Towards a New Urban Philosophy

TOWARDS A NEW URBAN PHILOSOPHY. Nikos A. Salingaros. Originally published in two parts as “City of Chaos” in Greekworks.com (May & June 2004). Revised version is Chapter 20 of Shifting Sense – Looking Back to the Future in Spatial Planning, edited by Edward Hulsbergen, Ina Klaasen & Iwan Kriens (Techne Press, Amsterdam, 2005), pages 265-280. This is a condensed version of the original. Suggestions towards finding a solution. This paper presents some ideas on how to fix the disasters in European urban planning and design — how to repair Europe’s damaged urban fabric by locating the causes. Governments have made tremendous efforts to implement solutions to problems that were obvious to everyone. Unfortunately, these solutions only exacerbate the situation, for reasons I will discuss. Urbanist ideas have been applied since the 1930s that contribute to the deplorable state of urban life in many European cities. Time and again, politicians are seduced into constructing showcase projects that boast an alien, “contemporary” look. Finally, another theme to be discussed is the intimate link between bad urban planning and ecological disaster in the contemporary world. I will focus attention on the period following World War II, which is characterized by a strong negation of architectural and urbanist principles. All European countries suffered from misapplied architecture and urbanism in the postwar period. I am extremely proud to be a contributor to the New Charter of Athens, 2003 (ECTP, 2003), which is shamefully unknown to most government planners in Europe. They continue to work on the basis of the discredited 1933 Charter of Athens written by Le Corbusier. The European Council of Town Planners decided in 1995 that the effects of applying the 1933 Athens charter were so disastrous for European cities that it had to prepare a new one. A draft was approved in Athens in 1998, and, after more revisions, the new Athens charter of 2003 was presented in Lisbon (not in Athens, because the Greek government then in power did not give its full support — and this at a time when it was funding “fashionable” architectural and urban projects). The new Athens charter presents an enlightened urbanism for the new millennium founded upon the following principles, an approach that: A) accommodates people’s needs and social forces; 1 B) understands the fundamental role of connective networks; C) promotes the principle of mixed use of buildings; D) respects irreplaceable elements of the past; E) tries to integrate the built and natural elements of the environment. This vision considers spatial urban form as complementary to urban connections and movement, and gives priority to understanding their interdependence. It also emphasizes monitoring dynamic changes in a living city so as to catch potential problems before they become entrenched. The erroneous and untested ideas presented in the 1933 charter were primarily responsible for ruining cities around the world (Salingaros, 2005). The 1933 charter’s main purpose was to erase pedestrian urban life as defined on vibrant city streets in prewar European capitals. Its ideas are an expression of megalomania and disdain for the individual. Everyone knows the seductive images of skyscrapers sitting in vast parks that come from the 1933 charter (along with the strict segregation of uses). I should mention that several generations of urbanists have been taught the principles of the 1933 charter as religious dogma, which is the reason they continue to apply them. At this moment, the Far East is fast destroying itself by following that poleoctonic (urbanicidal) model. What we are dealing with here is a universal notion of isolation that extends over all scales. Anti-urbanist interventions cut human connections. High-tech architectural fantasies cut people off physically and emotionally from surfaces, from the social network, and from the built environment in general. We cannot solve the present crisis until we acknowledge that the architecture and urbanism of the twentieth century had as its principal goal the isolation of people, from buildings and from each other. That admission necessitates the even more difficult acknowledgment that the idols of modernism were false gods, and that several generations of planners and politicians were deceived into destroying our cities by applying inappropriate urban principles. 28 elements for a new approach to urbanism. We now face an urban Europe partially destroyed, perhaps more so than after the Second World War, because its population is so much greater today. Then, we were confronted with an expanse of ruins; today we look upon inhuman city cores surrounded by a suburban cancer eating into the countryside. The cities (and countryside) require a radical reorientation if they are to survive in urban terms. I do not advocate radical topdown intrusions, since these work only in select circumstances. The best way to save European urbanism is to promote a correct urban philosophy, and to help people save their own cities with the government’s encouragement and backing. This solution is independent of political orientation; I see no obstacle to its being embraced by all political parties. We cannot move forward unless we recognize, and get out from under, the ideology of the old 1933 model responsible for the destruction of urban landscapes. What I offer is merely an outline rather than a full analysis. It needs to be filled in with considerably more detail and specific examples, which I leave to others. It is incredible that, for the most part, many European urbanists either do not know or choose to ignore 2 the works of Christopher Alexander (Alexander, 2001-2005; Alexander et. al., 1977) and Léon Krier (Krier, 1998), today’s leading urban theorists. Let me outline some elements of this new approach: the following list can be used as a rough guide for developing more specific urban rules that better adapt to context. 1. Urban components should follow the universal distribution of sizes: many small buildings, structures, streets, sidewalks, and parks; a medium number of intermediate size; and only a few of large size Figure 1. 2. Since the smallest urban components commensurate to the size of a human being are the most vulnerable, they must be rigorously protected from encroachment by the larger urban elements. 3. The majority of buildings ought to be mixed-use, combining different functions. This could be implemented by legislation or promoted by tax subsidies. 4. A “neighborhood” is defined by its geography as a compact region where each point is no more than a 15-minute walk from any other point. Major impediments to pedestrians, such as highways, giant parking lots, or impassable barriers, have to be situated on the periphery (or otherwise raised or buried). 5. Zoning regulations should encourage every neighborhood to be mixed-use. I am now talking of an area with buildings of different uses, in rather close proximity (distinct from, and in addition to, mixed use in a single building). 6. Central city areas that are vacant at night will be populated during that time by other, weaker segments of the population. This is a natural phenomenon, in which an urban void is filled by available non-residents. People should be able to use urban regions at times when those are empty; but if these are left only to marginal elements of the population and the underclass, then that region becomes dangerous. 3 7. Urban life occurs on the surface (sidewalk) level. This domain contains pedestrian activities, and has to be protected from stronger urban elements. It is also where links to other forms of transport must originate. 8. Building fronts must act as connecting interfaces between private and public space, not as barriers. The more permeable the interface, the more intense the street life it can support. 9. Walls that are not perforated should instead be wavy and folded like a curtain, to provide a greater surface area for pedestrian nodes and interactions. Smooth, flat walls are essentially anti-urban. 10. Built elements provide the boundaries of urban space. The goal is to define a semienclosed outdoor space by arranging the buildings, and avoid buildings that stand apart. Vast, open spaces are not urban spaces. Figure 2. 11. If two distinct, vertically separated levels of pedestrian activity exist, either one will kill off the other, or both will be weakened. 12. When competing urban functions must be separated vertically because of density or danger, the pedestrian function has to occupy the ground level. 13. There is no sense in having strictly pedestrian areas larger than about 50 meters. It is essential, however, to protect primarily pedestrian areas from adjoining traffic by using physical structures such as high sidewalks, low walls, and bollards. 4 Figure 3. 14. A city, like the human body, works through network flow. Connect points within every neighborhood by alternative means of transport: pedestrian, private car, taxi, tram (if existent), and local buses (privately run jitneys or minibuses as well as public buses). Transport has to integrate into a linked set of networks, each working on a distinct scale and speed and requiring different infrastructures. 15. The city consists of interconnected modes of transport, made possible by permeable interfaces that allow one type of traffic to flow across while blocking another type. Figure 4. 16. Physically incompatible forms of transport, such as highways, the subway, and trains, should be located on a neighborhood’s periphery or be vertically separated from pedestrians, trams, and small local buses — which is necessarily expensive. 17. However, it is infinitely more expensive (because it destroys society and culture) to sacrifice the ground-floor pedestrian urban realm to automobile circulation, parking, and other transport. Cars and trucks, if allowed, will occupy every available surface space. Pedestrians must be PHYSICALLY and PSYCHOLOGICALLY protected while closely interfacing with moving and parked vehicles. 5 18. Neighborhoods within the metropolis have to repave local roads so as to REDUCE traffic speed, thus making it possible to extend human life onto the street. Excellent solutions have been given by the Dutch in their woonerven, which are vehicular streets accommodating both pedestrians and cars. Figure 5. 19. Where transportation paths cross, the weaker link must be protected against the stronger. This necessitates defining pedestrian paths across a street, giving a visual cue and also providing a physical barrier that slows down vehicular traffic. 20. Primarily pedestrian areas (such as sidewalks lined with stores and apartments) have to be fed by transport such as cars and buses; otherwise, they will die off. That requires slowing traffic and making sufficient parking available nearby. The pedestrian urban element must be accessible to all transport networks. 6 Figure 6. 21. Parking in the dense urban core can only be accommodated by underground garages or vertical stacking, so that it doesn’t encroach onto the ground-floor pedestrian realm. Multilevel parking garages ought to devote their ground floors to commercial use. 22. Neighborhoods need to be connected to each other by multiple transport, including cars, long-range buses, trams, subways, and trains. While the priority here is on nonpedestrian connections because of the larger scale, there must be at least one protected pedestrian connection between any two neighborhoods. 23. The government has to invest in creating crossover points between different transport types to make all these competing transport possible, and to ensure their seamless interconnection. 24. The city naturally divides into the car web surrounding and feeding pedestrian sidewalks and squares. The enclosed areas give priority to pedestrians, while being crisscrossed by cars constrained to specific paths. Cars are intentionally slowed down within a primarily pedestrian area, but are not excluded. Occasional access to all points in pedestrian areas for delivery and emergency vehicles must be guaranteed not by a wide road, but by a road surface that gives priority to pedestrians: vehicles should be allowed ACCESS, not SPEED. 25. The car web contains all those functions that optimize fast automobile traffic, but are essentially hostile to human beings, including wide roads that connect non-pedestrian nodes such as heavy industry, military installations, warehouses, giant parking lots, car dealerships, garages and gasoline stations, among others. 26. The present trend to locate office buildings as isolated nodes in the car web must be reversed by tax incentives, so that offices can relocate within the pedestrian urban element. Isolating nodes that contain many people makes sense only if their activities conflict with residential and other uses, for they create a dangerous dependence on cars. 27. Using tax subsidies, light industry must be encouraged to relocate within mixed-use regions. Only heavy industry should be isolated from the city. 28. Skyscrapers (buildings higher than 10 stories) are not cost-effective, and they burden a city’s infrastructure and transportation resources in a wide region around themselves. A city can only afford to support a very small number of skyscrapers for vanity purposes. 7 Figure 7. The above propositions come from the work of Christopher Alexander (Alexander, 2001-2005; Alexander et. al., 1977) and Léon Krier (Krier, 1998), as well as from my own studies (Salingaros, 2005). The three of us, drawing on work by others, are putting together a picture of the living city that can be used as a model for all future urban development. I have tried to orient the present essay toward the problems of the European city; yet most of these urban principles are, in fact, universally applicable. Joel Crawford (Crawford, 2000), Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck (Duany, Plater-Zyberk & Speck, 2000) and David Sucher (Sucher, 2003) from the United States, Josep Oliva from Barcelona (Oliva i Casas, 2001), and Jan Gehl (Gehl, 1996) from Denmark have all published books of sensible advice on how to reconnect the urban fabric. The ecological dimension. A radically new urban philosophy can emerge from these suggestions. It is but a small step in the direction I am proposing to bring the natural environment into the picture. This way of looking at the built environment gives priority to human beings and small-scale structures. It represents a drastic reversal of twentieth-century urbanism, which emphasized the large scale and ignored the individual. An urbanism that destroys the small scale and treats human beings as expendable objects will never respect the natural world. On the contrary, it is an expression of human arrogance regarding nature. A new urbanism, which respects our sensibilities in the built environment, would also appreciate our natural environment (Roaf, 2005). Once we begin to salvage the old, and now mostly lost, regions of our cities, we can also begin to appreciate the living elements within those cities. A tree grows naturally next to a low, crooked wall, and within a courtyard. A wide, uneven sidewalk has space to accommodate trees. An archeologically open space provides a habitat for some urban (if only avian) wildlife. This is more a philosophy of nature and of the earth than a conscious approach to urbanism. In any event, an urbanism that is modest and respects human sensibilities will also respect the natural environment; it goes hand in hand with a modest architecture of human proportions and textures. The alien look of polished metal, glass façades, and smooth, windowless walls breeds an intolerance for living things precisely because it represents the opposite properties. I am looking to the future, when we will use scientific knowledge about complex systems and their interactions to better plan our cities. Critics of such ideas dismiss them as nostalgic, belonging to the past. That is not accurate. What I propose has a striking commonality with some aspects of traditional urbanism, which accommodates human beings and not machines or abstract geometric forms. Those critics are stuck in an obscurantist mindset of inherited urbanist dogma. To them, any revolutionary proposal for progress threatens their own false promise of a “progress” possible only through modernist principles. Those principles are the same failed ideas of the 1920s, recycled 8 over and again. Each time, cities and nations are promised that they will work now, and that their previous applications were sabotaged by factors “beyond” their planners’ control. Like a pathogen, modernist urbanism is easily recognizable once one knows what signs to look for. Some of its principal characteristics are: A) monolithic buildings and vast open spaces; B) geometrical alignment to arbitrary rectangular axes; C) the elimination of the intermediate and smaller scales; D) insistence on industrial materials; E) insistence on the “purity” of form and surfaces. This attitude goes hand in hand with an intolerance of whatever helps to reinforce the urban fabric, such as pedestrian spaces, semi-enclosed urban spaces, permeable interfaces, folded urban boundaries, remnants of the past, modestly-sized structures, street furniture, and anything that “clutters” an empty minimalist geometry. Most telling is a static mindset that deceives anyone considering modernist solutions that look neatly regular on paper. Nevertheless, a dynamic city constantly evolves because of urban forces, much like any ecosystem. Only those persons who are supremely arrogant assume that they can impose static geometric solutions, and that people will follow them exactly without eventual change. The same foolish assumption is made about materials: architects erect smooth, flat walls and complain that they stain and weather badly. They have never understood how materials age, nor how urban structure evolves in time. (Modernist architecture is a geometrical abstraction constructed out of high-tech materials that does not lend itself to any modification or growth with the passing of time; its geometry is closed and does not accept additions, contrary to traditional geometries that evolve historically to adapt to the needs of families and society). Modernist prescriptions destroy cities by reversing hierarchies of connectivity. They remove organized structure and differentiation from the human scale. At the same time, they eliminate connective paths within human reach, which weakens even a society’s internal connections. The end result displays an artificial, mechanical movement reinforced by monofunctional zoning as services have to be forced into over-concentrated downtown office nodes. Human beings need both structures and paths on the human scale — an obvious biological fact that has escaped modernist planners. Further, as in an ecological system, when certain levels of life are missing, they are replaced by organisms from nearby strata. This has led to many downtown areas being occupied, after hours, by homeless persons and/or petty criminals. It is not the fault of these marginalized segments of the population; there are just no socially healthier elements willing to occupy that hostile niche in the urban ecosystem. Wherever there exists an empty niche in the urban ecology, it will be occupied by those who need the living space. 9 A new generation of urbanists. A separate but subtler danger comes from postmodernist architects who appreciate correct urbanist principles, but misuse them to promote their own alien buildings. These people (some of whom occupy positions of great power and influence in the architectural community) are promoting good cities with faulty pieces. What they would have us build is similar to some northern European “new towns”, where all the right urban connections are present, yet the towns are still dead because the architecture is alienating on a human scale. We have here high-tech parasites of the living urban fabric. To add insult to injury, some postmodernist urbanists have appropriated the terms “ecological” and “sustainable” to denote energy-saving buildings that are entirely alien to humanity. Up close, such buildings resemble a space station — as far removed from nature as can be imagined. Nevertheless, municipalities and national governments have been duped into spending money to build high-tech monstrosities out of extremely expensive materials simply because their architects add some solar panels to them or use elementary concepts of recycling and insulation. It is a mark of public gullibility that buildings have ignored such fundamental ecological concerns for so long that they can now be promoted as “innovative” (Roaf, 2005). Just like their modernist predecessors, these architects deceive us with flashy and seductive images of industrial materials. Some of these prominent architects are now destroying China’s centuries-old sustainable urban fabric, replacing it with an unsustainable nightmare of concrete, glass, and steel. This will guarantee gasoline dependence and urban congestion for generations. One would think that these planners are employed by transnational oil companies to stake out profits for at least a century, but no. They have been invited, and are paid, by the Chinese government to “renew” its cities. The damage they are doing, however, far surpasses that of the combined Mongolian invasions. I mention this only as a warning to other governments, which has been jealously looking to bring these same fashionable people to wreak havoc in their own countries. The new generation of urbanists encompasses several diverse groups: those who wrote the New Charter of Athens 2003; the neo-traditionalists inspired by Prince Charles (Charles, Prince of Wales, 1989); those who cling stubbornly to the old modernist dogmas; and promoters of the network city (which includes me and others who propose radical solutions based on technology). Some of these persons understand how a city works, while others only think they do. Some have a good understanding of urban processes on a particular scale, but grasp neither other scales nor their need to integrate into one another. Others are impostors, plain and simple. Urbanism is an easy field in which to make wild new proposals without having to prove their effectiveness. Sociologists keep the old dogmas alive. One is hard-pressed to explain postwar urban destruction on such a massive scale, implemented by governments using all their power and resources. This anti-urban movement (disguised as progress) continues unabated, while the few voices proposing a humane urbanism are ignored by the entrenched circles of power. Sustainable urban 10 models exist today, promoted by architects and thinkers who truly understand urban and social forces. We have adaptive solutions in our hands. It only remains to convince industry and governments to adopt them. That is not happening, and the reasons are principally ideological. Even though new urbanist visions are cheaper and more effective in the long run, the madness now being pursued is supported by a fundamental belief system. Certain authors on the political left continue to cling to the dogma that technology can “liberate” human beings from their own humanity; and that the gifts of the future are denied to those who connect to nature. The solutions offered are the same unworkable utopian dreams that in the past led to totalitarian interventions. Supposedly, the State knows all, whereas individuals are ready to betray progress so as to satisfy a sentimental desire for comfort. A successful deception has been maintained for several decades: claiming that urbanism lies primarily in the domain of sociology. Not only are the geometrical foundations of urbanism ignored; but people don’t even consider the possibility that urban structure has its own mathematical basis. When politicians seek advice on urban issues, they invariably turn to sociologist-urbanists, who offer the solutions we see implemented today. Why are sociologists complicit in this destructive act? I believe the answer lies in the original fascination the political left had with technology as a way of shaping society. Both Soviet Marxists and National Socialists were mesmerized by visions of skyscrapers, freeways, and centrally-planned industrial cities; i.e., all the paraphernalia of modernist urbanism. Today’s politicians, regardless of their political orientation, continue to be beholden to the same “experts”, who promise them quick technological fixes. The old images of shiny industrial objects have not lost their seductive qualities. International conferences planning the future of cities, on globalization, economic advantages, etc. still invite people to present the latest untried utopian conjectures, in a direct parallel to the old modernist dogma from the 1933 Athens Charter. Its propagandists have now cleverly repackaged the original message using new buzzwords such as “hypergrowth strategy”, “mega-projects”, “diversity”, “networks”, and “sustainability”. These words are unfortunately misused to promote an anti-urban agenda of skyscrapers and a dreary industrialized landscape. Truly innovative urbanists have been pushed to the sidelines by the false accusation that urban solutions based on real human needs are backward looking, and are furthermore politically conservative. New urbanists are condemned, along with their human-scaled proposals, as being outdated and reactionary. New urbanists who happen to be on the left, on the other hand, are dismissed as “anarchists”. This brilliant propaganda ploy has preserved the power and income of a handful of wily individuals. As a result, no politician dares to risk his or her public image as a “progressive” by sponsoring any traditional-looking urban project (that is, resembling pre-1933 prototypes), while promoting all the time a group of genuine conservatives and reactionaries. Modernist ideologues have even succeeded so far in their efforts to marginalize the 2003 Athens Charter. Christopher Alexander demonstrates beyond any shadow of a doubt 11 that urbanism consists of social processes that depend critically upon a geometric rubric (Alexander, 2001-2005; Alexander et. al., 1977). Many social patterns simply cannot take place without the appropriate geometrical framework. This result (experimentally verified) invalidates claims by eminent sociologists that 20th Century society has freed itself from the constraints of the built environment. I can understand why sociologist-urbanists continue to ignore the geometry of the urban fabric, as a policy necessary to preserve their dogmas. According to Alexander, geometry is the core of all urbanism, and a geometrical understanding does not allow anyone to get away with specious proposals. Conclusion. Modernist urbanism — based on the power to impose technology over nature — is essentially destructive of what already exists. It is also profoundly arrogant in its assertion of a brutal power over something it doesn’t understand, and which it disdains. Europe’s urban, social, and environmental devastation during the last two generations is due to interlinked causes. Today, progress requires a major change in worldview. The pairing of technological progress with an urbanism of alien forms is a great lie, but one fanatically believed in by many “modern” Europeans. Technology can indeed help in the reconstruction, when applied intelligently. Science is essential to help urban residents live like human beings once again and regenerate their environment. Misguided urbanists applying wrong ideas have done (and continue to do) so much damage that it is impossible to know where to begin a critique. Let me touch only on the topic of automobiles. Cars will not go away; everyone wants to own at least one and many persons own two. Automobiles are a tremendously useful, if very expensive, mode of transport, but they must be accommodated without destroying the pedestrian urban fabric. Since this has already been destroyed in most places, it must be rewoven. A living city connects its cars to people in a non-threatening way: automobiles should not take over a city. Planners have to understand how to interweave the car web to the primarily pedestrian urban fabric. Then they can work out how to optimize that web without destroying the rest of the city. These principles are very simple to understand. Europeans used to have a well-balanced respect for the environment (at least in the mythical days of yesteryear, when people lacked the technological power to destroy it). But this respect was replaced by a new philosophy of intolerance. Old Europe stood in the way of grand urban and architectural projects deemed necessary to “progress”. We sacrificed much to this progress, and it is now choking us. City building consists of a series of compromises and accommodations. This, however, is not the same as sacrificing elements of our heritage and environment to antiquated visions of the future. I would like to see the countries in Europe repair their urban environment so that their citizens and their citizens’ children can enjoy a better quality of life. I wish to save those pieces of uniquely European urban fabric from the senseless destruction to which it has been condemned. The solution to Europe’s urban problems is not merely contained in the points outlined above. It also lies in the adoption of a new philosophy of humankind’s 12 relationship to nature and the environment. It is contained in the serious, scientific study of what specific rules actually generate living cities. We need to recognize that the ideological urbanism of the postwar years has been discredited in practice. We also need to reject as toxic the high-tech “look” of contemporary architecture (tolerable only in minute quantities). Once those philosophically linked steps are taken — accepting the full humility of human beings visà-vis their environment, their fellow beings, their historical past, and their urban heritage — then everything else will follow. REFERENCES. Alexander, Christopher (2001-2005) The Nature of Order: Books One to Four (The Center for Environmental Structure, Berkeley, California). Alexander, Christopher, S. Ishikawa, M. Silverstein, M. Jacobson, I. Fiksdahl-King & S. Angel (1977) A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press, New York). Charles, Prince of Wales (1989) A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture (Doubleday, New York). Crawford, Joel H. (2000) Carfree Cities (International Books, Utrecht, Holland). Duany, Andrés, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk & Jeff Speck (2000) Suburban Nation (North Point Press, New York). ECTP – The European Council of Town Planners (2003) The New Charter of Athens 2003 (Alinea Editrice, Firenze). Available online from <http://www.ceuectp.org/e/athens>. Gehl, Jan (1996) Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space (Arkitektens Forlag, Copenhagen). Krier, Léon (1998) Architecture: Choice or Fate (Andreas Papadakis, Windsor, England). Oliva i Casas, Josep (2001) La Confusió de l’Urbanisme: Ciutat Pública Versus Ciutat Domèstica (Catalan version published by: Pòrtic ECSA, Barcelona). Spanish version, La Confusión del Urbanismo: Ciudad Pública Versus Ciudad Doméstica (Cie Ediciones Editoriales Dossat, Madrid, 2005). English version, Confusion in Urban Design: The Public City Versus the Domestic City (Techne Press, Amsterdam, 2007). Roaf, Sue (2005) Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change (Architectural Press, Oxford). Salingaros, Nikos A. (2005) Principles of Urban Structure (Techne Press, Amsterdam, Holland). Sucher, David (2003) City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village (City Comforts Inc., Seattle, Washington). 13