Course Syllabus
Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning & Preservation
A4666 Who Designs the Postsuburban City? (This has been listed as, The Architect and the "Undesigned" City.)
James S. Russell, AIA, Adjunct Professor of Architecture www.jsrussellwriter.com
"In America, the private world of power and money is seen as an inevitable force that dictates city form. And so architecture becomes little more than advertising."—Daniel Libeskind, January 2002, in an interview
America has over the last two decades largely dispensed with the idea that the urban future should be guided in some strategic way-whether that guidance be provided by planners, urban designers, architects or some other category of professional. This is not to say that urban growth in America is not designed or planned. It's just that the "designers" are often civil engineers, land developers, and even banks, and the determinants of urban form tend to be habit, tax policy and subsidy schemes, whether or not they were intended for this purpose. Such a way of making urban form has recently begun to generate new, unintended, and largely undocumented forms of urban growth—forms increasingly at odds with community aspirations, fiscal rationality, and environmental sustainability, for example.
The purpose of the seminar is to understand the mechanisms (which are cultural, financial and political) by which cities are made in America and to explore means by which architectural design can become a better-integrated and more essential part of the process. The American approach to urban development is particularly important because elements of it, are, by default or imitation, increasingly prevailing worldwide. The nature of the material is cross-disciplinary, and so participants from all GSAP programs are welcome.
The seminar will consider the methods, means, values, and "actors" that drive patterns of American urban development. All are amenable to the intervention of designers who choose to understand these processes and add value to them. Participants will learn the mechanisms that propel the simplistic, formulaic and apparently immutable (but often unintended) patterns of American urban growth. They will research and enter the debate that attempts to reconcile the dynamism of undifferentiated development (sprawl, for short) with both public and privatized paradigms that seek to align growth with community goals. Participants will use design thinking in two ways: to reconceptualize the mechanisms (financial, regulatory) of development (looking at, for example, efforts of the "new urbanists" to alter the development process) and to propose new or better-deployed design and design paradigms.
Requirements: The seminar will move from predominantly lecture mode to a mix of lecture and discussion, with the final weeks devoted to student presentations. Students will be required to attend and participate in discussions. Seminar participants will team up to make a presentation in the form of a walking tour in New York City or its environs. The presentation will include a summation of the growth/development/design paradigms involved and the presentation of possible alternate development mechanisms. A final requirement is summation of the presentation and discussion in a written/graphic form.
Readings: Specific assignments will be made from the sources listed below. Others will be suggested to individuals in preparation for specific topic discussion.
COURSE STRUCTURE
Lecture/discussion 1: Introduction to the course and presentation of the paradigms it intends to address: the methods, means, values, and "actors" who drive patterns of American urban development. Historical overview of American urban growth as a landscape of speculation.
Readings:
Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Random House/Vintage, 1984
Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press, 1991
Op cit, Globalization and its Discontents. New York: The New Press, 1998.
Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth. (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1968.)
Lecture/discussion 2: Value systems implicit in American citymaking modes of the 20th Century: Zoning (1916-1930), comprehensive planning (1930-1945); Government as an agent driving urban growth through tax and spending policies (1946-date); the urban-renewal era (1950-1979); regulated laissez-faire (1970-date)
Reading:
Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. Basic Books, 1987
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford University Press, 1985
William H. Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center. Doubleday: 1988
Lecture/tour 3: Midtown Manhattan: Laboratory of urban-design prototypes. A walk through a landscape produced by the tensions among developers, government agencies, planners and designers. Participants are urged to consider the uses of design in the provision of public amenities by private developers guided by a variety of urban-design, regulatory and incentive strategies.
Reading:
William H. Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center. Doubleday: 1988.
Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance.
Additional readings from The New York Times and Architectural Record on such midtown controversies as Trump Tower, preservation of legitimate theaters, redevelopment of 42nd Street and Columbus Circle.
Lecture/discussion 4: Government-led alternative paradigms: Amsterdam: Amsterdam School public housing (1915-25), Modernist-era social housing (1925-1975); recent re-urbanism, including Kop von Zuid, Rotterdam; KNSM Island, Borneo/Sporenburg islands, and Java Island, Amsterdam (1985-date). Berlin:Worker estates (1920s), Hansaviertel "open" city (1950s), IBA (1980s) "critical reconstruction" and other German reunification paradigms (1990s-00s).
Readings:
James S. Russell, "The New Berlin: What Happens When a City Transforms Itself Through Architecture?" Architectural Record, March 2002.
Michael Wise, Capital Dilemma: Germany's Search for a New Architecture of Democracy. Princeton Architectural Press, 1998.
Pietro S. Nivola, Laws of the Landscape: How Policies Shape Cities in Europe and America. Washington, Brookings Institution Press, 1999.
Hans Ibelings, 20th Century Urban Design in the Netherlands. Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 1999
Lecture/discussion 6: Who builds contemporary America? Overview of role of mortgage-banking system; infrastructure-subsidy system; highway and sewerage standards; real-estate development taxation schemes; property-taxation system
Reading:
John R. Logan, Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. University of California Press, 1987.
Joel Garreau: Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. Doubleday, 1988.
Sigurd Grava, Urban Transportation Systems: Choices for Communities. McGraw-Hill, 2002.
James S. Russell, "Leading the Money," Architectural Record, June 2003
Lecture/Discussion 7: Emerging post-suburban city form: Multistate, megasuburban landscapes; suburbanizing rural Neocities; warehouse and infrastructure Depotburbs.
Readings:
Robert Lang, Edgeless Cities, Brookings, 2003.
David Rusk, Cities Without Suburbs. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Robert Cervero, America's Suburban Centers: the Land Use-Transportation Link. Unwin Hyman, 1989.
James S. Russell, "The Megaburbs" and "The Neocities," chapter from upcoming book
Lecture/Discussion 8: The coming war between the suburbs: Collapse of the fiscal/political paradigm underpinning suburban growth since 1945. Blighting older suburbs and struggling new ones vs. the "favored sector."
Readings:
Myron Orfield, Metropolitics, Brookings Institution, 1998.
William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles. Solano Press, 1997.
Lecture/Discussion 9: Recent and emerging growth paradigms: Neo-traditional town-making; urban-growth boundaries; impact fees and other regulatory incentives/disincentives. Ownership derived strategies (Clark Stevens/RoTo; West Side Yards); public-entity strategies (Michael Gallis),
Jonathan Barnett, The Fractured Metropolis: Improving the New City, Restoring the Old City, Reshaping the Region. HarperCollins, 1995
Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream. Princeton Architectural Press, 1993.
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles. Verso, 1990.
Op cit, Ecology of Fear. Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. Metropolitan Books, September 1998.
Tour/Discussion 10-13
By seminar participants
