Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Selected Reviews
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Mike Greenberg, 1995. The Poetics of Cities: Designing Neighborhoods that Work. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. |
Reviewed by David Seamon
In this useful book, journalist Mike Greenberg sees in America a failure of urban community, which he relates largely to the demise of a dense, diverse urban grid that fosters movement and exchange. In its place, since World War II, has arisen a generic suburbia that "honors the automobile over the person, the real estate speculator and developer over the community, concrete and asphalt over trees, plastic fast-food homogeneity over local culture, giantism over the little guy, conformity over individuality, ugliness over beauty" (p. 6).
Drawing on the traditional urban neighborhood as a starting point, Greenberg calls for a poetics of cities, by which he means, making cities rightly, particularly fostering diversity, exchange, and community. His hope is for a city of lively, thriving neighborhoods‑-integrated urban microcosms "with ample opportunities for shopping, recreation, culture, and socializing near our homes" (p. 5).
Greenberg believes that the heart of urban vitality is the physical city, especially its network of pathways. The key question, he suggests, is how to craft the physical city in such a way "that it can be easily used by all its people‑-so that not only able-bodied, well-off adults with cars but also children, the elderly, the poor, the blind, the halt and the lame can have freedom of movement and convenient access to all the good things that cities offer" (p. 8).
The most important value of the city, Greenberg believes, is its network of human relations built on exchange‑-the full range of voluntary interactions, whether commercial, social, intellectual, or the like. Exchange, in turn, is very much dependent on the city's particular physical nature‑-especially proximity and connectedness.
Suppose, says Greenberg, that you set out to invent a form of urban settlement that best encouraged exchange. You would create a place where many people live and work in close proximity and routinely interact with one another; where many kinds of activity are linked together; where physical, legal and social impediments to free exchange are minimal; where there is ample diversity of thought and custom; and where that diversity is not kept isolated and inert but encouraged to recombine in unexpected ways. You would, in short invent something like the traditional city with its neighborhoods and neighborhood centers, its compactness and integration of functions, its diversity and serendipity (p. 54).
It is important to emphasize that, in Greenberg's interest in the traditional city as a prescriptive model, he is no nostalgic luddite seeking some urban golden age that never existed. Rather, he recognizes earlier city neighborhoods worked much better exchange-wise than suburban developments because there was not the technological infrastructure, particularly the automobile and mass communications, to overcome time and distance as can so readily be done today.
Greenberg's aim is to understand the traditional city and to apply its lessons to the contemporary city and suburbs to see how rules and regulations can be revised to escape the fragmentation and insularity of usual development. The aim is "to tie the pieces of a city together rather than to pull them apart" (p. 73).
A THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CITIES
In accomplishing this aim, Greenberg breaks his book into three parts composed of 11 chapters. The first part, "A Theory of Cities," asks what a city is and how it best works. Chapter 1 develops the ideas of exchange and poetics, while chapter 2 explores qualities that transform a locality into a neighborhood that both insiders and outsiders can use and enjoy. Chapter 3 defines the city as a network of relationships all involving exchange, which in turn requires physical proximity, diversity, and connectedness.
For urban phenomenologists and designers, the most valuable section of the book is part two, "A Practice of City," which explores the physical, designable qualities contributing to neighborhoods that are "unified ensembles and collaborations" (p. 57). The longest section of the book, part two is arranged, broadly, by physical scale from the largest unit‑-the layout of the city as a whole‑-to the smallest unit‑-high-density shopping areas with lively street life. Each chapter provides helpful discussions of how suburban and traditional urban places compare and contrast.
Chapter 4 examines the "urban matrix," which refers to the underlying grid that governs the arrangement and type of city pathways. In a successful urban matrix, pieces of the city assemble in a coherent, functional ensemble: the streets, sidewalks, and neighborhood arrangement bind the parts "into a whole in which person-to-person exchange can occur with optimum efficiency" (pp. 59-60).
An integral part of the urban matrix is the city's network of sidewalks, which Greenberg considers in chapter 5. Sidewalks are crucial because "ultimately, the act of exchange depends on an encounter between a flesh-and-blood human being and some feature of his or her world" (p. 76).
AN ARRAY OF NEIGHBORHOODS
In chapters 6 and 7, Greenberg turns to the urban neighborhood, which, today, he says, is too often an isolated subdivision of low-density residences occupied by people of similar economic status and segregated functionally (since commercial and institutional uses are usually not included). The result is that "the urban fabric is ripped into fragments...connected only by widely spaced major thoroughfares" (p. 149).
Opposing the standard conceptualization of the modern city as a grid of heavily-trafficked through roads, Greenberg argues that a better formulation sees the city's fundamental structure as "an array of neighborhoods, each with its own center" (p. 150).
Chapter 6 examines the nature of an individual neighborhood, which Greenberg argues is best conceived as a high-density, mixed-use core surrounded by rings of lower-density non-residential uses, apartments, and single-family homes. In turn, chapter 7 asks how such individual neighborhoods can be knitted together into a larger urban fabric that is integrated and alive.
Chapter 8 explores the functional center of each separate neighborhood‑-what Greenberg calls the market place, which he examines in terms of such qualities as variety, density, and comfort. Chapter 9, the last of part two, asks how the ideas and schemes of chapter 4-8 might be applied to the current suburban situation in a realistic, practical way. He writes:
We will be seeking planning tools to help us avert the chaos that is typical of suburban commercial areas, but we will accept as a discipline the real-world facts of suburban life--wide, heavily trafficked roads, ample off-street parking, huge discount retail stores, fast-food restaurants with drive-up windows. We will assume that the neighborhood commercial hub must cross major thoroughfares. We will accept these facts of life, not because we like them, but because a planning regime that attempts to ignore them is doomed, in most localities, to political failure (p. 199).
Part 3 of the book comprises two chapters, the first of which considers the crucial role of the political process in effecting successful design and policy changes. The last chapter considers in broad ethical and moral dimensions what our cities have become today and what the stakes might be if we don't find ways to revalue and to recreate the public realm and a shared sense of community. Finally, an appendix reviews the various aspects of Greenberg's urban matrix‑-urban form, neighborhood structure, neighborhood center, market place, pathways‑-and suggests policy tools that might help in their actualization.
COMMENTARY
In its emphasis on spatial permeability, mixed uses, concentration of people, and physical centeredness, Greenberg's thinking has much in common with other students of urban life who also believe that the city, first of all, should be a place of diversity, integration, and civilized exchange. One immediately thinks, for example, of Bill Hillier, Paul Murrain, Christopher Alexander, and‑-Greenberg's heroine‑-Jane Jacobs.
Each of these thinkers has, in some ways, developed his or her ideas about urban design more deeply and more practically than Greenberg, who, as a journalist, forges a style of presentation that is simple and engaging (though sometimes distracting‑-e.g., chapter 9's title, "The Asphalt Bungle or: How Can the City Cross the Road"). Greenberg's greatest strength is his love for the traditional city and his ability to portray, in an entertaining way, its workings and potential.
In this sense, the book should be a good vehicle for introducing laypeople and undergraduates to the dynamics of cities and their better design. In addition, Greenberg provides many conceptual drawings that readers will find helpful and stimulating.
On the other hand, much of Greenberg's information and evidence arises from real-world places that he has known firsthand, yet there are few photographs to help the reader enter into these examples. For beginners‑-especially because the written text is so accessible‑-the absence of this visual material may be missed. This lack makes me hesitate to recommend the book for introductory courses on the city, though I strongly believe Poetics would be a stimulating tool in upper-level courses in urban design and planning, environment-behavior issues, urban geography, and the phenomenology of place.
For environmental and architectural phenomenology, Greenberg's book is most encouraging because of the way it lends support, largely through independent verification, to the above-mentioned ideas of Hillier, Murrain, Alexander, and Jacobs. One begins to see that all of these authors, each in his or her own way and mostly without any conscious awareness of the approach, point toward a phenomenology of the city that sees the heart of the matter in the synergistic relationship between material and human worlds‑-the way that physical qualities like proximity, permeability, and density are necessarily a part of how people are with each other socially, economically, and ethically.
All these thinkers on the city clarify different aspects of this intimacy between material and human worlds‑-for example, Hillier most thoroughly clarifies how the liveliness or emptiness of a city's streets is related to the pathway system, while Jacobs best helps one understand how a city district's vitality is dependent on primary uses--i.e., functions like work places and homes to which people must necessarily go.
Greenberg's book is important for its clarity, integration of the city's various parts, and discussion of the sprawling, auto-bound dimensions of suburbia. Coupled with the ideas of these other urban thinkers, Greenberg's ideas point to a thorough phenomenology of the city that has yet to be written.
At the same time, the book works powerfully on its own, and one hopes it will have many readers. In addition, its style and content seem readily adaptable to other media‑-I can readily imagine a video version or perhaps some sort of computer presentation that would give action to Greenberg's stimulating conceptual drawings. In short, this book is an important contribution to the urban and urban-design literatures. Its honesty and creative view point offer a host of possibilities for giving new life to the city and to the way we think about and design it.
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