Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Selected Reviews
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Douglas Rae, 2003. City: Urbanism and Its End. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. |
Reviewed by David Seamon
Political scientist Douglas Rae’s City is a perceptive examination of traditional American urbanism grounded in lively streets, mixed uses, and a place-based commingling of citizenry different in race, ethnicity, and class.
Using New Haven, Connecticut as his case study, Rae creatively draws on archival materials to portray the everyday social and economic geography of the American city from the 1870s to the 1920s. He demonstrates the crucial importance of a locally-grounded network of human relationships founded in and sustaining urban businesses, civic organizations, and municipal government.
Rae also documents how, from the 1920s onward, the traditional American city unraveled, overwhelmed by new technologies, changing economic forces, regional decentralization, and federal policies that gradually enervated the earlier robust street life. Though he concludes that we can never recreate the old urbanism, Rae believes that we might improve today’s cities by understanding and remaking old urbanism’s best features—“the magic of small commitments to place, the value of strangers in ordinary life, the humanity of well-ordered sidewalks…” (p. 31).
A Day-to-day Vitality
For a phenomenology of urban place, Rae’s most revealing discussion is chapters 3-6, which, through superb archival documentation, reconstruct the day-to-day vitality of New Haven’s neighborhoods and their underlying interpersonal, social, and economic foundations.
In chapter 3, Rae examines the city’s “social geography of business” by describing the rich fabric of neighborhood stores that not only sold goods and services but also played a central role in governing “sidewalks and the people who walked on them” (p. xiii) [see box, right and map, right, p. 6].
Just as importantly, Rae considers how this dense structure of neighborhood retailing began to collapse—for example, the vulnerability of small enterprises to larger operations like chain stores that generated increasingly efficient economies of scale and thus undercut prices.
Rae finds that chain stores in New Haven appeared as early as 1913 and by 1950 had destroyed most neighborhood shops. The city’s locality-based business geography also depended on a “permissive treatment of mixed-use neighborhoods by government,” a civic attitude that would be replaced by the mentality of single-use zoning, which New Haven adopted in 1926.
Chapter 4, “Living Local,” describes the intimate connectedness between residents and their urban world—so much so, Rae suggests, that most residents could not imagine themselves in any way separate or distinct from that world:
A fully grounded city citizen would work full time within her city, would live her nights and evenings there, would educate her children there, would routinely shop in stores there, would worship there if anywhere, would live in a social network pinned down on the city. Its streets, saloons, restaurants, corner stores, plant gates, ballparks, and many more very particular and localized features would organize her life. It would be hard to say who she is without reference to her city (p. 113-14).
Again largely through maps, Rae considers the residential geography of New Haven’s working and affluent classes [see maps, following pages]. Almost all employees, whether factory workers or Yale professors, lived near their jobs. Sometimes the best-paid and working-class citizens lived close to each other, though Rae also finds that there were important boundaries that marked the well-to-do neighborhoods from the rest of New Haven.
These urban dwellers might not like all the ways the city contributed to their daily life, but the resulting world was inescapable: “the person’s sense of well-being and her sense of the place’s well-being would be intertwined: it would be hard for her to think all was well with her personally, or with her family, if the neighborhood was going to hell” (p. 114). One result was a kind of unself-consciously reinforced urban civility whereby citizens of different ethnicity, race, and economic class more or less “got on.”
Above: New Haven’s grocery stores projected over trolley lines and the city’s nine-square central grid, 1913 (p. 87). Numbers indicate neighborhoods. All maps © 2003 Yale University.
Self-Government in Place
In chapter 5, Rae examines the hundreds of volunteer organizations—football clubs, musical groups, religious organizations, and the like—that provided opportunities for community participation in New Haven. These institutions, whether formalized or informal, provided a kind of social capital that played a major role for New Haven’s governance in allowing “people to engage with one another, and to build trust across lines of difference” (p. 204).
In chapter 6, Rae examines city government in greater detail, finding it to be, most of the time, honest and well-intentioned but not “particularly farsighted or nimble….” (p. xiii). Rae concludes that, in many ways, city government was marginal to the economic and lived vitality of New Haven because the era was a time of “self-governance” in which “urban society regulated or resolved most of its own conflicts, so that formal government needed to enter into only a few of them” (p. 203). He explains:
The pressures of centered development, with factory jobs abundantly available, was part of the story. The dense fabric of enterprise, with perhaps three thousand retailers holding down street-corner and mid-block sites throughout the working-class neighborhoods and the downtown, was at once a normative force (‘eyes on the street’, as Jane Jacobs would say) and a major layer of opportunity for each generation of workers and their families.
The relatively thick layer of housing, thickest of all near industrial plants, was of very uneven quality, yet its residents appear to have regulated their neighborhoods with admirable success. The joint impact of housing and retailing was almost certainly a critical element of self-regulating urbanism (p. 203).
Above: Homes of corporate CEOs, projected over New Haven’s upscale neighborhoods, 1913 (p. 129).
Above: Homes of New Haven clerks, 1913 (p. 125).
Remaking Urban Liveliness
A practical problem in recreating lively cities is that Rae’s old urbanism just happened—it unfolded for the most part spontaneously because of a particular constellation of historical, geographic, economic, and technological circumstances. If we are to reproduce lively urban places today, we must understand self-consciously how these places work and how physical design might contribute to their everyday dynamism.
Unfortunately, Rae’s practical suggestions for urban regeneration are sketchy and steeped in the pragmatist ideas of conventional policy and planning. For example, he emphasizes, at the community level, the importance of historic preservation and adaptive reuse as a way to conserve “the ambience of an earlier age” and suggests that, through a renewed volunteerism, civic organizations might be resuscitated.
In regard to changes at larger environmental scales, he calls for a return to mixed-use zoning and hopes for community building across the complex web of municipal agencies and boundaries that today too often work independently and thus fracture and divide urban regions. He asks for a rethinking of federal public housing programs, particularly the need to find “less isolating ways to improve housing conditions for the urban poor” (p. 424). He argues that all levels of municipal government must be simplified, and elected officials given more authority as they are also made more accountable.
Curiously, Rae suggests that so far the most important 21st-century effort to recreate the traditional city is “New Urbanism,” the urban design movement that seeks to create walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods where buildings of a uniform architectural style shape coherent public spaces for neighborly sociability.
I agree with Rae that New Urbanism is a significant attempt to remake urban place, though it must also be said that many New Urbanist projects remain formalist stage sets rather than living places.
In this regard, Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of American Cities (1961) continues to be the single best understanding of the traditional city because her central notion of “street ballet” recognizes and unravels the intimate interconnectedness between urban lifeworlds and designable qualities of the physical city—i.e., mixed primary uses, small blocks, concentration of users, and range of building types.
Rae’s book provides valuable corroborating evidence for Jacobs’ street ballet, but practical guides for making street ballet happen in today’s cities are better found in Christopher Alexander’s theory of environmental wholeness and Bill Hillier’s theory of space syntax.
Their ideas, coupled with Jacobs’, demonstrate ways in which urban parts might better relate to city wholes. Hillier’s work is pivotal because it uncovers the inescapable relationship between pathway structure and the lively street ballet that graced Rae’s old urbanism and must grace any city and its districts if they are truly to be healthy urban places.
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