Getting Real About Urbanism: Contextual Design for Cities

By Bernard Zyscovich with Douglas R. Porter

Urban Land Institute, 2008, 137 pp., $69.95 hardcover

Miami architect Bernard Zyscovich has done some interesting urban things. He is credited with devising the redevelopment plan for Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road shopping district, which had a lively mix of people and activities the last time I walked it. More recently he has played a leading role in shaping Midtown Miami, a formerly nondescript railyard area two miles north of downtown Miami.

After years as a holding area for cargo containers, the 56-acre Midtown site now features tree-lined streets, about 1,000 housing units in three high-rise buildings, and 470,000 square feet of multistory retail space, including big-box stores that have been coaxed away from dull suburban building formats.
In his slim but extensively illustrated book, Zyscovich says urban design should be all about “enhancing and creating places that have identifiable character and personality.” He calls this approach “real urbanism” — he also designates it “contextual urban design” — and says it “seeks what is unique and original in any neighborhood, district, city, and region.”

To make his points, Zyscovich presents — in a relatively brief text, in sizable color photos, and only rarely in site plans — a broad array of urban undertakings, mostly by planners and designers other than himself. The projects are all over the map: in Barcelona; Baltimore; Boston; Bellevue, Washington; Miami; New Orleans; New York; San Francisco; San Jose; Sydney, Australia; Toronto; and elsewhere.

Examples of New Urbanism
Many of the developments shown by Zyscovich are new urbanist creations, including Harbor Town in Memphis; Bethesda Row in Maryland; New Columbia in Portland, Oregon; Market Common Clarendon in Arlington, Virginia; Stapleton and Highlands’ Garden Village in Denver; and the recreated downtown of West Palm Beach, Florida. He praises street life, walkable neighborhoods, mixed uses, varied housing types, integration with mass transit, concealment of parking garages behind liner buildings, and connections across boundaries.

Yet he never, as far as I could determine, mentions New Urbanism by name, and he finds fault with “many recent developments” that feature “the vernacular housing, neighborhood, and shopping districts of the 18th and 19th centuries — often charming in detail, but increasingly copied with mindless imitation.” He asserts: “Many designers of such developments adhere to a model of urbanism that lays down rules about physical and visual character, such as the design and arrangement of windows in a building and the proximity of buildings to streets, without recognizing the special character of the location or allowing the possibility of variations on the theme.”

If he is criticizing a sizable contingent of new urbanists, as I think he is in those passages, his argument is refuted by the variety of the new urbanist projects that he has chosen to sprinkle throughout his book. Del Mar Station in downtown Pasadena, California, is remarkably different from Laurel Homes in Cincinnati, and both are a far cry from the South Campus Gateway in Columbus, Ohio.

Getting Real About Urbanism troubled me with some of its pronouncements. The author implies, for example, that transit-oriented developments should incorporate substantial parking facilities. That may be good advice in some locations, but it would have been better if Zyscovich had helped readers understand when and where abundant parking begins to do more harm than good.

He writes that “Del Mar Station was key to revitalizing downtown Pasadena” and he reports that SouthSide Works spurred the revitalization of Pittsburgh’s South Side neighborhood. Not so. Downtown Pasadena bounced back because of other interventions, as well as people’s changing taste, before Del Mar Station was built. South Side Works came after the old commercial main street of the South Side had become a magnet for the young and those who crave a place with character.

What Zyscovich has produced is a book packed with pictures of interesting or laudable projects and containing a quite readable, though flawed, survey of today’s urban design thinking. That will be enough to make some readers happy. New urbanists, however, will have a few bones to pick.