DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED
PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
30
certainly contributed to the decline of urban form in
America, but even more destructive was the emer-
gence of a completely car-dominated culture. The
automobile, a powerful instrument of convenience,
demanded easy access to such an extent that develop-
ers, planners, and architects allowed its needs to
override almost every other consideration of urban
space and building design. Designing for the car con-
tributed to the decline of urban form in city centers as
countless buildings were demolished for parking lots,
a practice facilitated by American property tax laws.
Land is generally taxed
in America according to its
‘highest and best use’. If a building sits on a parcel of
land, the property owner pays taxes based on the
productive use of that structure, whether occupied or
not. If the owner demolishes the building, his or her
tax bill drops quite dramatically: now the best use for
the land is only a car park, and it’s taxed at a lower
rate. Add to this saving a steady income from parking
fees, and the property owner
has a substantial incen-
tive for demolition. The loss of older buildings in this
manner has reduced many American city centers to
the ubiquitous but arid formula of a cluster of office
towers surrounded by oceans of asphalt parking lots
(see Figure 2.1).
In suburban America the process was, and remains,
just as stark. Since the 1950s the placement of
commercial buildings has been dictated by a simple
formula: buildings were set way back from the street
to make room for large,
asphalt car parks in front,
and without buildings close to the street to advertise
themselves, large signs were positioned at the curb to
catch the eye of the passing customer. The building at
the back of the site became nothing but a blank box
for commerce (it didn’t need windows to lure pedes-
trian shoppers) and simply draped itself with another
large sign or gaudy fake façade to guide the shoppers
to the entrance. It was a singular recipe for con-
venience that gave little or no thought to larger issues
of community aesthetics or pedestrian space.
Architects largely ignored this commercial strip as a
populist environment that
offered no scope for their
design talents, and which, moreover, was beneath their
professional dignity. It wasn’t until 1972 that Robert
Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour star-
tled the profession into reconsidering the suburban
environment with their book
Learning from Las Vegas
,
(as we shall discuss further in Chapter 3), and even
then there was little positive response from architects
for another decade.
Planners were similarly ineffectual. They
created
generic zoning plans and regulations that dealt
with land purely as a commodity rather than an
eco-system, and regulated site layouts purely for the
convenience of automobile traffic. It was as if Ian
McHarg’s treatise
Design with Nature
had never been
written, and America’s fine tradition of urbanism had
never existed. Having painted broad brush categories
of land use across the map,
planners then spent most
of their time administering petty details of entrance
drives and landscape buffers. Neither profession was
looking at the patterns and character of suburban
development from an urban design or environmental
perspective.
In defense of architects and planners, the pace and
extent of this suburban growth in America in the
decades after the end of World War II was over-
whelming. It was difficult for anybody to get a grasp
of the extent of the production of new suburbs.
Growth was so dramatic and intense that a clear
understanding of its causes
and precedents was hard
to come by in the midst of all the activity. Very few
people thought that history had much relevance, but
they were wrong.
The urge to live in the suburbs has a long history.
Two thousand years ago, when the
villa suburbana
was the residence of choice for the Roman elite who
lived on large country estates outside the city, sub-
urban living already carried a distinguished pedigree.
The Latin word,
suburbanus
, meaning ‘near the city,’
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