Urbanism

There are different arguments to be made about raising the height limit on buildings in the District of Columbia, but both Representative Darrell Issa and New York Times reporter Rebecca Berg are mistaken when they describe the original decision to set height limits as “arbitrary.” Before the Building Heights Act of 1899 was passed, Congress sent a commission to Europe to study height limits in cities such as London (80 feet), and Paris, Berlin, and Vienna (64 feet), and to also look at American cities, most of which had height limits (New York and Philadelphia were two exceptions).

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The opening of the new Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia has caused some locals to tout the creation of a “museum mile” along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, with the Philadelphia Museum of Art at one end, the Franklin Institute at the other, and the Barnes and the Rodin Museum in-between. Ever since the City Beautiful movement proposed creating grand civic centers, the idea of clustering urban functions has gained traction. But it only makes sense in selective cases. Grouping theaters, which tend to be open at night, supports pre- and post theater restaurants (as in Broadway and the West End); grouping stores allows shoppers to do errands conveniently.

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Park Circle, a neighborhood in North Charleston, SC, was originally laid out according to British garden city principles in the early 1900s. Since then, the adjacent naval shipyard has closed, and the grand vision has not quite come to fruition. But Park Circle is only ten miles from downtown Charleston, and it caught local developer Vince Graham’s eye. He had completed the successful planned community of I’On in nearby Mt.Pleasant, and this seemed like another opportunity to apply the principles of density, walkability and  mixed-use. The development, which he called Mixson, after one of the original city’s founders,

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Jim Yardley has an excellent story in the New York Times on Dharavi, a large Bombay slum. It is not clear exactly how many people live in Dharavi—probably no one is quite sure—but it is reported that there are estimated to be 60,000 dwellings, but since a slum household can be anything from 2 to 20 persons, that is not much help. What is sure is that the slum, while lacking basic infrastructure is a hive of activity. One resident entrepreneur estimates Dharavi’s annual economic output is between $600 million and $1 billion. When I was researching slums for a Canadian aid project,

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More than half of the world’s population is now urban, a famous factoid. City boosters tend to play fast and loose with this statistic, as if it represents the triumph of the city, and more than half of the world’s population now lives in a combination of Manhattan and Singapore. Of  course, they don’t. The majority of urban Americans either live in suburbs, or in new cities–Phoenix, Seattle, Houston–whose character is distinctly suburban. Nevertheless, Richard Florida’s article in the October issue of the Atlantic segues from global urbanization to the virtues of density, closeness, and human interaction in concentrated cities.

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On a recent visit to Charleston, a local complained to me that the city was in danger of becoming New Orleans, that is, a playground city. The tiny historic peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, whose resident population below the Crosstown Expressway is about 20,000, is inundated with tourists (an average of about 12,000 per day), and day-visitors from mammoth cruise ships. Many of the homeowners are absentee landlords for whom the charming place is merely an occasional pied-à-terre. But New Orleans has a gritty decadence that prim Charleston lacks. If I were living in Charleston, I would cast a wary eye on Venice,

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Most cities have a vertical business district surrounded by lower residential neighborhoods. Not Vancouver, British Columbia, which has relatively few office buildings but scores of densely packed, extremely slim high-rise apartments. It creates the appearance of an Asian city, not North American at all. In part, this is because so many of the apartment dwellers—or at least owners—are from Hong Kong and mainland China, and are accustomed to vertical living. (It has been estimated that as many as sixty percent of new apartments are owned by non-resident investors.) Windows look out at each other, twenty feet apart.

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We’re in Ghent for a 10-day holiday. The old part of the city is crowded with bicycles, cars, trams and pedestrians. There don’t seem to be many rules. The trams have precedence, otherwise there is an uneasy but generally polite truce between everyone else. This is also true of the architecture. The streetscape is a mixture of medieval stepped-gable houses, Baroque and Classical residences, Gothic churches, and Art Deco public buildings. Perhaps Camillo Sitte could make sense of it; I can’t. It’s just all jumbled together in a pleasant oleo. I suppose there is a historical commission here,

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