Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Discovering Urban Design
Robert Fabian
Fabian is a retired Canadian management and systems consultant. He was the first Chair of Computer Science at York University in Toronto. He is now involved in downtown Toronto neighborhood matters and works to improve a small property he and his wife have on southern Ontario’s Trent-Severn Waterway. See his website at: www.fabian.ca. © 2012 Robert Fabian.
Recently, I have come somewhat belatedly to recognize the importance of built form and space in establishing our context for living. The discovery process started after I turned 65 and began to withdraw from active consulting. In the hope that others may find value in seeing the steps I took, this is the story of my growth toward urban design enlightenment.
I had been educated to seek Truth that would be valid anywhere and everywhere. Given that all my degrees were in mathematics, that assumption about knowledge should not be surprising. Truth was to be context-free. But reality began to intrude even during the time my focus was on computer systems. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with organizational-development psychologist Eric Trist, who helped me see the value of a socio-technical approach. I came to realize that social context is critical to understanding how systems actually work.
The research I did with Trist led me into full-time consulting—I decided to see if what I was professing had real-world relevance. The socio-technical view, while important to me, was not generally important to clients. As a “computer consultant,” one of my growing concerns was with what it should mean to be an information-technology (IT) professional. That aim led me to reflect on codes of professional ethics. After considerable thrashing about, I came to see that philosopher Stephen Toulmin had it right in The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (with Albert Jonsen; Univ. of California Press, 1988). There are only accepted ethical precedents. The challenge is to argue from those precedents to action that fit the situation, certainly a context-sensitive perspective.
When I passed 65 and without the press of new consulting business, I began reading about the importance of social and historical context in human life. Given what I saw about me in society, the Communitarian movement attracted me. It’s important to balance rights and responsibilities. And the social context— the “community”—is key to understanding what drives us and what we value. I also began to appreciate the importance of social history as Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky understood it.
All of that had been fermenting in the background. Then a Toronto developer can forward with a proposal to put up twin 58-story towers 30 feet from our condominium window. I experienced a strong NIMBY (“Not in My Back Yard”) reaction. But early on I also recognized that nothing protects the view, at least not in downtown Toronto. If the proposal was to be turned into something positive, I would need to look elsewhere than to NIMBYism.
The proposed architecture was an example of what has been called “glass brutalism”—oppressive glass towers with no redeeming features. The architecture could certainly have been improved, but too much would still have been jammed on a lot too small. My concerns went beyond architecture. But expanding to an urban-planning scope was too broad. It would be both politically difficult to address and would not allow concerns of the local impact of the proposed building to be properly considered. Urban design was the right “frame” from which to assess the proposal.
All of which motivated me to look at urban design in greater detail. Living in Toronto, it was natural to reread Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities (Vintage, 1961). Little more than a decade after Jacobs’ book was published, Christopher Alexander published his original series of books on Pattern Languages. Reacquainting myself with that body of work was a natural step—the systems people had already taken to heart the pattern language message.
I was increasingly drawn into an urban-design world view. In what follows, I highlight some of the key points along my path toward enlightenment.
Community and Neighborhood
Too much of the discussion
about community and neighborhood takes them as being
nearly equivalent. I’ve come to see that there are
important differences. A “neighborhood” is a physical
place. The boundaries may be somewhat ill defined, but
the neighborhood is rooted in a physical location. In
the past, “community” may have been largely identified
with “neighborhood,” but that’s no longer true.
Serious urban-design mistakes happen when we don’t keep separate our understanding of community and neighborhood. My view is that a community consists of people with shared values. The strength of the community depends on the nature and strength of those shared values. On the other hand, neighborhoods consist of people with shared practices. Or more precisely, a successful neighborhood is composed of people with sufficient shared practices that they can live together harmoniously.
Built Form and Space
One of our local concerns
is with the preservation of Toronto’s
nineteenth-century commercial heritage. The last,
best example is just outside my window along Yonge
Street. Many nineteenth-century
commercial buildings remain, albeit with sometimes
grossly inappropriate modern signage. An inexpensive way
of “preserving” that heritage is to keep the storefronts
as facades on new, larger buildings. A faint echo from
the past is preserved. Unfortunately, the resulting
structures are not harmonious—they lack Alexander’s
quality that has no name.
I’ve come to see that the problem lies in not recognizing that the space within which built forms are experienced is a critical factor in what we experience. Radically alter the space and the experience is radically altered. That’s exactly what happens when an historic front is pasted on a new large building. The experience is “wrong,” with the visual image inappropriate for the space in which it is experienced.
Place and Placelessness
Edward Relph’s Place and
Placelessness (Pion, 1976, 2008) provided an early
and important distinction between locations that are
“places” and those that lack a sense or spirit of place.
As originally presented and originally read, Relph
suggested that having a sense of place was “good” and
not having that sense was “not good.”
Subsequently, Relph did recognize that placelessness can confer a cloak of anonymity that many urban dwellers find attractive (see, for example, his new introduction to the 2008 reprint of Place and Placelessness). Such urban dwellers don’t define themselves by where they live within the urban sphere. It’s more a question of where they work and where they recreate. Their lived-in neighborhood doesn’t need to contain places. That’s certainly how many who live in vertical neighborhoods would seem to view their world
Upon reflection, this lack of urban places seems to me ill advised. We should all seek an urban balance, with some healthy degree of urban anonymity and some healthy degree of the urban rootedness that recognizable neighborhood places can best provide.
Top-Down and Bottom-Up
There is an attractiveness
in the incremental, evolutionary, bottom-up urban design
that Alexander described so well, for example, in The
Oregon Experiment (Oxford Univ. Press, 1975). We do
instinctively move toward the wholeness and completion
that is found in built forms and spaces that have
developed over time. Such places “work” on many
different levels. If each separate development is small
and developments are spread out over time, the bottom-up
approach can make sense.
Today, however, many development increments are not small and many developers have no long-term view. The mega-project is alive and well, with many developments filling one or more city blocks. And developers, especially condominium developers, have a very short-term view of their buildings. The goal seems to be to finish the building, make sure all units are sold, and then get out. This process takes several years but is almost always less than a decade—not exactly a long-term view. Under such conditions, the “quality that has no name” may never emerge. It’s important to have both a top-down vision and allow bottom-up creativity.
Space Syntax
The name alone is appealing
to someone who comes from the world of mathematics and
computing. Bill Hillier’s work on space syntax is
fascinating stuff—see, for example, his Space is the
Machine (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). How the areas
within an urban center connect is a revealing picture of
how the people in those areas connect or can connect on
a social and economic level.
For my purposes, however, much of the space-syntax work is at the urban-planning scale rather than urban design. Even so, I did extract an important insight from this way of thinking about urban space. Neighborhoods, especially open, heterogeneous neighborhoods, are significantly shaped by the number, nature, and kind of connections made possible by the built form and space. Indeed, the openness of a neighborhood requires that there be open, inviting connections from and to elsewhere.
Phenomenology
I didn’t start out with a
phenomenological view of the world. I grew to recognize
the importance of context in properly framing our
understanding. Very little that’s meaningful can be
expressed in context-free terms. And the critical test
of any context-sensitive understanding is the degree to
which that understanding sheds light on individual,
personal experience. In my case, my NIMBY reaction led
to context-sensitive understanding about what Toronto
should allow on “my” stretch of Yonge Street.
Preserving the form and space of 19th-century Yonge Street requires that no building, old or new, exceed a four-story height, at least not at lot line. Some reasonable step-back is required before new buildings can be erected. Our neighborhood association advocates a 30-meter step-back. My sense is that the required step-back should be related to the height of the new, taller, proposed building. Actual proposals are for 60-plus-story buildings with step-backs of five meters. This arrangement would destroy any real sense of our 19th century commercial heritage.
Next, Yonge Street is the central north-south pedestrian corridor in downtown Toronto. It’s currently effective but not always appealing. It’s also very attractive for condominium developers. There are over a dozen condominium development proposals, all within a few blocks of where I live. We should be able to turn this stretch of Yonge Street into a great, world-class street as Alan Jacobs describes such a possibility in Great Streets (MIT Press, 1995). The elements are present and development dollars could be channeled into the project. Setting a “great Yonge Street” Goal may have enough political traction to actually change the shape of development.
I’ve come some distance from my initial NIMBY reaction. I don’t know if the approach I’m following should be called phenomenology. I do recognize that any insight, necessarily context-sensitive, must be tested against personal experience. The insight and the experience are indissolubly connected—one without the other is a pale, shallow thing. Am I like the Moliere character who has been speaking phenomenology but never knew it?
One last note. In case there is any doubt, I have only taken the first small steps towards urban-design enlightenment. It’s been an interesting experience even though I’m far from enlightened!