unrecognized, this inner voice may become so loud it is impossible to hear anything else, including the voices of others and significant research findings. Even with the best intentions, it can be difficult to engage others without trying to control the outcome.

Just as flight attendants advise us to secure our own oxygen masks before assisting others, it is important we listen to ourselves so we can be receptive to others. It also helps to recognize and build on our own strengths in order to help others build on theirs. To breathe life into our places, we must first breathe well ourselves.

Once personal gems are revealed, the next step is collective prospecting, which involves sharing our gems with others and learning about their gems. At the same time, place prospecting begins, the extracting of gems from specific locales through observation and effective community engagement. Then, research is undertaken into relevant history, political and economic conditions, best practices, site conditions, and so forth. All three kinds of prospecting contribute to polishing the gems (figure 2.2).

The third step is envisioning best possibilities and proposing plans, policies, and designs for crafting the polished nuggets into jewels that add economic, social, aesthetic, and environmental value to places. At this point, the proposal may be prototyped for testing and additional feedback. Then, the concept is promoted to a larger public to obtain even more input and build support. Well taken, these steps generate the resources required to implement the project along the way.

Ultimately, the project is presented to trustworthy partners capable of realizing the vision on an ongoing basis, and the initial catalyst may move on to catalyze other projects. Neither mountains (large interventions imposed deductively on a place) nor pebbles strewn about (too small to have an impact), these jewels are graciously endowed to adorn and enrich places and communities. Pursuing the path toward prosperity ignites sparks of creativity that animate places so they ring true to all, become the pride of communities who maintain and adapt them accordingly over time, and have an enduring positive impact.

The Path toward Prosperity offers a tool for designing the process to be adjusted on a case-by-case basis. For an initiative already at the proposal stage or beyond, but stalling, it may make sense to dip down and prospect in order to spiral back up and reenergize the project. In some instances, promoting may begin during the collective prospecting in the form of an ideas competition, or prototyping may not occur until after promoting. Projects will accord varying emphases to different steps along the path. In sum, the six steps are a heuristic device to be calibrated and customized for each project.

CHAPTER 3

The Tao of Urbanism: Rendering the Latent Manifest and the Possible Inevitable

That flowing imagination which founded the city in the first place can be re-found. It is planted in our midst always ready to flower—if we begin, not with the “problem” of what needs to be changed, or moved, or built, or demolished, but begin with what already is here, still stands and sings of its soul.

—James Hillman (2006, 18)

Artisans, artists, designers, choreographers, and other creators shape their work from the resources at hand: materials, dancers, money, land, and other given resources. If they devoted their time and energy to bemoaning what they lacked, they would never bring anything of value forth into the world. In similar fashion, when we build on our own gifts, rather than dwell on inadequacies, our strengths grow stronger. Some Native Americans consider these intrinsic gifts our “original medicine,” endowing unique personal power so we may serve the world most optimally.1 The Taoist tradition, hailing from fifth century BCE China, maintains that awareness and trust of our own inner nature allow us to be our best and avoid manipulation by others. These and other wisdom traditions exhort us to honor this rich source of authenticity and creativity.

Likewise, when we identify the assets of places, the data (given, or gifts), these too may flourish. When considering how best to improve the places we live, then, what if we focus on what we value rather than on what we can’t stand? What if we devote special attention to what works rather than lament what doesn’t? What if we recognize all we appreciate, cultivating gratitude in the process? The goal would not be faultfinding, but gift finding. Truffle-sniffing pigs, unearthing delicacies for all to enjoy.

In most instances, problems are what propel us to address issues and make changes. Rather than beeline directly to resolve the problems, the path toward prosperity resists this temptation and begins instead with a step aside, enlarging the perspective and gathering the gifts. It was this step aside that enabled the conversion of an abandoned elevated railway, regarded widely as a liability, into an outstanding amenity for New York City (see the High Line case study later in this chapter). In the Phoenix region, it generated a proposal for leveraging an extensive canal infrastructure into a distributed system of vital urban hubs along the water (see the Canalscape case study later in this chapter). Building on existing assets in a former brownfield in Minneapolis, what could have been an isolated ballpark became an urban neighborhood combining entertainment, transit, and clean energy generation (see the Groundwork case study in chapter 6).

During this personal, collective, and place prospecting, including “hope stories” (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993) for the future, we may also turn attention to past missteps and current obstacles along with “the powerful emotions that underpin many planning issues” (Sandercock 2003, 163). Since our survival imperative naturally scans the horizon for potential threats to our well-being, it is important these are voiced. Airing these issues freely in the company of others can help address the threats effectively, dissipate contempt, enable forgiveness of wrongdoing, and allow grieving of irrevocable losses. Collective prospecting can also help us avoid repeating previous missteps, strengthen resolve to make improvements, and even transform our greatest problems into our greatest solutions.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Good Urbanism by Nan Ellin. Copyright © 2013 Nan Ellin. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.