Restoring Reason, Beauty, and Trust in Architecture, Part 21: Revitalizing Inner Cities

Episode Topic: Revitalizing Inner Cities

Ray Gindroz, co-founder and principal emeritus of Urban Design Associates, will explore innovative approaches to revitalizing inner cities through the transformation of public housing projects into vibrant, mixed-income neighborhoods. Drawing on over five decades of experience in urban design, affordable housing, and participatory planning, Gindroz will discuss the role of architectural pattern books, traditional neighborhood design, and policies that support sustainable urban development. This lecture will highlight case studies from his extensive work with Urban Design Associates, showcasing strategies for fostering economic growth, social equity, and community resilience in urban environments. 

Featured Speakers:

• Raymond Gindroz, Co-Founder and Principal Emeritus, Urban Design Associates 

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/016b66.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Restoring Reason, Beauty, and Trust in Architecture.

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Transcript

Introduction and Welcome

1 0:14

Good afternoon to all of you. Welcome. Thank you for being here this afternoon. It is a very, very special pleasure and a great honor to have Ray Ndro among us today. Ray is one of the great living architects and urbanists in the world, certainly one of protagonists of the urbanist movement, the United States, and a person who has given us a great deal of insight, both for his writings, his, his projects, and his, and his teaching. He, uh, went to school at Carnegie Mellon, both undergraduate and graduate. He is been involved, within urbanism for at least 40 years, or 30, 30, 35, and counting on the movement in five or 10, proceeding it as a, uh, as an advocate for its ideas before it was actually formed. He is co-founder and, and, um, and principal emeritus at UDA in Pittsburgh for out of where he did most of his life's work. And his greatest contributions are not only the many beautifully designed projects for new communities throughout the US but also more specifically in his influence on the Hope six project, which was his national urbanist movement to turn public housing into neighborhoods. His general further advocacy for continuing this, this effort beyond, beyond, beyond, uh, hope six with ongoing initiatives in, in, in a variety of ways. And finally for his, re revisiting and re regenerating the notion of pattern books and coding in general, as ways of, of having, neighborhood cities and particularly individual people. And, and communities of people engage with a, with a, uh, uh, with a planning and design process. I mean, the, I I think it's fair to say that UDA through his work and, and, uh, and David Lewis were probably the first people, uh, the first instances in the United States where somebody advocated that communities should have a role in, in, in the, in the generating of a built environment. And this is a time when, when, as he said to me today, buildings were landing like spaceships on, on, on American, on American cities. many of us have admired his work for the longest period of time, is an immense pleasure having him here. I hope that he, he lectures today and, uh, and also allows us to ask him a whole bunch of questions. Particularly inspiring, I think, is not only his advocacy at the urban designer architectural level, but also his ability to connect, built environments and living environments with people. Institutions and causes, uh, that have to do with environmental, social, economic progress in, in, in people that are generally also, underprivileged. So he is very much, as you can tell, a person that is operating within, well, operating within the, the, the mission of this, of the school of architecture. It's a great pleasure having you here, eh, thank you for being with us. Please welcome, uh, Ray,

Speaker 2 3:20

are you? Pardon? Are

Speaker 3 3:25

I'm here to help you? Okay. Oh,

The Impact of Urban Design on Society

Architectural Reflections of Society

Community and Social Capital

Diversity and Social Mobility

Case Study: Norfolk Housing Project

Speaker 4 3:29

good afternoon everyone. It's a great joy to be here. See you. So many old friends. the subject is revitalizing inner cities, which of course is a vast topic. I'm gonna focus on one part of it as Stephen has already said, that the main focus of our work. Was finding ways of meaningfully engaging residents and citizens in the process of planning their own community. It was more complicated than residents, of course, because city officials, property owners, business people, religious leaders, civic leaders, all need to be part of that package so that you have a comprehensive view of what the issues are, and then you can find solutions. I thought maybe I'd spend a minute clarifying one thing about our process. I've been thinking about this lately because community participation and processes constantly come under attack from different directions. Some friendly flyers, some unfriendly flyer. I just wanna be clear about how we saw it. You know, it's almost still true. If you get a very good doctor. He or she will sit and talk to you, listen to what's wrong with you, but also talk generally. And those conversations are really data collection, trying to understand what's going on and what your perception of it's. And we see our engagement of citizens in very much the same way we're learning about the neighborhood. We're learning about their perceptions of the neighborhood. Here's one example. We were working in a place that had a reputation, a perception, but a reputation as being a high crime area. But the statistics didn't reflect that. So we asked the police if it was a high crime area or if it was safe, he said, they said, well, it's perfectly safe. We know we're there every day with our dogs. We asked an elderly woman. Whether it was safe or dangerous. She said, of course it's dangerous. Why else would the police be there with their dogs? In another case, safety was being described in terms of manpower and police, and then one woman got up and said, the best security system is a nosy neighbor. Now, this was a design charette, so imagine the change of focus that that made from thinking about protective barriers to thinking about ways of designing buildings, houses, public spaces so that nosy neighbors could do their job most effectively. So it's that kind of input and information that we always treasure from being engaged with citizens because we only know half the problem and the issues by looking at it analytically. People on the ground really know, but I'm not gonna talk about that anymore. I'm gonna focus on the way the design of cities impacts people and neighborhoods sociologically and psychologically, which has been a central theme of my passion since I was in graduate school. And I present to you a work which you may or may not have seen. it is a mural in the University of Rome's campus at the edge of the Escal neighborhood. It's in a building built in the 1950s, which was a police barracks, and was of course a dreadfully bear in a stair room. An American artist named Doug Cooper was commissioned to do murals around the entire room. This is, but one part of it, and I love it because it's a magnificent portrait of the Escal neighborhood. To do his work. Doug spends time living in the places, talking with people, getting them to do some sketches, and then he winds up putting them in the mural. So the people that you see, particularly on your left, are the people he had interviewed and he tries to embody in the mural the things that they described that were important to them. Now, is there a forward key? What happened to the keyboard? Sorry. Is it possible to use it? I'm sorry, I, I'm old fashioned. Personally, not only old, but old fashioned. Okay, so let's look at it a little bit more closely. This is one panel which has the Piazza in front of, Santa Maria Majo. I'm sure you all know it in Rome. and we see human beings running around doing all sorts of different things, riding a motorcycle. Actually graciously stopping to let pedestrians go across Miracle of Miracles. and we see it that we see that this dazzling perspective construction of ducks really creates the stage set for everyday life. Little girl walking her dog or the dog walking the little girl. That's not clear in this drawing. a young woman on a, on a cell phone in a jazzy sports car is zipping past. But if you look just above that, you'll see that the Church of Santa Maggiore has been represented with a, with a section cut. And in it it's represented as it was in the fifth and sixth centuries with the monks from that period in that, so that we're seeing everyday life in the context of a great sense of history, which the residents of that neighborhood were aware of and very proud of. And the landmarks very much a source of. A source of great pride. Now we're gonna go up in the drawing and look at a closeup, and you'll see over on the right, a little hard to see. You'll see there's Michelangelo's Moses rising up out of San Pietro and Vly in which it's located because that's another source of pride. And to the left, uh, to, to his left, you'll see there's a man oversized, helping a little child over the top of the coliseum. This is recording a conversation that Doug had with an elderly man who remembered as a child that the cosm was not closed off and secure the way it was. It was just an open public space. And he has, he and his friends used it as their playground. And so this mural reflects that wonderful relationship between great landmarks and daily life. If we go to the left, you'll see the column from the Piazza is still there. Um, and we look at cross sections through buildings. Doug was very influenced, as you can see by medieval paintings. So scale is constantly manipulated and changed, and we see people in all sorts of interactions, dancing in the streets, singing in a cafe, having a drink, meeting with friends, doing shopping, being together, creating a sense of community by being together, which is the essential ingredient in creating social capital, which is that economic. So sociologist called economic value of a cohesive and strong community. And if you look to the right behind the monument, you'll see the marvelous, uh, late 19th century buildings, which are similar to the Paris model, which I'll show you in a little bit, which are definitely mixed income. In their form, but with a noble architecture, which does a great deal to lift the spirits and provide a sense of dignity for everyone in the community irrespective of their income. So these qualities, I love this mural and Doug's work because it shows vividly the relationship between people and the city in which they, in which they live. So there are four qualities that sociologists and psychologists have delved into over the course of the last 70 or 80 years, uh, that I'm going to discuss, and I'll illustrate it with some existing examples and then some examples from our projects which show how they played out. One is dwelling as mirror of self. What does the image of your dwelling tell you about your soap? Social capital. How do neighbors get together to create social capital? Diversity we know is extremely important, particularly for people in poverty to be in a mixed income, more diverse environment and knowing how to use the city. We've learned that person's ability to use the city is directly related to his or her chance of succeeding in life. All of these things that seem to me are design criteria that we as architects and urban designers must respond to. The difficulty is that these issues are the most difficult to achieve in the current development and building and planning process. They get trampled by other considerations, some real, some not real, and that's why I think it's so important to talk about them. Highlight them. Now, these are not my ideas. Many different personalities played into it. Jane Jacobs, I know you're familiar with because you walk into the and see her portrait every day as you come into the architecture school. She was extraordinary. I had the great pleasure of meeting her a couple times and hearing her speak her as the book was being written. And afterwards she was very impressive, quiet, low key, very straightforward. It's fairly dramatic in the way she dressed. She wore a black knit dress, very French, with brilliant ochre colored stockings and these enormous glasses. So this is someone you paid attention to when she walked into the room and she spoke so sensibly about real human experience. It was when you're in a presence, it was hard to remember that the entire planning profession and development industry was in a rage, over the kinds of revelations that she'd made. She really turned the whole idea of planning upside down. Kevin Lynch was a planner in person. He was exactly like he is in this photograph, very straightforward, interested in how people perceive the environment, and gave some initial structure to that. And Holly White for his descriptions of the social life of small urban spaces and then setting criteria for good spaces made a remarkable contribution. I had spent two days with him once, only time we were together. it was in the city of Charlotte and we'd walk around at noontime when lots of people were on the streets and he'd. Make com comments and observations and make notes. But he always had a little counter, you know, these counters that people use when you're going into an event, an event to count it. And so whenever we got to a street corner, he'd be doing this and continue talking all the while, while he was doing it. And then at the end he'd look down, make a little note of what it was so that his observations were metric, were in metric terms, not just in observation, but the most influential person I never met. And that's Alvin Shore looking, not very happy in this drawing, in this photograph, it's the only one I could find. he was a social worker, professor of social worker. And under the Kennedy administration, he was deputy secretary of HUD for research. And in that period, he compiled the previous 10 years worth of research on the causes of poverty and published them in a little tiny book called Slums and Social Insecurity. In which he poses the astonishing question that really changed my life, which was, is there a causal relationship between the physical form and imagery of cities, homes and neighborhoods, and a person's ability for a capacity for upward social mobility? He never said yes or no, but he gave a series of examples that show how it can work. And it's from this man that I really charted my career, my career. Um, I'm not even sure that I realized it, that it was going, but it was. So of the four points, the first one is dwelling of mirror self, and I don't think I need to explain these two cartoons. This is by the French artist. Jean Paul Sope, who sadly is no longer alive, uh, did a lot of New Yorker co covers. and he captures beautifully, I think, the relationship between architecture and people. So one person is filled, woman is filled with joy in front of our house. Uh, the obviously brutal businessman who controls everything is absolutely thrilled with the homage his apartment building is paying to his great success, uh, in its architecture and, and doorway. So these are two very positive, uh, images. Uh, the way in which the mirror of the house at home represents ourself and presents a positive image. On the other hand, these are from the Harper's Weekly, 1890 publication, of, uh, that documented some of the slum situations in New York. And clearly this little fellow who's struggling across the street does not have a very positive image. And the key in shore's word is the image compared to what is considered main street in society, whether it's through the media. When Shore wrote the book in 1963, it was the Brady Bush. So people living in these kinds of conditions are in public housing. We're comparing themselves to that. That is such a negative impact on one's self-image, that it diminishes self-confidence and makes it much less, uh, easy to succeed in life. the, among the worst, and I've deliberately given this a really bad photograph, but among the worst, images of cell is what American public housing had evolved into by the 1970s and 1980s. barracks like buildings. Originally inspired by German social housing, which is a very different social structure than American, uh, society, but diminished into the least common denominator, making what they believed to be the cheapest possible. And most indestructible buildings set generally in open landscape without definition of public and private space. In one project, a man stood up and said this about the stigma of living in public housing. He said, brown buildings, brown windows, brown grass, brown people. It makes others in the city afraid of us. Another comment was public housing architecture. To the illegal drug industry, what McDonald's arches are to arches. So the image of this housing dreadfully important. An early project of ours, which I keep coming back to, it moved me more than anything else. It was one in, it's this one, and we were asked to do some exterior remodeling. There was money for minor improvements to the exterior, and there were drug wars going on. The drug gangs had taken over. Residents were afraid to come out of their buildings. bullets were flying at night, so they slept on the floor. and the director of housing said, I don't see how new windows are. The kind of usual repairs is gonna change that social situation. What can be done? So we did a very simple thing, which was to add the features of a traditional neighborhood. So the red brick building on the right is the same buildings that we were looking at before, and you can see on the top is a little metric of the buildings as they existed, which were just barracks on greens. there was a, a number plate at the end of each one with the numbers of the units in that row because there was no street in front of the units, only at the ends. So we added porches, which in Norfolk, Virginia is on almost every house. The residence, when we were designing it insisted that they and the windows be white and be very simple and not complicated, and certainly not modern, but be what we would find in a normal neighborhood, which is a theme that keeps running through all of the conversations we've had. In public housing, residence housing, we added little streets so they could park in front of their house and have an address, which is really one of the most fundamental elements of being a citizen, having an address and fenced off the backyard to prevent some of the things that were going on. So this is early, shortly after the first phase was built and this man standing here looking out, you see, has planted a wonderful garden in front of his porch. Before he couldn't do that. No one could plant flowers'cause they'd be trampled on and ripped up by the gangs. and he was very adept at it. So he was teaching his neighbors how to do the same. and another person loved to garden but couldn't before. Um, and you can see she's working quite industrially on her garden. She was so enamored with her garden and loved it so much that she made clothing for herself. Sitting in it dwelling as mirror of self, the reflection of who we are as people and as architects and urban designers. We must be very careful about who it is our imagery is intended to work for. the school was nearby. Teachers told us that after the renovation, the students in the school did had higher grades because they were no longer kids from the project. They were kids from the neighborhood growing as image of soap in a different project somewhat earlier in 1978, uh, in Richmond, in Randolph, a traditionally American, African American neighborhood. the middle had been demolished and the edge still had some of the traditional houses, which were these residents, loved those traditional houses, wanted them to be preserved and wanted new houses to be like that. So we developed the very first pattern book, which set up, construction documents for the front facades. And here it was built. One morning I went to see it when it was partially built, very early, seven in the morning, and a man came out from a side street, two blocks away, saw me immediately, came, charging over, looking quite angry, wanted to know what I was doing, and his neighborhood. And I said, I had been involved in the design. What did he think of the design? And he looked at me angrily. He said, what are you blind? Can't you see man? This is a neighborhood. There used to be houses on Jacqueline Street. Then they were torn down. Now there are houses again on Jacqueline Street. This is a neighborhood we look after each other. I can't credit the architecture entirely with that, but the fact that it was rooted in the place and reflect what the tradition is, I think is important. In 2006 seven, after the hurricanes Katrina, and Rita, we were asked to redevelop the, uh, Lafitte public housing project, which you can see here on the left, in its condition right after the flood brick buildings, very institutional style. In New Orleans, most people live in houses, not in brick buildings. When this particular one, for instance, a double shotgun, that's two houses in the width in the length of a Volkswagen, but they're 60 feet deep, so they've got all the rooms you want. A tumultuous series of public meetings where advocates from all over the country, including a television program, tried to prevent the demolition. The residents proclaimed that they wanted a new life. They didn't wanna keep the old buildings, and they said, we'll gladly trade the bricks for a house that led the design process to do nothing but houses, sometimes double houses, sometimes small apartment houses, but they were all houses. And here's, from the second charette, a model with moveable parts being conducted, by the way, by a Notre Dame grad of probably 1998. and, to discuss how it works, but look on the wall, you see their elevations and plans of houses. We had nine architects come and design houses. Marianne Sato, for instance, was one of those people, brings back memories. And, we pinned them all up on the wall. Now we also had a group of architects from, Tulane, who insisted on doing modernist houses and they were up on the wall. We gave residents green dots for what they liked, red dots, what they didn't like. So anything that looked like a house, particularly a traditional house, got a green dot, something that looked like an institutional building, got red dots. But the modernist buildings got red dots. One person said who would wanna live in something that looks like a phone booth? So there's a strong sense of local identity that's tied to these houses. Houses. And so to be able to make it affordable, we worked with, uh, builders to have standardized building types and use the pattern book approach to add porches and other things to make it equivalent. And one of the main streets. Has a whole series of those shotguns and double shotguns, to, uh, to accommodate residents. There's a brilliant example by a whole series of architects in Santa Barbara, California in which the public Housing authority commissions architects to do things in the Spanish colonial style, which is what the majority of the big wealthy houses and the commercial areas are, so that homeless people, public housing residents have a dignified place. And the staffs there has told me that the very low recidivism, recidivism rate, high employment rate, all of the metrics that indicate people are succeeding. But as I said, this is difficult. All too often this kind of thing happens where these are the front entrances to buildings that are moderately subsidized housing. Somehow in that process, these values get crushed, um, and. Although this was also a low income project, you have to work very, very hard to hang onto those values. And I find that the best way is to find whatever the vocabularies are that are most admired in a given community. And work with those is you have a better chance of realizing. The second point is about neighbors, community and social capital. Another MPE drawing of communicating in the neighborhood. and the second thing about social capital is people look out after each other and whether you can see this, but if you look very carefully, you'll see a woman with wide-eyed terror looking at the cat, who's perfectly calm about balancing on the, on the rail. So this is people looking out for each other and all creatures great and small, in their neighborhood. When something happens like the tree trimming, everybody gathers round and has an opinion. From their balconies as well as from the street. That's social capital at work, back to the same public housing project. They, people said, the residents said, we would like to have porches, not because we need another room, but so that we can see each other, come together, be together, and deal with our problems. The community police officer said before the demolition, before the re restoration or redevelopment, when something happened, an incident happened. No one saw anything. No one heard anything. No one said anything afterwards. His uds with calls about every little thing that happens'cause it's building. They've built a sense of social capital. It didn't. It lasted for 15 years. Not doing so well now because it's still an enormous concentration of people and poverty, which just doesn't work. The American cross section, of course facilitates this, the front porch, front yard, all connecting to the street. So it's a space that's both public and an extension of the family's house. The same Richmond neighborhood that I spoke to, their tiny houses, but we managed to get very large porches tacked onto them. and since you only see them from the front, you don't notice how almost ludicrous it is that these are supersized porches. So in 2018, which was 40 years after they were built, I paid one of a regular number of visits to this neighborhood and we parked over on the left side of the photograph in front of a house. And I went out, walked around and took pictures and my wife stayed in the car and she said she noticed after about five minutes, man in the closest house came out with a broom and started sweeping his porch. And then in another three or four minutes a house, two houses down, man came out, started tripping his porch. And then before, not you knew it, five or six people were out sweeping their porches. And my wife decided it was time to do something about it. So she went up to explain that I had been involved in, in the design of this. It was coming back to see how it was doing. So the first man she spoke to went to his door, opened the door, and shouted a loud voice so the whole neighbors could hear honey, that architect is here, he is back again. So all was safe. That's social capital. At work in a, in a, in a, in, in a neighborhood. There are many forms for this porch aren't the only thing. Sometimes there are communal spaces within blocks like this place in Pittsburgh. You can see it in the aerial photograph with the lawn. Where it's 13 townhouses grouped around a green set up above the street. and it becomes a place for all sorts of activities in the course, but it's still connected to the street. But there's a cohesiveness within this community, that has very strong in social capital. I dunno whether you're familiar with Capital Street in Charleston. It was developed by a group of friends. It's in the middle of a block, and it's a group of friends to begin with. So it has strong social capital, but it is an example of spaces like this within blocks, um, that can function well in an urban environment and certainly in Italy. this works, well with the courtyard buildings, you know, whether, you know, the Nadi quarter in Milan, it's a, it's where the canals are and it's not a very fancy neighborhood, but it's a very vibrant and alive, wildly diverse community. And there are two types of courtyards. This is called a palazzo type, where the units are grouped around the courtyard and the stairs are in the corners. So you can see even on a gloomy day, it brings some cheer and light to it. But I've interviewed people in that building, and they, I asked if they could trust anyone in the building, and they said everyone a hundred percent to, to help. If we needed a problem, they would help. And they, they build social relations just because of the casual content, uh, contact coming through. There's another even more powerful example about two blocks away where a former factories have been turned into condominiums occupied mostly by writers, artists, craftsmen, designers, and there are shops and workshops and sales shops, display rooms on the ground floor and apartments above in what's called ca in Ringera. In Milano, which is, uh, houses with railings. And they too have this incredibly strong. I was, privileged to be there for an event, uh, in several of them. And I talked to people and they told me about the structure of the community and the kind of congenial atmosphere that they have. Now. Not everything works well. One of the works I admired in my youth was Rossi Scholar Housing, which you see on the left. Been there several times since, and I'm about to talk to someone who lived there. but it's devoid of any kind of activity compared to this one, which is in the ne beauty courtyard filled with activity. So what's the difference? The space is under houses where the space and the Milan example, um, is surrounded by houses. So there are no eyes on the street and the one, plenty of eyes on the street, ground floor activity, all working extremely well. Point number three, diversity and social mobility. Sociologists tell us that a person, a child growing up in a community with 30% or more poverty rate has very little chance, four or 5% chance of succeeding in life. This is a statistical average that's taken over many, many, uh, communities in different parts of the country. If that child is, PA has parents who grew up in a community with more than 30% poverty, the chance is almost zero that they would be able to succeed. So therefore, diversity is extremely important. You can see in this chart and some of these examples of oh six projects that rebuilt them, that suddenly there was a huge increase in employment, decrease in crime, great increase in educational achievement for the children. That's a fact. Proven that, but getting diversity in our society in United States is very difficult. Nimbyism runs rampant. It's very hard to insert low and moderate income housing into affluent communities. It's easier to attract middle and upper income people into, impoverished areas, and particularly in the rebuilding of public housing, which is one answer. It's not the whole answer, but it's one answer. and so I'm gonna show you just a couple examples of that main feature of much of our work. I'm gonna first talk about diversity models. Everybody knows about the Paris cross section, right? House funds, codification of what was the traditional French model. The ground floor in pink was commercial. First floor above very wealthy people. Next floor, little bit less wealthy people above that middle class, working class people and in the attic. Very poor people. Especially starving artists in our romantic imagination, but generally very poor people. So it's a vertical, slice of society, but that's not the whole story. Houseman's blocks had perimeters and they had interior courtyards, so the same colors are applied to very high cost apartments on the perimeter, very low cost apartments in the middle, so that you had a three dimensional grid matrix of different income levels living in one block. Now it's also expensive, it's a moot point, but the system worked very well for a while, and part of the genius of it is that the buildings on the perimeter have a great deal of perimeter wall, which was required to be very expensive carved stone. The ones on the middle have almost none, so they are in fact different in cost as well as in price. The American model is very different. We deal with separate buildings. This is a traditional American neighborhood, like many all across the country, in which you have a mix of apartment buildings, uh, townhouses, small apartment buildings, big houses and small houses. You can tell by the colors. So there's a mix of incomes in that block, and you can see there's a fine definition. The street to the, to the right is a through street, so it has mostly apartments and smaller houses. The street to the left is less a through street and therefore has a lot of big houses on. It doesn't happen by legislation. It happened by the way in which people use the property and developed it. And all classes are tied together by an architectural consistency that unifies the neighborhood and masks the difference and income. That's the key quality. A local imagery of the best quality that masks differences. And then the mixed income developments can work very well. Another part of the same neighborhood, perhaps a more complex diversity in 1200 feet from top to bottom. That's a variety of houses, a park, smaller houses and apartments, and then commercial uses. Now compare that which you see on the left to what happened after World War ii with single family zoning. You have no diversity, just one product. There's a lot of theory that a monoculture can't survive. Generally, single income, single type, developments don't last through. The first generation have to dying and come back again. So after the war, affluent people escaped to the suburbs to live in this, leaving the poor, behind, and desperate conditions. Public housing came in and built more uniformity, again, completely violating the American tradition. And of course the motivation for single family housing was largely racial. When the Civil Rights Act started eliminating discrimination, real estate developers and communities tried all sorts of ways to get around of it, one of which is single family zoning.'cause they assume black people could not afford to live in a single family house, buy a single family house. So the fractured nature of our physical environment is a result of a whole series of bad and sometimes badly intentioned legislations. And it's our job to try to fix that. An an example that changes that is also in Norfolk is a, a housing project, which went, if you look at the plan. The two right hand blocks were a project housing project that looked just like the one that I showed you before. a ho six project was done. We developed a plan, and you can see in pink, those are the rental units, which are subsidized largely public housing level income. the white or the yellow houses, in the, in the second block are market rate houses. Even. They even had aama selling up to four and$500,000 immediately next to each other. How does it work? Well, the upper image is part of the subsidized housing. It's two units, not one unit. Below is the imagery of a sidewalk of the very expensive houses, and the key image is this one where the two level porch that you see on the far right. Is for two flats. In the subsidized development, the two level porch on the left is of a$500,000 house. And the vocabularies are the same vocabularies that you find in Norfolk neighborhoods. So the message is to do this, understand what the local vocabularies are, work within those traditional vocabularies, and produce an equivalent form for whatever the income group is. That's what, the touch of Cornwall has done in pounding and is doing now in seladon. It's the same basic idea. Uh, here's just another example, of the aerial photograph. The building types are similar, but some are home ownership. Some are deeply subsidized, some are moderately subsidized, and some are in townhouses and some are in midrise buildings. They all share again, the same vocabularies. Which is the same as the slightly wonky photograph on the bottom right, which is from the adjacent neighborhood street. Looking to it, the community was adamant that this development should reflect the architectural bar specific architectural vocabularies of Washington Hill, the neighborhood in Baltimore to make that work. And apparently it's had a positive impact on the property values in the areas around it. just to be a little specific for a minute, these are different ways of combining, uh, different incomes. On the, on the left is the traditional one I showed you below is Celebration Florida, which was a breakthrough. But up to that point, developers would only go cottage style, which is low cost housing here in one development. village style, which was medium priced and estate style in other different, completely separated. What Disney was able to do because of their power in the marketplace was put them all in one block. But very specifically, they have, uh, each has their own address. So the smallest houses you see in the middle are facing each other on a street. The estates are facing out to the golf course and so on. So that's a principle, an address with common values on the, on the upper right is public housing transformation in Louisville, Kentucky, in which these apartment buildings were designed actually by the architect William Ron, to look like a collection of traditional Louisville houses. In them, they have all three income levels, low income, moderate income, and straight market rate rental. Across the street there are for sale standard spec houses. So in the plan you can see on the right these houses and on the left and the different colors of yellow, the market rate houses. In Pittsburgh, a similar thing, mixed income in the apartments. You can see those on the north, south street. and then home ownership took place behind it, and so on. This is a way in which you can create a community that has mix of incomes, but still works. Sometimes it is necessary to practice urban acupuncture. You have only a tiny piece, and this is one of those that helped turn around a whole section of the city because the new architecture reflected the existing traditional architecture that was there. I'm gonna go on now to the last point, which is understanding the city and how to use it. Now I've added to this is from Alvin Shore. How you understand the city has a lot to do with how you achieve your goals in life. So. One thing that this led me to do was study the psychology of perception, and I wanna thank the editors of an and Steven Sims in particular,'cause the New edition has a reproduction of my article from 1968, plus a new commentary of it on this. So I thought it was important to share just a little bit of it with you. Um, after looking at many towns, a psychologist who was also a cinematographer and I teamed up in our research work, to study a series of small towns, and we set onto this town, which is called Z East of Rome. And you can see it has a main street down the middle, which is in 1, 2, 3, 4 distinct segments. Each segment ends in a piazza that connects you to the next segment, and each segment has a landmark at each end, which you can see what the landmarks are like down below. We thought this was the most magical and clear structure we'd ever seen. But did it mean anything to people? Did the fact that we admire the structure mean anything to the people who lived there and used it for whatever reason? My friend, my colleague, did not feel that this corset was useful as a psychological test because there were too many associations with it. So we found a side street. There were two parallel streets. One short and one long. The short one was called the Vilo Longo, right? With a Long Street. My psychologist friend got very excited.'cause there's a, there's something called phenomenal time. How, how long an experience seems to take as opposed to how long it really takes, right? So psychologists use that to measure how well people understand a space. So the fact that the short street was the Long Street immediately caused him to think this might work. So we did interviews of 120 people. One group had was asked the question on this street, the long one, how long does it take to walk from point A to point B? The second group had the same distance marked as point A and B. On the, on the, on the other street, the irregular on Form Street. 99% of the participants confirmed, said that the short street was longer and the Long Street was shorter, which we took to mean that this visual structural richness really makes sense. I'll say one more thing about, about, uh, my colleague, in this project who was very interested in phenomenology and the sketches that I did that you see above here were used in the interviews. He said, when is the door not a door? Anybody remember the

Speaker 3 48:27

grade school joke about that? When is the door not a door? Nobody remembers. Yes. I mean, it's a jar. That's right. Absolutely right. well,

The Importance of Street Connectivity

Challenges in Modern Urban Planning

Speaker 4 48:41

when is the door, not a door? So he said, visualize walking down a street. The sidewalls are moving past you very quickly. You just see textures going past fields of texture and up ahead there's a vertical line in that texture. And as you approach it, it gets wider and wider and you get close to it. It starts moving faster, starts opening up faster, and there's the door, and then you leave it behind and it's no longer there. So if you think I, I mentioned that because I think it's a very valuable way of thinking. When you're doing your design design, think about what it's like to walk through it and where your eyes are focusing. And a fundamental principle of that is that objects on the side are a tiny fraction of the retinal image in your eye. Objects that are perpendicular to you are much larger as a retinal image in your art. So if you're designing long than your streets, find ways to get perpendicular elements or changes in the anger to articulate that street. So the last point, finding your way around the city as a key to success. Our little friend here that we saw at the beginning has one big advantage. He's on a street. It's Manhattan. All the streets are connected to each other. Every door is connected to every other door. Wall Street is not far away. You could wind up there. Access to opportunity means you have opportunities available. It's the essence of the, what I call the great democratic American grid. Every door, it's connected to every door. Every door is connected to opportunity if you want a ticket. So we see this in large cities and small cities. The grid is there. You can easily get from house to shop, to church, to school, whatever it is. It's extended and it is extended as the town's extended. It has its problems when you extend it too far, but the theory, and it doesn't need to be rectangular, can be irregular form, so long as it's continuous. But here's the opposite of that. We did a project in England, east of London, in the most unfortunate new town called Basilton. You wanna see a laboratory of what not to do. Go Toton. And in Basilton is a place called Kray, which was a social housing project of 700 units with no streets. You see there's one street around the perimeter, and you entered and you see the diagram. the left hand diagram is the one street and a network, labyrinthine network of parking spaces. Just so you know what it looked like. There's an image of one of those so-called green spaces in the middle and what the architecture was like, and there was some sort of pedestrian connection, but it was almost incomprehensible, completely incomprehensible environment. A few stories, people living in this community have a 12 year shorter lifespan than people in adjacent neighborhoods. Uh, they use health facilities much less often than the rest of the city. It has a very high unemployment rate and very few people seek jobs or training even though there's a community college a block away. When we proposed streets, people were terrified about their children'cause their children get this, did not know how to cross the street. The only streets they knew were highways. They didn't know how to do it. So think about someone growing up trying to succeed in life, not knowing how to cross a street. We had a developer client once who had embroidered in a panel behind his desk so you couldn't miss it. Architecture can hurt you. This is an example of that. Architecture hurt you. We did a plan, and I'll show you just very quickly, uh, that introduced a network of streets. That's pretty labyrinthine, but it's because we had to preserve 75% of the existing buildings, which were not designed to be on streets. And we put in place, a, a network of pedestrian streets that was more sensible and pedestrian connections, which are part of the street system, and developed an architecture that was more humane. Unfortunately, the first phase got under construction and the government changed and all the funding was withdrawn. And then immediately after that, the developers completely changed its team. so things went into hibernation for a while. It's now being redone. they're about tearing down more houses and will hopefully have a more sensible, a more sensible, plan. My final example. Is how we have destroyed the American grid. Remember, I view the American grid as sacrosanct. It's the way, it's the essence of democracy and upward social mobility. Did I tell you, an historian once said, American City, late 19th, early 20th century, is the most efficient upward mobility machine the world has ever known. So this mobility machine was systematically being destroyed after the second World war. So this is Nordic, Virginia. On the left you can see the grid pattern. Very irregular, but continuous. And there were lots of east west pedestrian scale connections, streets that you could also walk on easily that are indicated in green. Now the west half is affluent white. The left half is poor black. So after the war. This street system was put in place where the grid was dissolved. There are no green lines because there are no pedestrian scale connections between east and west and giant super blocks were put in that lose all of the effect of the fine grain grid. A lot of work was done on the west side, not on the east side, most of which we were responsible for. So that over time, a pedestrian scale, interconnected network of streets and open space was developed. I was pointing the wrong thing on the west on the left side. No bottom left row. You can see it nothing on the east. In a recent master plan and in a major project to redevelop the public housing in what's called a choice neighborhood project, we were able to do in plan, at least what you see on the upper right, which is to reconnect a number of those east west streets. And if you look at the bottom right, you'll see the design. Of the redeveloped Public Housing Project on the right is of a series of normalized city blocks with an interconnected grid of network. This is the work that needs to be done all over the country and has been through the Hope Six program, and others. Here's an aerial view. You can see the public housing project in the lower foreground, and you can see the barrier roads that separate it. there's flooding in the right hand side of that image. and so a major part of it, of the infrastructure is what's called a blue green wave, which is to manage the water in that whole flooding district with a park, which you see as this large form on the right hand side. And then the neighborhood itself is an interconnected network of streets. the straight line street that you see connects the Martin Luther King Memorial with the Basilic of St. Mary's, which is a. Catholic church from 1840 Magnificent Gothic revival building and the center of the community. And then the old barrier road over on the left is now being tamed with actual crosswalks and things that can do it. So that framework then becomes the framework for a variety of different scales and sizes of houses, which is what's now being fought over, labored over, and worked on as part of the solution. So in conclusion, I'm gonna go back to my favorite artist, Jean Jacque. We see a couple sitting on their very small balcony in incredibly tiny chairs with their very tiny little pool, uh, looking out and surveying their neighborhood. And she is very satisfied with it all. I mean, after all, it's a neighborhood. Whose image is very positive, Paris, after all, it's the best it could be. The exteriors of the buildings are all glorious. There's tremendous social capital. We saw earlier what happens when the tree trimmers come and we saw people watching cats and all of that. So that ingredient is there. It's very diverse. I showed you the French apartment buildings and how you get a tremendous mix of incomes in it and the this clearest city in the world to find your way around. So they're very content, but why is the man looking so intently? Well, if you look at the image on the left, what do you see in the distance? There's a construction crane, something is happening, something's gonna disrupt, or has the capacity to disrupt this

Audience Q&A

Speaker 3 58:45

fantastic environment, will it be supportive and enhance these qualities? Or will it diminish them and weaken them and start a process of diminishing the whole place. I think it's our job, particularly your job since I'm retired. But it's your job to see that that doesn't happen, don't you think? Thank you. Let's take some questions. Speak to the mic.

Speaker 5 59:41

Thank you for a really amazing lecture.

Speaker 3 59:43

Thank you.

Speaker 5 59:44

The, for the analysis of cities, especially when you were looking. Phenomenon of time and how people experience space. Did you explore that in any non-Western context? No,

Speaker 4 59:58

I did not.

Speaker 5 59:59

No.

Speaker 4 59:59

No, I

Speaker 5 1:00:01

did not. Do you think based off your experience, there might be a difference based off of Western urbanism versus, Eastern or African, types of urbanism?

Speaker 4 1:00:11

I think the, well, I don't know because I haven't been to those places. the closest I've been to a different, attitude about city building was in the Arab world in North Africa. and they are very different. the traditional environments are really very labyrinthine. and you need a code to sort of know where you are because of the introverted nature of the houses. A door might lead to a house that might lead to a school that might, in one case it led to a slaughterhouse when I looked into the door. So that's, a whole bunch of uses are buried in that. So I really can't answer that. Um, and I've tried to focus only on things that I've actually experienced. and although I'm interested in the rest of the world, there's only so much one person can do. Please. Well, I think I, I would, I'd be delighted to find studies that do that. I mean, I think that'd be a great area of research, and worth pursuing. I suspect because human beings are human beings, that there are similar constructs and similar methods. but just as buildings are in different languages, cities are in different languages. And, um. It will be different. Now, I do know of one example. Um, there was a professor at Berkeley. I was asked to evaluate her thesis. I believe her name was, it was Chow. I know several chow. I'm trying think which one it is. I think it was Renee Chow. And she had documented the traditional cities, which are now all being demolished by the regime, but the traditional cities in the traditional parts of several cities. and there was great similarity actually. I mean, the forms were different, but the structures were actually very similar. so I'm sorry I can't answer your question, but I hope somebody maybe you'll try to find out and figure it out. Be a great project. And I trying to, I believe it's Renee Chow. You might look her up. She's teaching somewhere else now. She was at Berkeley. She's somewhere else. and see if you can get a hold of prothesis.

Speaker 6 1:02:39

thank you for the lecture. It was great. can you speak to the way that these traditional cities were designed without a designer, like how they naturally came about?

Speaker 4 1:02:53

Yes, I feel strongly about that actually. first of all, it happened slowly so people could look at something and change it if they didn't like it or if it didn't work. so I believe they were designed pragmatically. I don't know that this is absolute, but they probably were not pre-planned. I mean, you have this great tradition from Greece through Rome, even into the middle ages of planned towns where everything was laid out. I've always been fascinated with, the vernacular towns that have very interesting street patterns and gorgeous spaces and beautiful buildings. Uh, they were built over time by people who are building for themselves. so naturally all of these issues that I've been describing are satisfied because they were there, they knew it Well. There are some interesting aspects, though. you can see it in the archaic planet of Athens, and you can see it in most vernacular villages and buildings. There is some sort, street may be a regular that connects gates and entrances into it. and they may be like this, but they, they go and do that. So there's a kind of built in hierarchy, right there. If not originally over time, because something that's more traveled may encourage different kinds of uses than you would have on a street that's not traveled very much. So you tend to have public uses on streets that have more traffic and private uses on streets that are more private. So that's one thing. Also, they evolved over time, and I've observed it in many of these towns as they became part of a larger society when they're an isolated society, it's one thing, but then they became part of a larger society. Trades started happening. So people who weren't from there were coming there and they needed to welcome them because they were doing business with them. Things started to change. So in many of them, there is a street, sometimes only one, sometimes several, but curves and bends around for purely pragmatic reasons. We don't know what they were, but someone wanted to expand a building or change this, or somebody owned a property and wouldn't let the street go through any one of those. Practical reasons. In any case, there is a structure to it. Now, coming back to my point about when you're walking along with parallel walls, things flash past very quickly and you don't see them. But if there's something perpendicular, you see it. It's at those points on those curved streets that you will always see a tower, a fancy doorway or something that's different from the surrounding to give coherence to the town. So that wasn't an architect coming down and saying, do this. It was the people themselves. It might have been someone who had been successful in business in the middle ages. There were incredible trading going on all over Europe, and wanted to build his house and make it be prominent. So he might have cleared away somebody else's house, bought it, and then built his and had it stick out with a big tower so that you could see it. Or it might have been a church tearing down some buildings and building a larger church, whatever that building operation was, usually, not always, but usually on those streets that have some kind of inflection, there's a lot to be learned in that. this is gonna be more than you asked for, but, there's a lot to be learned from that. I think in our present state, my career has been working with large scale efforts in small places, trying to tone them down and make them seem like they were natural or incremental. Uh, there's a growing movement around the United States, particularly with gridlock in Washington and accelerated now with a sense of hopelessness that anything is gonna be able to happen to help cities, of sort of grassroots development in which a couple people will get together and do something. Or they might put an a DU in the backyard, or they might buy a house that's derelict and fix it up and do it, uh, or they might buy an empty lot and build a new building. There is actually a lot of that right here in South Bend, whether you're aware of it. But the Near Northwest community, has been written about nationally, actually the Near Northwest community, a man named Mike Keen. and it's the North Near Northwest Community Development Corporation was not sure it's a corporation, but near Northwest something was the spark was one of the sparks that an individual people were. So now there's something like 50 different people doing little projects all around, and it works because it's in the context of an existing city. Most of what they're doing is restoring tumbledown houses. there's some new construction, much of which is very sensitive to the environment and uses the same vocabularies. Not all, but much of it is. and I see this as a new move, as a new wave, as a, you know, we've done, we got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. I mean, I go to the bigger and bigger part for a minute. when we work on these kinds of projects, it's now almost impossible to get in the big projects, single family houses or duplexes or even row houses, just because the construction and financing industry is all about the 5 0 1 apartment buildings, you know, or, and sometimes single family houses, but usually not. So it's getting harder and harder to do it. And the contractors say, we can't afford to build a single family house. We can build this apartment building and afford to do townhouses. It's too expensive. I'm involved in two situations now in Norfolk. One is a big project where it costs$256,000 construction costs for a two bedroom apartment in a building in a little neighborhood. Very distressed neighborhood that has a strong civic leadership firm I've worked with, has developed, handbook with pre-approved plans for very traditional houses of 16 to 7,000 square feet that are being built for 160,000. So the so you, that difference of a hundred thousand dollars is the difference between a big scale operation, which layers upon layers of expense, much of which has nothing to do with building the end result. It's financing, marketing, all of that kinds of stuff. so I see that there is a potential movement for doing small things. Now, the challenge. Is designed consistency and appropriate decisions if they're not already there. And so we, for example, I didn't talk about it all. We initiated the revival of pattern books. Stefanos mentioned this and we did one for an interesting joint venture, joint venture between the Institute for Classical Art and Architecture and Habitat for Humanity. And it's called, uh, building Neighborly Houses. I think the pattern book and plan books have a great role. They are what made the great 19th century and 20th century, early 20th century neighborhoods of America. They're all done with pattern and plan books done by individual builders. Same thing with Georgia and London. There was a pattern book and all those squares with GE identical Georgian houses were built. It sent the historian, sir John Summerstone into despair. By the way. He said, oh my god, even a brick layer could design a house. Well, I say, hooray, this is what we want. Because urbanism has to be at scale. You need lots of buildings to create urban spaces, and if they don't work together is not gonna work. So, sure. Long answer to a short question, but thanks you

Speaker 3 1:11:17

everybody's afraid to raise their hand or we'll be here another half hour. Okay. I think we have do the next few weeks. Thank.