University of Cincinnati

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:______

I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:

It is entitled:

This work and its defense approved by:

Chair: ______

Manifesto For Revolutionizing A Central City For The 21st Century

A thesis submitted to the

Division of Research and Advanced Studies of

the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulﬁ llment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE

in the School of Architecture and Interior Design

in the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning

2005

Steven Waldron

B.S.Arch., University of Cincinnati, 2003

University Faculty: First Committee Chair: Udo Greinacher Second Committee Chair: Michael McInturf Third Committee Chair: Jay Chatterjee

External Advisors: Scott Enns, Coordinator Community Developmennt, Ofﬁ ce of the University Architect David Ginsburg, President, Downtown Cincinnati, Incorporated Neil Kittredge, Associate Partner, Beyer Blinder Belle Tim Reynolds, Planner, Southeast Ohio Regional Transit Authority Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

The project focuses on the urban and societal conditions of today and realigning our environs more effectively to the manner in which we live. The neighborhood was hypothesized to become the cellular structure for a metropolitan region, replacing cities as the base unit. Rather, it is within the local neighborhood in which people identify with and utilize nearby parks, grocery stores, and churches.

Design methodology for the neighborhood was derived from various urban design literature through the last 100 years, comparing overlapping principles, and implementing them into a neighborhood designed to withstand degradation.

The ﬁ rst focus involved concentrating on public transportation systems and obtaining a means to integrate a system the fast paced American culture. The second phase involved the design of the idealized template, devoid of existing structures. Finally, the process was tested in Blue Ash, a ﬁ rst-ring suburb in the Cincinnati MSA, situated in the midst of rapid growth that will soon connect Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio.

Steve Waldron • Abstract Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

1.0 Introduction – Cities Are Redesigned Every 50 Years 1 1.1 The Strive for Change 2 1.2 Problem Statement 3 2.0 Deﬁ nition of Urban Utopias 4 2.1 Thomas More 4 2.2 Karl Marx 4 2.3 John Ruskin 5 2.4 Utopia versus the Modern World 5 3.0 Previous Urban Utopias 7 3.1 Theological Communes 7 3.2 Ebenezer Howard 9 3.3 Frank Lloyd Wright 9 3.4 Le Corbusier 10 4.0 Results of the Early Manifestos 11 4.1 The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard 12 4.2 The Legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright 12 4.3 The Legacy of Le Corbusier 13 5.0 Additional Utopian Creations Since the Early Manifestos 13 5.1 Walt Disney Resort Parks 13 5.2 Arcosanti 15 6.0 Conditions that Necessitate Change in Urban Design Process 15 6.1 The Gaping Holes of Urban Fabric Ripped by the Automobile 15 6.2 Technology in the Constructed World 18 6.3 Density in the Built World 22 6.4 Transit in the Current World 24 6.5 Urban Blocks in the Current World 28 6.6 Open Spaces in the Current World 29 6.7 Building Form in the Current World 29 6.8 Boundaries in the Current World 30 6.9 Corporate in the Current World 30 6.10 Institutional in the Current World 31 6.11 Retail in the Current World 31 6.12 Residential in the Current World 34 6.13 Industrial in the Current World 34 7.0 Neighborhoods Are the Future ‘Small Towns’ 35 8.0 The Reactive Force of the New Urbanism Movement 39 9.0 Explanation of Periodic Writings on Urban Form 43 10.0 Quintessential Urban Design Theorists 43 10.1 1989: Camillo Sitte 43 10.2 1904: Raymond Unwin 44 10.3 1920s: J.C. Nichols 44 10.4 1938: Lewis Mumford 46 10.5 1960: Victor Gruen 46 10.6 1961: Jane Jacobs 47 10.7 1980: William Whyte 48 10.8 1981: Kevin Lynch 49 10.9 1993: Peter Calthorpe 49

Steve Waldron Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

10.10 1993: Spiro Kostof 50 11.0 Preparing the Suburbs and Cities for the Future America 50 12.0 Quantitative Background Based on Chart 53 13.0 Testing Location: Blue Ash; A First Ring Suburb of Cincinnati 53 13.1 Brief History of Blue Ash and its Environs 53 13.2 Strategy for Blue Ash Renovations 57 14.0 Programmatic Considerations 59 14.1 Proposed Transportation System of the Reconfi gured Blue Ash 59 14.2 Proposed Urban Blocks of the Reconfi gured Blue Ash 60 14.3 Proposed Open Spaces of the Reconfi gured Blue Ash 61 14.4 Proposed Intentional Ambiguity of the Reconfi gured Blue Ash 62 14.5 Metaphysical Boundary of the Reconfi gured Blue Ash 62 14.6 Corporate Presence of the Reconfi gured Blue Ash 63 14.7 Institutional Presence of the Reconfi gured Blue Ash 63 14.8 Retail Spaces of the Reconfi gured Blue Ash 64 14.9 Residential Spaces of the Reconfi gured Blue Ash 64 14.10 Industry in the Reconfi gured Blue Ash 65 15.0 Process of Alteration 65 15.1 Origination 66 15.2 Reduction 67 15.3 Implementation 67 16.0 Conclusion 71 17.0 Appendix 73 18.0 Works Cited 74 19.0 List of Illustrations 77

Steve Waldron Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

– Introduction:

0 . Cities Are Redesigned Every 50 Years 1

– 1.0 This design thesis is intended to reestablish the central city as a desirable location for residential, retail, ofﬁ ce and institutional development, through the combination of commonly recurrent urban principles. By thorough analysis of the classic literature of the twentieth century, it becomes • •

F F i possible to ﬁ lter rationale of disparate trends to enact a i g g u u r set of normative rules that satisfy the needs of a modern r e e

1 1

citizen. A set of theoretical principles provides validation • • for establishing the central city as the essential element for growth, as its importance is consistent regardless of time or location. When an urban structure is shown in a way Chicago, Illinois, has examples of multiplicity of which is aligned with the preferences of the masses, a new transit that creates neighborhoods equally usable for all ages and classes of citizens. comprehensive theory would result if the situation is placed into a framework such that it would be effective in multiple locations, in multiple cities, and in multiple time periods.

It is not too late for change to occur. But in the light of nearly 1.6 million new homes built in 2001 (USA Today, “The way cities and suburbs…”), it is now imperative to instill a change in heart of the people regarding the importance of a central city, before the last aspects become engulfed by competing suburbs, leaving moribund urban cores. “Historically, we have rebuilt our cities every ﬁ fty or sixty years… The choice is ours: either a society of homogeneous pieces, isolated from one another in often fortiﬁ ed enclaves, or a society of diverse and memorable neighborhoods, organized into mutually supportive towns, cities, and regions” (Suburban Nation, xiv). The opportunity to create an environment inside the city which balances the activities that cater to the life of a person yet provide all the personal amenities offered • •

F F

to a suburban person have never been more possible. i i g g u u r r e e

2 1

Typically, war has been the primary reason for modernizing • • the city; large redevelopment was needed to repair or replace the urban fabric which was destroyed by bombardment or conquest. This happened fairly regularly, up to as often as ﬁ fty years, and merely twenty in early 20th century Germany. In America, however, no city has been affected by wartime activity, nor widespread famine and disease, save the singular exceptions of Washington, DC in 1812 and Richmond in 1865. The stagnant growth that occurred left America subject to suburbanization in part due to lack of Development can begin with a single effective change - an opportunity which European cities, particularly movement, when considerate thought is given to German cities, were able to capitalize upon. Due to the what would best be suited for the area.

Steve Waldron • 1 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

worldwide organizations that monitor and limit warfare, it is a fairly safe assumption that most central cities in America will not be damaged through war, and therefore must impart its own regeneration periodically. –

1 .

1 The Strive for Change

– There have been several theoretical architectural attempts at bringing forth change to a city, solely through an individual's or organization's deﬁ ned vision. Once ideas of revitalization become widely accepted, it will be possible to invoke large degrees of change in very short order. Though never built in exact form, some promised examples of these include the Italian Renaissance writer Alberti; the Modernist Utopians of Ebenezer Howard of England, Frank Lloyd Wright of the United States, and Le Corbusier of France; and, more recently, members of the America Congress for the New Urbanism. The aim of each of these pioneers has been to advance society as a whole through architectural change.

These changes cannot occur detached from a basis within the scientifi c realm. Thomas Kuhn, a twentieth-century historian of science, has pointed out that previously established scientifi c verities are themselves capable of hampering scientifi c advancement. He called such verities “paradigms” and drew attention to the fact that they shape people’s entire worldviews. Most people do not enjoy having their entire •

worldview discredited; its sets them uncomfortably adrift. •

F F i i g

Scientists are no exception. A paradigm tends to be so g u u r r e greatly cherished that, as new knowledge or evidence turns e

3 1

• up that contradicts it or calls it into question, the paradigm is • embroidered with qualifi cations and exceptions, as opposed to losing the paradigm altogether. If a paradigm is deemed obsolete, it must fi nally give way, discredited by the testing of the real world. But outworn paradigms ordinarily stand staunchly until somebody within the fi eld makes a leap of insight, imagination, and courage suffi cient to dislodge the Seaside, Florida, greatly changed redevelopment thinking and provided a basis for an entire town obsolete paradigm and replace it. planning movement.

Architectural paradigms, known as movements, are no different than scientiﬁ c paradigms. Modernism as a movement began with the 1928 Foundation of the CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture) and was altered periodically but remained the predominant architectural value system until the late 1970s, when Postmodernism ﬂ ourished as a reactive force. Its impact still present in architectural discourse today, though its impact is much diminished. It appears to have run its course and waned

Steve Waldron • 2 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

in recent years, providing opportunity for new discourse to replace its dominance as a realm of thought. –

2 . Problem Statement 1

– As our society changes, it is necessary that the built world around us responds according to the way society chooses to live, and would be most effective if design in advance of market conditions, rather than through reactive design or renovations. With the dogma of modernism behind us, there are currently no pivotal ideas about how urban design • •

F should appear in order to most effectively accommodate our F i i g g u u r societal environment, and even less has been written on how r e e

4 1

to implement these designs into existing urban infrastructure. • • This thesis is a manifesto which proposes that a pattern exists which can become the basis of a paradigm for sustainable neighborhood design. A healthy neighborhood requires a variety of aspects to exist in tandem for a community to be created within it. From a specifi c list of guide- While most manifestos are created to be an idealistic lines, it is possible to have a community created interpretation of principles inherent in a particular design, in any of a number of locations. this thesis culminates in applying these principles in an existing city structure; much like a scientifi c experiment that proves or disproves a theoretical construct. This will be accomplished through the application of design principles suggested by widely acclaimed authors for their functionality in contemporary culture, on the premise that much of the ideals they preach are timeless and universal qualities that are usable today. When specifi c trends of contemporary culture and market analysis are added, a civic form suitable for any culture can then become appropriated such that those principles, set in an urban structure up to one-hundred years ago, can remain applicable – and acceptable - today.

The result of this project will demonstrate a prototypical guide for implementation of the most effective means for inhabiting people in an urban system that is equally functional, desirable, and socially responsive. In addition to a transportation route, a segment of urban fabric will be • designated to facilitate the application of a transit network, as •

F F i i g well as an urban retail core, a series of neighborhood parks, g u u r r e and mixed residential units into an existing city structure of e 5

• institutional and street corridors. Through the creation of • an urban design framework, the architectural components become uniﬁ ed and more successful due to their ordering, the quality of their public spaces, and the pattern interchange By reading the important aspects of urban life that occurs between them. that are described by designers in various countries and time periods, it becomes possible to ﬁ nd consistent ideals that are timeless and universal, To begin, it is necessary to look at how previous writers in the because they appear in multiple literary works.

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last few centuries promoted their hypotheses to encourage change on a large scale. Based upon observations, analyses or repeated patterns, and trends of important aspects in their cultural setting, these writers were able to portray their vision in a manner that could be understood. In this thesis, a vision is deﬁ ned as a concise statement or description of the direction in which an individual or an organization is headed (Hackman 107). To be compelling, the vision of these writers needed to be compelling a desirable. Though the cultural conditions are largely outdated, the fervor and devotion these visionaries had toward portraying their convictions are very relevant today. –

0 .

2 Deﬁ nition of Urban Utopias

– 2.0 –

1 . Thomas More 2

– Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia envisioned a place where realism and surrealism could coexist, a “nonplace” where creative thought reigned. As a satirist, More continued the tradition of Ancient Roman writers like Juvenal and Horace. Utopia meant “no place” but sounded like “good place” in its original Latin. In depicting Utopia, More’s ultimate goal was to indicate areas of improvement for Christian society by stepping outside the boundaries of Orthodox Catholicism. In the book, he references both Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle's ideas of aesthetics, justice and harmony were present in the Utopian's philosophy, as were Plato’s convictions of governmentally-controlled property. Utopia exposed the absurdities and evils of More’s society by depicting a perfect alternative (Rabb 34-42). As a work of satire, it indirectly criticized Europe's political corruption and religious hypocrisy. –

2 . 2

Karl Marx – In the 1800s, the rise of urban industrialization triggered the proliferation of Utopian projects, particularly agricultural communes, all of which failed. The concept of a utopia entailed creating an ideal society apart from the demoralizing city. When Marx created the Communist Manifesto in 1848, he described a system in which the government is established for the main purpose of empowering the common people to control the means of production at all levels. This concept immediately spawned multiple urban utopian communities, particularly in Britain, France, and the United States (Mumford 11). The utopian celebration of common property and dependence upon extensive state planning are the groundwork for communism and socialism as presented

Steve Waldron • 4 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

in Marx and Engels' written works. Utopia's criticisms of the nobility's perversion of law to subjugate the poor were applied to the suffering of industrial and factory workers. The abolition of money, private property, and class structure would undermine the power of the bourgeoisie. Socialists believed that agricultural economies with property held in common would cure the ills of industrial capitalization. –

3 . 2

John Ruskin – Although his name is not one that springs to mind when the public thinks of infl uential urban planners and designers, John Ruskin was a highly infl uential fi gure of thought in the mid-nineteenth century (Lang 44-56). He wrote on a multitude of topics, including art, social reform, and English literature, describing the need for practical reorganization. His pamphlets and lectures quickly gave him tremendous reputation in Britain and America as a critic of his culture. He regularly challenged artists, architects and town planners to collaborate on developing prototypes of his vision, in an attempt to versimilitudinously validate his concepts and ideals. His resultant tests then became a basis for subsequent urban designers such as Lewis Mumford, Patrick Geddes, and Ebenezer Howard, each of whom followed his belief for bettering society. The works of these fi gures, in turn, are the infl uence of current practitioners of the New Urbanist movement such as Peter Calthorpe, Andres Duany, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. –

4 .

2 Utopia Versus the Modern World

– Stated earlier, the concept of a utopia entailed creating an ideal society apart from the demoralizing city, but today the utopia can carry a different meaning. Rather than look solely to areas not built upon, utopian imagery can work to portray an ideal society within the limits of a degraded central • •

F city in order to renew it to maximum capability. However, F i i g g u u r because they usually involve a systematic or unmitigated r e e 6

overhaul, utopian visions frequently contain a connotation • • of irrelevancy to reality. This is due to the fact that city planners do not work on a blank canvas; they can only make incremental changes to an urban scene already shaped by a Overlapping a new neighborhood into an existing complicated historical process. city structure is typically improbable, even with careful phasing. Throughout civilized history, there has been a belief that an ideal city stems from a planned city. From Iktinos and Kallikrates of the Parthenon to James Oglethorpe's Savannah, Georgia, plan to L'Enfant's Washington, DC layout, each major city involves further implementation of a basic system

Steve Waldron • 5 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

of organization. These cases exhibit human rationality that retained a level of control over the blind operation of economic forces. In utopian designs, proﬁ tability is no longer relevant to a city’s structure; the community wields greater power than a sole self-seeking individual so that more beneﬁ cial • •

F design and increased aesthetic qualities may proliferate. The F i i g g u common good embodies every detail of a utopian city plan. u r r e e 7

This is not to say that a good city or ideal city needs to be 1

• a socialist city. The common good is simply the result of • realizing the harmony inherent in an industrialized society. This harmony can be found through the physical expression L’Enfant’s Washington, DC, plan incorporated a of ﬁ rst-rate housing available to all and in magniﬁ cent public series of connective diagonal arterials over a reg- facilities for everyone’s use; and the aesthetic realization in ular city grid, balancing effective movement with the beauty of the city as a whole. comprehensible patterns.

To create an improved environment, the designer must bring a certain number of prescribed values and an intended reasoning for pursuing an objective improvement. Typically, there have been two distinct methodologies for how a utopia was created: either the designer portrays a fully functional • •

F F i and aesthetically interesting illustration, or a market analyst i g g u u r relates the procedures used in creating a ﬁ nancially sufﬁ cient r e e 8

package. Either method is capable of producing a repeatable • • process that results in a desired outcome, enabling subsequent reproductions. The historical problem occurs in that fact that one methodology rarely takes the other into consideration, resulting in a depiction which tends to be unconstructable Relationships and focus elements are an essential or unattractive. Synthesis of the two polar extremes would consideration of urban designing. result in a design that is uniformly plausible and appealing.

A template for design can be either literal or theoretical, it can be a ﬁ nal result or describe a process, and it can be either stringent in exactitude or provide a loose framework from which copies can be altered to suit existing conditions. It • •

is the intention of this thesis to provide the latter in each F F i i g g

case; this project will provide the framework for theoretical u u r r e e

implementation of a process of development for a sustainable 9 1

• neighborhood. The defi nition of sustainable, as used in this • thesis, is longevity of activity – that a city or town once fl ourishing may remain that way, and that the rise and fall The process of plugging singular elements into an common in many suburban developments may not happen existing condition to create a more unifi ed fi nish here. This occurs when the number of residents leaving an is a desirable goal of neighborhoods. area is equitable with the number arriving in the area each day, when the number of residences for sale equals the number bought, and the density of structures once desired remains static. In order to accomplish this, the decisions made with this prototype are intended to answer the questions that arise

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from the site itself and the procedure given to it. Therefore, any subsequent projects would similarly be able to follow the process of phasing, and though the development may look unrecognizable, the underlying elements would be consistent and effective. –

0 . 3

Previous Urban Utopias – 3.0 –

1 .

3 Theological Communes

– In America, the most numerous withdrawals from society were religious and social communal groups developed in the nineteenth century. Perhaps most notable of the religiously-

oriented towns was the Puritan establishment at Plymouth • •

F i

Rock, Massachusetts, though its origin as an individual town g i g u u r e was largely accidental. There were hundreds of communal r e

1 0

utopian experiments in the early United States, and the

• Shakers alone founded around 20 settlements. By the end • of the mid-twentieth century even theosophical colonies, Amana, IA, stands as a still-working city of quaint based off Madame Blavatasky's merging of eastern and and idealized architectural typology. For this rea- western mysticism, had cropped up in such places as Point son, it has recently become a tourist destination. Loma and Temple Home, near San Diego, California. Other groups included the Zoarites in Ohio, the Moravians of North Carolina, and the followers of German-born Wilhelm Keil, a Methodist minister heavily inﬂ uenced by the pietist movement, who founded colonies in Bethel, Missouri, and Aurora, Oregon. While great differences existed between the various utopian communities or colonies, each society shared a common bond in a vision of communal living in a utopian society.

Creating a fully urban utopia is not a new concept, either; many have tried and failed for various reasons. Between 1890 and 1930, three pivotal examples were created by Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier, in which they tried to create designs for a city that expressed the power and beauty of modern technology and the most enlightened ideas of social justice of their times. These cities were complete alternative societies, intended as a revolution in politics and economics as well as in architecture, and were therefore not situated to any particular location in the existing world. There were utopian visions of a total environment in which man would live in peace with his fellow man and in harmony with nature. Each had detailed plans for factories, ofﬁ ce buildings, schools, parks, and transportation systems that were innovative designs in themselves and were a part of a revolutionary restructuring of urban form. The economic and political organization of the city, which could not easily

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be shown in drawings, was worked out in the voluminous writings appended to the visual design. The designer wanted to show that the urban designs they advocated were not only rational and beautiful in themselves, but that they embodied the social goals he believed in.

Resulting from the Industrial Revolution, the monstrous size of big cities was relatively new, and thus unsettling. Modern technology, the planners believed, had stripped the historological social order of any value, resulting in chaos

and strife. The reason was not the industrial society, which • •

F i i they each felt had an inherent structure and ideal form that g g u u r r e

would banish conﬂ ict and bring order and freedom to the e

1 1

common worker. Rather, the plight of the city was the sheer • • magnitude of the contemporary city itself. In the fi rst half The overbearing nature of cities caused by the of the nineteenth century the great European Cities had factory-dominated society during the late nine- overfl owed their defi ned boundaries of historic fortifi cations. teenth and early twentieth centuries have begun For example, in the nineteenth century, London grew from to recede from urban environs, but their physical 900,000 to 4.5 million inhabitants. Chicago grew from a remains are often standing to this day. village established in 1840 to a city of 1.7 million by 1900. When Howard, Wright, and Le Corbusier began their work, they looked wistfully to the unaltered countryside; to them, it was a logical direction for a city to aspire to become. Their hate of what the city had become was uniform; they saw the city as a cancer, an uncontrolled malignant growth that was poisoning the modern world. Howard compared it to an enlarged ulcer; Wright remarked that the plan of a large city resembled “the cross-section of a fi brous tumor”; (Fishman 64) and Le Corbusier drew cartoons depicting Paris as a body in the late stages of a fatal disease, with clogged circulation and dying tissues from their own toxic wastes.

Each planner incorporated the technological advances of their time only as far as it was helpful to their social values. Instead of developing their ideas through collaboration with others and through practical experience, they increasingly worked in isolation as their models grew more elaborate. The ideal cities were therefore accompanied by detailed programs for radical changes in the distribution of wealth and power, changes which Howard, Wright, and Le Corbusier regarded as necessary complements to their revolutionary designs. This stemmed from a consistent belief that each of them held: a planner’s imagination need not be tested in an existing system. They regarded the physical structure of the cities in which they lived, and the economic structure of their societies as temporary situations that could be altered by a change of opinion in the masses. These beliefs formed the

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basis for the designs, and the “ideal cities” they presented were testaments to what they hoped people would want to exist as. The large scale changes each proposed was largely

inhibited by the fact that the work was not collaborative; • •

F F i i social and economic views are not easily changed, and the g g u u r r e

resultant development of each person’s scheme was, at best, e

1 1 2

•

incorporating bastardized concepts. • –

2 .

3 Ebenezer Howard

– The ﬁ rst of the modern theorists, Ebenezer Howard was an A city was the center of a larger region that di- ardent cooperative socialist who utilized planning as part of rectly served the city. his search for a united society of balanced incomes. The goal of mankind, as he saw it, was to incorporate aspects of both country and city, but at the same time ensuring it to be “the healthiest (city) for its inhabitants” (Howard 44). He was in many ways similar to the many inventors, enlighteners, self- taught theorists, and self-proclaimed prophets of the “Age of Improvement” in which he lived. His contribution was the “Garden City,” a plan for moderate decentralization and • •

cooperative socialism. F i i g g u u r r e e

These Garden Cities were intended to be economically self- 1 3

• contained, with several options for industrial employment • within their boundaries. He wanted to build wholly new cities in the midst of unspoiled countryside on land which would remain government property. He limited the size to 30,000 inhabitants and surrounded the urban form by a “greenbelt,” The radial corridors from the nexus were connect- in the hopes that the Garden City would remain a compact, ed to each other by concentric rings from which efﬁ cient, healthy, and beautiful location. The design was a gradient of real estate values determined land aimed at luring people away from cities such as London, uses. and these Garden Cities would be scattered throughout the countryside. Howard realized that the railroad system that had contributed to the growth of the great cities could serve the planned decentralization of society equally well. –

3 .

3 Frank Lloyd Wright

– Frank Lloyd Wright was an outspoken advocate for • •

the American decentralist philosophy. He believed that F F i i g g

individuality must be founded on each singular person; u u r r e e

everyone has a right to ownership. Decentralization would 1 1 4

•

make it possible for everyone to live their chosen lives on • their own land. In his 1932 publication entitled The Vanishing City, he envisioned transforming the entire United States to become a nation of individuals. This planned urban form, which he called “Broadacres,” took decentralization beyond the small community of Howard’s and devoted how these Buried within a grid of separated civic functions smaller cities could be better suited to the individual family were automobile arterials that carried a majority of people...

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home. In Broadacres, all cities larger than a county seat have been removed. The center of society moved to the thousands of homes that cover the countryside. • •

F i i g g

In his plans, everyone has a right to as much land as he can u u r r e e

1 personally use, a minimum of an acre per person. People 1 5

• would use a car to get around, evidence of the “still- • optimistic beginnings of the automobile age” (Fishman 112). Most people would work part-time on their farms and part-time in the small factories, ofﬁ ces, and shops that were ... and the places in which they worked. nestled among the farms. Through the use of the personal automobile and an elaborate network of roads, Wright felt it would be possible to join together the scattered elements

of society. The Broadacre City plan of 1935 is a large grid • •

F F i i of arterials spread across the countryside, with most of the g g u u r r internal space devoted to single-family homes on large e e

1 1 6

lots. Areas are also carefully set aside for small farms, light •

industry, orchards, recreation areas, and other urban facilities. • A network of superhighways knits the region together, so spatially dispersed facilities are actually very close in terms Wright’s uniqueness was not form but detailing. of travel time. –

4 .

3 Le Corbusier

– Le Corbusier was a fervent Swiss painter and revolutionist. Several of his most famous designs were initially published • •

F in the pages of the revolutionary journals he edited for. F i i g g u u

Based on his core belief of organized societies, he felt that r r e e

1 1

the government should have a large degree of control that 7

•

would coordinate massive amounts of production. While • Wright felt that most cities were too dense, Le Corbusier felt that cities were not dense enough. Faced with a continent By locating a majority of people in single vol- consumed with devastation and in need of drastic repair, he umes, a greater degree of land could be reserved looked to the future; attempting to instill a vision of what the for parks and recreation spaces. world should adapt itself to becoming.

Le Corbusier looked to the skyscraper as a kind of vertical street, a “street in the air” as he called it, which would permit intensive urban densities while eliminating the “soulless

streets” of the old city (Le Corbusier 22). Outside the central • •

F F i i ring of housing was a civic center, and beyond that, a series of g g u u r r e

belts of apartment houses, with a garden for every apartment. e

1 1 8

• Factories and utilities were relegated to the outskirts, for “in • a decent house, the servants’ stairs do not go through the drawing room” (Le Corbusier 77). In his vision, there were different levels of trafﬁ c, ranging from an intracity airstrip Though people-mover systems are highly mod- to superhighways for vehicles of varying speeds to walks ernized mass transit systems, travel between sec- reserved solely for pedestrians (Le Corbusier 78). Seeing tions of a city could be more efﬁ cient and consequentially more desirable.

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the advancement of mankind as a process similar to that of a machine, Le Corbusier stated that “the city that achieves speed…achieves success,” attempting to claim that a more efﬁ cient society is a result of a faster paced society.

Le Corbusier’s Radiant City scheme became the only model for urban development in America during the postwar decade. His reputation had steadily grown through the years of war and devastation, and he became the sole European • •

architectural theorist when World War II ended. Le Corbusier, F i i g g u

who hated ordinary streets and messy street life, featured u r r e e

American superhighways in the Radiant City scheme. Some 1 9

• of the most successful American public works projects of • the Depression were the early superhighways that created thousands of jobs, boosted rural real estate values, and Removal of some objects to create a single axis of promoted the sale of cars and gasoline. travel was not uncommon during the 1940s and 1950s. The Radiant City scheme also appealed to Americans because the existing cities were aging poorly. Through years of depression and war, routine maintenance had been deferred and nothing new had been built besides a few factories. To put it bluntly, American cities were deteriorating, and people’s affection for them was limited. “There were no teachers to teach us the new architecture,” says the Chinese-American architect, I. M. Pei, “so we turned to Le Corbusier's books, and these were responsible for half our education” (Von Boehm 24). –

0 .

4 Results of the Early Manifestos

– 4.0 Howard, Wright, and Le Corbusier employed similar processes which resulted in similar results. Each began his work alone, devoting long years to preparing hundreds of models and drawings specifying every aspect of the new city, from its generated ground plan to the layout of the typical living room. The three planners understood that these and other well-intentioned designs would be useless if their benevolent humanitarianism covered up previously existing inequities in the social system. This isolation encouraged Howard, Wright, and Le Corbusier to extend their intellectual and imaginative capacities to their limits, but also burdened each of them with countless dilemmas of implementation. By holding up their ready-made plans for a new urban order, they hoped to create their own movements. This strategy, however, led directly to questions of feasibility that resulted in little support from either planners of the time or socialist revolutionaries.

Steve Waldron • 11 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis –

1 . The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard 4

– The Garden City concept was not embraced as Howard envisioned, but was translated into something else. Howard’s original idea of cooperatively owned land, and Garden Cities, • • was reduced to privately owned land in “garden suburbs” F

F i g i

(sometimes only by name). However, a number of so called g u u r r e e

‘garden suburbs” were built. These include North Stockton, 2

1 0

•

Hamilton South, and Garden Suburb in Newcastle, England. • He later directed his focus on Australia, as it was in the beginning stages of a highly rapid growth. “As population Radburn, New Jersey, was one of the fi rst cities increases and fl ows to Australia, it is not diffi cult to picture to employ the radial concepts Howard envisioned, that every important new town will be based upon Garden and remains a city of few vacancies today. City practice and ideas” (Fishman 42).

In the few examples that were built, the Garden City concept was found to be decidedly ineffective. “Most people thrive on the vagaries, inconsistencies and rough-edges that come with infusing humanity within the built environment they themselves create” (Kostoff 26). While it is perfectly possible to judge a city by the decorative ﬂ ower arrangements on the medians of its boulevards; it takes only one homeless individual to “spoil” that image. “To allow judgments based on this fragility encourages tenuous associations,” writes Jacobs, “whether or not a given city is a good place to live based on the quality of its street furniture” (Jacobs 68). Clearly this is not the case. Indeed the perception of vibrancy in a city cannot be reﬂ ected in the manicured calm of its suburbs.

As an affectionist of the suburbs, Lewis Mumford claims that Howard’s theories have “done more than any other single book to guide the modern town planning movement as to alter its objectives” (Mumford 29). Today, the Garden City concept is routinely blamed for the birth of suburbs- towns in the country where people only keep their beds, and which they leave each morning to go into the big cities for work and shopping. –

2 . 4 • The Legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright •

F – F i i In many ways, Wright's Broadacre City resembles American g g u u r r e

suburban and exurban developments of the post-WWII e

2 1 1

•

period. He predicted – and applauded – the decline of cities, • the advent of rural subdivisions and super highways and even the coming of ‘Stop ‘n Go.’ (Wright actually designed The single estate within a vegetative-encased a convenience store-gas station in Minnesota.) His mistake landscape is the marketed concept of many afﬂ u- was to believe that all of this would be wonderful, healthful, ent residential districts today. Los Angeles is also considered to be a version of Wright’s concepts.

Steve Waldron • 12 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

aesthetically pleasing, and morally and culturally uplifting. Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of the future was all too clear and his prescriptions were followed all too carefully. The most ubiquitous form of modern American congestion is the suburban freeway. This congestion exists because we faithfully applied Wright’s prescription for what to do about congestion in the city. America enthusiastically built Wright’s dream of broad highways and broad cities, resulting in a catastrophic nightmare. –

3 . 4

The Legacy of Le Corbusier – Similar to Wright, Le Corbusier knew his ideal city could never be constructed all at once. But at least a “working model” could be begun, and from an idealistic design, a methodology for implementation could emerge. Its success would inspire • •

F F

emulation, which would spur further duplication; it would i i g g u u

become an ethos caused by a chain reaction of successive r r e e

2 1

thought. Particularly in America, Corbusier’s Radiant City 2

•

had demonstrable inﬂ uence in the postwar building boom: • the illustrative multi-story buildings created by Le Corbusier have changed the face of cities today. Admittedly, they would High density housing of cellular residences have look out of place if they were built individually, but in the always existed, but the duplication of these facilities across a landscape ﬂ ourished in the 1960s. developing cities where skyscrapers are located in clusters, they are an essential part of the modern city landscape.

The larger problem lies in the requirement of an inﬂ exible form. Despite the poetic title of La Ville Radieuse, his urban vision was authoritarian, inﬂ exible and simplistic. Le Corbusier began by testing it himself in Chandigarh, • • India, and then the principles were subsequently retested F

F i i g

in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Algiers, France. Regardless of the g u u r r e e

location, the results were a decided failure. Standardization 2

1 3

•

proved inhuman and disorienting. The open spaces were • inhospitable; the bureaucratically imposed plan was socially destructive. The basic component of his vision was the Algiers, France, was designed to be a coastal town high-rise, which nobody knew how to build better than easily accessed by a sinuous elevated roadway, Americans, nor valued them more. They were immediately from which redundant building structures are eas- attempted, but the ﬁ nished form of vast urban-renewal ily fabricated. schemes and regimented public housing projects damaged the urban fabric beyond repair. Today these megaprojects are being dismantled, as superblocks give way to rows of houses fronting streets and sidewalks. –

0 . 5 Additional Utopian Creations Since – 5.0 –

1 .

5 Walt Disney Resort Parks

– In 1952, as “a response to suburban boredom and the

Steve Waldron • 13 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

American desire to escape from reality” (Chung 276), Walt Disney conceived of an urban environ to instill a utopian ideal into reality through a high degree of fantasy” (Gosling 18). In this situation, the real world actually responds to and

physically emulates the utopian world Disney aspired to • •

F i i create. While the cleanliness and activity exhibit the desires g g u u r r of people in a real city, the complete control derived from a e e

1 4

ticketed entry allowed Disney to obtain an increased ability

• to control his society. Upon the opening of his Disneyland • theme park in 1955, Walt Disney stated, “Imagination is the model from which reality is created” (Chung 276). Disney Cinderella’s castle achieves its intent to evoke took the critical elements of urbanity and distilled them fantasy and wonder. Its central location dually into a single street, lined with commerce. By generating serves as a destination and wayﬁ nding device. a template composed entirely of recycling an earlier architecture and urbanism into a new commercial nostalgia, Disney’s visionary idea of a ‘perfect downtown’ resulted in the radical conversion of the city, from incorporating areas public to private, modern to neo-traditional, noncommercial to commercial. He accomplished his transformation of urban enjoyment. Given its renewable versatility, Disney’s concept subsequently proved adaptable everywhere that a new city was begun from scratch, and can still be seen in the gated communities of high-end residential developments.

Disneyland and its larger successor, Disney World, are designed to display a deﬁ ned sequence of events, much like the unfolding of a narrative, where geographically and architecturally unrelated elements are integrated into a necessarily sequential order of understanding. Both parks have received some of the highest acclaim possible, through • •

F F

both volume (Disney World is the most frequented tourist i i g g u u

destination in the United States), and through its repeated r r e e

2 1

analysis in literary discourse. 5

•

• While Disney does not contain all the necessary infrastructure of a true city, it does offer many provoking concepts that can be applied to urban design. Even without residential and industrial facilities, the formal techniques used in the themeparks offer principles that can be used in one. As an example, a centralized, iconic element can provide a sense MainStreet USA forces people to participate in a retail area by restricting options. People must of identity to the space as a whole, and provide a means pass through shopping to see entertainment. for wayﬁ nding for inhabitants of the park. Additionally, its ability to create largely pedestrianized zones and automobile-dominant infrastructure can exist in many cities as well, through linking of nodes with paths of easy transfer. Despite its gentriﬁ cation through ticket costs and lack of permanent residences, it has received some of the highest

Steve Waldron • 14 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

acclaim possible. In 1963, while giving a speech at the Urban Design Conference at Harvard University, James Rouse announced, “I hold a view that may be somewhat shocking to an audience as sophisticated as this, that the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today is Disneyland” (Chung 276). Disneyland, like the mall, is safe: it regulates against any unsavory activities, through control by design and adult supervision – visual evidence of the manipulated environment. –

2 . 5

Arcosanti – There is only one urban utopia project that is continually tested through employing theoretical ideas into the realities of the built world. In 1970, Paolo Soleri began building Arcosanti, an experimental town in the midst of the Arizona • •

desert which was to become a symbol of antisprawl, of the F i i g g u

sustainable city par excellence. Derived from a combination u r r e e

of the words “Architecture” and “Archaeology” - the pillars 1 6

• of his philosophy - the term “Arcology” was formed. Soleri’s • three-dimensional urban development was a reaction against the urban sprawl of big cities with their decaying suburbs. Arcosanti offers a waste-free solution to time The compact density of Arcosanti provides a high and space relationships and energy problems. The infused pedestrian dependency. density through miniaturization of the city enables radical conservation of land, energy and resources. The Arcosanti project is intended to use only two percent of the land required for a comparable city, due largely to the elimination of separated lotlines and transportation infrastructure. There are no automobiles in the city; rather, living, working and public spaces are located within walkable distances of each other to encourage pedestrian activity throughout the entire city. Soleri’s utopian city has succeed in both of his ideals in that he created a form of settlement that is conscientious of issues of energy conservation, land use, and optimal use of time. It also succeeds in providing urban spaces that have been developed over thousands of years with a form that makes these spaces appear to be relevant in the future. –

0 .

6 Conditions that Necessitate a Change in Urban

– 6.0 – Design Process 1 .

6 The Gaping Holes of Urban Fabric Ripped by the

– Automobile There has been a distinct connection between the rate of speed of the dominant transportation mode and the density and design characteristics of the city it inhabits. The early twentieth century desires for space and the lack of controlled growth caused many of the wealthy and semi-wealthy to

Steve Waldron • 15 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

leave the city.

By the time streetcars became a common means of travel, • •

F downtowns were already very busy, popular places. Frontal F i i g g

stores were directed to the main streets, where the streetcars u u r r e e 27

ran, while a traveler who waited to ride or a rider who exited 1

• a streetcar was presented with a multitude of shops facing • them. The development of these stores were only one block deep, however, as much of the retail gave way to residential The streetcar caused retail to operate as a long, development even as little as one block off the path of the continuous ribbon in many urban cities. streetcar.

The years of heavy rail produced a center dedicated to waiting for long lengths, and given the number of tracks that occur at most train stations, had a large number of square footage • •

to enclose within the building. In order to return a portion i g i g u u r r of the expenditure, retail options were added to stations to e e

1 8

promote impulse buying. Eventually, the train tracks were

• replaced by department stores as the reason for inhabiting • the space, but the idea of a large, single, enclosed volume of shopping remained. The train station housed retail on a large interior Affordable car ownership made the suburbs accessible for for people waiting on the next train to arrive. many Americans. Those who marketed suburbia tapped into American ideals of individualism, domesticity, and upward mobility as represented by the image of the detached house. Anti-urban sentiment, as well as blatant racism, helped • •

propel people from cities to suburbs. Two federal policies in F i i g g u

particular promoted and enabled the outskirts of long-settled u r r e e

metropolitan areas to be developed at rapacious speed: the 1 9

• Federal Highway Act of 1954, which began the creation • of the largest highway system in the world, and Federal Housing Authority mortgage programs, which subsidized Easy access to the highway was a necessary com- and guaranteed mortgages for much of middle-class America ponent for much of American development dur- (Dutton, 16). ing the mid twentieth century.

As the automobile rose in popularity, a corresponding architectural response arose. The typical form of a suburban retail center is oriented entirely to the automobile and its • • associated parking. Acknowledging department stores as the F

F i g i g

power sale center of its time, shopping malls aimed to increase u u r r e e sales by containing massive retail within close proximity 3

1 0

•

to one another. Placing these retail giants within walking • distance of each other intensiﬁ es the rivalry among stores in their war for greater proﬁ ts, while at the same time attracting shoppers to a clustered area charged with buyer frenzy. The multilevel shopping experience - largely the Stores are continuously competing to draw more customers result of a large volume of commuters waiting for a train to arrive.

Steve Waldron • 16 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

to their individual realms and to expand their domain. Based on the design of train stations for its singular enclosure and deﬁ nitive circulation pathway, the mall was able to space department store buildings with unique stores catering to the white middle class, increasing its desirability for patrons to achieve all errands in a single trip. Malls had the capability • •

to turn growing suburban towns into cities, but regardless F i i g g u u

of its size, these internally-oriented malls, shopping centers, r r e e

and entertainment centers could not become urban centers. 1

• • With the federal laws that favored single family houses, When the shopping mall motif was worn out, and the decreased cost of owning an automobile, it was developers had already prepared to divert new necessary for any family which could afford a car to have one. construction to destination entertainment centers, Increasingly, the number of cars per household increased, as in which media, lighting, and fresh activity were did the number of households. This was encouraged through integral components of the entire shopping expe- many federal policies that made driving an individual’s rience. car cheaper than commuting in mass. Government eagerly built networks of boulevards, parkways and expressways that served as armatures for dispersing development ever more widely and thinly. With the opportunity to travel comparatively quickly between points in the city, new growth • •

was no longer solely dependent upon any mode other than F i i g g u

the auto, and though convenient access to a large arterial was u r r e e

beneﬁ cial, it was not necessary. The individual would have 1 2

•

the capability to arrive anywhere. Resultantly, the number Traditional downtowns struggled early to main- • of cars in use proliferated, and it was quickly necessary to tain a quaint character that separated them from fund infrastructure to carry the cars in use. During the 1980s larger cities. Eventually, many these smaller cities and for the 39 largest U.S. metropolises, the number of lane- failed to prevent the inﬂ ux of residents that sought the smaller enclaves, leaving to their development miles of expressways and major arterials combined increased as an additional suburban city. just 13.7 percent, but vehicle miles driven rose 31.4 percent (Bernick, 43).

In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans tended to avoid buses and all forms of public transportation if they can afford it. In this country, and in many others, people • •

have opted for individual transportation whenever they F F i i g g u

could afford it, since it means privacy, door-to-door access, u r r e e

the ability to go and come at will, and the opportunity of 3 1 3

•

living and working at low densities. In modern suburbia, • where pedestrians, bicycles, and public transportation are Many buses struggle with maintaining carrying rarely an option, the average household currently generates capacities, largely due to the desire of most peo- thirteen car trips per day (Duany 22). Even if each trip is ple to avoid using them. fairly short, immense time is spent on the road, contributing to congestion, especially when compared to city structure based on neighborhoods. “While there has been some dismay at the price, and some improvement of transit service in central cities, the individual vehicle has not yet lost ground,”

Steve Waldron • 17 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

writes Lynch (Lynch, 422).

Because the car was already in use, the physical distance between buildings and structures became increasingly separated - there was little desire to park once and walk long distances when parking within close proximity of a destination and later driving to the next was equally convenient. Eventually, the “next” destination was further and further apart, until each destination contained a parking lot that served only one building. The correlation of the automobile and density, as it relates speciﬁ cally to retail, is discussed later in this thesis. Primarily, it is essential to understand that our culture has become dependent upon the automobile because we allowed it to become increasingly invasive to our urban fabric, to the extent that today change can only occur at a large and often costly level. Not only do we set aside large tracts of land for parking lots, highways and interchanges, gas stations and the like, but we have done so at the expense of mass transit and pedestrian involvement, which has led directly to a ‘have’ versus ‘have not’ marginalizing culture.

When the automobile became even more widely used, the architectural response was again changed to that of a strip mall, permitting a car to drive to the front door of the store. To a degree, shopping malls were opened from an introspective pedestrian-oriented center to an externally-faced automobile • •

F F

oriented series of facades. It enabled a shopper who carried i i g g u u r

lots of bags of goods to be able to deposit purchases in a car r e e

3 1 4

before driving a few feet to the next store in the same mall. •

Similar to the repetition of storefronts seen in the streetcar • districts, these strip malls consist of little more than a fanciful The shopping center was created by the autonomy veneer placed in front of a long series of repeated store offered by the automobile, combined with the de- volumes. Throughout the 1980s, lines of stores got longer sire to walk from store to store as had occurred and longer at what are now called strip centers, and some previously. developers experimented with doubling them up and forming L- and V-shaped conﬁ gurations, enabling a panoramic view • •

of all stores as one exits their car in the centralized parking F i i g g u

lot. Placed along the back boundaries of a site, the building u r r e e

became secondary when seen from the road, appearing as 1

Large retail offered the ability to combine a mul- 5

•

though a backdrop of a site comprised mainly of a large titude of retail options into one single trip. The • paved surface dedicated to automobiles. breadth of each store, however, required the shop- –

per to drive again before shopping next door. 2 . 6

Technology in the Constructed World – Though our cities and regions have become increasingly distanced, the result of globalization is the necessity to relate one’s strengths and diminish one’s weaknesses on

Steve Waldron • 18 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

the worldwide stage. Though, the downtown or business center in many cities is losing its impact, the importance of

a region as a whole has increased. A business in one city • •

F F i i may own several others in a distant side of the country, or an g g u u r r employee may report to a boss of another country altogether. e e

3 1 6

Our world may likely become continuously closer with •

• communication, but require less physical connection. It is The traditional city hall as the dominant building through communication devices developed in the most recent of a historic square, contrasted with the possibil- twenty years that this is possible, and how it will impact a ity of a communications tower in a square today. city, a district, or an individual building has yet result in design changes.

It will become the responsibility of each community to keep pace with the evolving communicative processes, and

each neighborhood should be able to provide the necessary • •

F F i i

services to its citizens. It is debatable whether communicative g g u u r r services will become necessary public services such as sewer e e

3 1 7

and transit, but the tower infrastructure could be leased out •

to private industries. This can be done primarily through • A cell tower, typically a bleak contrast to the roll- a centralized telecommunications tower that will not only ing hills they are placed upon, can be designed provide the services to its citizens but also act to promote the to be an attractive element for the neighborhood, existing neighborhood culture. in the same manner as Disney themeparks used Cinderella’s castle. There is opportunity for technology to be the impetus for an iconic presence to occur within the central plaza itself. Much in the way that a mural can represent the existing conditions of the neighborhood, programmatic elements can make a neighborhood unique. Some of these exist as decorative artworks such as Supergraphics or vibrant colorations, either of which can easily be applied to a central communications tower for the neighborhood. A cell phone tower, necessary in all cities today, currently has not been addressed as an architectural element, though its impact to urban landscapes • •

cannot be denied. Through the identiﬁ cation and beautiﬁ cation i g i g u u of a typically banal aspect of urban infrastructure, the urban r r e e

environ can become more beautiful. Its inclusion as a 8

• necessary piece of urban infrastructure would better enable • a city to become better prepared for the ever-changing market resulting from the technical fl ux. In accordance with the existing telecommunications movement, this attachment to technological processes is not only necessary now for increased effi ciency of living, but will become increasingly essential with the imminent future culture. Currently, The sculptural form of Santiago Calatrava’s com- Philadelphia is experimenting with a system that will enable munications tower not only provided an interesting piece when in Olympic Park, but also enabled the entire city to have wireless networking for computers, and Olympic Park to be found from other locations of its result will affect everything from portable cash registers the city. to offi ces not bounded by walls. Barcelona, Spain, received

Steve Waldron • 19 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

wide praise for its communications tower that was integrated into the Olympic Park of 1992, and continues to serve as the primary means to distribute television waves to the center city over a decade later.

Through many have tried to address the pervasiveness of technology in the life or a person today, the diversity of thought reﬂ ected in the design of buildings, cities, and regional centers is evidence of a lack of uniform thought. Currently, these differentiating design styles exhibit what the belief of the designer’s vision for technology is, and how the evolution of the technological culture we are

accustomed to will manifest itself as a theoretical construct. • •

F F i i Several key buildings by Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, g g u u r r e

and Daniel Libeskind promote American ideologies in a e

3 1 9

• worldwide economy, but a vast amount of other work by • European architects such as Rem Koolhaas, Ben van Berkel, MVRDV, Santiago Calatrava, and Coop Himmelblau push toward a new paradigm of design in conjunction with engineering and media technologies. Some architects are said to have progressed past the High-Tech trend, namely Norman Foster. Meanwhile the Deconstructivist architects The technological advances of the past few de- use philosophy to continually question how a body responds cades will continue to change urban form for the to societal conditions: Zaha Hadid, Eric Owen Moss, Thom at least the next several decades. Mayne of Morphosis, and Daniel Libeskind come to mind. These conﬂ icting methodologies exhibit a consistent lack of guidance and awry patterning sufﬁ cient to warrant change on a massive scale.

At the present time, there are no architectural utopian manifestos that would guide us into the twenty ﬁ rst century, but there is ample need to warrant one. Many of our traditional precepts are old, analytical and rigid. Even the suburban principles of complicated, winding pathways originally reminiscent of natural pathways are contrived, repeating the • •

same redundant patterns from an unrelenting standard of F F i i g g u

outdated design cues. To remedy this, ambiguity should be u r r e e

given sufﬁ cient credence as a design motif. Ambiguity itself 4 1 0

•

can become a paradigm that challenges static procedure, • forcing designers to fully investigate relations of objects before creating change. While rich with possibilities for the creator, this uncertainty leaves little opportunity for the The speed and pervasiveness of the car is disharmonious from the urban fabric that is residual viewer and participant to extract hidden meaning. Ambiguity from previous modes of transportation. A change inspires artists and their work but must also acknowledge of one or the other, or an effective balance of both, creativity fueled by culture. By creating and inserting work should be necessary for the health of a city. with ambiguous intentions back into society, the artist may promote a variety of perceptions from different aspects of a

Steve Waldron • 20 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

temporal, spatial and social reality. This in turn can assist in shaping the way society thinks. And if the artist can affect the way a society thinks, they can undeniably affect the spatial structure in which a society lives. • •

Ambiguity can manifest itself in architectural design as well. F

F i i g g

One architectural development in recent years has been the u u r r e e

severing of the box as the most essential building form. 1 1

• The simple box has become a technological and theoretical • entity destined for extinction. This is occurring not due to its inability to function so much as its inability to become Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los affected by the technological associations our culture has Angeles is an example of contextual facades and chosen to embrace. The box has since progressed into an amorphous volumes that coexist beautifully. amorphic shape, capable of adapting itself to the contextual and programmatic conﬁ nements placed upon it. The dynamism produced occurs in distinct forms, but withhold the ability to relate well to each other. Greg Lynn, at the forefront of this shift in thinking, has argued in that ‘the blob’ is really a developed form of ‘the cube.’ In his arguments,

he contends that it can handle more information than the • •

F i i dumb box because of its complexity; therefore sensitivity is g g u u r r potentially greater (Lynn, 2003). e e

1 2

• Presently, there is no singular example in which that • variation is exempliﬁ ed. It has, however, been attempted through projects such as Norman Foster's London City Hall project. The internal space and structure are convincing, The Santiago de Compostela project converts top- but the project fails to divulge how the structure of the city ographical changes into building form in a com- affected its form. Conversely, undulating landforms such as prehensible manner. Peter Eisenman’s City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela combines the surrounding landscape and generates additional metaphorical associations, but does not comment on the technological processes inherent in the concept. Coop Himmelblau, Morphosis, and Zaha Hadid have each won several recent competitions with a wave-like landform. Soon, a museum in Lyons, a BMW technical center in Germany, and many other subsequent projects will subsist • •

as undulations of man-made materials, changing the natural i i g g u u r

rolling landscape with mimicking hardscapes, or softening r e e

edges of a rigid urban environment. 3

• • Most great cities do indeed contain such unique, expressive public buildings, but they are inevitably surrounded by repetitive and undistinguished private buildings. If every building were to croon at once, nothing could be discerned from the cacophony. The second false assumption is that, in The civic importance of the St. Louis Courthouse the absence of architectural restrictions, what would emerge is overshadowed by the commercial structures that surround and outsize it.

Steve Waldron • 21 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

would be a harmonious landscape of structures that looked as if they had been designed by Richard Meier or Frank Gehry. Somehow, from the perspective of the schools and the magazines, the default setting for unrestricted architecture appears to be modernism. If only this were the case! The default setting for architecture in America is not modernism but vulgarity. To conﬁ rm this assertion, the architecture magazines need only look at the advertisements that ﬁ ll the • •

pages between the masterpieces they display.

F F – i i

g g u 3 u r . r e e 6 Density in the Built World

1 4

– • As people move further from the central core,

The suburban dilemma cannot be overstated as problematic. • Today, the complete lack of any ideological, theoretical, the density of culture dissipates to the extent of and futuristic aims are exhibited in suburban growths. The non-existence. The result of this occurrence is the requirement of transportation to any destination, problem in America today is not unhealthy city congestion removing happenstance interactions that are criti- and concentrations of people, but sprawl. In a signiﬁ cant cal to the success of any community. irony, the last remaining problem of "congestion" that we face today is congestion on our freeways, caused not by too much density but by a lack of it. Sprawling developments where everyone must drive have led to a 240% increase in driving nationally since 1960. While repeatedly written as detrimental to the health of population growth, suburban lexicons continue to pervade newly formed landscapes. Thus far, American planners have not had much success in imposing a rational form on this process. However, New Town and greenbelt programs in Britain and the Scandinavian countries have, to some extent, prevented formless sprawl from engulﬁ ng the countryside.

The situation is not improving; while there is a consistent • •

desire for people to return to the city, there is a vast amount of F F i i g g

farmland still being converted into processed single-family u u r r e e

housing. Among cities in the industrial Midwest, Cleveland 4 1 5

•

warrants special mention because it has been sprawling at an • alarming rapid rate even while the region as a whole, not just the urban core, has been losing population. In particular, from 1950 to 1990, the suburban population around Cleveland more than doubled, while that of the central city declined by almost half because people abandoned the urban life for the suburban dream. Since 1970, the regional population declined by eleven percent, while the amount of urbanized land grew by thirty three percent. Planners project that by 2010 greater Cleveland’s population will decline another three percent, but developed residential land will grow another thirty percent (Benﬁ eld 8). The problem becomes much more ampliﬁ ed areas of population growth. Cleveland showing metropolitan growth on the periphery and impoverished areas in the core. 1940; 1950; 1960; 1970; 1980; 1990; 2000.

Steve Waldron • 22 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

The most effective means of containing sprawl is to conﬁ ne it through statutes. Unlike a city wall, the historical response a city’s demise through invasion, an Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) acts as an ethereal wall which prevents a city’s demise through too rapid of emigration. Its use has been extremely effective, and a rapidly increasing number of communities • •

are employing such restrictions today. In come cases, these F i i g g u growth boundaries have proved to be incredibly effective at u r r e e

retaining growth patterns. 1 6

•

• If there was an example of a built work that has served as a In a Growth Boundary, a government if capable of controlling the distance and direction of move- paradigm for successful city structure worthy of emulating, ment from the central core, enabling economic de- it would be Portland, Oregon. In 1973, the state of Oregon velopment to continue to occur in both the central was among the ﬁ rst to implement a widespread growth city and fringe neighborhoods while maintaining boundary. The program incorporates protective zoning for densities necessary for communal interaction. about 40,000 square miles (25 million acres) of farmland and private forest land. It requires cities and counties to zone for affordable housing, in effect increasing average residential densities. The Portland metropolitan UGB encompasses 24 • •

cities, parts of three counties, and some 1.3 million people F i i g g u

as of this writing. It is just over 200,000 acres in size. Under u r r e e

the plan, the region expects to be able to accommodate a 1 7

•

population increase of one million people over 50 years, with Portland, like Cincinnati, overlooks a large river • only a 6 percent expansion of the urban growth boundary but is not dependent upon it, and competes to re- (Dutton 81). tain activity and interest from another state across the river. Portland has become an intensely lauded model for the nation because it has made its popular MAX light rail system an integral element of its land planning and downtown revitalization efforts. The two lines run on exclusive right- of-ways which connect the eastern and western suburbs to downtown, and then rely on other modes of transit for intracity transportation. MAX runs on shared downtown city streets at no charge, while a downtown streetcar line leads to Portland State University. These three public types of transit - separated light rail, shared light rail, and streetcars - are an example of the many types of transit that are in use today, and that can work together to create a vibrant urban existence.

By blending an urban growth boundary, parking limits, and new housing downtown, the MAX light rail system has brought life to downtown core and stimulated signiﬁ cant economic growth. More than $1.9 billion in new development was built near the Eastside MAX stations in just 14 years; another $500 million and about 7,000 homes was then ﬁ nished near Westside MAX since its opening in 1998 (Urban Visions).

Steve Waldron • 23 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

Portland’s downtown has accommodated 30,000 new jobs in the last two decades without a signiﬁ cant increase in the number of parking spaces or vehicle trips. Assisted in part by the region’s excellent light-rail system, there has been a ﬁ fty percent increase in public transit trips to downtown, and their website reports that 43 percent of all work-related commuting trips in Portland are now made on public transit. The regional economy is in good shape as well. Newer companies in or near Portland, such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Nike, have located themselves there precisely because of the attraction of a diverse urban lifestyle in close proximity to a preserved, scenic natural and rural environment. –

4 .

6 Transit in the Current World

– Every modern city contains an amazing array of pathways to carry fl ows of people, goods, water, energy, and information. Transportation networks are the largest and most visible of these. Ancient cities relied on streets, most of them quite narrow by modern standards, to carry foot traffi c and carts. The modern city contains a complex hierarchy of transportation channels, ranging from ten-lane freeways to sidewalks. In the United States, the bulk of travels are carried by the private automobile, with mass transit a distant second. American cities display the low-density sprawl characteristic of an auto-centered urban development. In contrast, many European cities have the high densities necessary to support alternative transportation. Discovering a balance between these systems would be incredibly benefi cial because the ability to move goods rapidly, while maintaining residential densities suitable for consistent interaction, is the urban condition desired by much of the existing residential market today.

There are typically only a few modes of transit that are regularly discussed by transportation organizations and politicians. At the forefront of many minds is light rail, though heavy rail, express buses, streetcars, and other •

alternative modes also exist. Heavy rail transit (HRT) and •

F i i g

light rail transit (LRT) systems both run on steel rails; the g u u r r e

main technological difference is that heavy rail draws power e

1 8

from overhead wires while the light rail uses an electriﬁ ed • • third rail at ground level. In technical terms, LRT is little different than a modern streetcar system, as they can run on existing streets, but are often packaged in much more Light rail exists in many cities, and has grown in elaborate terms. Where light rail does run on existing rights popularity in the last few decades, existing now in of way, its per-mile capital costs might be as little as one- a large majority of the 35 most populated cities.

Steve Waldron • 24 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

tenth those of heavy rail systems, but since LRT tends to run at lower average speeds than heavy rail systems, it is likely to have considerably higher labor costs for each mile of service than heavy rail. The reconﬁ gured streetcar, which now contains all the advances of modern technology in the shell of an old system, is another option that exists in approximately eight U.S. cities today. Virtually every major metropolitan area is currently planning, designing or constructing one of these projects. “In fact, new rail or rapid bus systems are planned or under construction in all but three of the top 30 metropolitan areas,” (Bernick, 129).

While the chart in the appendix shows the various costs and advantages of each type of transit, they also each have their corresponding disadvantages. The sheer expense of heavy rail and dedicated light rail rights-of-way, caused by the purchase of dedicated lines, leveling of steep topography, and segregated space far exceeds the projected ridership of these projects. While streetcars and shared light rail lines are signiﬁ cantly less expensive than segregated railways, • •

the delays and frustrations caused by sharing with existing F i g i g u u

automobiles are equally costly, as evidenced by the existing r r e e 49

bus system in Cincinnati today. The bus system, in addition 1

• to its intervening with existing traffi c fl ow, is a mode of • transit which is readily avoided by those who can afford to. The Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system, however, offers The elevated PRT system would do comparative- fewer disadvantages over the conventional modes of public ly little to disrupt the infrastructure currently pres- transit, and will be discussed further. ent in any city, but offers the potential of personal fl exibility lacking in many rail options. The concept of PRT, fi rst conceived in 1953 by Chicago transportation planner Donn Fichter, is simple. The theory of the PRT approach is that users can be custom-routed from where they are, using an automated, driverless operation to navigate precisely where they need to go: remote-controlled electric cars carry one to six people on an elevated guideway. An empty car will await passengers at every stop—or arrive within three minutes. A computerized switching system •

would allow the electric cars to bypass intermediate stations. •

F i i g

Each car is propelled by a linear induction motor and travels g u u r r e

at up to 70 miles an hour. PRT promises all the privacy e

1 0

and convenience of the automobile while using less than a • • quarter the power, not to mention more efﬁ cient use of fossil fuels than individual engines. When the concept was being A PRT car is capable of carrying three to six peo- aggressively pushed by the federal government in the early ple in a carriage-like housing, roughly resembling 1970s, Architectural Design magazine explained that PRT the interior of an automobile, without requiring vehicles “are designed to provide the security and privacy the dedication and human error potential of driving. not usually found in larger more common transit vehicles,”

Steve Waldron • 25 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

and they would “provide passengers with a single trip, much like taxi service.” Thus, the concept requires a relatively vast network of guideways and stations to be available in an urban area (Richards 159). The advantage of the PRT system to any other is the similarity of the car and the public transit, enabling a more effective shift between modes.

However, according to its promoters, this extensive guideway network would be affordable, because PRT would be less costly compared to more "conventional" transit modes, like LRT. The lightweight cars (in many designs, using variants of automotive technology) would cost less than heavier, fullsize railcars. More importantly, the elevated guideways would be much cheaper because they wouldn't have to support as much weight. Furthermore, the pavilion-sized elevated stations would be smaller and signiﬁ cantly cheaper than larger terminals required at transit stations for the masses. As a result, Personal Rapid Transit proponents usually conjure visions of an extensive web of slender guideways and bus- like PRT stations weaving through neighborhoods and activity centers, and even penetrating ofﬁ ces and apartment highrises.

PRT stations are located off the main guideway so that cars for other destinations can bypass undesired stations. To accommodate this, they require a guideway structure to facilitate the ingress/egress of PRT cars. While this signiﬁ cantly increases the amount of elevated structure, the transit stop can become the center for neighborhood regrowth due to the activity of people arriving and departing

from them. Because the PRT system is highly individualized, • •

F i g there is no need to have large waiting concourses or malls i g u u r r dedicated to layovers, yet people must walk to them and e e

1 1

from them, creating the inherent potential for commerce to

• • occur. This removes much of the need to have a centralized A separated track exists at PRT stops, enabling facility, including any sort of center in which transit serves through trafﬁ c to continue unimpeded. as an anchor. Instead, principles of a mall and circulating people through retail opportunities can be extended in a wider radius, ﬁ ltering from the arrival/departure area of the PRT to the existing neighborhood composition. This works well in conjunction with the fragmentalized commercial area of Towne Centers.

A current issue with PRT is the visual clutter which would be produced by multiple miles of elevated guideways and dozens of overhead stations – each with at least one long, additional access track to connect the ofﬂ ine station and its incoming

Steve Waldron • 26 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

and outgoing cars with the main guideway. PRT designers propose an aerial web of guideways a mile apart, with stations at each intersection. The effect would be to create an array of steel support piers and aerial structures, meandering and crisscrossing throughout the urban environment.

Additionally, any elevated urban transit system incurs special problems in actual operation since it is situated above the • •

ongoing activities below. Personal Rapid Transit promoters i g i g u u r r portray a system of slender, unencumbered overhead e e

1 guideways, with little cars speeding smoothly to their 2

• destinations. Granted, any new complex system is subject • to glitches and breakdowns, however modern technology has improved greatly since the government sponsored test project in Morgantown, West Virginia, of the 1970s. The The PRT stop can take many forms, including the system built in that location broke frequently and was so potential for not requiring elevated access at all. unresponsive that no further systems were built.

PRT promoters claim extremely high capacities for PRT. SkyWeb Express, for example, claims the capability of operating at one-second distances between cars and conveying as many as 10,800 passengers per hour in fully loaded 3-person vehicles. Designers even postulate operating vehicles at fractions of a second apart, yielding staggeringly high capacity rates. Leaving aside the probability that average loads would be less than full capacity, critics question the plausibility of assuming such close headways for vehicles operating at up to 40-50 mph (as the SkyWeb design assumes).

Reasons for why these systems were not further developed and implemented are difﬁ cult to assess, as no published comprehensive study on this subject has been performed. A few reasons might have centered on technical problems, lack of perceived demand, concerns over cost-effectiveness, shifting transportation and research priorities, lack of government support, and doubts over possible adverse public reaction.

Dr. Vukan R. Vuchic, an internationally acclaimed transportation professor at the University of Pennsylvania, in his classic textbook Urban Public Transportation (1981), recounts that "PRT systems were one of the most glamorous concepts in transit innovations during the early 1970s." He recalls that numerous articles, reports, symposia, and similar events were focused on development of the Personal Rapid Transit concept. However, he notes, "in spite of all

Steve Waldron • 27 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

these studies and promotional activities," the PRT mode had not moved any closer to actual implementation. Today, 51 years after Fichter launched his crusade, only three PRT systems have been completed. The ﬁ rst project was with a • • technologically-archaic six-mile line in Morgantown, West F

F i i g g

Virginia, constructed in 1972 with ungainly 20-passenger u u r r e e cars. Additionally, the Regional Transit Authority in 5

1 3

•

suburban Chicago bought heavily into the venture, investing • tens of millions of dollars in a proposed PRT system in Rosemont, where a conference center and hotel complex The Morgantown PRT system contains a larger- near the Chicago O'Hare airport were planned. A 3.5-mile than-necessary track system, a cumbersome-moving car, and stations that are frequently in disre- triple-looping layout with about 8 stations and 40 cars, pair. operating 20 hours a day, was intended to feed passengers to the RTA's Blue Line rail transit station. The system was projected to attract about 2 million rider-trips a year, at a cost of $1.00 per trip (Samuel, 4). However, costs were soaring far above the initial rosy estimates of $23 million/mile, and in late 1998, RTA director Valerie Jarrett, who also chaired the Chicago Transit Authority Board, halted the project. Since then, there has been the successful completion of a highly modernized three-mile test loop in San Mateo, California, yet no farebox recovery rates or ridership ﬁ gures have been released (Cervero, 46). Rochester, New York, and St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Duluth, Minnesota have expressed interest in similar test situations (Thistle D1). –

5 . 6

Urban Blocks in the Current World – Only in town planning has the principle of moving forward without a rational plan occurred. In this premise, a designer sets up a loosely-organized building plan without a defi nite program, and this derives from the fact that one simply does not know how any specifi c new district will develop, but showing a general massing plan is often helpful for exhibiting an idea of completed form. The consequence of this absence of a program is the familiar building-block system, which essentially states: ‘We could perhaps create something beautiful and useful here, but we do not know just what, so we humbly decline to deal with such a vague problem, and therefore present merely a division of the surface area so that its sale by square foot can begin.’ Though mildly helpful, this system is in need of change to a system that is based more on the process of arriving at the result than on the fi nished aesthetics themselves. This will result in a more convincing scheme, in which the effort involved in setting up the new block system can be better realized and more compelling. – 6

. Open Spaces in the Current World 6

–

Steve Waldron • 28 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

Not all space will be developed as densely as possible. Open space is usually treated as leftover space, but its presence contributes greatly to the quality of urban life, and should be essential in the design or redevelopment of any urban condition. It is in hard-ﬁ nished spaces such as plazas, malls, and courtyards that settings for public activities can be provided, and where people may choose to congregate in large numbers. Soft spaces such as parks, gardens, lawns, and nature preserves provide essential relief from harsh urban conditions and serve as space for recreational activities. These amenities increasingly inﬂ uence which cities will be perceived as desirable places to live. Their pervasiveness in dense cultures is essential, because buildings should extend to the perimeter of the parcels they are built onto, in order to maintain a continuous face along the street, reinforcing walkable spaces. – 7 . 6 Building Form in the Current World – Buildings are the most visible elements of the city, the features that give each city its unique character. Residential structures occupy almost half of all urban land, with the building types ranging from scattered single-family homes to dense high-rise apartments. Commercial buildings are clustered downtown and at various subcenters, with skyscrapers packed into the central business district and low-rise structures prevailing elsewhere, although tall buildings are becoming more common in the suburbs. Industrial buildings come in many forms ranging from large factory complexes in industrial districts to small workshops scattered throughout the urban core. But each of these can be tied together, and none of them require a necessarily rectilinear structure.

Irregular building lots are just the ones that allow, without exception, the most interesting solutions and usually the better ones. Naturally, if one has not the perseverance to work this out in detail, then for sure a tenement district will develop in every case, as this is the lowest common denominator and consequently the dreariest and most featureless formation; anything can be ﬁ tted into it if need be. But though an irregular design demands a more careful study of the plan, its deviations from normalcy can become advantages to the design of spaces - in the interior of such a building, wedge- shaped pieces can become suited for services and extra rooms such as elevators, restrooms, and service closets. –

8 .

6 Boundaries in the Current World

– Mentioned as a key precedent for urban design, Disney

Steve Waldron • 29 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

themeparks contain an ability to demarcate zones without the use of signage or barriers. This concept will be essential in the differentiation of neighborhoods, clusters, and areas of necessary segregation. Though people will have a choice between any of a number of transit stops, the differentiation between them is imperative in the resulting identity and character of each neighborhood. This differentiation can also exist within the neighborhood and within a cluster, as it can discourage loitering and trespassing of commercial property.

Differentiation is also required between various land uses. For example, residential and industrial tend not to exist in adjacency, due to imbalance of building scales, and the connotations of noise and pollution. Rather, a barrier or screen placed between them can retain the boundary needed to maintain both uses at market conditions. Additional desires for boundaries include the desire for separation between residential and highly traffi cked roadways, and between schools and industrial complexes. It has been found, however, that “offi ces, retail, and open spaces are like parking lots: they can fl ourish everywhere with proper codes” (Kelbaugh 144). –

9 .

6 Corporate in the Current World

– Corporations tend to desire a parklike environment, but they need not have a private park. The primary reason for selecting sites with a park connotation is the importance associated with being the only building on a landscape. Combined with lower taxes frequently found in the suburbs, demand for ofﬁ ce space has risen more in the suburbs than downtown since the end of the 1980s. The advantage of close proximity to many other business and functions present in a downtown has also decreased, owing to the decentralization of a metropolitan region.

But the offi ce typology does not need to be a box-like tower. Rather, the small offi ce unit enables the building typology to conform to many various confi gurations. In many various ways, an offi ce can function within the density desired for a pedestrian-oriented neighborhood. Shared cafeterias, parking lots, and even building structures themselves can save a corporation money while providing unique opportunities by uniting services with the companies they support. This concept is readily apparent in Detroit, where suppliers for auto manufacturers are in nearby the companies they produce for.

Steve Waldron • 30 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis –

1 Institutional in the Current World . 6 In the Culture of Cities, Mumford instills the importance of – institutional centers as necessary and unchanging aspects of urban life (Mumford 111). Institutional buildings do much to create an identity for the neighborhood they occupy, because schools, churches, and hospitals may produce as much of a connection to a geographic area as the civic boundaries that contain them. Additionally, the longevity found in institutions is desirable because these buildings frequently outlast the markets of desire. In much of the building world today, a thirty year period is roughly the duration before a market changes, causing ofﬁ ces, residences, and retail venues to shift rapidly. Yet, institutional buildings tend to remain in a single locale, often merely adding to a existing structure. Though conﬁ ned to a single building or small collection of structures, institutional facilities often house a high concentration of employment, providing a large economic return for the limited space they consume. –

1 1 . Retail in the Current World 6

– Toward the latter half of the eighteenth century, particularly in America, the city as a setting for commerce assumed primacy. New towns founded during this period were conceived as commercial enterprises, and the neutral grid was the most effective means to divide land up into parcels for sale. The city became a checkerboard on which players speculated on shifting land values. No longer would religious, political, and cultural imperatives shape urban development; rather, the market would be allowed to determine the pattern of urban growth. Downtown New York, Philadelphia, and Boston in the early twentieth century exemplify the commercial city, with their bustling, mixed-use waterfront districts.

Neither suburbia nor the suburban mall wants to repeat the conditions that originally drove their residents and customers out of the city half a century ago, though it may be beyond their control. The most affl uent patrons of the shopping mall were those who were the fi rst to fl ee to the suburbs, and yet many recent studies have shown this market segment desires to return. “The belief has taken hold that to make the city urban requires submission to the model of the suburban” (Chung 202). These prodigal citizens do not return unconditionally, however; they have brought back with them their suburban values of predictability and control and desire for instantaneous accessibility: parking, recreation space, and individualism.

Steve Waldron • 31 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

The concept of “shopping” architecture is not meant to be seen. It exists customarily in surveys and market analysis, showing an increasing interest in learning what the mall’s constituency wants, and adapting for the uprising of any future preference. ‘The Next Big Thing’ is always on the way, because stale retail equals dead retail. Current trends expire and then the next trend always comes bigger, faster, and fresher. Not only is shopping permeating into our very culture of life, everything else is permeating into shopping. Through successive waves of expansion, each more extensive and pervasive than the previous – shopping has incrementally encroached on a diverse spectrum of life so that it is now, arguably, the deﬁ ning activity of public life. It exists as a backbone for economic survival in airports, • •

F museums, train stations, carnivals, and everywhere else the F i i g g u u

public ﬁ nds themselves. r r e e

5 1 4

•

The problem with the ‘Next Big Thing’ is that in a rapidly • changing environment, the cost of construction and the impact of these buildings on the built world causes many Incorporating seemingly superﬂ uous elements buildings to be emptied of use but stagnant in the landscape, such as lighting, luxurious materials, and appeal- hallowed depictions of a retail opportunity that once existed. ing signage aids in attracting shoppers within a The goal of sustainable retail, then, exists in creating a store. Similar tactics can be effective in urban de- structure in which a consistent base of people necessarily sign as well. passes through the shopping core on their way to something else. Regardless of storefront changes and window displays, retail cannot be sold unless there are people in the area to • •

sell the goods to. Malls allow themselves to die because their

F F i i g

clientele may opt to drive to the newer mall. Conversely, g u u r r e e

dilapidated stores can simply renovate to re-attract people

5 1 5

• to the store, provided the clientele they seek is already in • the area. Transportation serves as one of the few means to Immense structures for discount retail eradicate provide this, provided that the transportation mode itself is the landscapes and offer little for the community. attractive enough to encourage a desirable market segment to opt to utilize it. As long as people ﬂ y, they must pass through an airport, and be tempted to buy products. As long as people wait on a train to arrive, impulse shopping has an appeal. And as long as people depart from a bus or PRT station, they may be presented with retail opportunities.

In 2004 alone, about two dozen so-called “Towne Centers” that combine dining, entertainment and specialty stores in a smaller, outdoor setting were built across the U.S. “Right now, they’re the hot development trend,” Erich Duker said. The concept known as Towne Centers, known to be an urban approach to a suburban shopping mall, is the preferred locale

Steve Waldron • 32 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

for large retail opportunities, especially impulse shopping. Created by the principles of New Urbanism, these centers act as downtowns to locations which never had one. It stems from the understanding that pedestrians are the catalyst • •

needed to make communities meaningful as the center of F i i g g u u

integrated commercial, recreational, and civic life. They also r r e e

incorporate the most up-to-date trends of shopping, such as 1 6

•

restaurants as anchors. Gone are the days of department • stores as anchors, and likewise the bland facades inherent in a strip mall are also considered unfashionable and outdated. The sprawling mall - a New Towne Center is a culmination of a shopping mall and a downtown merchant street. Towne Centers, like the original shopping malls by Gruen, are more about the experientiality created by the shopping than the shopping for a purpose. Many elements of mall • •

F design can still be applicable, such as circulation, designing F i i g g u u r

for inhabitant’s attention, and need for entertainment. Along r e e

5 1

with entertaining experiences in engaging places, consumers 7

• Though the resultant product appears vastly dif- • want and need broad social contact that is not available at ferent from the prototypical shopping mall, the home or in the automobile. While the essence of a mall still Towne Center is little different than the old center exists, the pieces are spread further apart and combined in with less density and more architectural variety. a stage set of urban feel, based on the traditional values of small-town America. The appeal of Towne Centers is believed at this point not to be a mere trend, but a wholistic movement of market trends. Essentially, the form of the mall is altered though the principles are the same, and therefore the individual stores are the primary element subject to large degrees of change, as has always been the case. For this reason, the incorporation of a Towne Center typology in the midst of the neighborhood development is suitable, for its impact and interest is not expected to wane for a long time.

While anchor stores may need to orient to arterial and parking lots, smaller shops should orient to pedestrian “foot streets” and plazas. Direct local street access from the neighborhood is required to foster consistent traffi c to grocery stores and similar neighborhood centers. The confi guration of shops in the core area must balance pedestrian and auto access, and offer visibility and allure for better sales. To accommodate this, it is likely that a successful retail core will front both the public transit stop in the center of the neighborhood and the automobile traffi c along the peripheral arterial. Many neighborhood-oriented venues will be located within a double-loaded pedestrian corridor, in response to failed two-

– corridor schemes that lacked apparent activity of people.

2 1 .

6 Residential in the Current World

– Several market analysts have noted a preferential shift of

Steve Waldron • 33 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

residential desires. In 1998, a survey jointly commissioned by Smart Growth America and the National Association of Realtors was released which reinforces the notion that Americans would prefer to live in walkable neighborhoods of higher density housing, given a free choice. Prompted to choose between a neighborhood of homes on one-acre lots that requires driving to restaurants and stores, as opposed to a much more walkable area where homes are on smaller lots and closer to shopping, more than two-thirds favor the community with the larger lots. A shorter commute time, in fact, is the single biggest factor that guides people when making a choice of where to live, the poll found. While the poll seems to show a disconnect between where people choose to live and what they say is important to them when purchasing a home, the poll’s authors claim it is because there is a limited supply of affordable housing, which in turn forces people out to distant suburbs. Such a situation, however, is changeable.

Calthorpe mentions that 12 residential units are the minimum number per acre capable of sustaining public transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area, which tends to have a higher-than-average ridership percentage due to the longevity of the successful BART system. To accommodate a lower expectancy of ridership, the design for Blue Ash will incorporate a minimum 16 units per acre within a one- third mile radius. The remaining one-sixth mile ring within the neighborhood boundary will remain densely compacted single and two family residences, averaging to approximately 8 units per acre. Because of the low land space consumed by the residential buildings, they contain the ability to be placed as inﬁ ll, provided the scale of residence to adjacent building

– is sufﬁ ciently contextual.

3 1 .

6 Industrial in the Current World

– With the ability to obtain industry away from waterways, what little manufacturing exists in American today is no longer limited to riverside areas. Railroads, too, are no longer necessary, though their inclusion is still regarded as an asset. Rather, the determining factor in the placement of industrial areas is derived from the cost of the land, because industrial facilities typically consume a large tract of land to afford high purchase costs and yearly taxes. The location of Blue Ash is advantageous, as its suburban setting reduces land cost, and the proximity to two highway arterials would aid in logistic transportation. Additionally, Blue Ash contains a fair number of railroad tracks that run primarily north and

Steve Waldron • 34 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

south to accommodate a small degree of industry in the city. Because new railroads are rarely constructed, retainment of existing lines is beneﬁ cial to any area that owns some. –

0 . Neighborhoods Are the Future ‘Small Towns’ 7

– 7.0 In each of the eight years between 1988 and 1996, central cities as a whole suffered a net emigration of between 2.4 and 2.9 million people. During the same period, suburbs experienced a net gain of between 2.1 and 3.1 million people each year. This expansion, though much more rapid than ever before, is not a new phenomenon. Fringe cities have always occurred as a result of new towns incorporating on the periphery of a larger metropolis and expanding slowly. What is commonly overlooked, however, is that these smaller cities adjacent to the central city used to be incorporated through annexation.

Unlike New Urbanism, which believes that suburban and urban entities are vastly dissimilar, it is the contention of this thesis that the two will coalesce into multiple areas of similar • •

F F

densities. The inner city areas were left behind by a massive i i g g u u r

relocation to the suburbs, which began in the late nineteenth r e e

1 5

century but accelerated in the 1920s with the spread of the 8 •

automobile. The introduction of freeway construction after • World War II opened up even larger areas of suburban land, which were quickly ﬁ lled by people ﬂ eeing central city Mixed uses make neighborhoods successful be- decline. Today, more people live in suburbs than in cities cause they create activity on sidewalks throughout a day, making any location more desirable proper (U.S. Census). Manufacturers have also moved through life itself. their production facilities to suburban locations which have freeway and rail accessibility.

Indeed, we have reached a new stage of urbanization where the metropolis is the new scale of the city. Most major cities are no longer focused exclusively on the traditional downtown. The growth that occurs outside in suburbs has accrued to a level of density sufﬁ cient for city centers, though less dense than traditional cities, creating validity for the term “metropolitan density” (U.S. Census). Every year in America since 1960 we have become more and more metropolitan and less and less compactly urban. The proportion of Americans living in places deﬁ ned as "metropolitan" has increased from two- thirds in 1960 to 80% today. Yet, the new development is not as dense as the city; rather, it has affected the center city and begin to dispense its components throughout the region, as traditional downtown elements such corporations, sports stadiums, and occasionally government centers have left the

Steve Waldron • 35 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

core. It is made up almost exclusively of low density suburban sprawl and “edge cities” (Garreau xiv). New subcities have risen around the periphery, and these subcenters supply •

most of the daily needs of their adjacent populations. The •

F F i i g

old metropolis has become a multi-centered urban region. g u u r r e In turn, many of these urban regions have expanded to the e

1 5

9 point where they have coalesced into vast belts of growth •

• - what the geographer Jean Gottman termed “megalopolis” Much like Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City con- (Gottman 4). The planner C.A. Doxiadis has speculated that cept, central cities and suburban municipalities these growth areas will become increasingly urbanized, and interact frequently to create a vibrant metropoli- occur throughout the world during the next century (Neal tan region. 14).

In the Bo-Wash Megalopolis, the stretch of 450 miles between • •

F Boston and Washington, D.C. is so completely built upon F i g i g that there is little distinction between states, counties, and u u r r e e

6 in many cases, cities. This was caused by suburban sprawl 1 0

• slowly extending out from one urban enclave until it reached The importance of individual neighborhoods oc- • the suburban sprawl of a different city, and the densities curs through a dominant use or iconic building of naturally increased when there was a lack of direction for that area, and visitors and citizens alike associate new growth. The entire super-region has the potential to act with it. as one single oversized urban body caused by consistent growth throughout the area.

The occurrence of the megalopolis is not unique to the eastern seaboard. Even locally, the boundaries of Cincinnati and Dayton are extending towards each other, with a fair percentage of residents living in southern Dayton yet working in Cincinnati. The growth of Montgomery County is increasing much more rapidly in the southern portion of the county than in the northern half, and commerce and industry has since followed. It is the conjecture of this thesis that the interstitial area between the Cincinnati and Dayton will growth to a desired level of density, and then new growth areas will occur in the existing cities. Once this infrastructure is in place and operating as a megalopolis, this idea of individual city governments will give way to only • •

large blanket government over the entire region. F i i g g u u r r e e

As the megalopolis develops, the entire region will be 1 1

• connected through a public transit system that services both • within and between these “smaller cities,” minimizing the need for vehicular trafﬁ c within the city. As the megalopolis grows and matures, new infrastructure will resemble The I-75 corridor is the location of the greatest existing infrastructure in a way that uniﬁ es these smaller degree of growth in the Cincinnati region. Being cities into one large metropolitan area. The ability for only less than an hour’s drive to Dayton has ac- convenient and accessible transportation throughout the city celerated growth for reasons of easy access to either city.

Steve Waldron • 36 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

will increase communication and interdependency between the neighborhoods. Indirectly, the effectiveness of public transportation affects whether a metropolitan area is capable of becoming a healthy, vibrant, and sustainable place to live.

It is the conviction of this that the neighborhood scale, typically composed of a half mile square and containing approximately 7,000 residents, will become the new cell structure for the metropolitan area. Each neighborhood will not be able to stand alone, but will be interdependent upon each other through the region to retain its health and vitality. This will naturally occur in a developed region, because services to the individual neighborhood must be supplied by the region as a whole, and likewise the region as a whole is supplied by the larger global exchange of goods. As a result, this equation can be replicated between neighborhoods, so that the form of each neighborhood is proportional to any other. Consequentially, these neighborhoods are not simply related between each other in a similar metropolitan area, but can be compared to other neighborhoods in separated • •

F metropolitan regions. F i i g g u u r r e e

6 As Kevin Lynch explained in his book Image of a City, a 1 2

•

city is not merely as strong as its downtown, or even its main • three or four features, but rather a wide array of memorable places and locations of an individual’s memories. Like Jane Jacobs, he saw the city as a whole unit. Many cities today This thesis hypothesizes that a neighborhood will converge all their interest or attractions into a single location one day act as a single structure in a large an in- for tourism. This operates in similar fashion to the dumbbell terdependent region. Design of one element can be eventually duplicated throughout the larger scheme in Disney parks, except that the remainder of the city whole. as a functional unit has been neglected. The city is composed of a polycentric urban form that functions most effectively when various pieces of importance are not coalesced in close proximity but are separated to the degree that each area has its own importance, be it a fruit market, an aquarium, a sports arena, or a university. What cities ought to be doing is creating a means for visitors and permanent residents alike to be able to traverse the existing framework effectively to arrive at each sector of urbanity easily, but with the understanding that it contains its own unique signiﬁ cance. This does exist in a few locations – for example, a traveler may ride the subway through Manhattan, but knows each stop will have a different ‘essence’ to it; be it SoHo, the Financial District, or the Upper West Side. Even though a single transit mode carries passengers to each location, passengers comprehend the change and appreciate the distinctions.

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By creating a template to be used for further development, many issues addressed in this thesis can remain intact when • •

F copied to another situation. However, to avoid inherent F i i g g u

redundancy of neighborhoods created by half mile spacing, u r r e e

6 each node should have its own theme or emphasis of a 1 3

• particular building type based on this history of the city. This • emphasis would only consume a small portion of the total Only public transit can transport a large volume of leasable area, but would give character to each neighborhood people while offering the individual the opportu- district. To retain a sustainable use over the lifetime of the nity to read, eat, or sleep while commuting. project, retail and residential should be attached to the existing ofﬁ ce or institutional spaces which are naturally vibrant along the transit lines. For example, along the periphery of the university, a bookstore makes sense because it is analogous to learning. In the Uptown area of Cincinnati, the • •

small medical facilities relate well to the many large hospital F i i g g u institutions that exist there. This is being copied for other u r r e e

uses in suburban shopping malls; for example, Cincinnati 1 4

•

Mills, a newly-renovated local shopping mall, has three • “neighborhoods,” each with a different theme: clothing, specialty items, and activities in each of its main walkways. The iconic element of the neighborhood could be a range of particular building typologies, or it As cities engulf towns, they have the ability to retain the could be a particular monument or tower object than can be seen throughout the neighborhood. existing town as a neighborhood of the new. Emphasizing the importance of these small towns would be incredibly beneﬁ cial for the purposes of historical attachment. Studies in suburban growth suggest that the small-city environments chosen by people who move to areas with populations of 250,000-500,000 are disappearing rapidly, as they quickly outsize themselves. America has always cherished the small town, at least as an ideal. While the sheer attractiveness of these areas become its own demise, maintaining the reasoning for its popularity is essential, and can be duplicated readily. The sense of an individual is still present; it is not engulfed by the sheer mass found in high residential densities of a major city. The ability to interact with both established friends and random strangers is still present; the small town has the density to allow for contact, even by foot. This same density enables shopkeepers, barbers and doctors to establish a rapport with customers who frequent them, and neighborhood parks and plazas to exist within a three minute walk of a residence. There is no reason to believe that these desires cannot continue to exist in American cities today; rather, this concept could easily be applied throughout the entire metropolitan area. Through the creation of pedestrian pockets throughout an urban city, residential locations become integral with daily-life activities. Activities such as

Steve Waldron • 38 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

recreation and essential shopping will occur in one’s own area through both desire and less willing to contend with the increasing frustration of vehicular trafﬁ c problems.

Neighborhoods are ideal frameworks for creating cities focused on pedestrian activity, as many of these areas have already incorporated the pedestrian as the basis for sizing a building and city block in its original historical development. Additionally, they frequently have land available for renovation, since few vacancies involve the demolition of the previously existing use. The Maryland Ofﬁ ce of Planning reports, for example, that the 20 percent population growth projected for metropolitan Washington, DC, from 1995— 2020 could all be accommodated within the boundaries of existing developed areas (Weitz, 3). –

The Reactive Force • •

0 F

. F i g i 8 g

of the New Urbanist Movement u u r – 8.0 r e e 65

•

In the midst of several architectural treatises that discuss the • necessary evolution of city form and architectural design, an equally impactful force upholds the converse belief of Combining the desirability of neighborhoods with preservation. People are inherently comfortable and do not large city amenities would be the most desirable wish to change, even when change is inevitable through compromise a region can offer. societal upheaval. Today, the general population clings to the historical adornments and traditional mannerisms, unwilling to separate from the concepts of custom to venture into a more ﬁ tting environment with the world they exist in. Particular evidence of this is exhibited in residential housing that is adorned with traditional fenestrations and decorations. These new housing structures, through their attempt to look old, actually do a disservice to the architectural typologies they imitate.

When these knock-off buildings are copied carelessly throughout a development, then repeated development after development, it is understandable that much of it carries a connotation for redundancy. These suburban development exacerbate the concerns through cliché branding of Park, Woods, and other natural elements with the name of what used to exist in its place. Even the entryways into these subdivisions has become banal in design. Repeated time and again, many entire suburban growth areas of today tend to lack uniqueness. As discussed in a following section, buildings contain a more artistic aspect when better integrated to each other. Regardless of cladding or color, big- box architecture and parking lots do not vary from project to

Steve Waldron • 39 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

project. Few developing suburbs take the time to plan the arrangement, and because of rapid development, they are continually reactive to the overnight change that occurred. This did not happen in cities that developed over a span of many decades, as components of the city moved and rebuilt, • •

various neighborhoods are distinct between them. Retaining

F F i i g

that dissimilarity is essential to the economic life of each g u u r r The development patterns that occur in many sub- e e

neighborhood. The collective result of that retention of

6 1

urbs are homogenous because the residential de- 6

• identity contributes to the uniqueness of one city to another. velopments occur in one instance, the product of • a single developer that converts a massive tract of Like the suburban environments they were created in, shopping land at one time. Services, retail, and ofﬁ ce soon centers or malls were attempts to create euphonic lifestyles follow to provide amenities to these workers, but the middle class desired. Suburbs were great places to raise they are relegated to a different part of the town- families, especially since “good” housing was available at a ship due to the delayed development and zoning codes. reasonable cost, but suburbs weren’t true places, they were simply areas of new growth to occur at. As a reaction to this decay of community, malls seemed to be an effective answer. The mall combines urban and suburban elements with the aim to have the urban amenities but within an environment that, like suburbia itself, is controlled. Malls did not have the balance of good and bad that is so integral to human life. Suburban housing did not have the combination of land use types that prevent a city from appearing repetitive and dull. This, of course, is the crux of the suburban dilemma today. They weren’t places. While this factor is one of the most • •

F difﬁ cult to quantify, it also represents the cornerstone for a F i i g g u u

vast grouping of related impacts, including social alienation, r r e e 6

1 increased stress, and a lack of civic engagement. Suburbs 7

• contain a connotation of street after street of single-family • homes, with an occasional school thrown in. But there were no true public realms, no civic centers, no main streets. The introversion of suburban malls leave little activity to occur outside. Accordingly, the only determining factor of business is the number of cars Mall development has typically taken the form of speculative parked outside, not the visual activity caused by realty, in that it can be constructed in one single phase. people walking around. This is the antithesis of the urban growth process, which transforms incrementally through the process of change. The disadvantage is that each urban fabric has its own scale of commercial buildings. Our society battles between “big-box” architecture which offers lower prices but cannot be traversed by foot, and the downtown which is more expensive, but incorporates narrow storefronts that are accommodating for • •

F F

walking. i i g g u u r r e e

6 1

In response to these suburban issues, an organization of 8

•

architects, planners, developers, politicians, concerned The omittance of any sort of interaction forces • homeowners, and many other activists created an organization shoppers to drive from destination to destination in 1992 to create awareness and more community-oriented in personalized yet solitary vehicles, gaining no social experience from the shopping activity.

Steve Waldron • 40 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

design that is relevant to American culture today. New Urbanists promote a return to the traditional town planning that deﬁ nes places like downtown Charleston, South Carolina; old town Alexandria, Virginia, historic San Francisco, California and Georgetown in Washington, DC. These traditional neighborhoods feature walkable Main Street shopping districts, downtown parks, and grid streets.

There are four primary issues that New Urbanists seek to improve. The fi rst, and considered most important, is Walkability. As part of this, they believe that basic goods and services should be readily available within a fi ve- minute walk. Sidewalks, narrow streets, and proximity of commercial and residential areas must facilitate walking. The second element can be seen as an extension of the fi rst: De-emphasize the car. Much of the designs by New Urbanists show garages which are hidden in alleys, out of sight from the main traffi c street. Parallel street parking is encouraged because it replaces parking lots when unnecessary, and diminishes the required size of them when they cannot be altogether avoided. The third issue is to fi nd a better of Mix of Uses. Traditional suburbs put homes in one area, schools in another and shopping in yet a third. New Urbanists mix building types, sizes and prices. A modest townhouse or duplex cozies up to large single family home, which may have a rental apartment over its garage. Apartments are built over street level stores. When all these uses are fully mixed together, it becomes increasingly possible to establish the fourth issue, Community. New Urbanist design encourages human interaction by keeping houses close to each other and close to the street. Residents gather on front porches, in nearby parks and on open plazas. Neighbors share driveways, walkways and alleys, reducing pavement costs and environmental damage while promoting more constant interaction between citizens. Though many residential and whole-town developers are fairly hesistant to incorporate these concepts wholesale, the ones that have so far have been rewarded with higher-than-average sales rates on buildings.

To further promote uniﬁ cation between the New Urbanists, the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) was formed shortly after to increase awareness among political circles. As a nonproﬁ t organization that advocates the principles needed to “instill a wholesale shift in the way communities are built” (Laceese iv), they gain much favor by the people of a town, and are often met with applause upon suggesting changes to an existing city. Through large-scale revisions

Steve Waldron • 41 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

of codes, the New Urbanists succeed in creating design changes without replacing the local architects and planners. Based upon a system of three distinct scales defi ned by the Region, the Neighborhood and the Block, New Urbanism prescribes important elements which tend to produce effective results without direct management. New Urbanist design philosophy can be summarized by these essential elements for a neighborhood: A discernible center — often a square or green and sometimes a busy or memorable street corner — where the transit stop would be located; Most dwellings within a fi ve-minute walk of the center; Shops and offi ces of suffi ciently varied types to supply the weekly needs of a household; A small ancillary building within the back yard of each house that might be used as a rental unit or place of work; An elementary school within walking distance of homes; Small playgrounds convenient to every dwelling; Connected networks of streets, providing a variety of routes for walking and for vehicles; Streets that are relatively narrow and tree-shaded, slowing the traffi c in favor of walking and cycling; Buildings around the neighborhood center are placed close to streets, creating a well-defi ned public space; Parking spaces and garage doors rarely face the street — they are relegated to the rear of buildings, usually accessed by alleys; and, Prominent sites are reserved for civic buildings, accommodating community, education, religious or cultural activities.

While commendable for the wholesale attention brought by collecting a large quantity of theories, New Urbanism is not sufﬁ cient for solving the multitude of problems we have created. In an attempt to resolve the issues that came to light after World War II, the Congress still clings to the conditions that existed prior: picket fences, brick structures, front porches, and working shutters. Under the title Neo- Traditionalism, the designs tend to consider the automobile as a threat to pedestrian activity, and fail to make full use of the vehicle that has become a core aspect of our world today. “Caught in our own urban crisis, we tend to romanticize the populous cities of the turn of the century. To many of their inhabitants, however, they were frightening and unnatural • •

phenomena” (Kostoff 16). Their unprecedented size and vast, F i i g g u u

uprooted populations seemed to suggest the uncontrollable r r e e

forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, and the chaos 1 9

• that occupied the center of modern life. •

– Seaside, Florida, attempts to re-create a city in

0 Explanation of Periodic Writings on Urban an undeveloped location through its traditionalist . 9

Form adornments and gridlike street system. – 9.0

Steve Waldron • 42 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

City planners must weave a complex, ever-changing array of elements into a working whole: that is the never-ending challenge of city planning. The physical elements of the city can be divided into three categories: networks, buildings, and open spaces. Many alternative arrangements of these components have been tried throughout history, but no ideal city form has ever been agreed upon. Lively debates about the best way to arrange urban anatomies continue to rage, and show no signs of abating. The following writers were compared to one another to derive a matrix of design principles, from which the most repetitive principles were decidedly most imperative, and given higher status for implementing. –

0 .

Quintessential Urban Design Theorists • • 0

F F 1 i

i g g u

– 10.0 u r 1 r 1889: Camillo Sitte e . e

7 0 1 0

Sitte, Camillo. City Planning According to Artistic Principles. 1 •

•

– 1889.

We usually associate medieval cities with narrow winding streets converging on a market square with a cathedral and city hall. Many cities of this period display this pattern, A design for enduring usefulness should not be the product of thousands of incremental additions to the created in a void but based on research and veri- table observances of society. urban fabric. During the Renaissance, architects began to systematically study the shaping of urban space, as though the city itself were a piece of architecture that could be given an aesthetically pleasing and functional order.

Without any formal training, Sitte was capable of discovering that there was inherent framing of perspective in many spaces. Locations such as St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, in which all views are necessarily directed to the longitudinal elevation of the church, came from a dedicated •

• F and disciplined understanding of art. He spoke outwardly on F i g i g u

the importance of unifying buildings together, and showed u r e r e

1 numerous examples of iconic churches that were set within 7

• 1

a curtain of additional buildings; when these churches are • placed separated from other structures, they act as eyesores every time. Additionally, streets are more effective when they twist and turn through a contiguous street wall because a winding roadway exposes new vantages continuously. –

2 .

0 1904: Raymond Unwin 1 Sitte observed that the “anomalies” of cities are – Unwin, Raymond. Town Planning in Practice. 1994 ed. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. actually the spaces most frequented and considered beautiful by its occupants.

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Unwin looked at planning a design-based discipline rather than a purely technical one. He believed that artistic and practical criteria were mutually supportive and carried this out in his work by creating plans that represented a unity of art, science, and technology. Unwin is perhaps the greatest ﬁ gure of the Garden City Movement, which has had a tremendous impact on planning in both Europe and the United States. Although the 1904 version of Town Planning has become the blueprint of neo-traditionalist planners, this book is not a nostalgic view of past planning ideas; rather, it is a useful, forward-thinking book that holds valuable lessons for today's planners. Its insightful critical analyses of many towns throughout Europe and the United States are accompanied by photographs, plans, drawings, and six foldout maps. With keen observations of the modern city, Unwin discovered that motorists inherently slow down in response to what they perceive to be an unusual intersection. He saw both the straight boulevard and the twisting road to have advantages and should each be present in a city. Consistently, he found a balance between an individual and • •

F a larger whole; from proportional experience to enclosure of F i i g g a place, he proved that there is a natural ﬁ t of every aspect u u r r e e

7 or urban design. Though not necessarily artistic, the issue 1 2

• of cultural beauty derived from built space was largely •

– repeated.

3 . 0

1 1920s: J.C. Nichols

– In Kansas City, Missouri, developer Jesse Clyde Nichols (1880-1950), began to develop neighborhoods that revolved around commercial districts. His rationale was twofold; while giving people a reason to "get out of the house and off Unwin noted that various confi gurations of street the porch,” (Beyard 65) it also made him a sizeable amount patterns and intersections do a great service to of revenue. traffi c maintenance, but these principles have been largely ignored by code writers. Amongst national acclaim for the highly desirable urbanity he created, Nichols began to distribute his keys to success. As a founding Urban Land Institute member, Nichols is widely regarded as one of America's most infl uential entrepreneurs • in land use during the fi rst half of the 20th century. Seeking •

F F i i g to improve the quality of real estate through the best in “land g u u r r e use policy and practice” (Beyard ii), ULI documents best e

7 1 3

•

practice and publishes literature to present the knowledge • gained to encourage improvement of performance. To bring attention to advances in policy and practice, the ULI JC Nichols Prize for Visionary Urban Development is presented The inclusion of civic amenities boosts real estate to an individual “whose career or institution demonstrates values of commercial centers more than the value if they were replaced with more shops.

Steve Waldron • 44 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

the highest standards of responsible development.”

Nichols’ Towne Centers succeeded in creating pedestrian activity that was not concentrated along a single interior path, but rather had an urban feel that exists from crossing simple streets, sitting on a sidewalk bench, and observing alternating roofl ines above shopping venues. The downfall of Towne Centers was that many of them fail to effectively accommodate parking. While the developers of these facilities agreed that a peripheral sea of parking would not create a welcoming gateway to the project, the compartmentalized pockets of parking were not suffi cient because people continued to pour into them and added unnecessary traffi c to a full parking lot. Even a parking garage tended not to accommodate the volume of a center, because the breadth of the new mall structure consumed more space, and created a sizeable walking distance from parking at one end to anchor locations at the opposite end. He did admit that what would succeed most effectively would be to arrive at such a location with public transit, where parking is no longer an issue, and the Towne Center is able to blend more effectively with the city that surrounds it.

Slowly, malls have begun to transform into Nichols’ creations, which present the emotional response of downtown life, but retain the control over uninvited aspects of actual urbanity. Given that the suburb forces people to have to drive to any location, the Town Center is likely the best possibility for a public gathering space. To the greatest extent possible, it is a destination and central element to the city. Much in the way original shopping malls created implicit means to bar poor people through its clientele, the new disassembled mall still omits panhandlers, Section 8 housing, grafﬁ ti, and vacancies, thereby providing appealing aspects of urbanity –

while dismissing problematic concerns. 4 . 0 1

1938: Lewis Mumford – Mumford, Lewis. The Culture of Cities. 1st ed. New York: • • Greenwood Press, 1938. F

F i i g g u u r r e e Similar in thought to Ebenezer Howard, Louis Mumford 7

1 4

•

argued for a decentralization of cities into thinned out • areas resembling towns. Mumford expounded upon the The suburban shopping mall as an introversion design has disappeared to a form less dense, but psychological reasoning for dispersing citizens through operates with similar design tactics. a broader area, and how it would better society to have few large cities. Beginning with a 300-page history of European and American cities, Mumford recounted the

Steve Waldron • 45 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

importance of regional planning (and why he advocated for it) in politics of regionalism, and miscellaneous topics such as agriculture, hygiene, museums, housing, transportation, government, cultural centers, and schools.

This book was seminal for its time. It represented a massive scholarly undertaking. With a historical overview that was interesting and informative, Mumford pointed out how residents of cities in the Middle Ages enjoyed freedoms not possessed by land-bound peasants, and how life in the cities of those times did not entail exile from natural surroundings. He went on to describe how cities lost an increasing number • •

of their green spaces as they become more densely developed, i i g g u u r r

and how the air and water of industrial cities made these e e

1 5

cities quite unhealthy places to be in. He also described the

• original Garden City concept, which aimed at building small • livable cities for the working class. Mumford had a strong distaste for urban developments of his time, calling them "dormitories", and he rails against time wasted in workday Civic and cultural dominance was as important in commutes. His ideal goal was small cities of 30-40,000 medieval times as it ought to be today, though its inhabitants, with dense efﬁ cient housing, ample green space impact is currently overlooked in design. attainable by all classes, and workplaces within walking distance from homes for everyone. –

5 .

0 1960: Victor Gruen 1

– Gruen, Victor, and Larry Smith. Shopping Towns USA. New York: Reinhold Publishing, 1960.

Victor Gruen was an Austrian-born architect who is credited as the creator of the enclosed shopping mall itself. Within a few years of practicing in the United States, he became known as a brilliant and passionate theoretician and advocate of community planning. He focused on suburban sprawl and the damage he believed the automobile was causing to the social fabric. The ﬁ rst shopping stores enclosed in a single envelope occurred in his design for the Southdale Shopping Center in Edina, Minnesota, in 1954. Gruen conceived of the large shopping mall as an antidote to suburban sprawl by

providing civic interactions present in a city but with refuge • •

F i g from the chaos of the city found in a suburban setting. With i g u u r r his European background, Gruen believed that in order for e e

1 6

communities to work they must provide places for people to

• be together, not isolated in cars, housing tracts, and ofﬁ ce • buildings. He saw it as a centralizing inﬂ uence, an organizing principle, as well as an adaptable mechanism for creating With or without a roof, people need a location to community centers where there were none. congregate and socialize. Gruen sought to provide these aspects to people in multiple climates and both low and high urban densities.

Steve Waldron • 46 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

Gruen instantly became recognized as an innovator in retail design for the next ﬁ fteen years. Shopping then evolved into a scale, density, and pervasiveness such that it now operates as “a totalizing landscape system” (Chung 619). In this ﬁ fteen year period, he was responsible for completing 560 storefronts and nearly 200 shopping center designs. Shopping, once synonymous with solely downtown activity, became through its replication an aid to the diminishing importance of the center city as the vibrant force. Gruen’s reconstituted idea of the mall reestablished shopping as the principal means for understanding urban vitality. Though initially designed by Gruen as a supplement to city life, it became accessible by all who had a car, to the degree that the suburban shopping mall has become a distilled means of understanding the experience and planning of the city without having to enter into one. Its realizations are not merely perceptions of the city, however; the mall begins to involve the layout of street patterning, distancing, and circulation, and can provide a • •

F F

sense of interactions and observations when a true city is i i g g u u – r r

miles and miles away. e e 7

6 1 7 .

• • 0 1

1961: Jane Jacobs – Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 3rd ed. New York: Random House, 1993. (1st: 1961) The suburban shopping mall was, and still is, in- accessible to those who do not possess the capa- This 1961 book by Jane Jacobs, a one-time writer for bility to drive an automobile to them. architectural magazines in New York City, received enormous acclaim for her observations of cities. Jacobs, who possessed no formal training in architecture or city planning, relied on personal experiences of her surroundings in Greenwich Village in New York City to supply ammunition for her charges against the grand motifs of the architectural profession. The Death and Life of Great American Cities consisted mostly of common sense examinations, but also included economics, sociology, and some philosophy as the base of the author's arguments. According to the author, the “mess we call cities today” (Jacobs 5) emerged from Utopian visionaries from Europe and America beginning in the 19th century. “Figures such as Ebenezer Howard, Lewis Mumford, Le Corbusier, • •

and Daniel Burnham all had a signiﬁ cantly dreadful impact i i g g u u r r

on how urban areas are built and rebuilt. These men all e e

1 8

envisioned the city as a dreadful place, full of overcrowding,

• crime, disease, and ugliness” (Jacobs 9). •

For Jacobs, the key to a successful city rests on one word: diversity. Diversity means different buildings, different Small, affordable amenities provide much more residences, different businesses, and different amounts than aesthetic interest: diversity and safety can occur through mixed use and careful planning.

Steve Waldron • 47 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

of people in an area at different times. The antithesis of diversity is what we see today on a stroll through our built world: a bland uniformity of offi ce buildings, apartment dwellings, and houses that stretch as far the eyes can see. In Jacobs’ view, this lack of diversifi cation leads to economic stagnation, slums, crime, and a host of other horrors that have culminated in the unsafe conditions associated with many large cities today. The author examined the role and practicality of parks, sidewalks, business interests, city government, streets, automobiles versus pedestrians, and boundaries. Repeatedly, Jacobs expounded upon fatal errors in how planners build cities. She found parks placed in the sunless shadows of skyscrapers or at the end of dead end streets, narrow sidewalks incapable of carrying heavy foot traffi c, city blocks so long that people avoided walking down them. Jacobs then directed her focus toward governments to show how it would be most effective to fi x them. –

7 .

0 1980: William Whyte 1

– Whyte, William H. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. New York: Project for Public Spaces Inc, 1980.

William H. Whyte focused on issues of sprawl and urban revitalization, and dedicated his career to scientiﬁ cally examine rational development in cities in. As a result of his ﬁ ndings, it is rare to see an expansive urban plaza devoid of benches and attractive elements placed according to what he showed to cause high usage.

In 1980, Whyte published his experiments in his revolutionary Street Life Project entitled The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Using time lapse video and pinpointing sitting locations, he promoted the need to protect the backs of people sitting, prefer sun, do not move out of the way when conversing in the middle of circulation routes, and enjoy white noise. He suggested that the success of several main plazas resides on the fact that there is not other open spaces nearby, intensifying its use through lack of option. Both

the book and the accompanying ﬁ lm were instantly labeled • •

F i i classics, and launched a mini-revolution in the planning and g g u u r r study of public spaces. They have since become standard e e

1 9

texts, and appear on syllabi and reading lists in urban

• planning, sociology, environmental design, and architecture • departments around the world. –

8 .

0 1981: Kevin Lynch Residences operate with community when they 1 face each other through close distance and are not – Lynch, Kevin. Good City Form. 2nd ed. Cambridge: divided by streets and parking lots.

Steve Waldron • 48 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001. (1st: 1981)

In Good City Form, Lynch offered fi ve basic dimensions of city performance: vitality, sense, fi t, access, and control. To these he added two “meta-criteria:” effi ciency and justice. For Lynch, a vital city successfully fulfi lls the biological needs of its inhabitants and provides a safe environment for their activities. A sensible city was organized so that its residents could perceive and understand the city's form and function. A city with a “good fi t” provided the buildings, spaces, and networks required for its residents to pursue their projects successfully. An accessible city allowed people of all ages and backgrounds to gain the activities, resources, services, and information that they need. A city with good control was arranged so that its citizens have a say in the management of the spaces in which they work and reside.

Finally, an effi cient city achieved the goals listed above at the least cost, and balances the achievement of the goals with one another. They cannot all be maximized at the same time. And a just city distributes benefi ts among its citizens according to some fair standard. Clearly, these two meta-criteria raised diffi cult issues which sparked debates for many years, and in fact, are still raging today.

These criteria show aspiring city builders where to aim, while still acknowledging the diverse ways of achieving good city form. Cities are endlessly fascinating because each is unique, the product of decades, centuries, or even millennia of historical evolution. In his theory, we should be able to learn the lessons of history and rebuild cities in a way that our descendants will admire and wish to preserve. –

9 .

0 1993: Peter Calthorpe 1 Calthorpe, Peter. The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, – Community, and the American Dream. New York: Princeton • •

Architectural Press, 1993. i i g g u u r r e e

One of the foremost practitioners of New Urbanism, 0

• Peter Calthorpe, an urban designer and architect based • in Berkeley, California, offers one of the most coherent and persuasive arguments for moving the United States away from sprawl and toward more compact, mixed-use, Determining when and where to build can be a product of aesthetic appeal as much as economic economically diverse, and ecologically sound communities. forces. In the book he presents twenty-four regional urban plans, in which towns are organized so that residents can be less dependent upon their cars and can walk, bike, or take public

Steve Waldron • 49 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

transportation between work, school, home, and shopping. This book is not just for architects and urban planners, but for all concerned citizens interested in developing a cohesive, feasible vision of the sustainable city of the future.

There are multiple terms for this type of urban structure, in which the entire node is oriented around a transit stop. Two such terms are “Transit-Oriented Design” (TOD) and “Transit Village,” and both may be used interchangeably in this work. Regardless, what he proposes is a mixed-use community within an average 2,000-foot walking distance between a transit stop and a core commercial area which reduces or even eliminates automobile vehicular trafﬁ c and promotes pedestrian activity. Characteristically, the highest housing, job, and shopping concentrations, along with the most diverse and pedestrian-friendly neighborhood features are placed closest to the TOD stops. The concept is simple: moderate and high-density housing, along with complementary public uses, jobs, retail and services, are concentrated in mixed-use developments at strategic points along the regional transit system.

He advocates a fundamental change in patterns of building to •

respond to the growth crisis in US metropolitan regions. He •

F F i i g

entails the importance of building in a “new direction,” and g u u r r e provides guidelines to do so. It is not considered an architectural e

1 8

1 manifesto or utopian proposal, but merely alternatives to •

improve upon housing, trafﬁ c, and environmental and social • problems. The second half of the book describes numerous –

real projects from various regions. In Calthorpe’s designs, streets of the neighbor- 0 hood center upon a commercial area integrated 1 .

0 1993: Spiro Kostof with the transit mode that connects to the larger 1

region.

– Kostof, Spiro. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History. New York: Bulﬁ nch, 1993.

Kostof produced a standard textbook recounting urban patterns through history. The book was written to appeal to designers, architects, and planners, as it organizes its subject matter according to what form it takes (grids, diagrams, skylines, etc.) rather than chronologically, topically, or typologically, as do other surveys of urbanism. Kostof presented the text as though he were a master tour guide, discussing conditions in an easy writing style, a welcoming mind, and a worldwide mastery of his subject matter. –

. Preparing the Suburbs and Cities 1 1

for a More Functional America – 11.0 – – 11.0

Steve Waldron • 50 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

Included in the addendum to this thesis are the forty-nine principles that were extracted from the literature as pivotal elements found in attractive cities that can be implemented at a neighborhood scale. From these forty-nine principles, nine large concepts were distilled that relate to the intentions • •

of the original principles. F i i g g u u r r e e

The ﬁ rst major concept is the encouragement of automotive 8

• 2

trafﬁ c to ﬂ ow between neighborhoods on the boundaries • between them. This opens up the inside from contending with rapid speeds, and pedestrian and bicycle activity easier to facilitate. By having a wide arterial between neighborhoods, Architectural adornments make the city a special it also enables the identifying line between them easier to place, an aspect which is largely lacking in suburban typologies today. comprehend by the people that inhabit the neighborhoods.

The second major concept is the reversal of building order. Throughout the history of the United States, the roadways and infrastructure has been the primary system to complete, and then the parcels and buildings are adapted to the street network. If the buildings, parks, and plazas are previously designed, however, then the scale of development is reduced, and the individual person becomes more valuable. It is also inherently more likely to have buildings become more cohesive, because the composition of an entire block is considered as one element, and then separated by a street from the next block.

In the center of the neighborhood, an activity magnet is highly recommended. In this area, identity of the neighborhood can be observed through iconic buildings that foster the civic importance. Not every neighborhood will have the same focus, though a neighborhood retail area is suggested for its variety in hours of concentration and potential for diversity. All roads leading from the periphery of the neighborhood should concentrate or terminate in this area, to reinforce its signiﬁ cance to the area, and public transit should also be located in the center. It is possible, though not required, to have an activity area extend from the center to one peripheral arterial, so that public transit and automobiles can each have access to the space – essentially making transportation the anchor for the urban market.

Due to the square mile area of the suggested neighborhood extents, it is necessary to subdivide the neighborhood into smaller sections, so that disharmonious borders do not develop. Much in the same manner that roadways were used to separate neighborhood boundaries, minor roadways or

Steve Waldron • 51 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

boulevards are suggested for partitioning off these ‘clusters.’ As an example of necessary separation, large industrial complexes do not work in adjacency to residential districts, because the connotations of enormous size, noise, and smell from the factories decrease real estate values signiﬁ cantly in the residential areas. Therefore, it is necessary to induce minor segregation, though uses such as ofﬁ ce, institutional, and retail should be scattered fairly uniformly.

Continuing the literary suggestions, the roadways within the neighborhood should be arranged such that travel through the neighborhood is inherently more difﬁ cult than passing around it. Yet, the intra-neighborhood roads should also accommodate additional aspects, such as frequently changing directions to naturally reduce speeds, variation of width and material to establish hierarchy, and connectivity without a uniform grid, to enable buildings of various sizes to determine the street spacing.

By altering the directionality of the building canyons on either side of a street, the road is continuously framed towards an ever changing perspective. When the focus occurs towards a single element, such as fountain or building, that piece of urban structure becomes more important, and is immediately an iconic structure that contains either civic identity or increased real estate values. The intentional inclusion of a wide variety of these terminal vistas matters a great deal to the neighborhood, because unending perspectives foster feelings of insigniﬁ cance to the individual inhabitant.

Rather than obtain a single large tract of land for a park, its it advised to intersperse public recreation areas to smaller parks that occur within a three minutes walk of any space within the neighborhood, to be used as playgrounds, for ofﬁ ce lunch breaks, baseball games, and neighborhood street festivals. By limiting the size, parks actually become safer – a person passing by should be able to see from one side of the park to the other, eliminating dangerous areas that occur from limited supervision.

Caution was raised in the books that hinted at private and public spaces are naturally occurring in a neighborhood, and any attempt to avoid them will fail. However, they need not be entirely segregated. For example, the main entries to the neighborhood may be public spaces, and the area between these axes may be increasingly private. When properly designed, these private areas need not have gated entries or

Steve Waldron • 52 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

luxurious entry walls, yet may still contain the feeling of distinction desired in many communities. This may occur through lack of visual access from the main road, or by a change in materiality.

In order for a neighborhood to sustain its vitality for a longer duration than the standard ﬁ fty years, employment opportunities should be diversiﬁ ed and scattered throughout the area. A single building use may still remain the primary type, but focusing all effort upon a single market segment can become disastrous when that market is no longer desirable. –

0 .

2 Quantitative Background Based on Chart 1

– 12.0 To create a sufﬁ cient density needed for pedestrian life to survive, the design solution of this thesis will mix public transportation, ofﬁ ce, retail, residential, open space, and public uses in a walkable environment, making it convenient for residents and employees to travel by transit, bicycle, foot, or car. This will provide travel opportunities to all ages, including the young and old, and all classes, including the impoverished unable to afford an automobile. The mannerisms used in producing such a list involve the collaboration of lessons taught in the previously mentioned doctrines of urban design, in order to establish a sense of hierarchy of principles through the repetition of similar thought.

According to Urban Land Institute, the breakdown for self- sustaining urban neighborhoods follows these percentages of structures: 45% residential, 25% retail, 15% ofﬁ ce, 10% • •

institutional, 5% public service (Kelbaugh 116). Christopher F F i i g g

Alexander, a widely regarded architect for his ability to u u r r e e

observe patterns in the built world, discusses slightly different 8 1 3

•

proportions in his New Theory of Urban Design. These are • 26% residential, 7% shops and restaurants, 15% community functions, 5% hotels, 16% ofﬁ ces, 12% manufacturing, and The neighborhood can take many shapes, provided that the resultant product provides the ameni- 19% parking (Alexander 34). Some of these numbers can be ties sought after in the framework created in this altered according to the existing conditions and the degree of thesis. imbalance that may exist outside of the project area. –

0 . Testing Location: 3 1 Blue Ash, A First Ring Suburb of Cincinnati – 13.0 –

1 .

3 Brief History of Blue Ash and its Environs 1

– One hundred forty-ﬁ ve years ago, Cincinnati was the ﬁ fth largest city in the United States, today it is forty ninth

Steve Waldron • 53 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

with 317,361 people (U.S. Census). Downtown Cincinnati Incorporated, a non-proﬁ t organization dedicated to the revitalization of the center city, posted statistics on their website have revealed the following facts about the city: • •

overall 26% loss to City population since 1970, including a F F i i g g

9% loss from 1990 to 2000 alone; no Class A ofﬁ ce growth u u r r e e

since 1991; 26% loss of convention market share; and hotel 8 1 4

•

occupancy regularly below 50% average. Additionally, • Cincinnati contains only 36% home ownership, compared to Due to the automobile, design of both architecture national average of home ownership in city centers of 68%, and urban design has become increasingly hori- zontal in nature, and less dense, because a car is which affects the quality of care and respect to the buildings capable of moving from separate structures fairly and their environs (DCI website). Hamilton County, of easily. which Cincinnati is a part, lost 2.6 percent of its population from April 2000 to July 2003, a faster decline than all but tech-wrecked San Francisco among the nation's 100 largest counties (Cincinnati Enquirer, “Hamilton Co. shrinks by 2.6%”). According to the U.S. Census, it is one of the seven Midwestern counties to be included in the ‘Losers’ group of the ten counties in the United States to have the most rapid declines in population, by percentage points, among the nation's 100 most populous counties from 2000 to 2003, and • •

F is second-worst overall in the nation in the category (U.S. F i i g g u u

Census website). r r e e

8 1 5

• Though staggering numbers portray foreseeable demise to • the city, despair is not necessary. Cincinnati's metropolitan area can claim the nation's sixth-highest concentration of Fortune 500 companies, not to mention a stable and There is direct connection from Blue Ash to diverse metropolitan economy. “Cincinnati has just half the downtown Cincinnati via the Southeast Ohio Re- population of Boston, but after Proctor & Gamble completes gional Transit Authority bus lines, a key indicator it takeover of Gillette Co., the city once dubbed ‘Porkopolis’ of employment and residential pathways. will have as many Fortune 500 headquarters as the self- described ‘Hub of the Universe’ having only 10” (Gavin E1). Location and a top-notch transportation network were among the key reasons Toyota headquartered its North American manufacturing division in the Cincinnati area. The same situation occurs for Boston fund fi rm Fidelity Investments, which located its Midwest regional center in a northern Kentucky suburb of Cincinnati, and now employs more than 3,600 there, according to the article. Reinforcing the activity present in the metropolitan area, the story added that the international airport is one of the nation's busiest, providing direct fl ights to nearly 140 cities in North America and Europe. The airport recently completed a runway extension that will permit direct fl ights to Asia, and by year's end, will add its fourth runway, a $250 million project (Gavin E1).

Steve Waldron • 54 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

It may be comforting that Hamilton County's population loss was more than offset by fast suburban growth that led the 15-county Greater Cincinnati MSA to increase its population by nearly 2 percent to 2,047,333, but this simply reﬂ ects an increase in suburban sprawl. More than 7 million acres of Ohio farmland has vanished since 1950. That represents about 30 percent of the state's farmland, an area equivalent to 23 Ohio counties, according to American Farmland Trust (Cincinnati Enquirer, "Ohio's farms eroding development"). Ohio lost 212,000 acres of farmland from 1992 to 1997, second only to Texas, the trust says. • •

F F i i g g u u r

Only ﬁ fty miles north of Cincinnati, Dayton, Ohio, is another r e e

8 1

signiﬁ cant component of the 2 million person metropolitan 6

• statistical area (Cincinnati USA website). Between the cities • of Dayton and Cincinnati the largest growth is occurring at a rapid rate, and few pockets of developable land remain. One of these median cities is the City of Blue Ash. Largely comprised of sprawling offi ce park and a community Less than one half mile from the Blue Ash airport, airfi eld, the city is considered to be a fi rst-ring suburb due Interstate 71 (right side) can easily feed develop- to its proximity and historical dependency on the City of ment in the area. Interstate 275 is only one and a half miles north as well. (Not To Scale) Cincinnati.

Located largely in the southwest corner of Interstate 71, and Interstate 275, this city offered ease of transportation access to prospective corporations seeking to move outside the downtown core of Cincinnati. Having undergone a signifi cant building boom in the early 1990s, the town is relatively stable today in regards to infl ux and out fl ux of residents and employment fi gures, but will soon be subject to large changes, as the center of the town is available for sale. • •

During the building boom, the city was eager to include as F F i i g many new corporations as possible, and offered the lack of g u u r r e e

interference caused by urban design guidelines as incentive to 87 1

•

locate within the city. The result was incredibly low-density • development centered upon two main boulevards, with little services offered to them. Most ofﬁ ce towers are distanced from the street through the use of large parking lots and water ponds with standardized fountains. The sprawling area is dotted with trees that intend to create a parklike setting but The large parcels existing on the site are mostly industrial and ofﬁ ce, with the airport consuming fail to balance the horizontality of the developments. the majority of the land on the northwest corner of the site. The City of Cincinnati owns a square-mile airport in the middle of Blue Ash and has recently sought sell the land due to lack of interest in developing a site so removed from its corporation line. It was originally purchased in the 1930s to become the location for the main Cincinnati

Steve Waldron • 55 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

Airport; however the development of the Air Force airport in Erlanger, Kentucky, during World War II accelerated the Kentucky airport beyond the competitive abilities of the Blue Ash site. Today, the airport is used primarily for recreation • •

F ﬂ ight, as most business travel occurs through Lunken Airport F i i g g u u r (closer to downtown Cincinnati) or the Cincinnati/Northern r e e

88 Kentucky International Airport in nearby Erlanger. 1

•

• In the southwest corner of the airport, another large Brownfi eld sites occur when a space is either con- taminated or under-utilized, such as many subur- development infl uence on the airport site is the satellite ban malls, or in the case of this thesis, Blue Ash campus of the University of Cincinnati. Known as Raymond Airport. Walters College, the largely commuter and technology school has experienced a rapidly increasing enrollment (up 33% in the past seven years according to the University website) that has led offi cials at the Offi ce of the University Architect at the University of Cincinnati to consider master planning the area. As the campus enlarges, the University is intending to promote a more well-rounded campus environment there, which would likely include amenities presently occurring only at central campus areas, such as recreational facilities and student-rate housing. This will do much for the area of Blue Ash as a whole, as a campus environment brings stability and fairly consistent growth to an area.

On the northwest and southeast corners are residential developments, which are screened from the airport through a fairly thin line of trees. Much of this development is currently terminated by the use of cul-de-sacs, which could be added to with little difﬁ culty. The non-residential existing streets • •

F i i

on the periphery of the site can easily be extended into the g g u u r r site, as many of them are in accordance with the existing e e

1 9

topography and sufﬁ ciently suited for handling trafﬁ c.

• •

Because the building explosion caused a large, sudden increase in traffi c ten years ago, the City built Reed Hartman Cul-de-sacs on the periphery of a development Highway along the north-south axis effectively accommodate offer the potential for connection to a new devel- large volumes of traffi c. In doing so, the highway was dug opment or roadway at a later date. into the earth, moving traffi c through a sort of trench that divides the site into two almost equal halves that relate poorly with each other. To create a unifi ed neighborhood, the highway must be removed to unite the neighborhood and encourage inter-neighborhood traffi c to exist primarily along the boundaries of the area. This follows the suggestions of the literature, because the removal of expedient traffi c allows for pedestrians to feel safer and more likely to walk adjacent to the streets.

Steve Waldron • 56 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

Following the large building explosion ten years ago, services and amenities have begun to inﬁ ll in areas not originally developed. For example, an Applebee’s restaurant • •

F F i

was built in the midst of an industrial park to provide lunch i g g u u r opportunities to nearby workers, and is successful despite r e e

9 1 0

poor accessibility from roadways. Similarly, hotels and small • ofﬁ ce-oriented retail buildings have begun to capitalize upon • the dominant commercial real estate of the area. Providing The variety in scale and poor context leaves much a sensible development scheme that incorporates the small of Blue Ash in need of restructuring. retail, additional residential, and supportive urban elements into the existing building pattern will become the focus of this design project.

Finally, the topography of the site is an important aspect. It is not ﬂ at land, evidenced in the fact that the topography spans one hundred sixty feet from the highest point to the lowest point. Despite the changes, however, there are large • •

areas in which development can readily occur due to largely

F F i i g unchanging topography, further promoting the likeliness of g u u r r e e

– the site to be developed in the near future.

9 1

2 • • . 3

1 Strategy for Blue Ash Renovations

– By selecting an underutilized site within a built environment, this thesis has the ability to provide relevant principles that can be applied to both the existing urban cores and the growing suburban centers, in the belief that the two will Site terrain, white showing raised elevation, black one day become one contiguous expanse. Secondly, the showing troughs. Difference is 160’. principles used in this thesis should include various scales in an effective manner that uniformly corresponds to pedestrian activity, but offers variety of prices and services customary • •

F F

in suburban living. Whether it is rapid bus, heavy rail, light i i g g u u r

rail, commuter rail, or a new transit form, it is possible for r e e

1 9

a region to have the opportunity to create a new armature 2 •

• for growth and development that is oriented to public transit Design can incorporate both urban and suburban service. fenestrations in a single, cohesive street wall.

In the design of a neighborhood area in this thesis, public transportation and automotive trafﬁ c will be designed to work in tandem, such that one cannot function without some use of the other. This will be accomplished in a radial • •

F F i gradient, in which transit centers dominate the center, blend i g g u u r r

to a pedestrian area, and development gradually becomes e e

1 9

more automobile-oriented toward the periphery of the • • neighborhood. The ring structure of automotive and public transit reliance can exist in many forms, which can After the regional public transportation system is selected, become the rationale for separating densities and the design of the neighborhood occurs, because the urban land uses.

Steve Waldron • 57 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

structure will be affected in large part by how people move through it. The ﬁ nal appearance will also be based upon the design principles suggested by the ten urban design writers, in order to incorporate the timeless and universal quality necessary for creating a sustainable city. In the following sections, a condensed explanation of these concepts will be expounded upon.

As the design develops, the detailing of specifi c spaces will also become increasingly concise. Individual blocks will be demarcated for what percentages of land uses will take place within them, and these land uses will be refl ective of Urban Land Institute’s recommendations based upon nationwide market surveys and analysis of successful and unprofi table retail and offi ce projects. The advantage of comparing this design to national averages exists in the ability to establish this project as the original of a template of recursive and subsequent neighborhood forms.

In the near future, it is likely that a private developer will purchase the site directly for developing into either corporate facilities, residential developments, or a combination of both. With multiple large offi ce areas occurring in the southeast corner of the site, it could be a logical extension for real estate values to guide future development in this manner, in accordance with contemporary thinking of land use segregation. This would tie into the existing offi ce park area that exists on the northern border of the site, but would not foster a truly urban life; rather, it would revert to the suburban concept of segregating uses. There are three residential developments surrounding the site, and while Blue Ash is lower than the Urban Land Institute’s recommendation for the desired proportion of residential composition, the economic return that occurs from offi ce use will likely guide construction to that aspect.

There are additional problematic aspects of Blue Ash that will also be taken into consideration during design. Primarily, a totalized dependency on automobile traffi c, largely caused by the low density development, can be rectifi ed through increased density and the including of sidewalks and pedestrian pathways. Currently, there is a lack of sidewalks in the area, forcing pedestrians, few that they are, to walk on the same streets as automobiles moving at 55 miles per hour. In reaction to the ever-increasing automobile traffi c congestion, the City of Blue Ash is currently undergoing a large-scale roadway widening project, though the results of

Steve Waldron • 58 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

simple widening projects are never truly beneﬁ cial in the long term. –

0 .

4 Programmatic Considerations 1

– 14.0 There is little doubt that Blue Ash would beneﬁ t greatly from increased density and variety activity caused by mixed use. In almost every aspect of consideration, built form can greatly improve the area, and bring a vibrant neighborhood life to an area that does not currently have one, without sacriﬁ cing the economic return that exists in employment opportunities of the area. –

1 . Proposed Transportation System of the Reconﬁ gured 4 1

Blue Ash – As this is an architectural project, and not a thesis analyzing transportation systems, only a limited amount of research has been included regarding the public transit mode selected. This was intentionally done to recognize that extensive analysis and comparative study is needed to suggest any mode of transportation, which is not the aim of this thesis. Instead, after a broad comparison of average costs and results were set next to each other, a mode of transit was selected which was considered to be most aligned with the intentions of urban regeneration desired in this thesis. The regional transit method selected for this thesis was the PRT system, with the primary advantages of individuality and potential for expansion between neighborhoods.

Following the advice from the urban design literature, the street system will be established in a hierarchical nature. This will provide volume control, and segregation of speeds. By pushing much of the traffi c fl ow to the periphery, inter-neighborhood transportation can still exist without competition. Because the physical breadth and speed of traffi c fl ow is not conducive to pedestrian activity, streets within the neighborhood will not appeal to driving. Essentially, the street structure will be designed in a way that the most effective manner of crossing the neighborhood is through driving around it or using public transportation between it. In areas of new growth, these large boulevards that ring the neighborhood can become the limits of an urban growth boundary, and enable future neighborhoods to be master planned according to a functional design when the governmental agency permits.

Within the limits of the neighborhood, smaller sectors,

Steve Waldron • 59 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

referred to in this thesis as “clusters,” can provide an opportunity for creating smaller components of concentration. This can occur most easily and effectively through the use of avenue patterns, which gesture towards particular areas without having to name or intentionally subdivide them. This can occur not only on the neighborhood scale, in which a neighborhood could be partitioned into four to eight smaller areas, but also on the block scale, by combining various block sizes within a street, and sectioning these areas apart with pedestrian pathways.

Between these clusters, fairly radial roadways cater to automobile traffi c within the neighborhood, but do not attract increasing traffi c volumes through it. This allows intra-neighborhood functions to exist with relative ease, and for development to infi ll the parts remaining between the avenues. Rather than constraining the streets to a particular geometry, the streets will alter directions fairly regularly, diminishing traffi c speeds. Meanwhile, the avoidance of unending streetways enables a constantly changing vantage to occur, by which buildings of the neighborhood possess a more iconic element. Observations by Whyte have shown that this enhances civic identity when of a governmental building (Whyte 62), and it is logical to estimate that real estate values of commercial, industrial, and even residential areas would also increase for the same reason.

When orchestrating the street pattern, consideration must be made to the existing topography of the site, because development of both roadways and structures function best when either parallel to contours or run directly perpendicularly to them. Oblique angles, in which streets attempt to run diagonally across an incline, require signiﬁ cant extra roadway space and become signiﬁ cantly more expensive to develop. Although particular anomalies such as Lombard Street in San Francisco do occur, the intention of duplication resulting from this thesis discourages its use. –

2 .

4 Proposed Urban Blocks of the Reconﬁ gured Blue Ash 1

– Currently, Blue Ash does not operate on a block system. It uses large streets in a rough grid several thousand feet apart, leaving the space between streets to be designed as the developer wishes. As stated previously, the resultant design was long, ﬂ at, sprawling buildings with no relation to each other. In the design of this thesis, the disparate buildings will be connected through increasing density, in order to establish an improved sense of cohesiveness. When this uniformity

Steve Waldron • 60 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

has occurred, beautiﬁ cation of the city is inherent, which will aid in attracting additional development in nearby neighborhoods that abut this one.

Within the limits of the neighborhood, blocks of buildings will be designed before the street system is laid out, because the scale of an individual person becomes more important. Rather than designing for an automobile, as is typically done today, designing for a pedestrian will encourage its use whenever possible, in turn aiding the visual activity and life of the city. The blocks will be outwardly focused, and • •

through a park system and other community features, people F i g i g u

will have reason to make the neighborhood more active. u r r e e

1 4

• In line with the earlier discussion on technology and Composition from repeated cell units is a method • diminishing importance of the box as the basis of architecture, for creating city uniformity that is often ignored new blocks within Blue Ash will not necessary be rectilinear in suburban settings. in form. The alternation of traditional polygonal and recent multi-gonal forms can create a system that corresponds to any street network, topography, existing buildings, and size of structure, without creating a bleak or banal landscape. Without deconstructing existing elements, a more interesting and dynamic form may envelop, consisting largely of

– alternating patterning and rhythmic variation.

3 . 4

1 Proposed Roadways and Open Spaces of the

– Reconfi gured Blue Ash The primary existing pattern for developing the neighborhood in a particular way is the topography, which determines the buildable and unbuildable spaces. To the greatest extent possible, the streets will run between fl at spaces to reserve fl at spaces for buildings. For this reason, a parallelogram grid is likely to occur on the site, as the ridgeline topography allows for north-south roads to extend almost perpendicular to the slope, and transverse roads to exist parallel to them. In addition to a more responsible vehicular street system, a series of pedestrian pathways will be instilled to cultivate walking areas in the neighborhood. Following the advice •

• F

from much of the same literature, the promenades will be F i g i g u u

arranged in a fairly radial scheme that unites various fringes r e r e

of the neighborhood with the center of the community. 9

• 5

This will make both the public transit stop and the central • commercial area easily accessed. The open spaces that are intentionally created for Rather than combining all park spaces into a single large the common public tend to attract people, and tract of land, parks and plazas will be dispersed throughout indirectly increase real estate value in addition to creating a more attractive environment. the neighborhood, to appeal to surroundings within a three-

Steve Waldron • 61 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

minute walk. These smaller spaces will be inherently safer, as safety increases within these areas when they are small enough that visual access can occur from one side to the other, rather than creating a void caused by too large of parkland.

In modern town planning, each side of a rectangular plaza is drawn absolutely and brutally straight, allowing for no visual interest. In modern layout the centering and uniﬁ cation is said to make sense, but Sitte pointed out that in the old system of city-building more statues and monuments can be ﬁ t into an irregular plaza. Additionally, the opportunities for their placement are also more various, yet those for isolation are being chosen as more favorable. –

4 .

4 Proposed Intentional Ambiguity of the Reconﬁ gured 1 Blue Ash – The spaces within Blue Ash will be conﬁ gured so as to avoid • •

regularity and redundancy of structures. This will be done F F i i g g u

initially with the arrangement of parcels, through various u r r e e

shapes and sizes in accordance to both existing topography 1 9

6 •

and building typology. They will be placed them in a pattern • such that each parcel maintains access to an avenue or While some building types do not work well service alley, but it is not essential for each parcel to have when adjacent to another, many can be integrated vast street frontage. As stated earlier in this thesis, the variety to create a more balanced community. of conﬁ gurations will provide for the greatest architectural result, thereby beautifying the neighborhood.

The arrangement of buildings on the parcels will be designed to maximize the available space. Since parking will be relocated to public parking garages, there is no longer a need for parking lots or the private driveways to support them. In accordance with the desire to attain a higher density among building structures, parcels will be allocated at a slightly smaller scale than current practice allows. The end result of the parcel reconﬁ guration will be the return to the street

– front, and a more uniform street canyon.

5 . 4

1 Metaphysical Boundary of the Reconﬁ gured Blue Ash

– Through the use of existing neighborhood patterns, it is possible to utilize psychological barriers without requiring them. In the case of Blue Ash, the central activity area will be shared by both the residential area more heavily concentrated in the northwest sector and the existing industrial park in the southeast sector. Through the commercial core, the neighborhood will not appear to be two differentiated triangular areas, but will rather provide a reason for

Steve Waldron • 62 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

pedestrians to ﬁ lter into the center into the neighborhood.

Within the residential area, it is rather necessary to further subdivide the area, though mixed uses must still be present. To promote this infusion, the heights of the structures will be employed to affect the scale. Along peripheral avenues and intra-neighborhood boulevards, the buildings facing the streets will be signiﬁ cantly heightened, then decline within a more residential area. The integration of ofﬁ ce and pedestrian-oriented retail will not diminish, but the services will be more supportive in their appearance to the living

– conditions of the cluster.

6 . 4

1 Corporate Presence of the Reconﬁ gured Blue Ash

– Though the airport is physically in the most centralized location of the city, Blue Ash has obtained a connotation of ofﬁ ce-oriented development, due to its large number of ‘corporate parks’ and comparatively low residential developments that exist within its boundaries. As suggested by the urban design literature, Blue Ash does contain a wide variety of businesses, and is not reliant on the success of

any one market. It does not succeed in dispersing these • •

F F i i employment centers throughout the neighborhood, however, g g u u r r e

and will require signiﬁ cant concentration in this area to e

9 1 7

• create a mixed use environment. This is possible through the • combining of parking lots into multilevel parking facilities, Institutional structures have regularly formed the decreased dependency on them through the implementation important placeholders of the main squares and of the public transit system, and reduced distances of civic centers of towns, and will likely continue to residential areas to the employment, promoting pedestrian maintain a similar presence in the distant future. activity. –

7 .

4 Institutional Presence of the Reconﬁ gured Blue Ash 1

– As mentioned earlier, institutional spaces become the central identifi ers for the neighborhood as a whole. When the airport is removed, Blue Ash will retain an institutional presence through Raymond Walters College and the offi ce buildings that exist. Signifi cant growth can be expected from the college, and its impact may soon extend past its existing neighborhood area and into adjacent ones. This expanded impact will come in the form of affordable residential, and use of the public transit system outside of the normal half- mile radius, as collegiate students are more likely to walk a greater distance (Sucharov 202).

Scattered throughout the neighborhood, various institutional structures will be placed to foster importance to the components that foster a community. Within the

Steve Waldron • 63 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

parallelogram grid, acute angles form spaces that will be prominent to view through terminal vistas, and reinforced through the pedestrian pathways that converge upon them. On these triangular parcels, institutional buildings such as schools and churches will be located, but structures such as grocery stores and post ofﬁ ces will also be put there, due to the tendency for interaction within them. –

8 .

4 Retail Spaces of the Reconﬁ gured Blue Ash 1

– Retail will be divided into two major aspects within the neighborhood – shops that are more daily use and can be easily walked to, and those that are less frequent and necessitate vehicular access. The daily use shops will be scattered throughout the neighborhood, and will inherently boost pedestrian activity when made easier to walk compared to driving and parking. These shops will likely be smaller venues, such as convenience stores, family restaurants, and ice cream stands, especially since they tend to be locally owned and operated.

Within the central activity area, larger or national chains will likely dominate the space, for the size of structures will be varied to enable big-box retail and large, national restaurants to operate in the area. The area will be employed utilizing New Towne Center ideology, and each structure will primarily front the pedestrian promenades within the center. Visual access from the avenues terminating at the retail center will be important in preventing introversion of the space, and taller structures and brighter lights than the remainder of the neighborhood will provide additional

– support.

9 . 4

1 Residential Spaces of the Reconﬁ gured Blue Ash

–

As stated previously, there will be a more concentrated • •

F i i residential area in the northwest sector of the site, and smaller g g u u r r clusters will be formed within it. However, the redundancy e e 98

common between many subdivisions today will not occur,

• not will the segregation of uses. Clusters will vary in size and • arrangement, but the proportions of multi family housing and supporting retail and ofﬁ ce will not, in order to discourage Downtown lofts have become increasingly popu- gentriﬁ cation. Parks and public services will not be arranged lar in the last decade, signaling a desire of many to serve a single cluster, but will overlap the boundaries and ex-suburbanites to return to a more urban envi- serve their surrounding areas equally. ronment.

Additionally, the land consumption typical in contemporary single family housing will be reduced to roughly the sixteen units per acre necessary to support effective public transit. As

Steve Waldron • 64 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

a result, there must be an elimination of private backyards, separating side yards, and underutilized front yards, in order that walking between residences becomes more possible. The building structures themselves will be altered to a vertically- oriented condition, blending architectural fenestration • •

common in brownhouse and traditional housing. It will be F F i i g g

possible to retain the human scale and construction methods u u r r e e

present in residential building today with the taller nature 9 1 9

•

found in more densely urbanized neighborhoods, and the • result may be more appealing than commonly considered – one need refer to the soaring gables in much of the single Residential structures should vary in a similar family residential housing to agree. Adapting current fashions scale to the sizes of the units that exist behind the – facades, to avoid banality and increase interest

0 to the appropriate condition is a worthwhile venture. 1

. along the street wall. 4 1

Industry in the Reconﬁ gured Blue Ash – In response to the diminishing industrial aspect in our culture, there is little need to further expand upon the industrial complexes within the neighborhood. Rather, surrounding them with smaller services that support the large structure will help maintain a scale that is consistent to the neighborhood. In various locations, small parks with large trees may help screen the size of the factories and warehouses, but there is no desire to remove them altogether. In addition to the roadways and service roads needed for large trucks to make deliveries, bicycle lanes should be present for recreation and navigation when a car is not mandatory. In these manners, it is possible to better integrate the industrial facilities into the neighborhood scale. –

0 . 5

1 Process of Alteration

– 15.0 The process of alteration is presented here merely as a hypothesis for developing the design concepts into a buildable neighborhood. in a linear fashion for purposes of explanation only; its applicability will be tested through a series of overlaid mapping diagrams that articulate the inﬂ uence one step places on subsequent steps. For the purposes of understanding, the maps exhibited in this section are merely •

• F

i F

descriptive, and are not intended to show the most effective g i u g r u

design for the Blue Ash site. Rather, an additional evaluation e r

e 1

0 section will be added to this thesis after the mapping study 1 0

•

has been completed. •

The end result of this site study will be a logical pattern for placing a speciﬁ c land use in an area, a roadway in another, Industrial parks are a primary concern for Brown- and how aspects such as parks and pedestrian pathways can ﬁ eld and Revitalization projects today, because of best be laid into the site. This will enable this thesis to act as the reduced need.

Steve Waldron • 65 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

a template, because the rationale for the resultant design will be readily apparent, and able to be relocated to a new site for duplication of process. It is the intention of •

this thesis to provide a guide for • F

F i g

neighborhood planning to the degree i u g r u e r

that conscious decisions need not e 1

0 1 1

occur by the planner, but are instead •

presented from a thorough analysis of •

– the site.

1 . 5 1

Origination – The primary change to the naturally- existing site occurred through the suppression of Reed Hartman Highway into the topography. This •

• F

was evidently done to enable a more F i g i u g r even roadway, at the expense of the u e r

e 1

beauty present in the ever-changing 1 2

•

landscape. •

The second phase was the addition of the street structure, in accordance with the American tradition of adapting structures after a street is completed. This followed three major axes: the north-south grid present throughout the site, the east- •

• F

west transverse, and the southwest- F i g i u northeast axis that Reed Hartman g r u e r

e 1

Highway occupied. From this axis, 0 1 3

• the main runway of the airport was • realigned from its original east-west direction, in order to lengthen the runway by utilizing the golf course on the western periphery of the site.

The addition of building structures soon followed, and a majority of these were ofﬁ ce parks and industrial •

• F

facilities. Each of these used F i g i u g r commonplace principles of aligning u e r

e 1

0 the building to face the street is 1 4

•

accesses, •

Expansive parking is extracted as an additional step, in that it is essential

Steve Waldron • 66 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

a service to the building. In Blue Ash, each parking lot was designed to accommodate a greater sum than •

the workers and visitors total each • F

F i g

day, since there was ample land to i u g r u e r

expand upon. e 1

0 1 5

•

Little modiﬁ cations have been made • on this site in the last ﬁ fteen years, and the summation of the origination steps are presented here as a snapshot of existing conditions. –

2 . 5

1 Reduction

– In order to create a more uniﬁ ed •

• F

neighborhood within the site, the i g i u g r initial alteration will be the removal u e r

e 1

0 of Reed Hartman Highway, to 1 6

•

promote inter-neighborhood traffi c • to occur along the periphery of the site. This can be done with little alterations, as Glendale-Milford and Plainfi eld road are both suffi ciently wide streets to consume additional traffi c. •

The secondary changes will be the • F

F i g i u removal of the parking facilities, g r u e r

in order to later replace them with e 1

0 1 7

additional buildings that will boost •

the density with mixed use. Parking • will later be arranged through public parking garages.

There is a need to remove a small number of buildings, and this would occur after the parking facilities are removed. The demolition of •

• structures is necessary to enable F

F i g i u roadways to occur in places that g r u e r

e allow more density, and some 1

0 1 8

•

buildings interfere with this. In order • to ease transformation, however, the least number of buildings will be removed. –

3 .

5 Implementation 1

–

Steve Waldron • 67 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

To create the boundary of the site, Cooper Road will be extended to Kenwood Road, and will be slightly •

widened to the four lane roadway that • F

F i g

exists along the remainder of the site. i u g r u e r

e 1

0 1 9

The second phase will be the entry •

of the north-south roads that beckon • to enter the site. As they enter, they terminate upon interferences; these may include an existing building, difﬁ cult topography for development, large parcels that offer large real estate value, or the forthcoming central activity area. •

• F

F i g i g The third step will be the analysis u u r e r 1 of readily developed land within the e

1 1 0

•

site. In the study of this thesis, a grade • change of one foot per ﬁ fty foot run was used.

Having already established the potential development zones, the roadways have the ability to partition off the areas and make more usable spaces from them. These will be •

• F

located between development tracts F i g i g u u

located in the previous step, so that r e r

e 1

areas of high real estate return are 1 1 1

•

not severed by roadways which • generate no return. This is supportive of the concept of designing a town by beginning with the buildings and adapting the streets to it, because the most important spaces are unaltered by streets.

According to Christopher Alexander, •

• F

F i g

the next step is creating the impetus i g u u r e for subsequent development through r

e 1

1 1 2 a centralized activity area. The •

identiﬁ cation to the neighborhood • could exist through an institutional facility, a cultural space, or a commercial core.

Steve Waldron • 68 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

The central area must be within easy access by both vehicular trafﬁ c and public transportation. Therefore, •

the next step should be to produce a • F

F i g roadway system that enables trafﬁ c i g u u r e r

to utilize the central core. Parking e 1

1 1 3

facilities should be placed adjacent to •

the terminus of roadways. •

Additional residential will follow the completed central space, adding real estate value and providing the backbone to the neighborhood. Following the design concept of public and private spaces, these •

• residential areas should be designed F

F i g i g as pockets that will be injected with u u r e r

e supporting retail and ofﬁ ce spaces, 1

1 1 4

•

such as dry cleaners, law ofﬁ ces, and • convenience stores.

The additional development created by the residential will provide adequate reason for continuing to connect the roadway system of the neighborhood, though discouraging cross-trafﬁ c

through the neighborhood remains ill •

• F

F i

advised. g i g u u r e r

e 1

1 Walking paths should connect 1 5

•

residences and ofﬁ ces to parks, and • connect the intermediate areas of the neighborhood with both the central activity area and the automobile- oriented arterials along the periphery. This connection will provide access to many spaces without disrupting the urban fabric being established. •

• F

F i g i g Immediately after residential u u r e r

construction begins, parks and plazas 1

1 1 6

•

need to be created for access by both • the intra-neighborhood trafﬁ c and the pedestrian pathways. These should be placed, according to the design concept, in small nodes scattered within a three minute walking distance

Steve Waldron • 69 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

from any point in the neighborhood.

In collaboration with the park •

arrangement, terminal vistas should • F

F i g i

be considered, because the open g u u r e r e spaces offer additional of line of 1

1 1

sight capabilities that resemble the •

desired ofﬁ ce park condition that was • mentioned earlier.

Terminal vistas should be utilized in the design whenever possible, because they readily connect inhabitants of the neighborhood with the structure of the building. Rather than limit the •

vistas to a single use typology such as • F

F i g i g ofﬁ ces, however, it should additionally u u r e r

focus on retail, institutional, and e 1

1 1 8

multifamily housing, as they tend to •

offer the greatest economic returns • for the increased real estate potential.

Steve Waldron • 70 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis –

0 Conclusion . 6 1

– 16.0 As our cities and suburbs continue to accommodate an ever-increasing population, the borders between these municipalities will begin to diffuse. It is possible to predict how and why development occurs, and designing a neighborhood that is conscious of the patterns should be a necessary process for urban planning. A pattern for designing this imminent megalopolis should be conceived before the situation occurs, to enable proactive development that is capable of incorporating the cultural aspects as they occur. Regardless of center city, suburb, or infi ll development, many considerations should be consistent. The result of this synthesis, then, is the potential for duplication of a development scheme that combines the design qualities and the feasibility fi nancing that was omitted from previous utopian considerations. The development potential, combined with the existing infrastructure already present, enable Blue Ash to increase its signifi cance in the Cincinnati area. In fi nding principles that establish true urbanity to the neighborhood, the development of plausible templates that enable the neighborhood to function more effectively will result, because while the fi nished product is variable the process of implementation is uniform. To do so, the perception of the new ideal prototype must be established, tested, and then inserted for applicability. In this thesis, a hypothesis of development sequence for the Blue Ash neighborhood was •

designed, and then tested for its appropriateness according • F

i F g i

to a study of design inﬂ uences. u g r u e r

e 1

2 1 1

When successful, the neighborhood will incorporate aspects •

of urban living observed and recorded in prominent urban • design literature, though not commonly incorporated into When a neighborhood exists in its full potential, town design. The new neighborhood typology will contain a harmony is present between a wide range of ele- variety of transit modes, rather than reliance upon solely one ments that operate interdependently to provide an appealing setting. option, and these two modes will be dependent upon each other, rather than in competition against the other. Inter- neighborhood travel will be constricted to the periphery, to promote activity within the neighborhood that is better suited for children and pedestrian activity as a whole; it will promote the use of local neighborhood business due to the ease and convenience of its proximity; and it will encourage employment to occur within the boundary due to increased density of the neighborhood. The intra-neighborhood street pattern will assist in beautiﬁ cation of the neighborhood through ever-changing vantages that focus on the buildings; and the parks and plazas dispersed throughout will become

Steve Waldron • 71 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

available from anywhere in the neighborhood. Employment will be scattered throughout due to a mix-use design, though the concentration of public and private areas will be able to be maintained by increased and decreased concentrations. A forthcoming evaluation will be added to this thesis that analyzes the design that results from the mapping study, makes minor alterations to the sequence presented, and enables the process to be duplicated.

Market conditions and developing trends will be heavily considered in the balance of neighborhood conﬁ guration as well. In response to the declining need for industrial facilities in the neighborhood, their importance will play a reduced role in the reconﬁ guration. Meanwhile, the expansion potential for Raymond Walters College will emanate from its existing boundary, to allow for possible expansion of learning facilities and near-campus living. The centralized activity center, from which the personal rapid transit station will alight, will be adapted largely from the Town Center concept, to recreate urbanity and a feeling of downtown environs without the undesired complications.

Success of this test will either produce a process that creates neighborhood that combines the concepts of good neighborhood design with existing market principles, or will result in a process that needs further guides for doing so. By evaluating each principle individually, a test can evaluate the neighborhood design to the forty four neighborhood design principles that were utilized to create it. It is through the unifi cation of all the currently disparate elements of simple city living that the signifi cance of the neighborhood unit as the cellular structure of an entire metropolitan region may occur. When the guidelines are completed, the template created and tested in Blue Ash will be able to be extended into a wide range of potential neighborhoods needing redevelopment. This vision, desirable and attainable, would become the forefront for future development throughout the Cincinnati Metropolitan Area, because its completion would align the components that coalesce into a desirable city responsive to the twenty-fi rst century.

Steve Waldron • 72 of 72 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis –

0 Bibliographic References .

7 This thesis uses the MLA standard of cross referencing three sources. 1

– Benﬁ eld, F. Kaid, Matthew D. Raimi, and Donald D.T. Chen. Once There Were Greenﬁ elds : How Urban Sprawl is Undermining Americas's Environment, Economy, and Social Fabric. New York: National Resources Defense Council, 1999.

Bernick, Michael, and Robert Cervero. Transit Villages in the 21st Century. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.

Beyard, Michael D. Developing Retail Entertainment Destinations. Washington: Urban Land Institute, 2001.

Beyard, Michael. Dollars and Cents of Shopping 2000. 1st ed. Washington: ULI-the Urban Land Institute, 1996.

Beyard, Michael. Dollars and Cents of Shopping 2000. 2nd ed. Washington: ULI-the Urban Land Institute, 2000.

Beyard, Michael. Dollars and Cents of Shopping 2000. 3rd ed. Washington: ULI-the Urban Land Institute, 2004.

Calthorpe, Peter. The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993.

Cervero, Robert. Paratransit in America: Redeﬁ ning Mass Transportation. West Point, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1997.

Chung, Chuihua Judy, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, and Sze Tsung Leong, ed. Harvard Design School Guide To Shopping. 2 ed. Cambridge: Tashen GmbH, 2001.

Dutton, John A. New American Urbanism: Re-Forming the American Metropolis. New York: Abbeville Publishing Group, 2000.

Fishman, Robert. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Publishers, 1977.

Garreau, Joel. Edge City : Life on the New Frontier . New York: Random House, Inc., 1991.

Gruen, Victor, and Larry Smith. Shopping Towns USA. New York: Reinhold Publishing, 1960.

Hackman, Michael Z., and Craig E. Johnson. Leadership: A Communicative Perspective. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2000.

Howard, Ebenezer. To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform. 2003 ed. London: Routledge, 2003.

Steve Waldron • 74 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 3rd ed. New York: Random House, Inc., 1993.

Jacobs, Jane. Dark Age Ahead. New York: Random House, 2004.

Kostof, Spiro. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History. New York: Bulﬁ nch, 1993.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientiﬁ c Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Kunstler, James Howard. Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. New York: Touchstone, 1993.

Lang, Michael H. Designing Utopia: John Ruskin’s Urban Vision for Britain and America. Montreal: Black Rose Press, 1998.

Laccese, Michael, and Kathleen McCormick. Charter of the New Urbanism. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

Le Corbusier. The Radiant City. Trans., New York: Orion Press, 1967.

Lynch, Kevin. Good City Form. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001.

Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge: Cambridge Technology Press, 1960.

Lynn, Greg. Intricacy: a Project by Greg Lynn. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2003.

Neal, Peter, ed. Urban Villages and the Making of Communities. New York: Spon Press, 2003.

Mumford, Lewis. The Culture of Cities. 1st ed. New York: Greenwood Press, 1938.

Richards, Brian. "PRT/GRT: Development in Personal Rapid Transit." Architectural Design March 1974: 158-170.

Peter Samuel, "Status Report on Raytheon's PRT 2000 Development Project", ITS International, November 1996; UTU Daily News Digest, 9 November 1998

"Population and Housing Counts." 17 Nov. 2004. Selected Historical Decennial Census. U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division. 02 Jan. 2005 .

Sitte, Camillo. City Planning According to Artistic Principles. 1889. Translated by Phaidon Press, London: 1965.

Soleri, Paolo. Arcosanti: An Urban Laboratory? 3rd ed. Scottsdale, AZ: Cosanti Press, 1993.

Steve Waldron • 75 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

Sucharov, L. J. Urban Transport V: Urban Transport and the Environment for the 21st Century. Southampton, UK: WIT Press, 1999.

Thistle, Scott. “Bill Uses Taxes To Lure Taxis.” Duluth News Tribune 17 Feb 2004: D1.

Wall, Derek. Green History: a Reader in Environmental Literature, Philosophy, and Politics. London: Routledge, 1994.

Weitz, Jerry. Sprawl Busting. Washington: American Planning Association, 1999.

Unwin, Raymond. Town Planning in Practice. 1994 ed. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994.

Von Boehm, Gero, and I. M. Pei. Conversations With I. M. Pei: Light Is the Key. New York: Prestel Publishing, 2000.

Vuchic, Vukan R. Urban Public Transportation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.

Whyte, William. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. New York: Project for Public Spaces Inc, 1980.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Vanishing City. New York: Rizzoli, 1932.

Steve Waldron • 76 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis –

0 . List of Illustrations 7 1

– Figure 1 Chicago Transit Original photo by author Figure 2 Development Sequence Original sketch by author Figure 3 Town Planning Map from Nesmith, Seaside Style, 14 Figure 4 Neighborhood Aerial Original sketch by author Figure 5 Bookshelf Original sketch by author Figure 6 Neighborhood Streets Original sketch by author Figure 7 Washington, DC www.creative.gettyimages.com, 243589445 Figure 8 Electrical Circuitry Pabla, Electric Power Distribution, xvii Figure 9 Building Implementation Original sketch by author Figure 10 Amana, Iowa www.creative.gettyimages.com, 247467742 Figure 11 Factory in Disrepair French, Urban Space, 73 Figure 12 Howard Untitled Sketch 1 Fishman, Urban Utopias, 43 Figure 13 Howard Untitled Sketch 2 Fishman, Urban Utopias, 43 Figure 14 Wright Grid Concept Fishman, Urban Utopias, 68 Figure 15 Wright, “City in Motion” Fishman, Urban Utopias, 69 Figure 16 Wright “Beacon of Form” Fishman, Urban Utopias, 73 Figure 17 Le Corbusier, “City of 3 Million” Fishman, Urban Utopias, 96 Figure 18 Le Corbusier, Untitled Sketch 1 Fishman, Urban Utopias, 99 Figure 19 Le Corbusier, “Spatial Form” Fishman, Urban Utopias, 126 Figure 20 Radburn, New Jersey www.creative.gettyimages.com, 248956453 Figure 21 Wright, Miller House, Canton, OH Original photo by author Figure 22 Apartment Complex, Baltimore, MD Original photo by author Figure 23 Algiers, France www.creative.gettyimages.com, 245792441 Figure 24 Cinderella’s Castle, Disneyland Ofﬁ cial Brochure, © Disney 2001 Figure 25 Main Street USA, Disney World Chung, Harvard Design Guide to Shopping, 143 Figure 26 Arcosanti www.arcosanti.org Figure 27 Streetcar Original photo by author Figure 28 Heavy Rail Original photocomposite by author Figure 29 Suburban Mall Aerial Original sketch by author Figure 30 Suburban Mall, Interior Original sketch by author Figure 31 Suburban Mall, Interior Original photo by author Figure 32 Traditional Downtown Scape Original photo by author Figure 33 City Bus Original photo by author Figure 34 Shopping Mall Aerial 2 Original sketch by author Figure 35 Big Box Facades Original photo by author Figure 36 City Squares Quantrill, Urban Forms, Suburban Dreams, 13 Figure 37 Crossroads with Tower Neal, Urban Villages, 62 Figure 38 Barcelona Olympic Tower Original photo by author Figure 39 World Trade Center Entry 0000000000000000000000000000 Figure 40 Urban Canyon Original photo by author Figure 41 Walt Disney Concert Hall www.creative.gettyimages.com, 187533684 Figure 42 Santiago de Compostela Eisenman, Re-working Eisenman, 42 Figure 43 St. Louis Courthouse French, Urban Space, 187 Figure 44 Sprawl Original sketch by author Figure 45 Cleveland Sprawl U.S. Census

Steve Waldron • 77 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

Figure 46 Restrained Sprawl Original sketch by author Figure 47 Portland Riverfront www.creative.gettyimages.com, 245689336 Figure 48 Streetcar 2 Original photo by author Figure 49 PRT System www.lightrailnow.com Figure 50 PRT Car Metropolis Jul 2002, 46 Figure 51 PRT Station www.skytaxi2000.com Figure 52 PRT Center Original sketch by author Figure 53 Morgantown PRT system Original photo by author Figure 54 Shopping Center, Interior Original photo by author Figure 55 Shopping Center Aerial 3 Original sketch by author Figure 56 New Towne Center, Reston, VA Original photo by author Figure 57 New Towne Center Layout Original sketch by author Figure 58 Mixed Use Buildings, Boston, MA Original photo by author Figure 59 Suburbs and Central City Original sketch by author Figure 60 Neighborhood Landmarks Original sketch by author Figure 61 Greater Cincinnati Growth Map www.gccc.com Figure 62 Neighborhood Honeycomb Original sketch by author Figure 63 Heavy Rail 2 Original photo by author Figure 64 Iconic Neighborhood Element Original photo by author Figure 65 Main Street Retail, Burlington, VT Original photo by author Figure 66 Suburban Segregation Original sketch by author Figure 67 Shopping Center Aerial 4 Original sketch by author Figure 68 Shopping Center Aerial 3 Original sketch by author Figure 69 Seaside Aerial Nesmith, Seaside Style, 54 Figure 70 Designer Original sketch by author Figure 71 Sitte Intersection Diagrams Sitte, City Planning... Principles, 76 Figure 72 Unwin Intersection Diagrams Unwin, Town Planning Practice, 32 Figure 73 New Towne Center, Reston, VA 2 Original photo by author Figure 74 New Towne Center Layout Original sketch by author Figure 75 Cultural Dominance French, Urban Space, 27 Figure 76 Shopping Center Food Court Original photo by author Figure 77 Shopping Mall Aerial 2 Original sketch by author Figure 78 Residential Court, Arlington, VA Original photo by author Figure 79 Adjacency Diagram Whyte, Social Life... Urban Spaces, 91 Figure 80 Highrise Construction Sketch Original sketch by author Figure 81 TOD Diagram Calthorpe, Next American.... Dream, 33 Figure 82 Fenestration Kostof, City Shaped, 102 Figure 83 Neighborhood Aerial 2 Bohl, Place Making, 83 Figure 84 Car-Oriented Design Original sketch by author Figure 85 Southeast Ohio Bus Route www.sorta.com Figure 86 Blue Ash Aerial Cincinnati Area Global Information Systems Figure 87 Parcel Conﬁ guration Cincinnati Area Global Information Systems Figure 88 Brownﬁ eld Sites Original sketch by author Figure 89 Traditional Downtown Scape 2 Original photocomposite by author Figure 90 Applebee’s Restaurant Original photo by author Figure 91 Topography Map Original map by author Figure 92 Traditional Downtown Scape 2 Original sketch by author

Steve Waldron • 78 Neighborhood Design: Response to Megalopolis

Figure 93 Ripple Conﬁ guration Original sketch by author Figure 94 Cellular City Original sketch by author Figure 95 Street Trees, Barcelona, Spain Original photo by author Figure 96 Building Adjacency Original photocomposite by author Figure 97 St. Stephen’s, Versailles, France Original photo by author Figure 98 Downtown Lofts, Chicago, IL Original photo by author Figure 99 Rowhouses, Highland Park, IL Original photo by author Figure 100 Industrial Scale Original sketch by author Figure 101 Reed Hartman Highway Original map by author Figure 102 Existing Street Structure Original map by author Figure 103 Existing Building Structure Original map by author Figure 104 Existing Parking Structure Original map by author Figure 105 Summation of Existing Original map by author Figure 106 Reed Hartman Removed Original map by author Figure 107 Parking / Airport Removed Original map by author Figure 108 Building Structures Removed Original map by author Figure 109 Cooper Road Extension Original map by author Figure 110 Entry Roads Original map by author Figure 111 Development Tracts Original map by author Figure 112 Potential Roadways Original map by author Figure 113 Central Activity Area Original map by author Figure 114 Connected Central Activity Original map by author Figure 115 Residential Development Original map by author Figure 116 Service Development Original map by author Figure 117 Pedestrian Pathways Original map by author Figure 118 Parks and Plazas Original map by author Figure 119 Terminal Vistas Original map by author Figure 120 Variety of Terminal Vistas Original map by author Figure 121 Neighborhood, Bruges, Belgium Original photo by author

Steve Waldron • 79