Urbanized Page #4

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because not only have you lost

holding the street wall here,

you now have a building that is

very out of scale

with the Brooklyn Academy of Music

historical building.

We can't actually design

the architecture,

we can't design the storefront,

but at least we can set up

these basic parameters

that give you the best possibility

that this will be a great street.

Our plans have really redrawn

the entire land use blueprint

of the city.

Because we have to grow by

over a million people.

And our plans have therefore been

as ambitious as those of Robert Moses.

But we really judge ourselves by

Jane Jacobs' standards.

Robert Moses was

"the master builder."

He planned looking at the

city from above

and his highway building destroyed

entire neighborhoods.

He cutoff our entire island

of Manhattan

from the waterfront by building

highways down the edges.

His impact was profound

and his insensitivity was legendary

to the texture of the city.

His downfall came at the same time as

the rise of Jane Jacobs.

Jane Jacobs was a journalist,

she was not trained as a professional

architect or planner.

In the early '60s, there was a plan

to put through some major highways that

would have knocked down

most of Greenwich Village, which

was her neighborhood.

And she began to write about what

she thought the planners

really weren't seeing

and understanding.

They were looking at problems

from the 30,000 feet height,

and she was really looking at it

from the perspective of someone

living there on the street.

She was really the first voice

who came out and argued that

these aren't just these old,

overcrowded,

small, chopped up little spaces.

Instead, there is an incredibly rich

social structure here

that actually works incredibly well.

Communities had a mix of uses.

You had people living there,

working there, you had shops.

She talked about the importance

of having "eyes on the street".

Of people who know each other

and make the street a more safer

and comfortable place.

What Jane Jacobs was able to describe,

I think incredibly accurately,

is there's something about the DNA

of cities and the relationship between

physical space and social fabric.

She recognized that the minute

you put people into a housing block

you lose the fundamental social

infrastructure

which makes community possible.

So schools,

where people meet informally.

They weren't necessarily close

to where people were living.

So much effort and interest went into

creating the house unit,

that little attention went into,

well what happens on the outside?

Where do kids play? Where do mothers

look at their kids playing?

Jane Jacobs recognized the difference

between people

and different activities

pushed together is what a city

is about at its best.

She attributed most of these problems

to the loss of the heart of the city.

That as people move out of the city,

the sense of the civic center

is really being lost.

From the beginning of recorded time,

there's been this vacillation

between the desirability of living

in the periphery of the city,

and living in the center.

After WWII, suddenly we began

a pattern of development that was

absolutely based on suburbanization.

Getting out into the suburbs,

with a car,

was considered

a tremendous step up

from what at the time was perceived

as overcrowding in the cities.

The American Dream

was home ownership

and one's own little piece of dirt.

Defining sprawl is a little bit

like defining pornography.

You know it when you see it.

There is no consensus on any one

single definition of sprawl.

But as the basic process of

suburbanization has been continuing,

we've been getting more and more

of these massive developments,

by large home builders,

where every house is the cookie cutter

looking exactly the same.

Multiply that by having chain

store retail

where every single big box store

looks exactly the same.

More and more cars,

that require us to drive

much longer distances.

That's when people really start

saying, "This is now sprawl.

This is not just suburbia."

The main negative of sprawl,

as it is used

as a pejorative term to me,

is it spreads everyone out over

a larger area of land,

and eats up the bucolic,

rural villages of Vermont,

by overrunning them with subdivisions

and that...

that would be a better lifestyle

to preserve.

So there's a perception, if you

listen to NPR, that...

sprawl is always bad, and Phoenix is a

poster child for bad sprawl.

But Phoenix is not a city where we're

taking a high-density population

and redistributing it at a low density.

We're building at the same density

we've always lived at.

Nor are we overrunning rural,

pastoral landscapes.

Now, we are eating up desert.

And the desert is really beautiful

here and really important.

And we've tried to learn a better

way to develop in the desert.

But I don't think this is a poster

child for sprawl.

This is a poster child

for an automobile oriented,

post-war urban fabric.

This is what you get.

You're not buying "sprawl

is always bad

and density is always good"?

No, you know, here's the deal.

Let's be honest.

I live on a 3/4 acre lot

and I like my backyard

and I like my swimming pool.

And I think living in a condo

would be cute and interesting,

and I'd like to do it about

two months out of the year,

but I like the way I live.

That's really what it's all about,

at the end of the day.

While I have my preferences

of where I want to live,

I certainly would never tell anybody

mine is right choice and everyone else

has made the wrong choice.

But I do think especially

with the environmental crisis

and issues of climate change,

that we do as a society

have to begin to decide

whether some of these choices

come with additional costs.

It's certainly not about eliminating

the suburbs.

But we need a different vision,

with walkable, compact,

connected communities.

Cities are extremely dynamic organisms.

Throughout the history of the world

we've watched cities that bloomed

and then collapsed.

And similarly we see now amongst our

cities and our suburbs,

some of them are growing

and still booming

and more and more people

want to live there,

and others are shrinking.

Detroit was once two million people.

And a metropolitan area that really was

the center of industrial production,

not just in the United States,

but in the world.

The city has shrunk back

to about 700,000 people.

It's a city of 138 square miles.

You could fit Boston, San Francisco,

and Atlanta inside the boundaries

of the city of Detroit.

It's that big.

So when you have 700,000 people as

opposed to two million people,

you've got to scale back to your

neighborhoods and your areas

where there is concentration,

where there is this livability

and urbanity.

My grandmother bought the

house we're in in 1969.

When I was a kid it was like

a village, you know?

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