Where We Want to Live: Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities
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Where We Want to Live: Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities
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Overview
**Winner, Phillip D. Reed Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment**
**A Planetizen Top Planning Book for 2017**
After decades of sprawl, many American city and suburban residents struggle with issues related to traffic (and its accompanying challenges for our health and productivity), divided neighborhoods, and a non-walkable life. Urban designer Ryan Gravel makes a case for how we can change this. Cities have the capacity to create a healthier, more satisfying way of life by remodeling and augmenting their infrastructure in ways that connect neighborhoods and communities. Gravel came up with a way to do just that in his hometown with the Atlanta Beltline project. It connects 40 diverse Atlanta neighborhoods to city schools, shopping districts, and public parks, and has already seen a huge payoff in real estate development and local business revenue.
Similar projects are in the works around the country, from the Los Angeles River Revitalization and the Buffalo Bayou in Houston to the Midtown Greenway in Minneapolis and the Underline in Miami. In Where We Want to Live, Gravel presents an exciting blueprint for revitalizing cities to make them places where we truly want to live.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466890534 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
RYAN GRAVEL is the founding principal of Sixpitch and creator of the Atlanta Beltline, the reinvention of a 22-mile circle of railroads that began as the subject of his master's thesis. Today, Gravel is a designer, planner, writer, husband, and father. He is increasingly called to speak to an international audience on topics as wide ranging as brownfield remediation, transportation, public health, affordable housing, and urban regeneration. Through keen observation of the relationship between infrastructure and our way of life, he makes a compelling case about how we can shape the future of cities.
Read an Excerpt
Where We Want to Live
Reclaiming Infrastructure for A New Generation of Cities
By Ryan Gravel
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2016 Ryan GravelAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9053-4
CHAPTER 1
AS MANY GAINS AS LOSSES
The tree-lined streets of the 16th arrondissement immediately behind the Trocadéro had suddenly and somehow unexpectedly broken through the long, beige, bleak Paris winter. It seemed that, exactly at the moment that I emerged from the Métro, they exploded in the sunlight with impossibly green young leaves at the end of every branch. They led me behind an imposing wall into the Cimetière de Passy, which had also burst to life with bright flowers and singing birds. A spirit of lightness shone through the stained-glass windows of the cemetery's many mausoleums, lifting the gloom of winter, and the smiles on every passerby confirmed that I wasn't the only one who had noticed.
I discovered the joy of springtime in Paris on that April day in 1995. It was the satisfactory result of a homework assignment from my professor, a scholar of the Situationist International, to conduct a dérive, or unplanned journey. In mid-twentieth-century Paris, the situationists deliberately created situations that would build critical awareness of the spaces and actions in people's everyday lives. They used the concept of the dérive (literally, drift) to help break the monotony of life's routine. Rather than slogging through each day, retracing the exact same steps with the same low gaze upon the sidewalk, conducting a dérive requires you to pay attention to the world around you, to allow your feelings, intuition, and experiences to guide you through an exploration of the urban landscape. Such wanderings "express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences." The larger goal of the exercise was to gain an appreciation for the city in hopes of stopping its destruction at the hands of what the situationists saw as the greed of capitalism, highway building, and other midcentury assaults. My assignment had been to conduct a dérive in a part of the city I had not yet seen. I enjoyed it so much that I immediately made it a habit wherever I went.
With each discovery, the city came alive to me. Of particular interest were its inner workings — the physical systems that support its mechanical functions but also breathe life into the streets and public spaces and give each district or place its identity. The origin of my dérive, the Place du Trocadéro, radiates typical Parisian boulevards to the north and west and frames a dramatic vantage point to the southeast of the Eiffel Tower across the River Seine on the majestic Champ de Mars. Classic Parisian plane trees surround the square, performing their technical duties of making oxygen, shading the sidewalk, cooling and cleaning the air, and simultaneously providing intangible benefits like beauty, artistic inspiration, and smiles at the onset of spring. The surrounding streets carry a nonstop parade of pedestrians and other people on tour buses, city buses, cars, mopeds, bicycles, and subways. They provide conduits for utilities, emergency response, signage, and deliveries. But more than these utilitarian functions, the streets of Paris furnish the city's people with a stage for their lives. They become places for daily exchanges with strangers, friends, and neighbors, for sitting in cafés to read the news or observe the bustle of urban life. They are venues for innocent flirtations, arguments, or marriage proposals. For my part, an American student wandering around rather aimlessly, I discovered who I am one night walking down one of those dark streets in the "City of Light."
In Paris or in any place where people live in relatively close quarters, layers of shared infrastructure networks, including communication systems, storm-water drainage, transportation, and power, are developed to support them. These systems interact with local conditions including history, geography, topography, and climate. The resulting assembly is occupied and used by people in both expected and unexpected ways, both successfully and unsuccessfully over time, and those activities build economies, culture, and social life. The position of this assemblage, the strength of each part, and the skill with which people utilize the assets made available to them, result in a unique, complex living organism called a city. It is not fully comprehensible, and its complexity defies both the rationality of planners and the passion of designers. Yet there I was in Paris to study both. My immediate interest was to figure out how I could work within this complexity to improve cities like my own hometown. Long before my springtime dérive, I had come to the perhaps not-so-insightful observation that the best way to learn how to make cities great is to leave the classroom and walk the streets of great cities.
Fortunately, I didn't have to walk far. I found relevant instruction every morning when I left for school. I lived half a block off the Rue de Lyon in the 12th arrondissement. Every day I walked its most eastern block on the way to the Métro, where it terminates at the Gare de Lyon. Like the Place du Trocadéro, this short five-block link between the train station and the Place de la Bastille was lined with Paris's distinctive plane trees. The Rue de Lyon was part of the transformative vision that Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, known as Napoleon III, implemented in the mid-1800s. The plan's overarching premise was to open up the city's tangle of dim and narrow streets to improve both military access and public-health conditions. He gave his prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the financial resources and political backing to plow the now-famous grand boulevards through the heart of medieval Paris. And Haussmann, for his part, had the steely will to implement such an audacious vision. His dramatic alterations resulted in iconic new streets like the Avenue de l'Opéra, Boulevard Haussmann, and Boulevard Saint-Germain, as well as the lesser-known Rue de Lyon and the Place du Trocadéro. Haussmann oversaw dozens of projects like these from the 1850s through the 1870s, although some work continued to the end of the century.
The construction of the grand boulevards completely destroyed entire city blocks, along with homes, businesses, and livelihoods. The scale of change was enormous, and reconstruction continued for decades. Public opposition eventually got Haussmann fired, but while the personal and social costs to the people of Paris and the loss of its medieval character were real and significant, Napoleon III's vision also transformed Paris for the better. It implemented a physical plan for a more robust infrastructure network that still serves the city well today.
The grand boulevards were designed to accomplish many goals — not the least of which was the deterrence of social uprisings. The streets drained low-lying land and brought sunlight into formerly dark spaces in order to create healthier conditions. They strengthened commerce by providing pavement to improve the movement of wheeled carts and wagons. Underground pipes conveyed water and sewage. The boulevards also included a generous new public realm with plazas, monuments, fountains, and trees. Eventually, they brought street lighting, electricity, and other utilities. Starting at the turn of the century, they evolved to also accommodate an amazingly intricate and expansive network of underground subways. With all of these changes, the grand boulevards laid the literal foundation for the life of Paris, enabling its rise to global prominence as an economic, political, and military powerhouse.
But what really set the grand boulevards apart from an ordinary capital investment program is that they bestowed on Paris a distinct and profound physical identity that stimulated a cultural life in the city that has in turn become the engine of its economy and that remains recognizable around the world. In addition to the boulevards, Napoleon III's vision included new landmark structures like the Opéra Garnier, renovated public spaces like the Place de la République, and new parks like the Bois de Vincennes and the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. The newly sundrenched districts and lighted streets evoked the city's spirit — a "City of Light" — and that lightness was captured by painters like Gustave Caillebotte and Camille Pissarro in a radical new style called Impressionism. Over time, these places created a fertile environment for change, stimulating the city's legendary café culture of artists, musicians, and writers who by the first half of the twentieth century mingled there with cultural luminaries like Simone de Beauvoir, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Picasso.
Of course, Napoleon III's vision is only one part of the story that propelled Paris into a region of over 12 million people with one of the largest city GDPs in the world. The grand boulevards, parks, and public spaces support other investments in business, housing, and the arts to create a city that is both highly functional and culturally desirable. One example is the region's enviable rail transit network that itself works in multiple layers. Bullet trains carry passengers to major European capitals in a matter of hours. Other high-speed trains connect Paris to cities throughout France. The commuter train network links the far-flung suburbs within the urbanized parts of Île de France. And the iconic Métro, with its warren of tunnels and trains crowded with college students, suits, and tourists, performs almost effortlessly the demanding task of transporting 4.5 million people a day. Back above ground, several other modes of transportation support the network, including buses, trams, taxis, water taxis, and one of the world's first and most expansive bike-share programs.
The signature element of this transportation network, however, is found at the beginning and end of every trip. Whether along one of Haussmann's straight, broad boulevards or one of the remaining narrow medieval lanes like Rue Traversiére where I lived my year abroad, the sidewalks of Paris are not relegated to a subordinate, utilitarian role as they are in many cities. They are the system's signature element.
Everything comes to life in the city's streets, squares, parks, and gardens. In the decades during and following the construction of the grand boulevards, the new promenades became the territory of the flâneur. Unlike a wanderer on a dérive, a flâneur was a conscious actor in the theater of the city — a "passionate spectator," as described by Charles Baudelaire. The flâneur strolled confidently along the city streets, offering observations and commentary about the built environment and, by doing so, played a valuable role in defining the new lifestyle offered by Paris's transformation. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the flâneur embodied a bourgeois aspiration of leisure and a cultural life for the city that remains the foundation for Paris's defining global identity today.
The situationists despised that lifestyle as much as they railed against the city's destruction in their own century. "From any standpoint other than that of police control, Haussmann's Paris is a city built by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." To them, the bourgeois environment of the flâneur was only the beginning of a capitalist appropriation of Paris. Their focus, therefore, became the present, and their predictions about the impact cars would have on the city were prescient. They accused contemporary planners of being interested only in "ensuring the smooth circulation of a rapidly increasing quantity of motor vehicles."
As the situationists grew more concerned about these motives, the targets of their frustration became clear. They "regarded all the social sciences, including urbanism, with a suspicion proportional to the field's pretense of neutrality and expertise." They challenged the status quo in modern city building efforts and in the very legitimacy of city planning practice, much like Jane Jacobs and other contemporaries who were fighting the similar transformation of New York under Robert Moses.
Like that of Jacobs, and unlike most criticism of urban development patterns today, the situationists did not emphasize environmental matters such as climate change, air or water quality, land consumption, or the destruction of wildlife habitat. Their attention was less on economics or any concern for public health. Their focus was social and cultural — "the stifling functionalism of postwar urbanism, as seen especially in the autocratic housing schemes built around Paris and other cities, which they felt curbed the individual's creative capacities." In addition to the dérive, they engaged in dozens of other spectacles and activities that called attention to changes needed to reform contemporary society.
The situationists were unable to force change from the top, so they attempted to deliberately change individual cultural expectations through a kind of grassroots movement. It had radical, artistic overtones, but it was essentially community organizing. They challenged the individual to do something — to take responsibility for making change. The founder of the Situationist International, Guy Debord, wrote, "It is not a question of knowing whether this interests you but rather of whether you yourself could become interesting under new conditions of cultural creation." He saw full participation in the life of the city as not only an opportunity but also our responsibility.
Of course by the time I lived there in the mid-1990s, Paris, like most any city in the West, had been significantly altered by its long flirtation with the automobile. The flâneur's demise, presumably due to habitat loss, reflected a cultural shift toward driving cars and the physical space needed to accommodate them. The River Seine was lined with highways, divorcing its banks from urban life. The city had narrowed its sidewalks, compromised its public spaces to make room for automobile traffic and parking, and developed large, detached social housing districts around its periphery. While the situationists had been responding in real time to these "atrocities" as they happened in the 1950s and 1960s, they were far too marginal a group to stop them. They made contributions in writing and actions, like the dérive, and they also played a role in the protests in France in 1968. But for the most part, they represented only a small fringe of the intellectual, political, and artistic avant-garde. Like Jacobs, however, they did portend with crisp accuracy the kinds of challenges people would face as a result of the city's transformation.
The irony of my satisfaction with that dérive at the Place du Trocadéro, a part of Paris that had been radically altered at the hands of Haussmann, is not lost on me. But by acknowledging the viewpoint of both the situationist and the flâneur, a more enlightened picture is painted that illustrates what was — and still is — happening in the world. Alongside Jane Jacobs, parallel environmental arguments, and even more contemporary campaigns like Tactical Urbanism that are emerging at a grassroots level, the overwhelming sentiment seems to be that there is something very wrong with the way we have been building cities for well over the last half century.
The durability and diversity of this movement and the increased clarity of that larger picture also suggest that those of us who care should push more aggressively against the status quo of most city building practices. Even if we're not yet sure exactly what constitutes our collective success, we need to act, quickly and with confidence and urgency, as we move along any or all of these paths — social, cultural, environmental, economic, health related, or otherwise. We don't need everyone to agree on any one ideology before we start doing something. And in our data-heavy culture, we need to get more comfortable navigating through the sea of information rather than being paralyzed by its expanse. We need to be smart about data, of course, but we can't afford to pretend that a clear understanding is even possible — as if the city, in contrast to any other time in human history, is somehow now more knowable or less complex because of our ability to measure it with new technology. What has become clear is that whichever path each of us takes, and for whatever reason we take it, we need to actually start doing something.
At the time that Baron Haussmann took up the job of implementing Napoleon III's vision, the little railroad junction that would become Atlanta had only been around for about 20 years. Up to and following the American Civil War, which ended in 1865, the city enjoyed significant growth as a result of the expansion of rail service throughout the state. Later, hundreds of miles of streetcar routes opened up new land for development to support a growing population well into the twentieth century. The region's truly explosive growth, however, came after midcentury, when the same car culture that lined the Seine with highways was creating an entirely new way of life in the United States.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Where We Want to Live by Ryan Gravel. Copyright © 2016 Ryan Gravel. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
1: AS MANY GAINS AS LOSSES
2: "INFRA-CULTURE"
3: CYCLES OF CHANGE
4: THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH SPRAWL
5: TOUGH LOVE
6: AN IDEA WITH AMBITION
7: A WIDE-OPEN PLACE
8: AN EXPANDABLE VISION
9: BREAKING GROUND ON HOPE
10: CATALYST INFRASTRUCTURE
11: AN INFRASTRUCTURE FOR HEALTH AND WELL-BEING
12: AN INFRASTRUCTURE FOR ECONOMIC PROSPERITY
13: AN INFRASTRUCTURE FOR EQUITY
14: AN INFRASTRUCTURE FOR CIVIC IDENTITY
15: UP AHEAD
Notes
Index