Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder - Softcover

Greenberg, Ken

 
9780307358158: Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307358151 ISBN 13: 9780307358158
Verlag: Random House of Canada, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

One of the world's foremost urban designers shares his passion and methods for rejuvenating neglected cities and argues passionately for the importance and possibilities of their renewal.

From a youth spent in the boroughs of New York City and other great cities of the world, to his beginnings as an architect in Toronto, Ken Greenberg has long recognized that cities at their best provide much of what we seek in a place to call home. Community, places of culture and business that we can walk to, mass transit and a wealth of amenities that couldn't be supported without a city's density: the mid-century drive to suburbanization deprived us of these inherent advantages of urban living. The realization of this loss, in tandem with pressing recent concerns about energy scarcity and global warming, has made us see cities with fresh eyes and a growing understanding that they can provide us with an unparalleled measure of sustainability.

Ken Greenberg has not only advocated for the renewal of downtown cores, he has for thirty years designed the very means by which that renewal can happen. Walking Home is both Ken's story and a lesson in turning the world's urban spaces back into places that can give us not only a platform to face the challenges of the future, but also a place we can call, with pride and satisfaction, home.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

KEN GREENBERG is an architect and urban designer, living in Toronto. For over three decades he has played a pivotal role on public and private assignments in urban settings throughout North America and Europe, focusing on the rejuvenation of downtowns, waterfronts, neighbourhoods and university campuses from the scale of the city region to that of the city block. Cities as diverse as Toronto, Hartford, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, Montréal, Washington, DC, Paris, Detroit, Saint Paul and San Juan, Puerto Rico, have benefited from his advocacy and passion for restoring the vitality, relevance and sustainability of the public realm in urban life. A former Director of Urban Design and Architecture for the City of Toronto and Principal of Greenberg Consultants, he is the recipient of the 2010 American Institute of Architects Thomas Jefferson Award for public design excellence.

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My first and recurring experience of a city occurred at 1902 Avenue L off Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, where I was born in 1944 and where I returned to live twice in my youth. Many details of that place have long ago faded, but what remains with me is an enduring mental map of a small piece of the world that included nearby Avenue M, Avenue J, Kings Highway, the BMT subway (today the F Train), Coney Island, numerous neighbourhood streets, the playground that was the centre of my small universe and my school, P.S. 193.
 
My grandparents had an apartment on the third floor of a six-storey building, and many other family members lived in this neighbourhood of apartment buildings and private houses. Ours was basically a one-bedroom corner apartment with a very small extra room off the kitchen. When we moved in, my grandparents moved into that small room.
 
My younger sister, Laura, and I slept on the couches in the living room, and my parents took the bedroom. It was crowded and uncomfortable in many ways, but there were compensations in the world outside. I remember hanging out on the roof on summer evenings, collecting butterflies and bottle caps on the streets below with my closest friend, stretching the dining-room table into the living room (with several extensions) for family gatherings, watching Ed Sullivan on the small TV with my grandfather and vacuuming for my grandmother while the radio blared.
 
We moved in with my grandparents again when I was in second grade. My little universe, the one I could navigate on foot and explore on my own or with friends, was defined by a stretch of Avenue L between the park at E18th Street and my school at E25th Street, where my aunt was a teacher. I often walked home to have lunch with my grandmother. All ages shared the park and playground at E18th. It was well equipped with concrete tables for playing cards (mostly pinochle), handball and basketball courts, a wading pool (which doubled for intense games of dodge ball), swings, see-saws and slides. It even had a park house with a staff and sports equipment to borrow. I spent all my free time after school there. Down the block on Avenue M, my uncle’s father-inlaw had a candy store near the corner, and we shopped in all the small food stores between Ocean Avenue and the subway station, including my favourite, the bakery, where I was sent to buy fresh bread, bagels and bialys. There was also the unforgettable live-chicken market, with its cages, noise and smells, where I shopped with my grandmother.
 
This small universe would be lost to me when our family moved on in search of employment and a place of our own away from the “crowded” and “congested” city. But now, many decades later and looking back, I can see this neighbourhood had many characteristics that city dwellers now value. At the time, though, we either took them for granted or didn’t have the words now used to describe them—words like “compact,” “walkable,” “transit-oriented,” “dense,” “for all ages,” “mixed-use.” When I returned as an adult, I was surprised to find that, physically, it had changed very little except that the Yiddish signs on some of the stores had given way to Russian. I do recognize that part of my positive feeling for this time and place rests on the fact that at a very young age, I was able to venture around the neighbourhood alone or just with friends. Sadly, times have changed. Even if the streets were safer and more human in scale, today, many parents still wouldn’t be comfortable with that level of freedom for real or perceived safety reasons. To what degree that trend is reversible is a poignant and open question.
 
Like many others after World War II, my family was experiencing the great collective antsiness, the urge to move to the greener pastures that were opening up outside the city. I was vaguely aware of adult conversations about how the city was deteriorating, while exciting new places to live were opening up in Queens, Long Island, Westchester and points beyond. This was a time of social change, with new emphasis on the nuclear-family household, wondrous new labour-saving devices and, above all, the freedom of the car and the irresistible draw of new highways. I was just as swept up as anyone in the excitement of a Sunday drive on the recently opened Grand Central Parkway or to Jones Beach, all of us packing into my grandfather’s new DeSoto. With a move out of the city, came an assumption of quality, value and status.
 
We first moved as a family to Fresh Meadows in Queens, a brand-new development funded by New York Life Insurance, and then a year later to a similar development on Brush Creek Boulevard in Kansas City, Missouri. These post-war housing developments were full of returning GIs and their young families. With walk-up apartments and townhouses, these developments were like halfway houses on the way to suburbia. Small, bounded enclaves that weren’t exactly city anymore, they represented the beginnings of the pulling away, the sorting out of the city’s varied population into something more homogeneous and controlled.
 
I witnessed here the creation of a more specialized world, intended only for living, while everything else, like working, happened in some other location. These new, surburban-style neighbourhoods featured their own parking lots, and leaving them usually meant getting in the car. At first, they were actually hybrids, still within the city fabric. However, as they progressively turned inward, their connections to surrounding streets and neighbourhoods started to disappear and their edges grew sterile. The layout of these projects began to reveal what I now recognize as early modernist urban planning (which I’ll come to shortly): “super blocks” with many old streets removed and buildings set well back from the sidewalks of the remaining streets but at different distances, so they appeared to zigzag creating a “sawtooth” effect. There was also one small supermarket, where the parking lot replaced the local shopping street as the main community focus. All the same, this place of business was still far more modest than today’s super-sized versions. The area inside the project was still walkable, but there was none of the variety found in my Brooklyn neighbourhood, and the traffic rivers on its edges were getting wider and faster. It fascinates me to look back at this development formula. As we now try to create less cardependent “urban places” within suburban settings, we sometimes cross paths with this earlier transitional stage, though we’re going in the other direction.
 
In 1954, we finally moved to real suburbia, to our own single-family house on Beacon Street in Newton, Massachusetts. Our neighbourhood was just inside the rapidly changing edge of older neighbourhoods where Route 128 had just been built, ringing Boston on the border between countryside and city. This place was closer to the suburban pastoral ideal. Waban Village Center on the commuter line (now the Green Line of the “T”) was a short distance away, providing a quick train ride into downtown Boston. At the same time this was one of a scattering of historic or historically inspired “urban villages” close to the countryside. There was still the smell of real farmland, collecting tadpoles and fishing in creeks and ponds was within my reach. But the landscape was changing rapidly, and in a short time the nearby countryside would fill in around us with newer suburbs.
 
Then, in 1958, an unexpected break took place in my family’s migratory pattern. My father had accepted an offer for a two-year assignment in Geneva, Switzerland.
 
We moved into a relatively...

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Verlag
Random House of Canada
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307358151
ISBN 13 
9780307358158
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

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