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Devices and designs:
sources of good urbanism
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DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
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dramatic impact of its odd setting. Places don’t get
much odder for an urbanist that rural Mississippi,
but that’s where we are headed to next.
That we can travel to rural Mississippi in America’s
Deep South and find ourselves in the midst of a
sophisticated, self-made urban environment of close-
packed streets and squares affirms our belief in tradi-
tional forms of urbanism. The Neshoba County
Fairgrounds, a little over eight miles southwest of the
small town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, demonstrate
an unambiguous urge to be urban in the most
unlikely setting. This Mississippi backwater is chiefly
remembered in history for the brutal slaying of sev-
eral civil rights activists during the early 1960s, while
they were campaigning for the right to vote for
American blacks. But some attitudes have changed in
the last 40 years, and the Neshoba County
Fairgrounds provide an odd mix of Southern conserva-
tism and religious fervor combined with a lively
sociability and ardent festivities. The cultural impor-
tance of Neshoba in the American South was illus-
trated when California Governor Ronald Reagan
chose the Fair as the site of his announcement that he
was running for President of the United States in the
1980 election.
For British readers we should explain that the
annual county fairs and larger state fairs in America
are very important events in the life of communities.
There is a strong agricultural bias to the Neshoba
event, but the festivities, which last only a week, also
include fairgrounds with rides, carousels, and
sideshows (called ‘Midways’ in America) and horse
races. The closest English equivalent would be a com-
bination of a County Show, the annual regatta week
at holiday resorts around the coast, and a large village
fete, but this doesn’t really come close in terms of
scope and activity. One of the most interesting things
about these community festivals is that they often
include permanent structures on site, used only for
the hectic few weeks in the summer for the fair and
its preparation. The Neshoba County Fairgrounds
are unusual in that the community of self-built two-
storey wooden cabins resembles a permanent town,
laid out in a pattern of streets and squares with a con-
sistent range of building types (Craycroft, 1989) (see
Plate 1 and Figure 4.2).
The arrangement of the buildings on site, together
with their details and materials of construction, have
been controlled by common agreement between the
families, some of whom have inhabited the settle-
ment over several generations since the Fair’s found-
ing in 1895. Families return year after year for the
one week each summer when the place is active with
music, dancing, political and religious rallies, prod-
uce and craft fairs and horse racing events. For the
remainder of the year family members visit the
Fairgrounds occasionally to carry out maintenance
and improvements to their temporary homes.
A Fair Board, acting as a sort of town council,
oversees adherence to the informal zoning regula-
tions, adopted as ‘The House and Garden Rules’ in
1958. These rules set out the overall size and massing
of the buildings (originally 16-feet wide by 30-feet
deep by two storeys high) and specify consistently
tight (four feet) spacing between buildings. The only
exceptions to this spacing are for existing trees; no
tree can be cut without the Fair Board’s approval.
Where trees complicate the spacing of buildings, the
extra width of space is used for ancillary elements like
side porches or extra parking. Figure 4.1 illustrates
how all structures have to face onto public space,
respect ‘build-to’ lines along the streets, and are
required to incorporate double-height front porches
and gable roof forms for the houses (Craycroft:
p. 100). The buildings and spaces produced by the
application of these vernacular urban and architec-
tural conventions blend typological consistency with
many small variations bred of personal taste, prefer-
ence and material choices.
The 16-feet width of the cabins has practical roots:
the construction of the dwellings is generally timber
balloon frame, and the longest available timber came
in 16-foot lengths. Ground floors are raised two to
three feet above the ground to avoid dampness and
termites, and within this gable-roofed two-storey
form, a common suite of secondary items such as
steps, railings, posts and doorways comprise a vocabu-
lary of details.
The Fair Board also monitors new applications for
membership, and has on several occasions agreed to
new ‘subdivisions’ of cabins built as extensions to the
original ‘town form’. These new areas have been con-
structed to regular grids, have wider cabins (24 feet),
and have more enclosed, air-conditioned areas rather
than open porches. These newer extensions to the Fair
lack the charm of the more informal, older neighbor-
hoods, where the specified dimensional order is
warped by site circumstances like trees and gullies to
provide a degree of irregular ‘picturesque’ urbanism
unusual for most American communities (see
Figure 4.2). There is a constant tension between the
traditionalists and the newcomers, pitting authen-
ticity to tradition against modern conveniences
(Craycroft: p. 96). The issues concern more than just
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CHAPTER FOUR
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SOURCES OF GOOD URBANISM
77
aesthetics; when air-conditioned, closed spaces replace
open front porches, the social dynamic changes dra-
matically. People have to be invited inside as opposed
to the casual open neighborliness of the older parts of
the Fairgrounds where the semiprivate/semipublic
nature of the front porches invites a wide range of
social discourse. Suburban priorities of isolation and
separateness are making themselves felt even here.
Despite this suburbanization of social attitudes on
the part of some residents, the design and planning
concepts underlying the Neshoba County Fairgrounds
are distinctly urban, even though it sits in the context
of rural Mississippi. This paradox, while usefully val-
idating our contention that certain forms of tradi-
tional urbanism have universal applicability, can be
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