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Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities (The City in the Twenty-first Century) - Softcover

Buch 17 von 53: The City in the Twenty-First Century

Ryan, Brent D.

 
9780812223040: Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities (The City in the Twenty-first Century)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812223047 ISBN 13: 9780812223040
Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Almost fifty years ago, America's industrial cities—Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, and others—began shedding people and jobs. Today they are littered with tens of thousands of abandoned houses, shuttered factories, and vacant lots. With population and housing losses continuing in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis, the future of neighborhoods in these places is precarious. How we will rebuild shrinking cities and what urban design vision will guide their future remain contentious and unknown.

In Design After Decline, Brent D. Ryan reveals the fraught and intermittently successful efforts of architects, planners, and city officials to rebuild shrinking cities following mid-century urban renewal. With modern architecture in disrepute, federal funds scarce, and architects and planners disengaged, politicians and developers were left to pick up the pieces. In twin narratives, Ryan describes how America's two largest shrinking cities, Detroit and Philadelphia, faced the challenge of design after decline in dramatically different ways. While Detroit allowed developers to carve up the cityscape into suburban enclaves, Philadelphia brought back 1960s-style land condemnation for benevolent social purposes. Both Detroit and Philadelphia "succeeded" in rebuilding but at the cost of innovative urban design and planning.

Ryan proposes that the unprecedented crisis facing these cities today requires a revival of the visionary thinking found in the best modernist urban design, tempered with the lessons gained from post-1960s community planning. Depicting the ideal shrinking city as a shifting patchwork of open and settled areas, Ryan concludes that accepting the inevitable decline and abandonment of some neighborhoods, while rebuilding others as new neighborhoods with innovative design and planning, can reignite modernism's spirit of optimism and shape a brighter future for shrinking cities and their residents.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brent D. Ryan is Associate Professor of Urban Design and Public Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Preface

In the summer of 1993, on break from architecture school, I paid a visit to friends in the city of Detroit. I knew of Detroit's fearsome reputation, and the city's vacant lots, burned-out homes, and bleak, empty skyscrapers confirmed Detroit as the paradigm of urban blight. The sense of emptiness was overpowering; I was shocked to see that even the city's train station, designed by Warren and Wetmore at the same time as their Grand Central Terminal, had been left open to the winds of fate. Entering the station's burned-out, rubble-strewn great hall early one morning, I felt as if I was walking into the ruin of America. To me, Detroit was a half-dead declaration that the decades-long attempt to rebuild what were then known as "declining" American cities had utterly failed. What place was there for optimism in such a landscape?

As I researched cities further, I discovered that optimism did exist in Detroit and other Rust Belt cities such as Philadelphia and Cleveland: new housing was being constructed in small quantities, some commercial areas were thriving, and downtowns still attracted visitors for sports, conventions, and tourism. But my overall sense of disappointment was scarcely allayed by the scattered new neighborhood developments that I saw in declining cities. Many of them seemed to imitate suburban developments, complete with iconic culs-de-sac. In the late 1990s public housing towers began to disappear, replaced by townhouse communities allegedly modeled on the historic city but to me more reminiscent of suburban condominiums. The overall effect of these "revitalization" efforts struck me as not only formally unadventurous but sadly underscaled against the evident abandonment of declining cities. Was no one else noticing North Philadelphia and Detroit, I wondered? Why weren't we doing anything about these places?

I was well aware that older American cities had gone through a substantial rebuilding process only a few decades earlier, during the heyday of Modern architecture. My hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, was littered with the concrete and steel remnants of such efforts—an unfinished highway, a gargantuan arena, and lots and lots of empty land marked the results of the last time urban planners had tried to "save" the city. New Haven showed that the death of these so-called "urban renewal" policies had not been such a bad thing for the city—the brutal clearance of city neighborhoods ended, as did the construction of alienating buildings such as Roche and Dinkeloo's Knights of Columbus tower. At least the federal government was no longer subsidizing the dislocation of urban residents, and cities were no longer celebrating their own "sacking," as Jane Jacobs (1961, 4) had trenchantly put it. Architects were mostly building their large-scale work in the suburbs or on other continents, and many urban-renewal-era Modernists like Paul Rudolph had finished out their careers overseas in tremendous style. As I learned more about urban planning I saw that planners too had abandoned the notion of utopia; rather than projecting new visions, they sought to patch, support, and assist the modest but sincere visions espoused by city dwellers. In places like Boston, with a robust economy and substantial historical urban fabric, this postrenewal approach seemed to be working well.

But what about shrinking cities like Detroit? As far as I could see, not much at all was happening to help the Motor City, or the depressed areas of a half-dozen other large declining cities that I came to know well: Cleveland, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Chicago's south and west sides. The overwhelming modesty of these cities' 1990s rebuilding lacked Modernism's arrogance, but these projects also seemed to say that the future of shrinking cities was now the single-family detached home, perhaps constructed by a small nonprofit organization and housing a fortunate low-income family. Social planners celebrated this "community-based" rebuilding, but the tools and scope of this rebuilding, as far as I could see, were limited to the generic models provided by the suburban building industry and to the feeble funding still being provided by the federal government. If this constituted a victory over urban renewal, it seemed a pretty hollow one, for most shrinking-city neighborhoods were being abandoned, not reconstructed.

Unlike Jane Jacobs's "attack on current city planning and rebuilding" (1961, 3) in the Death and Life of Great American Cities, I found it hard to blame an obvious actor for the parlous condition of America's shrinking cities. The "master planners" of the 1960s were retired, large-scale neighborhood clearance was no longer occurring, architects were not building anything substantial outside of downtown facilities, planners claimed to represent the people, and city politicians all claimed to want to help their cities. It was clear that the failure I was witnessing, if one even perceived this urban shrinkage as failure, was a collective one, attributable to the entirety of actors responsible for rebuilding deteriorated, low-income, depressed areas of cities. There was no single actor to blame. The federal government mostly left cities to their own devices through decentralized funding mechanisms such as block grants; public-private coalitions worked hard to activate cities, but they focused on places like downtowns where developers could make money; nonprofit corporations struggled to generate and sustain modest amounts of housing; urban designers, where they even existed, were regulators more than they were builders.

But where cities like Boston and San Francisco were evidently on the way back from decline as early as the 1980s, it was equally clear that the departure of urban renewal had left shrinking cities like Detroit and Philadelphia adrift. The professional, political, aesthetic, and theoretical unity that had motivated Modernism had withered away, and in its place was a growing desolation, filled haphazardly and modestly by rebuilding strategies that were mostly not formal strategies, by planning departments that had lost the ability to plan; by real estate developers who quite sensibly wished to maximize profits; and by communities, most of them racial minorities, that sensed the scale of their problems but that had a collective memory of urban renewal and feared insensitive outside interference. Amid a narrative of urban revitalization success stories, I suspected that I was also witnessing the concealment of failure, for no one could convince me that a place like Camden, New Jersey, represented a policy or design success.

This book is my effort to better understand and explain what I saw happening in America's shrinking cities in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. My central argument is that the end of urban renewal in the mid-1970s brought both a sense of relief and a sense of disillusionment: relief, because urban renewal projects like the federally sponsored Cedar-Riverside New Town In-Town in Minneapolis treated existing neighborhoods with great brutality; and disillusionment because these developments also projected a vision of the future that was nothing if not optimistic. The late-1970s projects that followed them, such as Charlotte Gardens in the South Bronx, possessed neither this brutality nor any of this optimism. Instead, these projects set a tone of small-scale, incremental rebuilding that would continue, at least in city neighborhoods in the United States, for the next thirty years. From this sequence of events emerged a narrative of brutal Modernist urban renewal, and of restorative contextual design, that remains in force today. But I suggest that this argument elides an alternative narrative in which Modernist urban renewal, recovering from the insensitivity of the 1960s, reformed almost exactly at the same time as the federal...

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Verlag
UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812223047
ISBN 13 
9780812223040
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
261
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Verantwortliche Person
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