Michigan Debates on Urbanism Volumes I, II, and III

Edited by Rahul Mehrotra, Robert Fishman, and Roy Strickland University of Michigan, 2005, distributed by Distributed Arts Press, New York, 80 to 96 pp. each, $17.95 each. Doug Kelbaugh thinks Americans would understand cities better if we recognized not only New Urbanism but also what he calls Everyday Urbanism, ReUrbanism, and Post-Urbanism. As dean of the University of Michigan’s A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Kelbaugh last year organized three debates on the four urbanisms — now published and dissected in these slim volumes (available as a set from the College for $49). In the first volume, which focuses on Everyday Urbanism, Margaret Crawford of Harvard Design School tries to make a case for the importance of pieces of urban terrain that are hardly designed at all and that attract unexpected uses. An example is parking lots where at odd hours, people sell clothing, flowers, and miscellaneous merchandise. This topic could have potential, but Crawford seems uninterested in offering ideas on how planners and designers would make the most of those mundane settings. Michael Speaks, director of the Metropolitan Research and Design Program at Southern California Institute of Architecture, chides Crawford for being part of a coterie that seeks “hidden or concealed meaning in the banal residue of everyday life” rather than actually changing the city for the better. After a few pages, Everyday Urbanism looks like a dead end. Volume III portrays New York architect Peter Eisenman as a post-urbanist. Alas, the label seems as empty as some of Eisenman’s pronouncements (“Architecture is supposed to be the locus of the metaphysics of presence,” he says at one point, as if this advances the discussion). Speaks is not impressed by Eisenman’s stance or by Crawford’s. He dismisses both Post-Urbanism and Everyday Urbanism for having made “little impact as forms of urbanism.” Indeed, Speaks declares that New Urbanism is the only movement that “has reclaimed the ambition to systematically intervene in and change the city.” New urbanist Peter Calthorpe, in Volume II, lays out four principles that form the basis of his work: “diversity, human scale, conservation, and regionalism.” Calthorpe says he asks of each project his firm considers: “Does it have a wide range of income groups and a wide range of age groups? Is it multiracial? Is it accessible or is it locked away? Those are questions that we debate every day in our clients’ conference rooms, because there are many builders, as you well know, who think the only way to build communities … is to build them in isolation, to allow people to escape one another, to allow people to escape any differences.” The biggest disappointment in Calthorpe’s presentation is his dismissal of aesthetic concerns. Discussing a Berkeley project that puts ground-floor retail and mixed-income housing in four- and five-story buildings, he says, “In some cases they are terrible architecture. But do I care? I really don’t.” This does not sound like an attitude that will make New Urbanism successful. (Calthorpe’s debate opponent is Lars Lerup, dean of architecture at Rice University, who seems downright incoherent — worshiping freeways and speed one moment, lamenting their impact on communities and the environment the next.) Volume III is subtitled “Designs for Ground Zero.” In it New York architects Barbara Littenberg and Steven Peterson intelligently discuss their thinking about how to knit together the streets, roads, buildings, and public spaces of Lower Manhattan, creating a dense, yet appealing environment where many more people would want to live. Though Kelbaugh describes Peterson and Littenberg as pursuing ReUrbanism, and though the two decline to call themselves new urbanists, their ideas are well conceived, clearly explained, and, in my view, wholly in line with New Urbanism’s aims. By the end of these three volumes, New Urbanism is the only urbanism left standing. P.L.