Bringing urbanism home

I wrote the following essay for Architect magazine in September 2009.

Firefighters parade through Hudson, N.Y.
Macduff Everton/Corbis via Architect magazine

I love big cities, but I often find small cities more compelling. The dispiriting and encouraging aspects of urbanism are more immediately juxtaposed, often heart-rendingly so, but the disparity between them seems bridgeable. Surely, this place can be made to work, if only.

Hudson, N.Y., a settlement of 8,000 residents two hours north of Manhattan, is a two-square-mile snapshot of America’s urban disparity. Its main avenue, Warren Street, is a stunner; it looks as if eight very charming blocks of Brooklyn left the big city a century ago and moved to Columbia County. It has its rough spots, but Warren Street has been experiencing a revival, thanks to gentrification, historic preservation, an influx of antique dealers and tourists, and the helping hand of government.

In the blocks immediately to either side of Warren Street, one finds the other Hudson: comparatively poor, nonwhite, disconnected, and underemployed. The crime rate is higher, and the rough spots in the urban fabric are rougher. The industrial base is nearly gone, as are innumerable mom-and-pop shoe stores, food marts, and repair services that once made Hudson, Hudson.
 
What has happened in Hudson, as elsewhere, is that the middle has dropped out. But before blaming its vanishing middle class on the global economy, look closer to home. In fact, look in the home, for this is where American businesses—and American urbanism—used to get started. Before we became enamored of top-down urbanism—funded by government, propped up by feasibility studies, packaged by city hall, guarded by aesthetic review boards, and delivered by developers—urbanism arose through an organic process of small entrepreneurs opening home-based businesses to the sidewalk. Their one-of-a-kind shops and industries were the starting point for innumerable mixed-use streets, districts, and downtowns that we love today. Read more...

What is urbanism?

From Hudson Urbanism  
Yesterday I found myself wondering if I should have called this blog "Hudson Urbanist" instead of "Hudson Urbanism." The former might have granted me the freedom to occasionally write about things not directly concerned with the urban condition—baseball, politics, life minutia, and whatever interests me on a given day. I might take such license anyway; in any event, my internal dialogue got me thinking about the word "urban" and the extent to which America's urban problem—or is it our suburban problem?—is exacerbated by misuse of the term.

Consider the U.S. Census Bureau's report that 81 percent of Americans now live in urban areas. This important example of who-America-is data places the cul-de-sac-dwelling, automobile-dependent suburbanite in the same category as the sidewalk pounding Brooklynite. I can't help but think this makes the fight against the environmental and social ravages of suburban sprawl ever more difficult and diffuse. Similar conflations are found among geographers, sociologists, historians, and others concerned with broad trends in human development. In their comparisons of modern societies to ancient or tribal societies, they typically place the "urban" label on those with water and sewer infrastructures, formal governments, advanced methods of goods production and distribution, and so on. Again, they lump the suburb with the "urb." 

Further poking prompts more questions than answers: is "urban" a proper adjective for "city" even though many city districts are as suburban in their physical makeup as those outside the city boundary? Is it appropriate for a mayor to proclaim his city's "urban renaissance" as he cuts a ribbon for a new strip mall? Is it fair to blame the excessive consumption of land and resources on "urban sprawl" when by definition it is suburbs, not urbs, that sprawl? How should we categorize Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston that is politically a city, that is physically predominated by single-family houses and strip malls, but that also has within it thirteen quasi-urban villages? And what can we conclude of a person living in Boston's Back Bay—an urban neighborhood by probably everyone's definition—who drives thirty miles every day to a job in suburban Westborough? Is she an urbanite or a suburbanite? If she took a new job in downtown Worcester, would that change anything? Wouldn't she, despite structuring her life around two urban places, be living a life that is dynamically suburban?

Such questions point to two things we need to do if we are to attain more sustainable, and necessarily more urban, ways of building and living. One, we need to define urban and suburban in a way that clearly and concisely identifies and differentiates their physical characters. To this end I offer this: Urbanism is high-density mixed uses, and suburbanism is low-density segregated uses. While there remains a finer grain to explore, this distinction covers more ground more effectively than anything I have come across in more than twenty years of study.

Two, we need to go beyond physical definitions and begin working to reinstill the dynamic realities that underlie the physical form of urban places. As our Back Bay friend demonstrates, one can "live suburban" in an urban place, which negates the point of urbanism. And not to push this point too far or paint too broadly, but I often think that the primary, unrecognized goal of the urban planning establishment over the past several decades has been to accommodate large numbers of such individuals—to support a suburban social order within a physical facsimile of urbanism, rather than to promote urbanism as a way of living.

This will not do. It is not enough for citizens to establish residence in an urban place while continuing to chase around the region to fill their life needs. It is not acceptable for residents of an urban neighborhood to oppose their neighbors opening new businesses if those businesses would make that place more urban. It is not enough to fight for the preservation of existing urban environments in their current state; one must support those policies and practices that will lead to greater density and more mixed uses, and thereby more local living.

Because this is what urbanism is.

What is Radical Urbanism?

This blog advocates an alternative model of urban development. Radical Urbanism promotes organic, root-level methods of economic and community development akin to those that built our most beloved mixed-use urban districts decades and centuries ago. Such districts evolved through an ad hoc process of ordinary citizens opening businesses in their homes. Dining rooms were turned into cafes, living rooms became hair salons, garages were made into machine shops, spare bedrooms became second-hand stores, and basements were adapted into repair facilities. As these various efforts gradually cohered, new mixed-use streets, central business districts, and even downtowns emerged. The resulting urbanism was uniquely attuned to and intertwined with local culture. It was an urbanism in which citizens were personally invested, businesses were owned by familiar faces, and buildings were authentically, not cosmetically, human-scaled.

Since around the late 1800s, government regulations (building codes, zoning codes, health codes, and others), NIMBYism, and other factors have made it increasingly illegal to open most types of street-visible businesses in the home. The organic, bottom-up growth of our economy and our urbanism has been hampered, leading us to depend excessively on top-down development. Sadly, mainstream urban planning embraces and expedites this top-downism. It bypasses the historical genesis of successful urbanism and deploys top-down, professionalized expedients---comprehensive master plans, formal feasibility studies, developer friendly tax incentives, taxpayer-funded government grants, stultifying aesthetic codes, and cumbersome community review procedures. These methods neither produce a genuinely fine-grained urbanism nor foster the improvement of culture. Almost invariably, new buildings are multiples larger than their predecessors, the architecture is contrived, commercial tenants are national chains instead of indies, and an air of artifice pervades. Citizens are turned into strangers of their own neighborhoods. New business startups are hampered, our nation's economy is weakened, and our wealth gap widens.

Radical Urbanism works by promoting human-scaled cultural and business enterprise, out of which fine-grained urbanism naturally grows. Its essential tool is to allow a wide variety of home-based businesses, including retail stores, restaurants, service industries, and light industry. Radical Urbanism respects the need for government to regulate large commercial enterprise, but balances this need against the benefits of largely deregulating Mom and Pop. It is in doing so that America may once again build upon the many points of support that once made it great: its citizens.

radical = based in root-level processes 

urbanism = the dense arrangement of mixed uses (residences, retail, services, etc.) 

Radical Urbanism = densely built environments in which mixed uses are created through elemental processes, in particular the proliferation of home-based businesses 

Characteristics of Radical Urbanism:
■ allowance of a wide range of home enterprise start-ups, including retail, restaurant, services, assembly, and light industry

■ development by Mom and Pop, not just “developers” 

■ sustainable, bottom-up economic growth created by and for all, from the skilled to the unskilled 

■ cityscapes that change incrementally through the building of numerous small projects, not cataclysmically through large, developer-driven projects  

■ localized culture and democratic investment 

■ freedom of architectural expression

■ human-scaled buildings, streets, neighborhoods, and districts that arise as natural expressions of human-scaled culture, not because of formal mandate or cosmetic trickery

Radical Urbanism is not:

■ a free-for-all that allows, for example, a slaughterhouse next to a school 

■ New Urbanism 

■ "just like that mixed-use thing we're already doing" 

■ contrived to look old-fashioned 

■ subject to the feast and famine cycles of developer-based urbanism 

■ expensive 

■ reliant on government programs, tax breaks, or other unnecessary complexities 

■ perfect