Common Ground in a Liquid City. Matt Hern

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ You need quiet streets, places that feel restful. Even in New York the traffic is all on the arterials and some of the side streets are very quiet—and that’s important. We want liveliness, but we can’t be assaulted by the city. Even in Shanghai, which is incredibly dense, there are streets and areas that are very quiet. When I lived there, I would ride my bike downtown through some really peaceful neighborhoods with beautiful old houses and it was a restful commute.

      And she’s right, of course. The city has to contain all kinds of different spaces if all kinds of people are going to thrive here. All of us want (need) quiet places without traffic, without people rushing around, and protecting those spaces is contingent on our willingness to densify, especially high streets. But, sort of counter-intuitively, it is sprawl, both within and beyond city limits that destroys the capacity to retain those peaceful areas. Endless single-family housing sprawl through the city brings traffic into every nook and cranny, just as suburban sprawl erodes our agricultural base and the character of rural areas.

      When Larry talks about ending people’s romance with the burbs, I’m right there and I applaud (for real) the significant progress this city has made in densifying. But there is a sterile, manufactured quality to the density that I am calling into question, and I think it reflects the quality of civic engagement and participation that Vancouver has nurtured.

      Part of what I am poking at is the actual form. Glassy towers are just not a big part of my vision of convivial city life, for all the obvious reasons, some of them aesthetic, some practical. And they are not at all necessary for a dense city. As James Howard Kunstler said to me once: “Skyscrapers don’t equal rich cosmopolitan life—Paris has lowish rise, but is very dense.” Towers give you a peculiar kind of density, and not necessarily a convivial one. Often densely vibrant neighborhoods are entirely three or four stories high—think of Brooklyn or London, for example. There are almost no skyscrapers in Istanbul and it is as dense as I can imagine a city ever wanting to be.

      As Berelowitz wrote: “Architecturally speaking, it [the podium tower] is a one-liner…. I am more interested in how we use the city than necessarily how it looks. It’s packaged: look but don’t touch. It’s very much about a sanitized vision of the city.”³⁴ Beasley doesn’t dispute this per se, but argues that the vitality will come in time.

      This is something I have struggled with all my career. I travel all the time, I am always visiting new cities, and I love their public spaces, filled with people—and I often asked myself why aren’t the public spaces here like that? And you’ve got to realize that part of this is a difference in culture.

      In northern cities all over the world, the public realm is not where you hang out because of the weather, and in this culture people are often socializing in other circumstances, not the street or plazas. What I’ve tried to do, contrary to what is happening in many North American cities, is to design the public realm so it can be repopulated, it can be rediscovered. My hope is, and I don’t think this will happen overnight but over generations, that Vancouverites will rediscover how to use the space.

      I always tell the story of False Creek North—we designed the whole thing with the Seawall, parks; everything linked and five thousand people move in and there’s no one on the street. And I go, “My God. What have I done wrong? There’s no one on the street. I want street life!” Then a little food store opens and all of a sudden there’s people all over the street because up until then people had been taking the elevator down from their tower, getting in their car, driving to the suburbs where they used to shop, driving back to their tower. They were never outside. But that all changed as soon as local establishments opened.

      Right now, one of the criticisms of this city, and it’s a good criticism that I buy and one I don’t feel anxious about, is that it does feel packaged. But you know what? If you were in eighteenth century London, it would feel packaged too. When something is new, it’s just been created—it feels new. And that’s true of all cities, and then they get repopulated. The spaces that you and I love, say in Delhi, they were initially designed as great, government image-making things, and they weren’t populated. But human beings have this way of learning how to use cities and how to take advantage of what’s there. But our job is to make the infrastructure of the commonwealth of the city. In North America, that’s a dead art.

      It’s more useful if the question “Is it all about density?” is a little more nuanced. While a more compact city is critical, there are a lot of different kinds of densification, and the nature of that density is contingent on the processes that get us there. In Vancouver, we’re getting a very particular kind of density: a developer-friendly, instant-mix version that is injecting huge swaths of the city with a concentrated, pre-planned density in an incredibly short period of time.

      But density without community just sucks. Thousands and thousands of people jammed into faceless little boxes, trying to pay off exorbitant mortgages is not much of a city. The ostensibly public spaces in the new downtown are the opposite of common—they are filled with people rushing around through highly-manicured landscapes without a pause—mirroring the frenzied construction all around them. We really should be aspiring to density, but too often what we’re getting here is a rendition that threatens to undermine the virtues that theoretically inhere in dense urban life.

      Interestingly, many of the same things were being said twenty years ago about the West End. Critics claimed that it was being built too fast, that people were being herded into high-rise cages, that it was a faceless landscape of towers. But now, the West End proper is a terrific neighborhood in all kinds of ways, full of vibrant city life. Maybe in twenty years my critiques will seem equally unfounded.

      Maybe. But I think there is something different going on right now. First, the building frenzy going on presently is on a whole other level of magnitude. The West End was built fast, but nothing like this. Second, the West End really has a remarkable diversity of building forms. The other day, Selena and I spent an afternoon walking around the neighborhood and there is really a surprising lack of repetition; there are huge numbers of buildings and they are mixed-up very nicely. And the scale is something else. The West End is one whole order of magnitude lower than what is being built now and is mostly made up of five and six story blocks, and that matters. Past a certain height, you necessarily lose conviviality and neighborliness, especially when it is so choreographed.

      More than anything, though, density has to unfold, not sprout in a just-add-water boom. Christopher Alexander has often written about the need for incrementalism or accretive growth. His first rule of city building in A New Theory of Urban Design is: “Piecemeal growth as a necessary condition to wholeness.” It’s a principle that’s getting its ass kicked here. It’s possible that this is just the first blast to kick-start a new era of density, perhaps in time this will all settle down. It’s not the speed per se that I am objecting to here, but rather the process of growth that is reflected on the street.

      It’s something that Vancouver environmental designer Erick Villagomez echoed when I asked about his thoughts on density:

      We need more nuance about the implications of densification. This city was founded by developers and that has remained the core of the city. Obviously developers love density—it makes them a lot of money, as we’ve seen downtown—and although the city has handled it in a relatively decent way in terms of urban design, our densification has been pretty simplistic. Yes, density is important toward reducing our ecological footprint and creating vitality, but it can’t be that alone. If we are going to densify sustainably we have to connect it to many other factors.

      Coming from Toronto, it’s incredible how uptight this city is. If you are going to densify toward an urban culture you have to have more faith in people. We have to look closely at the pockets of the city where density and vibrancy co-exit and СКАЧАТЬ