Urban Design for an Urban Century: Placemaking for People

By Lance Jay Brown, David Dixon, and Oliver Gillham

John Wiley & Sons, 2009, 304 pp., $80 hardcover

I was suffering a case of compendium burnout, a malady familiar to architectural book reviewers, and I suspected that Urban Design for an Urban Century might be yet another of those books whose purpose is to dutifully publicize a bunch of award winners.

But no, when I checked with editor John Czarnecki at John Wiley & Sons, he assured me that this volume came about because he asked Lance Jay Brown and David Dixon to write a book on urban design. A lot has happened in urban design in recent years, and this book would be an opportunity for three leading practitioners to make sense of it all. It was Brown, a New York-based architect and urban designer, and Dixon, chief of urban design at Goody Clancy & Associates, who decided to fill more than half of the book’s 304 pages with “case studies” of projects that had won American Institute of Architects Honor Awards for Regional and Urban Design.

Two books in one
The result is almost two separate books. The first part, “Paradigms, Principles, and Process,” consists of five chapters — 112 pages — that look at the purposes of urban design, the historical roots of city-making, the decentralization that modernist architects and planners pursued for most of the 20th century, the more recent return to density and urban liveliness, and advice on how we should proceed at a time when “the United States stands on the cusp of an urban renaissance.”

This first part is superb. Bits and pieces of it will be old news to many new urbanists, but on the whole, the initial five chapters are tremendously illuminating. They vigorously capture the outlook of leading modernists like Le Corbusier, who regarded the urban street of the early 20th century as “no more than a trench, a deep cleft,” and who proclaimed, with what now seems a stunning blindness, “Our hearts are always oppressed by the constriction of its enclosing walls.” The authors shed light on the attempt of José Luis Sert, at Harvard, to reinject human scale into urban planning in the 1950s, and on the success of the brothers Robert and Leon Krier in getting designers to appreciate street walls and mixed uses once again.

The book points out the importance of Mizner Park, in Boca Raton, Florida: “It planted an entirely new ‘traditional downtown’ where none had grown before, and it did so in the heart of a fundamentally suburban community.”  The authors follow the trail from scattered early projects like Mizner Park and Battery Park City to the broad revival of urbanism. Key facts and their meaning pop up just when they’re needed: “From 1995 through 2006, US public transportation ridership increased by 30 percent,” the authors report. “Desire for proximity to transit has turned into a powerful market force.”

Brown, Dixon, and the late Oliver Gillham explain why compact, walkable, transit-served development is in everyone’s interest — because of climate change, the limits of petroleum, the problems of traffic congestion, and the health risks of not walking, among other factors. The authors identify challenges, some of which are difficult to overcome. “As urban and older suburban neighborhoods become more diverse, neighbors are less likely to share life’s everyday activities and the sense of community that such associations foster,” they state in one somber passage. “… So, while the icons of older neighborhoods — churches, parks, and Main Streets — these traditional forms have come to represent the body but not the soul of community.”

The book’s second part, “Putting Urban Design into Practice,” contains chapters on guiding regional growth, rediscovering downtown and Main Street, reinventing older neighborhoods, building new neighborhoods, reclaiming waterfronts, creating the public realm, and turning campuses into communities. It is rigorously organized. As in a textbook, the case studies — ranging from a watershed project in South Florida to the Park DuValle HOPE VI project in Louisville, Kentucky — are methodically arranged to present the critical issues and major urban design concepts of each project. Key principles are laid out in paragraph-long bullet points.

To me, the case studies are less than compelling. Complex regional, urban, and suburban undertakings are reduced, in many instances, to about two pages of text and illustrations — not enough to bring places to life. I would have preferred fewer cases, in greater depth. Many readers, however, may disagree. Those who are new to urban design and planning may find the case studies a quick, efficient way of gaining footing in the fundamentals of today’s urban design. In any event, Urban Design for an Urban Century is generous enough to give readers two different and complementary approaches: a big, yet nuanced historical sweep of urban design thinking and practice in the first 112 pages and a series of bite-size lessons in the pages that follow.