Douglas Kelbaugh-Three Urbanisms & the Public Realm

What exactly is New Urbanism and what are its advantages and criticisms?

New Urbanism is an urban design movement popular in America during the 1980s and models pre-World-War II-no-automobile eras. It emphasizes, walkability, connectivity, mixed-use, the public realm/ civitas, neighborhoods, place-making, pedestrian prioirity, human-scale, high density and sustainable design and has principles like TND (Traditional Neighborhood Design) and TOD (Transit Oriented Development). It takes traditional cities or polis as ideals for an design, opting for prescriptive rather than proscriptive policy. Its organizing body is Congress for New Urbanism founded in 1993.

It has been criticized as a type of social engineering by applying universal principles instead of letting locations determine the design. Right-libertarians claim that New Urbanism ignores consumers preferences which are car-oriented designs. At the same time, it is criticized by not truly pushing for pedestrian design by putting as much value to motor as it does to pedestrians even going as far to say that New Urbanism is a "grand fraud" (Alex MArshall, journalist), a repackaged suburban sprawl and that it ought to push for car-freedevelopments.

Three Urbanisms and the Public Realm

Douglas Kelbaugh

University of Michigan USA

Kelbaugh presents three emergent ideologies: Everyday Urbanism, New Urbanism and Post Urbanism. Extremist politics, technology and privatization challenges the public realms. Kelbaugh suggests that New Urbanism is the most ideal for wealthy but not yet fully established American cities.

While the locally-driven, decentralized nature of Everyday Urbanism fits the squatters and shanties of Developing countries and the grand, large-scale, non-contextual buildings (often designed by starchitects like Koolhas, Hadid, Niemeyer) may revitalize old European cities.

Three schools of urbanism has emerged which cover most of the theoretical and professional activity: Everyday Urbanism, New Urbanism and what Kelbaugh calls Post Urbanism.

Everyday Urbanism

In Everyday Urbanism much of the design process is left to the spontaneous devices of the public and is the "default" design mode if no planning is initiated. It highlights culture rather than design.

Although, this leads to vibrant neighborhoods, unchecked freedom leads to chaos.

non-utopian, non-structuralist, conversational
Non-utopian: rejects the idealist mentality of having set principles to determine design of community rather depends on diversity, plurality and spontaneity of everyday community life shape design
Non-structuralist: downplays direct relationship of physical design and social behavior
Conversational: openness, populist and egalitarian
Street murals rather than civic art, public markets rather than chain stores
How indigenous people and immigrants transform their environments with the resources they have.
open-ended and democratic
designer is co-equal with the public, empirical student of common and popular rather than ideal and pure
modest and compassionate
idealizes the everyday too much, prosaic present

New Urbanism

New Urbanism tries to order different elements in a hierarchy within a dense space.

Conceptually it makes a lot of sense but its criticisms lie in implementation. How is this implemented? Do not trust anything that claims utopia, you cannot find heaven on earth. We have 20th century history as proof of that.

"to make a link between knowing and feeling, between what people believe and do in public and what obsesses them in private."

utopian (reformist/ idealist), inspirational, structuralist (determinist)
Utopian: NU strives for a social ethic and a civic ideal, mixing of different ethnicities, income class, races as well as mixing of different land uses and architectural typologies
Inspirational: wants people to feel they are part of a bigger culture from their individual private lives by creating public realms and public architecture
Structuralist: there is direct relationship between social behavior and physical design
Normative: Good design-> positive effect on sense of place and community-> healthy society
High density, walk-able, spaces for face to face social interaction, hierarchy of public and private spaces
civic buildings, public architecture, squares and parks in the foreground
residential areas and private space in the background
normative and doctrinaire
most precedent-based: extrapolates from past enduring architectural types
tries to democratically include public through dialogue (public design charettes)
best practices of the past

Post Urbanism

Porst urbanist shoc-tactics often seem like shocking for its own sake then a genuine desire to challenge the status quo. Despite claims of its proponents of how post urbanist designs area product of open and democratic thinking it ignores its local context and urban fabric. It is often self-referential rather than contextual.

Post urbanism is the millenial version of Urban design: individualistic, self-centered, and isolated.

heterotopian, sensational, post structuralist
Championed by Rem Koolhas in the Generic City projects characterized by shopping mall developments and disconnected hyper modern buildings
Traditional cities, dependent on proximity and shared values, are repressive and no longer relevant in age of technology and telecommunication
Heterotopian: many fragmented individual paradises
Sensational: large, look-at-me diva buildings
Mistrusts order and promotes isolated zones of free-range commercial consumption, taboo, fantasy, etc.
"lone genius," does not include the public in discourse because it disbelieves that there can truly be coherence or unity
atomistic microcosm that does not try to weave itself into the urban ecological fabric
awes, shocks, overwhelms
overly comitted to the endlessly exciting future

Order is often equated with repression and, by the same token, disorder with democracy. John Locke, Enlightenment thinker and western philosopher, has presented democracy as both about personal rights ad freedoms but as well as civic responsibilities. In America, individual freedoms has so much trumped civic responsibilities that it endangers community.

Three Sensibilities, Methodologies and Outcomes

Differences in these three urbanisms are deep but their divergence with the designer's sensibilities have more to do with their early childhood experiences than their design values. These aesthetic sensibilities can be tempered with theoretical and ethical discourse, seeing the political and philosophical regimes that affect these frameworks, thus, shaping their design values.

Physical outcomes of the urbanisms are as follows: Everyday Urbanism with its spontaneous nature has the lowes asthetic quality, beauty or coherence. New Urbanism strives for unity and order with its grid streets and emphasizes pedestrian life, may look to rigid from above. Post -urbanist looks the most exciting with sweeping arcs and geometric lines but is least pedestrian-friendly.

Everyday Urbanism is default or accidental, Post urbanist are just trophy buildings inserted to dead public realms. New Urbanist claims to build a sustainably ordered and liberating space.

Civitas: the Public Realm

Human being, being social animals, have a need to be part of a bigger social structure. This need is provided for by organized religion but people also find this need assuaged by being part of community or 'polis'. However, our culture has become more individualistic and narcissistic making our private worlds more loveless and and selfish than it need be.

Insight from Bart Giamatti's line:

Private and public must be balanced in a constant act of daily gradual refinement that allows us to interact with each other harmoniously, and maybe even triumphantly, instead of constant chaos.

Kelbaugh says that a just and tolerant society is needed for minorites to live with dignity and peace but that America has lost city living skills as well as a history of discrimination. Communities must deal with human nature, its dysfunction, pathologies and y to achieve unity by creating an enemy. The question of the proper scale arises for social harmony and political unity: Ancient reeks suggested 5000 citizens per polis (25000 including wives, children and slaves). NU suggests half a mile on one side and a metropolitan region. Though Kelbaugh fails to address, if a community should inevitably have an enemy. What should it be against? And conversely what should it value? Controlling the scale of city is futile as majority of the world population has moved to the world's few capital cities, and the population continues to grow.

Middle class American and European immigrants have chosen privacy of gated suburbs, and LE Corbusier Modern European seperation of vehicles and pedestrian over the messy complexity of the public realm and urban streets which are brought by immigrants, Latinos, Africa-Americans and other minorities. The private affluent take quality schools and money with them, the public poor have a vibrant community life, bothe are necessary for a healthy community. There is a pattern here: those well-off have much to lose and so the protect and safeguard what they have, isolated, ordered and private, they are conscientious; while those are struggling share what the little they with each other, they are communal, messy and public, they are open.

Kelbaugh sees property rights trumping community rights as a threat to civitas as well destruction of civilization itself if there is absolute protection for private property and risk-free land ownership which is a social contract and not an inalienable God-given right. I do not know enough about the nature of land ownership and property rights but its seems that absolute property rights is unfounded and baseless. Should society's interests trump the individual's interests? It depends on what the interests are, society could be corrupted, the individual could be corrupted. Each case should be evaluated but by who?

America historically is seen an icon freedom and protector of private property from the threat of fascism and totalitarianism but though extremist threats are always present, the world does no longer needs its equally extremist individualism and must adjust to include community interest and put greater priority on land use and ecological policies.

Telecommunications and computers cannot replace the human need for physical contact. Everyday Urbanism with its rich public realm does not care weather this is physical or electronic, nor does it aspire for beauty or progress. Post urbanism is temporary and fleeting architecture. New Urbanism strives for a high quality physical world, desiring not to eliminate diversity but to control it-put chaos into order.

Everyday urbanism undermines what architecture and design can bring to community life, Post urbanism is cut off from community and could easily be novelty for novelty's sake. New Urbanism, like great cultures before, requires balance and discipline.

Do we put too much value on private pleasures that we threaten the common good?

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10/16/17 Notes and insights on the Three Urbanism & the Public Realm as well as trying to see which fits with the Philippine context and refining my own design philosophies