In addition to evoking the memory of indigenous environments, Aalto remained faithful to the belief that a motif borrowed from a different context and transplanted with sufficient conviction onto Finnish soil became genuinely Finnish. The Italian Renaissance was for Aalto an inalienable part of his heritage and philosophy of life. In his view, providing the inhabitants of Saynatsalo with a setting in which they could live much as the inhabitants of fourteenth century Sienna did was a natural act. When the members of the municipal board of building inquired if a small community like theirs really needed to build a council chamber seventeen meters high, especially since the brick was expensive, Aalto responded that the world’s most beautiful and famous town hall in Sienna had a council chamber sixteen meters high, and consequently, he proposed to build the one at Saynatsalo seventeen meters high.
The generation of cross-cultural learning arises out of understanding and applying, in a sympathetic and appropriate manner, urban design methodologies, processes, and forms from different cultural contexts. [8] An instance of this would be the woeful history of large-scale low-income housing (i.e., public housing) projects built by the government in various urban contexts in the United States. The government’s quest to provide no-frills housing (e.g., built at the lowest costs on cheap, often undesirable, land), combined with the private sector’s unrelenting demands that public housing be different (e.g., minimal accommodations which are overly modest and austere) from the rest of the housing stock, undermined the notion that public housing could also be attractive housing, and possibly, even contribute to the surrounding urban contexts. [9]
Henri Ciriani’s social housing projects in France, which are the equivalent of public housing projects in the United States, serve as a demonstration of how large-scale low-income housing projects built by the government can constitute positive contributions to the urban environment instead of being eyesores. La Courdangle is a large social housing project (e.g., 130 apartments, 230 parking spaces, and a day care center) outside Paris in Saint Denis. [10] The seven-story building with its striped cladding and geometric frieze rises above the muddle of neighboring streets and forms a corner in an otherwise loosely structured urban space. By creating a visually strong plan of geometrical precision, the project inspires a still-life composition device in urban design: Transformed into a picture plane, the various free-standing buildings as well as high-rise buildings that surround the project integrate into a more harmonious urban setting. The courtyard side of the building is a pure, right-angled figure containing a perfectly defined square space. The layering of the facades facilitates the articulation of the decreasing volumes, contains the apartments’ balconies and terraces, and mediates between the architecture of the building and the urbanity of the neighborhood. In this manner, La Courdangle constitutes a low-income housing project that is rich in architectural spaces and detail, while helping define and enhance the urban space around it.
The phenomenon of increasing economic globalization is rapidly growing and has been encouraged at the urban level. For example, in American cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Minneapolis, where foreign investors have been active in buying real estate, downtown real estate interests—brokers, commercial banks, real estate consultants, and property owners—have welcomed international property investment. Throughout the 1980s the infusion of foreign capital into the buying and selling of existing buildings and the construction of new building bolstered commercial property markets by raising rents, increasing property values, and generally expanding business opportunities. The interaction of forces operating at various spatial scales—especially the urban—can be illustrated in a variety of ways: the construction of an office building for a foreign bank using materials from around the world; the dynamics of a major research university whose architecture and urban planning faculty consult locally as well as internationally; and the corporate plan location and contracting strategies of multinational corporations such as Nike and Coca Cola, as they balance local labor conditions, regional locational advantages, national markets, and international investment opportunities. [11]
The ongoing phenomenon of globalization suggests some strategies for urban designers. Urban designers must be able to understand and react to influences impinging on their communities, regardless of where those influences originate (e.g., World Bank funded housing projects in developing countries) and which actors are responsible (e.g., American architectural firms designing office complexes in London). Furthermore, urban designers must develop associations and networks that extend beyond their spatial reach through collaborative endeavors and thereby provide another mechanism for responding to the multitude of actors who shape their communities. For example, the Indian architect B.V. Doshi utilized an institution, the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation for Studies and Research, to develop an internationally (i.e., World Bank) funded local (i.e., in the city Indore) housing project in India, Aranya Nagar. [12] The project has been largely a success due to the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation, which carried out considerable research, including surveys to understand the physical and economic factors that determine the size, type, and density of the housing plots that were specific to the local context.
Relevant
Urban design that is relevant is pertinent to matters at hand and is based on fundamental human and natural conditions. I highlight three such relevant approaches to urban design: (1) a history of urban form that analyzes the determinant processes and human meanings of form, (2) a theory of urban form that is normative and based on human values, and (3) a design methodology of urban form that is empirically based and derived from patterns of human behavior.
In order to study the phenomenon of city making in a historical perspective, one must consider cities to be amalgams of the living and the built; that is, as repositories of cultural meaning. Urban form is related directly to urban process; that is, the conjunction of people, forces, and institutions that bring about urban form. A way to examine this process is to ask probing research questions: Who actually designs cities? What procedures do they go through? Which are the empowering institutions and laws? Urban process also refers to physical change through time. The tendency all too often is to see urban form as a finite thing and a complicated object. However, thousands of witting and unwitting acts every day alter a city’s lines in ways that are perceptible only over a certain stretch of time. City walls are pulled down and filled in; once rational grids are slowly obscured; a slashing diagonal boulevard is run through close-grained residential neighborhoods; railroad tracks usurp cemeteries and waterfronts; and wars, fires, and highways annihilate city cores. [13]
As an example, let us consider the grid. The point is made regularly that grids, especially in the United States, besides offering simplicity in land surveying, recording, and subsequent ownership transfer, also favored a fundamental democracy in property market participation. This did not mean that individual wealth could not appropriate considerable property, but rather that the basic initial geometry of land parcels bespoke a simple egalitarianism that invited easy entry into the urban land market. The reality, however, is much less admirable. The ordinary citizens gained easy access to urban land only at a preliminary phase when cheap rural land was being urbanized through rapid laying out. To the extent that the grid speeded this process and streamlined absentee purchases, it may be considered an equalizing social device. Once the land had been identified with the city, however, this advantage of the initial geometry of land parcels evaporated, and even unbuilt lots slipped out of common reach. What matters most in the long run is not the mystique of the grid geometry, then, but the luck of first ownership. [14]
However, for the conventional urban designer, a grid is a grid is a grid. [15] At best it is a visual theme upon which to play variations: he or she might be concerned with issues like using a true checkerboard design versus syncopated block rhythms, with cross-axial or other types of emphasis, with the placement of open spaces within the discipline of the grid, with the width and hierarchy of streets. To Kostof and the meaningful urban designer, on the other hand, how, and with what intentions, the Romans in Britain, the builders of medieval Wales and Gascony, the Spanish in Mexico, or the Illinois Central Railroad Company in the prairies of the Midwest employed this very same device of settlement is the principal substance of a review of orthogonal planning. In fact, the grid has accommodated a startling variety of social structures—including territorial aristocracy in Greek Sicily, the agrarian republicanism of Thomas Jefferson, the cosmic vision of Joseph Smith in Mormon settlements like Salt Lake City, Utah—and of course, capitalist speculation.
The political, legal, and economic history of a city is an often-overlooked subject in urban design. The understanding of such a history involves ownership of urban land and the land market; the exercise of eminent domain, which is the power of government to take over private property for public use; the institution of legally binding master plans; building codes and other regulations; instruments of funding urban change, like property taxes and bond issues; and the power structure of cities. Urban designers do not need to know all of this information, but they do need to realize the significance of it, to know where to turn to obtain it, and to seriously consider it in their project designs.
There have been few serious attempts at a comprehensive and normative theory of urban form. The book, A Theory of Good City Form, is an impressive and daring attempt by Kevin Lynch at a systematic effort to state general relationships between the form of a place and its value to society. Lynch generalizes performance dimensions, which are certain identifiable characteristics of cities due primarily to their spatial qualities and are measurable scales along which different groups achieve different positions. These performance dimensions are based on the following thinking:
The good city is one in which the continuity of [a] complex ecology is maintained while progressive change is permitted. The fundamental good is the continuous development of the individual or the small group and their culture: a process of becoming more complex, more richly connected, more competent, acquiring and realizing new powers—intellectual, emotional, social, and physical . . . So that settlement is good which enhances the continuity of a culture and the survival of its people, increases a sense of connection in time and space, and permits or spurs individual growth: development, within continuity, via openness and connection . . . [a settlement that is] accessible, decentralized, diverse, adaptable, and tolerant to experiment. [16]
In Lynch’s theory, there are seven basic dimensions. First is vitality, which is the degree to which an urban form supports the vital functions, biological requirements, capabilities, and protects the survival of human beings, for example, via adequate throughput of water, air, food, and energy. Second is sense, which is the degree to which an urban form is clearly perceived and mentally differentiated as well as structured in time and space, and the degree to which that mental structure connects with the residents’ values and concepts, for example, via a distinct identity and unconstrained legibility. Third is fit, which is the degree to which urban form matches the pattern and quantity of actions that people usually engage in, for example, via compatibility between function and form. Fourth is access, which is the ability to reach other people, activities, resources, and places, including the quantity and diversity of the elements that can be reached, for example, via ease of communication and movement. Fifth is control, which is the degree to which the creation, access, use, maintenance, and modification to urban spaces and activities is managed by those who use, work, or live in them, for example, via localized power. Sixth is efficiency, which is the cost of creating and maintaining an urban form, for example, via less energy-demanding processes. Seventh is justice, which is the way in urban form costs and benefits are distributed among people, according to principles such as intrinsic worth or equity, for example, via equal protection from environmental hazards such as traffic and pollution.
A problem-solving approach to urban design would explicitly render the design methodology and describe how a meaningful urban designer might draw directly from empirical evidence and extensive research. For example, the book, A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander and his colleagues, is most useful as a series of thoroughly analyzed and empirically based guidelines to solving common problems of urban form. Each suggested solution is described in a way that provides the key relationships, for example, between human behavior and spatial setting, needed to solve the problem, but in a general enough manner to allow for adaptation to particular lifestyles, aesthetic tastes, and local conditions. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs repeatedly in the built environment. The longest portion of each pattern describes the empirical background of the pattern, the evidence for its validity, and the range of different ways the pattern can be manifested or designed.
According to Alexander, his coauthors, and the scientific research they cite, people need an identifiable spatial unit to belong to. [17] They want to be able to identify the part of the city where they live as distinct from all others. Available evidence suggests, first, that the neighborhoods which people identify with have extremely small populations; second, that they are small in area; and third, that a major road through a neighborhood destroys it.
What then, is the right population for a neighborhood? The neighborhood inhabitants should be able to look after their own interests by being able to reach agreement on basic decisions, such as about public services and common land, and to organize themselves to bring pressure on local governments. Anthropological evidence cited by Alexander et al. suggests that a human group cannot usually coordinate itself to reach such decisions if its population is above 1,500. The experience of organizing community meetings at the local level suggests that 500 may be a more realistic figure.
As far as the physical diameter is concerned, in Philadelphia, people who were asked which area they really knew usually limited themselves to a small area, seldom exceeding the two or three blocks around their house. One-quarter of the inhabitants of an area in Milwaukee considered a neighborhood to be an area no larger than a block, around 300 feet. One-half considered it to be no more than seven blocks.
The first two features of the neighborhood, small population and small area, are not enough by themselves. A neighborhood can only have a strong identity if it is protected from heavy traffic. Research cited by the authors suggests that the heavier the traffic in an area, the less people think of it as home territory. Not only do residents view the streets with heavy traffic as less personal, but they feel the same about the houses along the street: “It’s not a friendly street. . . . People are afraid to go out into the street because of the traffic. . . . Noise from the street intrudes into my home.” [18] This study, conducted by the University of California at Berkeley, found that with more than 200 cars per hour, the quality of the neighborhood begins to deteriorate.
Therefore, the proposed strategy suggests that to help people define the neighborhoods they live in, not more than about 300 yards or so across, with no more than 500 inhabitants or so. In existing cities, encourage local groups to organize themselves to form such neighborhoods, and keep major roads outside these neighborhoods. While one may disagree with the dimensions suggested in this pattern, one has to acknowledge that population size, physical area, and traffic flow are critical considerations for the design of contemporary neighborhoods.
In this and other patterns in the book, the authors outline an urban design methodology that is based on archetypal problems (e.g., neighborhood size), analyses of built examples, descriptions of historical precedents, and the explicit unpacking of design solutions such that they are clear, relevant, and thoughtful. The basis for the design patterns was extensive and thorough empirical research carried on over an eight-year period. Today, there is current and voluminous research, for example, on environment and behavior that is highly relevant and useful for urban designers. [19]
