on foot, bicycle, car or transit, and a place to meet for
business or pleasure over a cup of coffee or a glass of
wine. The street is once again a place of rest and
relaxation, work, entertainment and recreation.
But several critics, particularly in America and
Australia, have castigated traditional urbanism based
on streets and squares as being retrogressive and nos-
talgic, preferring instead either to search for new city
forms or, in some cases, to accept the existing models
as indicative of consumer preference (Sudjic, 1992;
Rybczynski, 1995; Safdie, 1997; Dovey, 1999;
McDougall, 1999; Marshall, 2000; Sorkin, 2001).
These and other critics have bemoaned the fact that
traditional urbanism is by its very nature somewhat
prescriptive, relying as it does upon a set of spatial
types that require adherence to street alignments,
build-to lines and proportional form-to-space
relationships. We have argued our rebuttal to these
rather tired arguments at several points throughout the
text, but a more substantive critique of traditional
urbanism is one that we noted briefly in Chapter 1,
namely that these attempts to create walkable commu-
nities, and the use of traditional urban forms in the
service of those ambitions, merely create stage sets for a
sybaritic ‘café society.’ Such a society, it is claimed, is a
venue purely for the consumption of goods rather than
a place of creative cultural and democratic activities, a
place where the richness and meaning of public life is
reduced to a manufactured spectacle.
This criticism is easier to refute in the context of
the refurbishment and adaptive reuse of buildings in
central city districts, such as Quincy Market in
Boston (1826, refurbished 1978), and Covent
Garden in London (piazza 1631, but extensively
rebuilt several times; market hall 1831, refurbished
1980) (see Figures 5.1 and 6.11). In locations like
these, the urban nodes of entertainment, recreation,
and retail activities have been integrated into an exist-
ing city fabric, often with dramatic improvements
of urban life over a wide area. A similar rationale
of social usefulness also applies to the regeneration of
grayfield sites, turning old, worn-out shopping cen-
ters and commercial districts into new urban villages,
but the fabrication of fresh suburban versions of
these environments on peripheral greenfield sites
raises more difficult questions.
We address the issue of why such developments
around the urban edges of cities are unavoidable in
America in some detail in Chapter 6, and make our
case for turning necessity to advantage. Briefly, we
believe that making new urban villages in the suburbs
can be one of the most useful strategies to introduce a
hierarchy and sense of place into the otherwise
sprawling periphery. They are part of a strategy to
transform the suburbs into a more coherent urban
fabric with discernable centers, neighborhoods and
districts. One reason for the loving to death of Seaside
was the lack of other places like it. Now that more
new developments are being created in the form of
urban villages, we believe the urbanity craved so avidly
by many Americans will evolve from a consumerist
spectacle into a normal setting for everyday life.
This claim is unlikely to quell the critics, but there
is one point on which all can agree. Unlike the
pseudo-public space of the suburban shopping mall,
where the communal space is privately controlled,
the streets, squares and parks in an urban village must
be truly public. This is crucial, for democracy and
urban life cannot flourish in privatized enclaves.
In America, the paradigm of new urban villages as
the settings for middle-class urban spectacles is
increasingly well ensconced in the suburban culture.
Branded as ‘lifestyle centers’ with themed retail and
entertainment venues, these developments profit
from established urban typologies. They utilize urban
blocks with vertical mixed uses of high-density hous-
ing and/or offices over retail stores, and traditional
spatial typologies of Main Street and urban square to
create pedestrian-friendly environments that encour-
age window shopping, browsing and sidewalk dining
in decent weather.
To entice people onto the street or public square is
one of an urban designer’s key objectives. But all
architectural and urban spaces need a program, a set
of anticipated human activities that can take place in
those locations, actions that can transcend passive
consumerism. To meet this need in our American
practice, we construct an ‘ideal user,’ someone we
may best describe as a sort of twenty-first century
flaneur
, an updating of the famous urban dweller
from the boulevards of Paris, immortalized by the
French poet Charles Baudelaire.
In his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life,’ first
printed in the Paris newspaper
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