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E D I T O R I A LD E S I G N I N G F O R G R O W T H A N D C H A N G E

ANDRES SEVTSUK

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The physical pattern of urban infrastructure, the two and three-dimensional geometry of built form and its circulation routes, the shape of public space and paths that con-nect them are key variables deployed by the urban designer to confi gure the change and growth of the city. The urban designer’s intention, through the exploration of different confi gurations and their probable consequences, is to discover the means whereby each part and the whole of the city becomes a better host for the activities of its users. Activities, their location, their intensity and their rate of change can also be variables in the city design process, but more often these attributes of the city are presented as the needs to be accommodated by a proposed change or addition to the city’s confi guration of infrastructure, built form and public space that will enable a city to become a more elegant, generous, just and functional host to human activities.

The relationship between the confi guration of a city’s form and its performance as a host along any of these dimensions has been the subject of some study, and a good deal more assertion. New Urbanism, for instance, has produced numerous claims about the formal structure of low-density housing environments, but only few empirical studies (Song and Knaap 2003). Others have searched vigorously for plausible propositions that would link the qualities of whole cities with their physical confi gurations (Lynch 1984). A great deal of investigation about the quality of city form also takes place in design practice – the making, rather than description of form – where ideas rarely get translated into writing. The ability to synthetize complex social and economic forecasts into formal propositions is inherent to what architects and urban designers do. This issue of Projections – the 10th anniversary issue of the MIT Journal of Planning – has thus invited both academics and practitioners of urban design to presents and review contemporary propositions about the spatial confi guration of the built environment. To focus an otherwise vast range of research, we have centered the issue of Projections 10 on two particular qualities that most urban environments are expected to accommodate over time: the capacity grow and change. We have asked both theorists and practitioners of urban design to refl ect upon design strategies that enable or allow settlements patterns to adapt, with ease and elegance, to changes in use, and to present and refl ect on design strategies that can readily accommodate growth in demand over time.

Theoretical discussions of growth and change have engaged architects, urban de-signers and planners for decades (Lynch 1958; Weeks 1962; Moudon 1986; Kool-haas, Mau et al. 1995; Habraken 1998), but the imperative for elegant and effi cient confi gurations of infrastructure at the scale of the city is again resurfacing due to a

3Sevtsuk

number of recent developments in cities. I would like to briefl y outline three such developments that afffect numerous contemporary cities.

First, explosive expansion of urban settlements in the Global South demands that both practitioners and scholars of urban design be prepared to propose develop-ment patterns that can readily accommodate growth, along with the social, eco-nomic and environmental changes sought in each city. The United Nations projects that between 1.6 and 2.1 billion people will be added to cities around the world by 2030 (UN-HABITAT 2006; UNFPA 2007).1 China alone is projected to accommodate an additional 318 million inhabitants in cities by 2030. So great is this global rate of urbanization that, taken together, it will add a million people to cities around the world every fi ve days between now and 2030. This places high expectations on urban designers and planners around the world. Understanding how the physical environ-ment affects, and desirably benefi ts the development of rapidly expanding cities, constitutes an interesting and urgent agenda for research.

Second, the rapid expansion of urban areas, combined with rising incomes and de-mands for a better life quality, also lead to systematic redevelopment of existing areas of cities. This trend is particularly notable in cities where the existing building stock is poor in quality and renewal generally desired. Redevelopment is in fact closely related to the aforementioned issue of growth on the edges – the outward shift of the urban boundary and the increase of a city’s population not only produce new real estate value on the periphery, but also bring up the value of land in existing areas. For redevelopment of an existing site to occur, the net value of land if developed at a new density must exceed the gross value of land and buildings that currently exist on the site plus the cost of replacing the old building stock. This tipping point is typically reached fi rst at the most accessible areas of the city, where land is of highest value due to convenient access from all parts of the expanding metropolis. Individual par-cels, full blocks, or even entire neighborhoods can thus become targets of redevelop-ment at greater fl oor area ratios that correspond to the new value of land in the larger and wealthier city. Understanding how the formal confi guration of the city affects this process, presents another interesting area of research.

Third, the accelerating pace of innovation, combined with the increasingly migra-tory nature of urban economic activity, also keeps changing the demands that a particular building, street or district face over a relatively short lifespan. On the one hand, the type and rate of change demanded varies by activity. Labor-intensive ac-tivities, whose performance mainly requires direct human inputs, impose relatively stable demands on city form over time. Restaurants, elementary schools, opera houses, courthouses, barber shops and other labor-intensive establishments are of-ten found operating relatively comfortably in historic structures built for their purpose generations ago. Public gatherings and parades often use the same square or the same route for centuries. The human inputs required to perform these activities have changed relatively little over time, allowing city spaces that accommodate them

4 Projections

to remain predictably unaltered. Capital-intensive activities, in contrast, whose per-formance is heavily dependent on technology and machinery, tend to be less forgiv-ing in their demands on the built environment. Factories, laboratories, hospitals and transportation facilities exert irregular and rapidly changing pressure on the facilities and land that house them. Changes in technologies, which these activities rely on,occur quickly, continuously demanding new sizes and confi gurations of form and space to operate in (see for instance the evolution of the MIT campus, as traced by Zafeiriadou in 2006, on the cover of this Journal). A great deal of prior research ad-dressing growth and change in architecture has therefore dealt with capital-intensive buildings like hospitals (Weeks 1960; Cowan and Nicholson 1965; Aylward 1969), universities and research campuses (Smithson and Team10 1966; Zafeiriadou 2006), airports, and so on. Though some argue that the evolution of technology predictably reduces, rather than increases, demands on urban space (Mitchell 1995), evidence from cities around the world suggests that this trend is usually offset by new and disruptive technologies that inevitably initiate unforeseen demands on urban infra-structure. Compatibility confl icts between form and activity often lead to demolition and redevelopment, imposing very considerable environmental, fi scal, and energy costs on cities.

On the other hand, urban economic activity also appear to be growing more mo-bile. In a typical American city, roughly fi ve per cent of all businesses either move or close doors every year (BLS 2008). The majority of retail tenants rent rather than buy their space – a trend that refl ects the footloose nature of the business. Litera-ture in urban economics explains how establishments’ location choices adjust to other establishments’ location patterns around them (Isard 1956; Sevtsuk 2010), and vary according to the life-cycle phase of a business (Shilton and Craig 1999; Green-stone, Hornbeck et al. 2007). Among knowledge-intensive fi rms, for instance, young start-up companies often cluster at high-rent locations that provide easy access to knowledge spillovers and labor transfers (e.g. Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA). As these fi rms’ operations standardize and consolidate over time, they tend to relocate to cheaper land (e.g. Route 128 in Boston’s periphery). Location patterns of urban activities thus constantly shift due to the changing landscape of activities around them, as well as life-cycle changes in their own operations. Contemporary urban infrastructure needs to accommodate rotating tenants and allow these rotations to occur at an accelerated rate.

What strategies do urban designers have at their disposal to address these demands on city form? The seven articles in this issue of Projections outline a number of fresh approaches to thinking about growth and change in the built environment. They range from analyzing particular building typologies and infrastructure elements that have been found to act as generous hosts to shifting use patterns, to institutions, policies and planning processes that are required to support desired change or growth over time. Collectively, these articles scratch the surface of the topic from different angles and start forming a multifaceted picture of questions and solutions that a treatment

5Sevtsuk

of growth and change in the built environment requires. We hope that the discussion that follows will inspire the reader to propose additional ideas and to initiate further research on the topic.

Focusing this issue of Projections on growth and change does not suggest that these two performance characteristics of city form ought to be the primary, let alone only, considerations for urban design. Our intention, on the contrary, is to suggest that though adaptability should indeed be an important consideration in design, it is always embedded amidst other important qualities that urban form has to offer concurrently – delight, stimulus, functionality, and justice to name a few. Our empha-sis on its capacity to accommodate growth and change is simply warranted by our quest for more depth on the issue. We also look forward to debate on other qualities of urban design, the collection of which will hopefully lead us closer to a more holistic understanding of the relationships between urban confi guration an d social life.

ENDNOTES

[1] UNFPA projects an addition of 1.6 billion urbanites between 2008 - 2030. UN-Habitat projects an additional 2.1 billion urbanites between 2000 - 2030.

WORKS CITED

Aylward, M.G. (1969) Towards a Theory for Describing and Designing Adaptability in the Built Environment. Transactions of the Bartlett Society, 7: p. 129-147.

BLS (2008). Private sector establishments by direction of employment change, as a percent of total establishments(1), seasonally adjusted. Business Employment Dy-namics Data By States (Massachusetts), Bureau of Labor Statistics: Table 7.

Cowan, P. and J. Nicholson (1965). Growth and Change in Hospitals. Transactions of the Bartlett Society, 3(1964-65): p. 63-88.

Greenstone, M., R. Hornbeck, et al. (2007). Identifying Agglomeration Spillovers: Evi-dence from Million Dollar Plants. Department of Economics working papers. Cam-bridge, MIT.

Habraken, N.J. and J. Teicher (1998). The structure of the ordinary : form and control in the built environment., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

6 Projections

Isard, W. (1956). Location and space-economy; a general theory relating to industrial location, market areas, land use, trade, and urban structure. [Cambridge], Published jointly by the Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Wiley

Koolhaas, R., B. Mau, et al. (1995). Small, medium, large, extra-large : Offi ce for Met-ropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau. Rotterdam New York, N.Y., 010 Publishers ; Monacelli Press.

Lynch, K. (1958) Environmental Adaptability. Journal of the American Institute of Plan-ners.

Lynch, K. (1984) Good city form. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Moudon, A.V. (1986) Built for change : neighborhood architecture in San Francisco. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. xix, 286 p.

Smithson, A.M. and Team 10. (1966) Team 10 primer. London: Standard Catalogue. 76 p.

Song, Y. and G. -J. Knaap (2003). “New urbanism and housing values: a disaggre-gate assessment.” Journal of Urban Economics 54 (2003): 218–238.

Sevtsuk, A. (2010). Path and Place: A Study of Urban Geometry and Retail Activity in Cambridge and Somerville, MA. Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Cam-bridge, MA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. PhD.

Shilton, L. and S. Craig (1999). “Spatial Patterns of Headquarters.” Journal of Real Estate Research 17(3): 341-364.

UNFPA (2007). State of World Population. New York, NY, United Nations Population Fund.

UN-HABITAT (2006). State of the World’s Cities. New York, NY, United Nations.

Weeks, J. (1963) Indeterminate architecture. Transactions of the Bartlett Society, 2: p. 85-106.

Weeks, J., (1960) Planning for Growth and Change. The Architects’ Journal, (July 1960).

Zafeiriadou, M. (2006) MIT Dept. of Architecture SMArchS Thesist. In the quest of an adaptable built form: studying transformations in the MIT Campus: 208 p.

7Sevtsuk

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I N T RODUC T I ON

JOHN DE MONCHAUX

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The ability to design for growth and change is an essential one for those respon-sible for the invention, making and replacing of human artifacts at every scale, from nano-tubes to nations. In current city planning documents, urban research reports and planning practice the imperative to design – or plan – for growth and change is mentioned much less often than other sought-after performance outcomes such as effi ciency, convenience, equity, justice, elegance, fi t and others. And rarely is there data about signifi cant changes in the setting over time or any monitoring of change in the demands that the intervention was designed to serve.

Recent annual editions of this journal have focused on some of these more familiar aspects of performance such as Justice, Equity and Sustainability (Projections 8, 9), and have examined how these performance outcomes are defi ned, detected and attached to the next generation of designs, plans and policy changes.

In the spring of 2010, Andres Sevtsuk, the editor for this edition of Projections, sug-gested that we investigate current thinking about design for growth and change. Our interest would be on whether and how contemporary design interventions in the land-scape, infrastructure and other elements of the city and their companion processes, plans and policy changes, are being confi gured so as to underwrite their continuing performance in a future when conditions in the settings where they were introduced will have been subject to signifi cant growth and change. Our interest has been to present speculative, theory-based ideas as much as it has been to show examples from practice. We distributed the call for papers in March 2010. With the generous help of our Editorial Board, the willing cooperation and patience of our authors, and the clear-headed energy of our Editor, MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Plan-ning is pleased to present seven papers on designing for growth and change.

In the paper that opens this journal, William Fawcett fi rst reminds us that there has been very little systematic evaluation of the fl ow, magnitude and incidence of benefi ts and burdens that might arise from the explicit provision of fl exibility in the design of buildings and cities to accommodate growth and change. But, he goes on to tell us that there is no such thing as a universally fl exible environment. These somewhat contradictory realities lead him to suggest and demonstrate the use of the fi nancial device of lifecycle options to derive a pattern of benefi ts and costs and how these are distributed.

9de Monchaux

From a close reading of the Team 10 discussions in the 50’s and 60’s and with the benefi t of more recent refl ections by Alison and Peter Smithson, Jaime J Ferrer Forés builds a description of the designs for the Free University of Berlin by Candelis-Josic-Woods and other approaches to the making of city parts of well connected low-rise ‘mat-buildings’. Of additional interest is Ferrer Forés’ recognition that the MIT cam-pus itself constitutes a good example of ‘mat urbanism’. (See this journal’s cover illustrations of MIT’s growth very kindly made available to us from her thesis by Maria Zefeiriadou, SMArchS 2006).

Alexander D’Hooghe also presents the issues surrounding design for growth and change through an art/architectural history lens. He offers an account of the three formal properties successively displayed in the major infrastructure elements of the 20th century city. He suggests that the future city landscape will be enhanced by designs for new highway, drainage and open space elements of the city that meet the tests of a good system, offer their users, in the case of highways, intelligible and rewarding views of the city, and are also conceived and executed as works of art in their own right. The re-building of existing urban areas is often a radical and frequently disruptive path to meet the demands of growth and change in the city. Once committed to that path, those responsible need to be able to summon thoughtful criteria, evidence and good judgment as to what buildings, public spaces, roads and infrastructure to preserve as working parts of the renewed urban area in order that those same facili-ties should serve the rebuilt area. Using a methodology derived from the renewal of the Sham Shui Po district in Hong Kong, the fi nal paper in this journal, by Pui Leng Woo and Ka Man Hui, presents a systematic approach to the determination of ‘what to keep’, given the contribution such physical elements will make to the functions and memories of the renewed district. Of special interest is the case they make for keeping intact certain planes, points and lines embedded in the form of the existing district and able in the future, as they have been in the past, to be drawn upon to help shape the yet unknown and unknowable changes that the district will experience in the more distant future.

The remaining three papers in the journal each present a case or proposition about designing for growth and change in America. But their applicability and/or their out-come, adapted only slightly to respond to local cultural and political structures, is universal.

Grace Catenaccio shows us the workings and weaknesses of growth boundaries legislated in the 1980’s to restrain perimeter development of Portland, Oregon and Las Vegas, Nevada.

Stephen Cassell and Anne Barrett demonstrate an approach to the programming and design of the Greenwich South Area of Lower Manhattan that is based on de-

10 Projections

vising and sharing with all parties in the process confi gurations of built form that will respond to the current goals while keeping open genuine and varied options for change and design in the future.

Sam Bass Warner conveys the seriousness and scale of the disruption to cities and their suburbs that would fl ow from global warming and new economic conditions. In such circumstances he suggests that the considered densifi cation of existing sub-urbs offers the best remedy to the burdens of over extended cities and their infra-structure. To provide a pool of professional skills to underwrite the design and plan-ning of suburban infi ll in elegant and sensitive ways he advocates the organization of local cadres of volunteer architects and planners as an urgent supplement to existing public sector staff.

All the essays, papers and proposals received in response to the call for ideas about designing for growth and change revealed two underlying issues. First, they convey the enormous strength and reach of our abilities to gather and manipulate information about city change and the potential to apply these strengths to better understand the serious and complex issues that arise from such change. Secondly, and perhaps more critically, they remind us that attention to issues of growth and change lies at the root of the broad human concern for an enlargement of the freedoms and choices that can be made available in the future, and of the conviction that informed planning and design can make worthy contribution to that expansion of those choices.

11de Monchaux

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ABSTRACT

Environmental fl exibility is widely desired because of uncertainty about the future, but because it is poorly understood there is a risk of either under- or over-providing for fl exibility. A more systematic understanding is offered by lifecycle options, which unify all aspects of environmental fl exibility and allow the value of fl exibility to be quantifi ed. Lifecycle options are adapted from fi nancial options, but instead of the advanced mathematics used in fi nance, lifecycle options are quantifi ed with straightforward simulation models. Universal fl exibility is impossible and whenever fl exibility is sought it is necessary to specify what the fl exibility is for, by defi ning a relevant set of possible future activity states. This can be done explicitly or by generating all possible activity states that are consistent with available knowledge. Many ingenious design strate-gies for fl exibility already exist, and the lifecycle options approach can help determine when and where and to what extent they should be employed.

I N V E S T I N G I N F L E X I B I L I T Y:T H E L I F E C Y C L E O P T I O N S S Y N T H E S I S

WILLIAM FAWCETT

Cambridge University

13Fawcett

Environmental Flexibility

There is common agreement about the desirability of physical environments that can accommodate growth and change. If future growth and change could be predicted it would present a challenging technical problem but one that would be, in principle, capable of fi nely tuned solutions. However, growth and change cannot be predicted, which is why fl exibility is sought.1

In the absence of credible predictions, people have relied on judgment, (and edu-cated guesswork), when designing and investing in fl exible environments for growth and change. There are two ways in which this could lead to poor outcomes:

• Under-provision for fl exibility, leading to future problems that could have been avoided if there had been better provision for growth and change.

• Over-provision for fl exibility, when provision is made for anticipated future growth and change, but not used.

Under-provision for fl exibility is seen in every urban plan where a street layout scaled for a small settlement survives growth into a large city, creating congestion that is almost impossible to overcome, except by drastic surgery like Haussmann’s in nine-teenth century Paris. Could the need for fl exibility have been anticipated? Perhaps not in mediaeval Paris, but London rebuilt on its mediaeval plan after the Great Fire of 1666, despite the forward-looking proposals by Wren, Hooke and others.

A classic example of over-provision for fl exibility is the Free University of Berlin by Candilis-Josic-Woods. Won in competition in 1963 and built in 1967-74, it is an inde-terminate two-storey network (Figures 1, 2). The architects sought ‘a tentative use of a minimum structuring system where individuals and groups may determine desirable relationships’ (Joedicke, 1968). In their design concept, ‘The need for the building to be adaptable to different work programs has been dealt with through a fl exible system “in the four dimensions”. … So a totally industrialized fl exible constructional system has been adopted as the standard for this building. … Entire blocks of the building can be dismantled and put up again elsewhere’ (CJW, 1975). The building was a disaster. There was physical disintegration, institutional collapse and vandalism (Bensing, 2005). By the 1990s a major refurbishment was required. Comparison of the plans in 1974 and post-refurbishment show that the building envelope did not move, and the main internal alteration was the division of larger spaces into small offi ces – which could be done in studwork without the totally fl exible construction system. It seems that the architects drastically over-valued the excessive (as it turned out) provision of physical interchangeability.

There are many examples of mismatches between investment in fl exibility and the

14 Projections

change that actually happens. To identify effi cient strategies for environmental fl ex-ibility, minimising the risk of under- and over-provision, a more rigorous approach is needed.

Lifecycle Options

Over the last ten years or so a proposal for transforming environmental fl exibility into a well-defi ned and quantifi able environmental attribute has been developed in Cambridge, UK, based around the core concept of ‘lifecycle options’.2 The research began with a study of evaluation tools for the sustainable refurbishment of existing buildings: designers come up with many ingenious ideas – but which ideas are best? Evaluating sustainability requires a long-term perspective, which should be provided by whole-life costing. But current methods of whole-life costing assume that the future can be predicted, an impossible precondition. The research developed a new approach to whole-life costing that acknowledges future uncertainty, and favours fl exible strategies that can respond to unfolding events.

In this approach, a lifecycle option is a feature of a design or plan that makes it pos-sible for new decisions to be made in the future. A simple example: if the future size of a hospital, university or factory is uncertain, build for current requirements and retain open space into which the buildings could be expanded. The retention of open space creates the lifecycle option to expand, which has fl exibility value even though it is not known when, if ever, the expansion will be carried out. Lifecycle options trans-fer decision-making from people in the present to people in the future who will know more about the changing state of the world.

All existing propositions about environmental fl exibility can be restated precisely in lifecycle options terms; for example, the lifecycle option of retaining land for future

15Fawcett

Figure 1. The Free University, Berlin, under construction in 1970 (Candilis-Josic-Woods, architects). A complicated kit-of-parts construction system provided opportunities for reconfi guration that were never used.

Figure 2. The bland interior of the Free University, Berlin, that resulted from a uniform, indeterminate and suppos-edly fl exible design strategy (photo David Heath, 2009).

expansion is seen in every master plan where phase two growth is indicated with

arrows and dotted lines. There are two reasons for adopting the lifecycle options

framework. First, diverse and apparently disconnected mechanisms for providing

fl exibility, for example, managerial and physical strategies, can be unifi ed in a consis-

tent framework; and more importantly, the lifecycle options framework gives a way of

measuring and putting a value on fl exibility, which up to now has been out of reach.

When the value of a fl exible project incorporating lifecycle options is quantifi ed, it can

be compared to the cost of providing the options – if value exceeds cost it is worth

investing in the fl exible project, otherwise not. By valuing lifecycle options the risk of

under- or over-provision for fl exibility is minimized.

There are many kinds of lifecycle option. Some are embedded options: they exist

even when they are not recognized. For example, a suburban bungalow with a large

garden might be sold for a higher price than its owners expected, because they did

not realize that they held the option to demolish the bungalow and develop a block of

fl ats. Overlooking option value leads to incorrect valuation – usually under-valuation.

Other lifecycle options are acquired by some deliberate action. For example, a parcel

of land without road access to a highway cannot be developed for housing, but if its

owner buys a strip of land that is wide enough for an access road, he creates the

option to develop the landlocked parcel. The increased value due to the develop-

ment option must exceed the price paid for the access strip, or the deal wouldn’t go

ahead.

Lifecycle options can be destroyed as well as created. For example, if a Victorian

warehouse on a city centre site is declared a historic monument and protected from

demolition, the option to redevelop the site is destroyed. The loss of the option re-

duces the value of the warehouse, or more accurately the value of the land on which

it sits.

Environmental value is affected by other people’s lifecycle options. One reason why

tenants buy the freehold of the house they are renting is to eliminate the landlord’s

option to terminate the tenancy. An option was one factor when the architect Sir

Albert Richardson and his wife were house-hunting in 1909: ‘Cavendish house in the

London Road, St Albans, happened to be on a lease with the option to purchase

and they took it because of its attractive front facade with Gothick sash windows’

(Houfe, 1980).

When an environment has embedded lifecycle options that are unrecognized they still

exist, but there are two problems. First, lifecycle options contribute to environmen-

tal value, so if they are overlooked the environment may be undervalued. Second,

unrecognized lifecycle options may be inadvertently destroyed. For example, when

Victoriana was out of fashion many ornate shop fronts were boxed out or removed;

boxing out retained the lifecycle option to reinstate when Victoriana came back into

16 Projections

fashion – as it now has – but removal destroyed this option. When removing Victori-ana, the option to reinstate was ignored or assumed to be of negligible value, but the cycle of fashion is so inexorable that boxing did have positive option value.

Lifecycle options can explain phenomena that are otherwise puzzling; for example, why are valuable city center sites used for car-parking (Figure 3)? Because the prop-erty owners believe that it is more valuable to retain the option to develop in the future than to proceed with current development in unfavourable market conditions. The owners rent the space as a parking lot and retain the lifecycle option to develop when the market changes. An option-holder can always choose whether it is more advantageous to exercise the option or retain it for possible future exercise – until the option expires.

The principles of lifecycle options are presented in the book New Generation Whole-life Costing (Ellingham & Fawcett, 2006); many examples in the book are at building scale but the ideas are equally applicable at urban scale.

The Real Options Paradigm

Lifecycle options are based on a direct analogy with fi nancial options. Financial op-tions have a long and controversial history, and only became fully accepted with the publication in 1973 of the revolutionary Black-Scholes equation for establishing the fair price for an option.3 Options are now an integral part of fi nancial trading and were implicated in the recent fi nancial crisis, but as Akerlof and Shiller note, ‘…there are two sides to creative fi nance: it may have gotten us into this crisis, but its genius may also get us out of it’ (Akerlof & Shiller 2009, p.92).

In a fi nancial option, a deal is struck to buy or sell fi nancial commodities at an agreed price within a specifi ed time, but the option holder can choose whether or not to complete the transaction. The option holder has to buy this option contract, usually for a much smaller sum than the transaction itself. The option holder exercises the option and completes the transaction if it is fi nancially advantageous to do so (the option is ‘in the money’), otherwise it is allowed to lapse (the option is ‘out of the money’) and the premium paid for the option is lost. When the option contract is

17Fawcett

Figure 3. High-value city centre sites in Toronto in low-value car-parking use: the sites’ value comes from the lifecycle option to develop when the market for offi ce de-velopment improves, not from car-parking income.

drawn up, it is uncertain whether the option will turn out to be ‘in the money’ or ‘out

of the money’ (Brealey et al, 2007, explain fi nancial options).

The two basic forms of fi nancial option are the ‘call’ and the ‘put’ – options to buy

and options to sell.

A call option confers the right but not the obligation to buy an asset at a specifi ed

price, within a given timescale. If the market price of the asset rises above the strike

price the option is ‘in the money’ and is exercised; if the market price remains below

the strike price the option stays ‘out of the money’, so it expires unexercised and the

premium is lost. If the option is exercised, the difference between the market price

and the exercise price is profi t for the option-holder.

A put option is the mirror-image of a call. It confers the right but not the obligation to

sell an asset at a specifi ed price, within a given timescale. If the market price of the

asset drops below the strike price the option is ‘in the money’ and is exercised; if the

market price remains above the strike price the option stays ‘out of the money’, so it

expires unexercised and the premium is lost. If the option is exercised, the difference

between the market price and the exercise price is profi t for the option-holder.

When options ideas are used in business rather than fi nancial markets, they are

called real options (Mun, 2006). Willis describes the use of options in the assembly

of sites for the interwar New York skyscrapers, two generations before the Black-

Scholes equation: ‘Keeping the scope of their plans secret so as to protect against

“hold-outs”, brokers would approach owners of various plots to arrange for [call]

options in the names of different companies’ (Willis 1995, p.160). If options could be

successfully acquired for all the plots forming a skyscraper site, they would be ‘in the

money’ and exercised so that redevelopment could proceed; if the whole site could

not be assembled, the options that had been acquired would be allowed to lapse.

All lifecycle options give value to the option-holder because they are only exercised

if it is advantageous to so, but option value varies greatly from case to case and de-

pends on the following factors:

1. The amount of uncertainty: In a situation with no uncertainty about the future,

lifecycle options are pointless. As the amount of uncertainty about the future

increases, the value of lifecycle options increases as well.

2. Duration of the option: Some lifecycle options are effectively perpetual, like a

property owner’s option to sell. Others have a fi xed term; for example, planning

consents in the UK are usually valid for fi ve years – if the option to develop is not

exercised within that period it lapses. The longer the life of an option, the higher

its value.

18 Projections

3. The probability of exercising the option: Every option has a trigger point, and if this point is reached it will be exercised, but the probability of reaching the trigger point varies. A lifecycle option has nil value to an investor who does not believe that it could ever be exercised. Compare, for example, two lifecycle options em-bedded in a power station for electricity generation: there is a higher probability of exercising the option to switch fuels from coal to oil than the option to switch use from a coal-fi red power station to an art gallery – although both options were successively exercised at the Bankside Power Station in London, which is now the Tate Modern gallery. The greater the probability of exercising a lifecycle op-tion, the higher its value.

4. The time to exercise: The value of lifecycle options is derived from future benefi ts, and the phenomenon of time preference tells us that people attach more value to a benefi t that is received today compared to the same benefi t received a year from now, and much more than if it is received far in the future. People have dif-ferent intensities of time preference; a Cambridge college, for example, recently bought the option to acquire a river-front site in 125 years time; the college was founded over 700 years ago and took a long-term view, but even so the option would have been more valuable with an earlier exercise date. The earlier the prob-able exercise date of a lifecycle option, the higher its value.

5. The cost of exercising the option: Some options can be exercised at no cost; for example, if a building is repainted every fi ve years, there is a no cost option to change the colour every fi ve years. Most options incur a cost penalty when they are exercised; compare, for example, two technologies that provide the option to move non-structural partitions in a building: if the partitions are made of plastered blockwork it is slow, disruptive and expensive to exercise the option, but if they are made of demountable panels it is much quicker and cheaper to exercise the option – so people are prepared to pay more for demountable partitions. The lower the cost of exercising a lifecycle option, the higher its value.

6. The resulting benefi t: The value of a lifecycle option depends on the scale of the benefi t that would be derived from exercising it. For example, the benefi t derived from exercising an option to change colour when repainting a building is modest. On the other hand, the benefi t from exercising an option to extend the building stock of a university is very great – without it the university’s development might be strangled. This is why the new universities founded in the UK in the 1960s had large sites of at least 80 hectares, even though start-up student numbers were tiny: the cost of acquiring and retaining empty land bought the valuable option to expand. The value of a lifecycle option increases with the scale of the benefi t that would result from exercising it.

These principles can be applied qualitatively when evaluating the lifecycle options or fl exibility – indeed ‘options thinking’ is perhaps a greater contribution to good

19Fawcett

decision-making than quantifi cation. However, quantifi cation of lifecycle options, and hence fl exibility, is also possible in many situations.

Quantifying Lifecycle Option Value

The range of possible lifecycle options is unlimited, but they fall into three main types:

• Lifecycle options to expand/upgrade: for example, when specifying the infra-structure for a new urban extension, providing generous infrastructure capacity in relation to initial needs will create the lifecycle option to add further develop-ment. This corresponds to a typical strategy for environmental fl exibility – the provision of redundancy or overcapacity, like the street grid of Manhattan.

• Lifecycle options to switch: for example, many non-prime offi ce buildings in Lon-don have been changed to residential use – the offi ce buildings had an embed-ded lifecycle option to switch use, even though it may not have been an objec-tive in the original design. There are also acquired switch options, for example, when a high price dual-fuel boiler is specifi ed because it creates the option to switch fuels in response to future changes in fuel costs and supplies. Provision for changing the use of a building, even when no physical adaptation is required, is also an example of a switch option.

• Lifecycle options to contract/abandon: for example, most multi-phase master plans are changed or abandoned before completion, so there is merit in de-vising plans that work well at each stage, even if later stages never happen. This corresponds to the concept of robust plans discussed by Rosenhead et al, although they do not use options terminology (Rosenhead et al., 1972).

Lifecycle options can derive from physical characteristics of the environment, like non-structural partitions that are easier to relocate, and they can also derive from social conventions or legal/contractual arrangements, for example, planning rules that permit change of use.

The ways of calculating lifecycle option value are similar for all types. The sophisti-cated techniques developed for valuing fi nancial options would be the natural starting point, but in fact they are of limited value. There are three reasons: fi rst, fi nancial com-modities are interchangeable and transactions repeatable, whereas all environments have unique characteristics; second, there are large and accurate databases of past fi nancial transactions, providing input data for advanced mathematical modeling, whereas historic data about environments is patchy and vague; and third, the fi nan-cial industry employs many high-powered mathematicians, but there are few working in construction or the environment.

20 Projections

As a result, lifecycle options are usually valued with relatively straightforward simula-tion methods, as in the examples in New Generation Whole-life Costing (Ellingham & Fawcett, 2006). The following example of a lifecycle option to expand/upgrade is based on a viaduct over a valley in Toronto that was built in 1919.4 The viaduct was initially required for road traffi c, but the city was aware that a new railway commuter line might be built later along the same route. The new viaduct could be built for road traffi c only, or with a road and railway deck, or with a roadway and the lifecycle option to add a future railway deck. Thus the city had three viaduct alternatives:

A. road-only viaduct, costing $30m (all prices adjusted to today’s values)B. viaduct with an upper roadway and a railway on a lower deck, costing $38mC. viaduct with an upper roadway and the lifecycle option to add a railway on a lower

deck, costing $34m – the option adding $4m to the cost of a road-only bridge.

Additional data:

Exercise cost of adding railway, if lifecycle option acquired: $6mCost of building separate railway viaduct: $20mProbability and timing of a new commuter line: 60% probability within 50 yearsDiscount rate to refl ect time preference: 2.75% per year (a low rate for public invest-ment).

The uncertain future as viewed from 1919 was simulated with 500 scenarios, in each of which the year of constructing the new commuter line, or of not constructing it within 50 years, was generated using random numbers; in Alternative C, this would be the date of exercising the lifecycle option to add the railway to the viaduct. The three viaduct alternatives were evaluated for all of the 500 scenarios, and the costs incurred in carrying the commuter line across the valley discounted back to 1919 using the 2.75% per annum discount rate, giving the present value at the time when the decision had to be made. The result is shown in Table 1: Alternative C, with the lifecycle option to upgrade the viaduct, performs best in the simulation.

The viaduct was in fact built with the lifecycle option to add a railway (Alternative C), but the Great Depression and World War II – unexpected events! – intervened and the commuter line was not constructed until 1966, 47 years after the option had been acquired. Had the city known in 1919 that the commuter line would be constructed in 1966 they would have gone for the cheapest viaduct with a roadway only (Alternative A) – but with the uncertain knowledge that was actually available in 1919 their deci-sion to invest in the lifecycle option was rational.

It is important to realize that all decisions about lifecycle options and fl exibility have to be made with present knowledge, despite the fact that it is incomplete. If better knowledge were available, it would be used. Decision-makers know that later events will supersede their knowledge but this does not help them at all – except to reinforce

21Fawcett

the wisdom of providing lifecycle options.

Envisaging Possible Activity States

In the viaduct example the alternative strategies were evaluated with reference to a set of scenarios refl ecting the decision-makers’ state of knowledge about possible future events. If a different set of scenarios had been used, the strategies would have been valued differently. Is there a paradox? – fl exible strategies are sought because it is impossible to predict the future, but the evaluation of fl exibility requires that pos-sible futures are specifi ed.

It is not a paradox, but it demonstrates something about fl exibility that is not always acknowledged. Environmental fl exibility cannot be added in ever-increasing quanti-ties until eventually a universally fl exible environment is achieved – one that could ac-commodate all possible future demands of any kind. This is fantasy: there is no such thing as a universally fl exibile environment. Any environment can accommodate a range of activity states – some environments are tightly adapted for a narrow range of activities, for example, a nuclear power station site, and others can be used in many different ways, for example, a gridded city like Manhattan. Environments with a wider range of possible uses are certainly more fl exible, but each environment is fl exible in a specifi c way. Manhattan is much more fl exible than a nuclear power station site, but it cannot accommodate a nuclear power station.

Thus, when environmental fl exibility is sought, one has to be able to answer the ques-tion – what is the fl exibility for? One might imagine that fl exibility makes the question

22 Projections

Alternative A:road viaduct only

Alternative B:road and railway

viaduct

Alternative C:road viaduct with lifecycle option

to add railway

Initial cost $30m £38m $34m

Action when and if commuter line

constructed

Build new railway viaduct, costing

$20mNo action required

Exercise option to add railway, costing $6m

Present value of cost of action, discounted to

1919 – average of 500 scenarios

$7.4m 0 $2.2m

Total $37.4m $38m $36.2m

Table 1: Simulation results of lifecycle options for a viaduct over a valley in Toronto as seen in 1919.

irrelevant, but this is incorrect. It is answered by defi ning a set of possible activity states, not states of confi guration of the physical environment – a static environment may be able to accommodate all relevant activity states without physical change.

If a design with a changeable physical environment is put forward as a strategy for fl exibility without an explicit statement about the relevant set of future activity states, then the design implicitly defi nes its fl exibility by the activity sates that it can actually accommodate – and the fl exibility may be of limited value. This seems to have been the case at the Free University, Berlin: the physical fabric could be changed, but it was not clear what activity states would require the physical change, and in fact there was very little physical change.

The Ensemble of Possible Activity States

In some cases the question ‘what is the fl exibility for?’ can be answered with a list of the relevant activity states; for example, a family house might require fl exibility to accommodate the successive stages of a family with young children, older children, and then elderly parents. But broader ranges of activity states can be defi ned by possible attribute values, not an exhaustive list; for example, a hospital accident and emergency centre might require fl exibility to cope with demand between 100 and 200 patients per day and a male-female ratio between 60% and 40%. From the specifi ed attribute ranges future scenarios can be simulated, as in the 500 scenarios for the viaduct example.

This is getting close to what Wiener termed the Gibbsian approach (Wiener, 1954), named after the Yale physicist J W Gibbs (1839-1903): ‘Gibbs’ innovation was to consider not one world, but all the worlds that are possible answers to a limited set of questions concerning our environment.’ The answers are termed the ensemble of possible states of the system. ‘If all objects are given, then at the same time all pos-sible states of affairs are also given,’ as Wittgenstein observed (Wittgenstein, 1922, §2.0124).

Specifying the ensemble of all possible activity states may seem over-ambitious, but the level of description can exclude unnecessary detail. Take a pared-down but impor-tant example: the ways that a population of people can divide into separate groups. This is important for matching the physical environment to activities – when visiting a cinema a population is grouped together in a single space, but at a hotel a population is divided into sub-groups requiring many smaller spaces. The possible groupings of a population can be enumerated: for a population of four people there are fi ve group-ings (Figure 4a), and for a population of seven people there are 15; for larger popu-lations the numbers rise quickly (Fawcett, 1979b). If the population is made up of distinct individuals, the number of ways that they can arrange themselves into a par-ticular pattern of grouping can also be enumerated: these can be called microstates

23Fawcett

associated with the grouping (Figure 4b). There is wide variation in the number of microstates associated with different groupings; if the individuals in a population were able join groups in an unconstrained way, one would imagine that each microstate would have equal probability of occurrence and that the groupings with most associ-ated microstates would be more likely to occur. This means that the probable pat-terns of grouping in a population can be anticipated, even when there is no informa-tion about people’s names, age, social class, reasons for joining other individuals, etc.

Following this line of reasoning, mathematical analysis predicts that the most prob-able groupings will follow a characteristic skewed pattern, with few very small groups, many quite small groups, and a diminishing number of groups as the size gets larger. Mathematically it is a positive Poisson distribution (Fawcett, 1979a).5 This theoretical result can be compared with empirical studies of free-forming groups carried out independently by James (James 1951, 1953). He observed regularities that matched the skewed distribution described above, and Coleman concluded that the observed groupings followed a positive Poisson distribution (Coleman & James, 1961) – a grat-ifying convergence of theoretical and empirical investigations. Both studies worked with highly simplifi ed activity descriptions: choosing attributes parsimoniously is cru-cial for the Gibbsian approach.

Designing for Activity Uncertainty

How does this connect to environmental fl exibility? Flexibility is sought because of uncertainty about future activity states, but the Gibbsian approach shows that we often know more about possible activities than we realise. This knowledge should be used.

Consider a worked example, about the design of a set of seminar rooms for a uni-

24 Projections

Figure 4a. (left) There is a fi nite number of ways that a population can divide into groups – for a population of 4 there are pre-cisely 5 possible groupings.

Figure 4b. (right) If the members of the population are distinct individuals, it is pos-sible to enumerate microstates showing the possible ways that the individuals can form the groupings. The microstates are not evenly distributed across groupings. If all microstates are equally likely to occur, the number of associated microstates is a measure of the groupings’ probability of oc-currence. If there is uncertainty about future grouping of a population, it is reasonable to believe that the groupings with the largest number of associated microstates are more likely to occur.

versity department with 80 students. Because the sizes of seminar groups is unpre-dictable a fl exible design is required. Simplifying the problem, suppose that seminar groups are always made up of multiples of 10 students; then there are 22 possible seminar groupings, with 4945 microstates (Figure 5a); as before, the groupings have varying numbers of microstates, so are not equally likely to occur.

Suppose there are three alternative designs to evaluate (Figure 5b): (A) has four mov-ing partitions that allow it to adopt 16 (i.e. 24) layout confi gurations; (B) has a slightly larger fl oor area but no moving partitions; and (C) is like (B) but with just one fi xed par-tition replaced with a moving partition – it can adopt two layout confi gurations. When the three designs are compared with the Gibbsian ensemble of seminar microstates, (A) performs worst and (C) best. The results are shown in the Table 2.

It is evident that a design which aims to provide fl exibility for activity change must be evaluated by comparison with possible activities, not by counting the number of

25Fawcett

Grouping Seminar group sizes Microstates 1 80 1 2 70 10 8 3 60 20 28 4 60 10 10 28 5 50 30 56 6 50 20 10 168 7 50 10 10 10 56 8 40 40 35 9 40 30 10 280 10 40 20 20 210 11 40 20 10 10 420 12 40 10 10 10 10 35 13 30 30 20 280 14 30 30 10 10 280 15 30 20 20 10 1680 16 30 20 10 10 10 560 17 30 10 10 10 10 10 56 18 20 20 20 20 105 19 20 20 20 10 10 420 20 20 20 10 10 10 10 210 21 20 10 10 10 10 10 10 28 22 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 1 4945

Fig 5a. The 22 possible states of grouping for seminars with 80 students, when seminar sizes are in mul-tiples of 10 students; and the associated number of seminar microstates.

Figure 5b. Three alternative designs for a set of seminar rooms, where each spatial module can accom-modate 10 students. Alternative A has eight spatial modules; Alternatives B and C have nine. The partitions between modules are fi xed partitions (solid line) or movable partitions (zig-zag line).

different physical confi gurations. Designers may fi nd this unwelcome, as they have control over the physical environment and can expend their ingenuity on ways of increasing physical changeability. But to produce fl exible designs or plans they have to engage with activity uncertainty, and the Gibbsian approach makes this possible even when there is little specifi c data about activities. It is not tenable to argue that provision for maximum physical reconfi guration is a valid response to activity uncer-tainty.

This theory was put into practice in the new building for the Faculty of English in the University of Cambridge (Allies and Morrison, architects, 2004) (Figure 6a, 6b). The author proposed that the sizes of seminar rooms should approximate to a positive Poisson distribution, with few very small rooms, more quite small rooms and a small number of larger rooms, as shown in Table 3.6

This proposal is in contrast to the ‘modularity bias’ of many architects who assume that a set of identical rooms will be most fl exible. The Poisson-derived seminar room strategy was carried out in the Faculty of English and feedback from users of the new building has been positive – so far.

Table 2 Possible layout confi gurations of layouts A, B and C in Figure 5b.

Table 3 The proposed distribution of seminar room sizes at the Faculty of English building in the University of Cambridge.

26 Projections

Alternative A: Alternative B: Alternative C:

Possible layout confi gurations

16 1 2

Possible seminar groupings accom-modated (max 22)

7 3 5

Possible seminar microstates ac-commodated (max 4945)

1695 2660 3290

Room type and size Number

small group/supervision room (3 people)

small class/seminar room (16 people)

class/seminar room (24 people)

classroom (30 people)

large classroom (70 people)

lecture room (100 people)

3

2

2

3

1

1

Conclusion

This paper has argued that environmental fl exibility for future growth and change in activities is derived from lifecycle options, and that fl exible strategies must be evalu-ated by comparison with an ensemble of relevant activity states. It is a pragmatic approach that attempts to make the concept of fl exibility precise, quantifi able and useful.

The history of fl exibility as a design objective has been far from precise, quantifi able and useful. It has sometimes been elevated to inappropriate prominence and used to justify crushing banality or irrational extravagance. The Free University, Berlin, falls into the fi rst category (and the banality was expensive to build); the Centre Pompidou7, Paris, falls into the second, where fl exibility ‘seems to have led to an overschematic solution … It is diffi cult to envisage any function which would require an unimpeded fi fty-metre span with a height limitation of seven metres’ (Colquohoun, 1981, pp.116-117). Neither tendency would be supported by a rational understanding of fl exibility.

Even when fl exibility has been pursued soberly, it has been unfocused. Lifecycle op-tions to enhance/upgrade, to switch elements, or to contract/abandon are often en-countered in the literature on design for fl exibility, although the options terminology is

27Fawcett

Figure 6a. The sizing of seminar rooms in the new Faculty of English building in the University of Cambridge (Allies and Morrison, architects, 2004) was based on an approximation to the positive Poisson distribution, to provide fl exibility when there is uncertainty about the size of seminar groups.

Figure 6b. A design study for the ground fl oor of the Faculty of English building shows the size variation of seminar rooms (upper part of plan). The smaller seminar rooms were distributed around the building.

new. For example, Weeks’ papers on ‘indeterminate architecture’ and ‘multi-strategy buildings’ offer a fairly comprehensive overview of what can be done by architects to create lifecycle options (Weeks 1963; 1969). What is missing is a method for evalu-ating the options and deciding when and where and to what extent they should be employed.

The opportunities for re-inventing the wheel in design for fl exibility seem inexhaust-ible. The catalogue of ingenious ideas in Flexible Housing by Schneider and Till is depressing, partly because of the duplication of design effort, but especially because no effort is made to test the ideas assembled so laboriously, either by simulation or by surveying the experience in use of the projects that were built (Schneider & Till, 2007). It implies that the fi eld is open for the endless recycling of untested ideas.

By demystifying environmental fl exibility the lifecycle options approach may strip the topic of some of its fascination, but if the approach can increase the long-term value of construction investment this will be a fair exchange.

ENDNOTES

[1] In this context the words fl exibility and adaptability overlap in meaning. Sometimes a distinction is drawn between the precise meanings of the two words but, confusingly, this is not done in a consistent way. Here the word fl exibility is used exclusively.

[2] The original study of lifecycle options was led by Cambridge Architectural Research Ltd, supported by two grants in the UK Department of Trade & Industry’s ‘Partners in Innovation’ programme of con-struction industry research, 1998-2002. Dr Kanak Patel of the Department of Land Economy in the University of Cambridge participated in the research team. The research is continuing through the European Commission-funded CILECCTA project (2009-13) – see www.cileccta.eu

[3] The Black-Scholes equation for pricing fi nancial options was developed by Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton. Scholes and Merton were awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1997; Black had died in 1995. For a survey see (Boer, 2002).

[4] This example was provided by Dr Ian Ellingham; the viaduct is real but the numbers are illustrative.

[5] The Poisson distribution is a mathematical formulation, defi ned in the early 19th century, that is widely used in the statistical analysis of social and physical processes. For example, it expresses the probability of a number of events occurring in a fi xed period of time if these events occur with a known average rate and independently of the time since the last event.

[6] The advice was part of a pre-design and briefi ng study carried out by Cambridge Architectural Research Ltd.

[7] Renzo Piano & Richard Rogers architects, 1972.

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28 Projections

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29Fawcett

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ABSTRACT

The urban growth boundary—a regional boundary circumscribing a metropolitan area and distinguishing areas for urban development from areas to be preserved as rural or wilderness— is widely seen as a promising tool for reining in urban sprawl. This paper compares the growth of two cities, Portland, Oregon, and Las Vegas, Nevada, which have, for different reasons, grown within the limits of externally im-posed boundaries since the early 1980s. Through a parallel analysis of the two cities’ statistical profi les, and of the planning policy decisions that have carried them to their present state since the 1970s, it investigates what impact planned growth boundar-ies have on the development of urban form, and raises questions about the role of planning in bringing about successful urban growth.

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U R B A N G R O W T H B O U N D A R I E S :T W O A M E R I C A N E X A M P L E S

GRACE CATENACCIO

Princeton University

Introduction

This paper compares the growth of two American cities: Portland, Oregon and Las Vegas, Nevada. At fi rst glance, the two could not seem more different: Portland, paradigm of wholesome, progressive living; Las Vegas, city of gambling and nightlife, tourists and transients. Yet, both have—for very different reasons—grown within the limits of externally imposed boundaries since the early 1980s.

In Portland, the urban growth boundary was the product of progressive land use planning policies established by the State of Oregon in the 1970s. The Portland growth boundary is explicitly tied to land use planning, zoning, transportation plan-ning, and environmental preservation in the region. The same body that governs the Portland boundary is responsible for deciding on the uses and densities that are permitted within it.

In Las Vegas, on the other hand, the boundary was a compromise between the Federal Bureau of Land Management, which owns almost all the land encircling Las Vegas, and the city’s developers. Gradually, the Bureau is auctioning pieces of its land to developers – but only land within the boundary is eligible for sale. Once land has been transferred, it is not within the Bureau’s purview to infl uence future development patterns for that property.

There are a surprising number of statistical similarities between Portland and Las Vegas. For example, according to the most recent U.S. Census estimates, the two cities are ranked adjacent to each other for population: Las Vegas the 28th largest city in the country with a population of 543,000 people, Portland the 29th largest city, at 535,000 residents. Both of these populations have a median age slightly below the national median of 36 years. The two cities differ in land area by only 30 square miles. Mean housing prices in both cities hover around $360,000. Many of these statistics remain similar if the area in question is expanded to each city’s metropolitan region.1

This paper will analyze the effect that the two types of growth boundaries under discussion have had on the urban form of their respective cities, Portland and Las Vegas. Analysis will focus on the two aspects of urban form considered to be most closely related to the institution of growth boundaries, 1) the degree to which devel-opment drops off or disappears entirely at the outer edge of the boundary, and 2) the density of development within the growth boundary.

Ultimately, this paper will question the role of planning in effecting successful urban growth boundaries. How much does the motivation behind the creation of such a boundary, and the resulting investment in the details of its implementation, determine its effect? To what degree will any boundary around a city have similar effects on urban form, regardless of why it was put there and how it is administered? Through a

32 Projections

parallel analysis of the current statistical profi les of Las Vegas and Portland, and the planning policy decisions that have carried the two to their present state since the 1970s, this paper hopes to reach a conclusion about what impact planned growth boundaries have on the development of urban form.

What Is an Urban Growth Boundary?

The concept of the city as an ideal, contained entity, fundamentally separate from the wilderness surrounding it, is as ancient as city walls. Given people’s limited mobility, concerns for safety, supply, and society kept them close. With the transportation advances of the 19th and 20th centuries, however, planners were led to make con-tainment a priority, in the service of large-scale government initiatives on resource allocation and quality of life. Sprawl had arrived with the railroad, and continued to expand around cities as fast as the automobile could accelerate. Great European cities such as London were fi rst to try to stop the rampage, but greenbelts were no match for the determination of newly-minted suburbanites and their shiny vehicles. Development continued on the far side of these supposed boundaries almost as if they had never existed.

In the United States, few concerted attempts have been made to rein in sprawl. In the early 1960s, the National Capital Planning Commission published guidelines for the urban expansion of Washington, D.C., which were highly praised but failed to be implemented.2 Several years later, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a se-ries of land-use planning bills were introduced in the Senate under the leadership of President Richard Nixon. Inspired by a disastrous 1969 oil spill in California, the new bills represented a shift in the role of land-use planning, away from urban design and towards environmental protection. By 1974, however, the bills had failed. In the decades since, the federal government has yet to resurrect land-use planning as a major national concern.3

Urban growth boundaries (UGBs) were fi rst put into practice in the United States shortly after these failed national attempts at land use planning. Oregon was the fi rst—and remains among the few—to make UGBs a key element in their statewide land use plan. Simply defi ned, an urban growth boundary is a regional boundary circumscribing a metropolitan area, which is used by governments to distinguish areas for urban development from areas to be preserved as rural or wilderness. In theory, UGBs control expansion onto farm and forest lands, while concentrating de-velopment to be more effi ciently served by urban infrastructure. UGBs also create motivation to develop and redevelop land and existing structures in the urban core, and so help keep historic downtowns in business. By setting out future areas slated for development in advance, UGBs channel government and commercial investment to the areas that most need it, improving effi ciency of new construction. They also create an incentive for cities and businesses to maintain their existing resources.

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I. Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary

Portland’s urban growth boundary is the product of a long series of planning deci-sions that started in the 1970s, when the state of Oregon set out to establish the fi rst statewide land-use planning laws in the country. As such, the Portland boundary has always been the benchmark against which subsequent urban growth containment programs have been measured. The product of a state-wide policy, Oregon’s urban growth boundaries encircle not just Portland, but every large town and city in the state. Each boundary distinguishes the rural land outside from the urban land within, and protects rural lands from urban-type land uses such as commercial or industrial activities. Rural lands are also protected from subdivision into lots smaller than two acres.4

The fact that Portland’s boundary is the result of a state law, not a city law, has been critical to its success, as will be discussed further. In theory, by dividing the state into distinct urban and rural areas through the use of urban growth boundaries, Oregon has created an archipelago of urban islands within a sea of rural land. The relative

success of this plan is visible in Figure 1, which shows urban development and open space in the Willamette Valley. If, however, it had been up to individual cities to set their own growth boundaries, their power to enforce such boundaries would disap-pear at the edge of the city—just at the very moment enforcement was needed. In order to succeed, growth boundaries must be overseen by a larger power that con-trols land both inside and outside of them. The change in development pattern that occurs at the north edge of the Portland boundary further proves this point: here, at state lines, the city’s otherwise contained suburbs suddenly sprawl into Washington.

Another essential aspect of the Portland UGB is its elasticity. Having learned from the experiences of European cities such as London that established greenbelts a gen-eration earlier, only to watch development leapfrog the boundary and keep growing, Oregon’s legislators stipulated that their state’s UGBs would be subject to revision and expansion over time. Critics often de-

Figure 1. Urban development and open space in Willamette Valley, Or. Source: Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001)139.

34 Projections

scribe the Oregon approach as “controlled sprawl,” rather than true planning, due to this fl exibility of the urban boundaries. Yet controlling sprawl is an essential element of the urban and land-use planning agenda of the state, so perhaps this intended slur can be understood, rather, as oblique praise. Furthermore, recent additions and amendments to Portland’s planning schemes have increasingly focused on increas-ing density within the UGB, not just protecting land outside of it. Though the bound-ary continues to expand incrementally, Portland’s attention has now turned to strat-egizing new ways to use land already within the boundary.

Administration

Portland’s UGB is administered by Metro, a regional government agency. State law requires Metro to review the Portland UGB every fi ve years, and to ensure at these reviews that the boundary contains a 20-year supply of land for growth in each of the three primary land uses: residential, commercial, and industrial. As of 2007, this law also requires Metro to designate additional “urban reserves” beyond the bound-ary edge, suffi cient to satisfy a further twenty to thirty years of expansion.6 This adjustment addressed the uncertainty inherent to the original system: developers and landowners never knew in advance which land was next to be brought into the boundary. Though urban reserves had been designated before, they were not

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Figure 2. Historic expansions of the Portland growth boundary. Source: Courtesy Oregon Metro, www.oregonmetro.gov.

planned to satisfy any specifi c timeframe. With the new system, up to 50 years of growth can be anticipated.8

Though Portland’s urban growth boundary is fl exible, most of the expansions that have taken place have been small, as shown in Figure 2. Of the approximately three dozen expansions since the boundary’s establishment in the late 1970s, only a few have added more than 20 acres. The largest was in 2002, when 18,867 acres were added to provide 38,657 housing units and 2,671 acres for additional jobs. In total, the current boundary contains about 256,360 acres, or 400 square miles, of land, home to approximately 1.3 million people.9

History

The history of Oregon’s urban growth boundary policy begins in the early 1970s, in the fi rst term of the fabled governor Tom McCall. Known for his fi ery rhetoric, Gov-ernor McCall was dedicated from the outset to the preservation of Oregon’s natural treasures. He began with legislative measures to protect the state’s beaches and coastline. In his second term his ambitions expanded, and he proposed a controver-sial state-wide land-use plan.11

The state-wide plan was met with strong opposition, not only from real estate de-velopers, but also from utility companies and the forest industry. In response, Mc-Call declared a state of emergency, imposing a development moratorium on several coastline communities where sewer discharges from new subdivisions were reaching area beaches. This trump card served its purpose: in 1973, the Oregon legislature enacted a comprehensive land-use law, including formation of a state commission with the power to write regulatory policy—policy that came to include the growth boundary regulations.12

In his pursuit of a state-wide land-use policy, Governor McCall gathered an unlike-ly coalition of farmers and environmentalists to champion his cause. Condemning “sagebrush subdivisions and the ravenous rampage of suburbia,” McCall convinced his constituents that, without action, both the state’s natural beauty and its farmland would soon be lost to urban sprawl.13 Growth boundary regulations were not, at least in the beginning, meant to serve the goals of urban planning. Rather, they were for the purpose of environmental protection, bolstered by the desires of farmers to protect their own livelihoods.14

In 1977, the Columbia Regional Association of Governments (CRAG) formally pro-posed the Portland Urban Growth Boundary. Two years later, in 1979, Metro was created by voters, and inherited CRAG’s planning responsibilities, including adminis-tration of the UGB. The following year, in 1980, Portland’s UGB was approved by the state Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC).15

36 Projections

Throughout the 1980s, the Oregon growth boundary program was considered suc-cessful at its primary goal of protecting environmentally sensitive and farm lands. By the 1992 UGB fi ve-year review, Metro began to acknowledge that preservation was an important goal, but it was not enough. From this discussion emerged the region’s fi rst long-term plan, the Region 2040 Growth Concept. New to the state’s growth planning agenda was the prioritization of regional planning, including an emphasis on transportation infrastructure and alternative modes to the automobile. Also new was the Growth Concept’s insistence on controlling growth patterns within the UGB.16

Over the course of four years, the Region 2040 Growth Concept developed into an adopted plan that focused on development within the UGB, using urban centers and transit-oriented development (TOD) to achieve desired densities and road relief, as visible in Figure 3. The plan also included a new, stronger open space element, with more explicit delineation of rural reserves and greenbelts never to be developed, even

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Figure 3. Region 2040 Growth Concept for Portland. Source: Courtesy Oregon Metro, www.oregonmetro.gov.

within the boundary.18

Adopted in 1996, the growth plan originally included eleven elements, since revised and expanded to thirteen. Requirements addressed a wide range of issues, from housing and employment accommodation to water quality and fl ood manage-ment. Since its implementation, the plan has been broadly criticized, but lives on in the city’s most recent initiative, ambitiously titled “Making the Greatest Place.”19 It continues to focus on transportation alternatives, and on channeling development along established transit corridors.

II. Las Vegas: the Burton-Santini Boundary

Las Vegas, notorious for its acres of subdivisions and skyrocketing population, is the last place most people would look for an innovative approach to urban boundaries. Yet, somehow, the city remains an island in the desert, its relatively low-rise, even pat-tern of development halting abruptly at the city’s edge, as shown in Figure 4. Beyond lies nothing but sand and scrub, for miles. Several local factors and historical events have prevented Las Vegas from sprawling ever outwards, while allowing the city to accommodate its rapidly growing population. Each of these reasons is related to the city’s location in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

History

The city of Las Vegas began in 1855 as a short-lived Mormon settlement beside a watering hole, resurrected a decade later during the California gold rush.20 The sec-

38 Projections

Figure 4. Satellite view of Las Vegas. Source: Google Maps.

ond settlement barely survived: by 1900 the Las Vegas Valley was still home to only 19 settlers. Rumors that the railroad was coming to the area spurred a small surge in population, and by 1904 a population of 30 residents was served by a new hotel, meat market, and general store, as well as four restaurants and a dozen bars, all built in anticipation of the railroad’s arrival.21

The railroad did come to Las Vegas, in 1905. By 1911, the town’s population had reached 1,500, and doubled over the next two years, reaching 3,000 by 1913. Fi-nancial constraints of the railroad companies caused growth to level off for the next decade, but the announcement of the planned Hoover Dam in 1928 spurred the biggest burst in growth yet. As the Great Depression gripped the nation, the hope of working on the new dam continued to draw people to Vegas through the early 1930s, and the population doubled and doubled again.22

Up until this point in its history, Las Vegas was still just a small railroad town, despite its rapid growth. New development clung to the small watering hole that had brought the town into existence. No one in Las Vegas, or even in the state of Nevada, was interested in the miles of barren, unpromising desert that extended in all directions. This land remained property of the United States federal government, even as the town continued to grow.23

The arrival of casino culture in Las Vegas spurred yet another surge in growth. Gam-bling had always been legal in Las Vegas, but the Strip itself did not begin to emerge until after World War II. With the growth of the Strip, the miles and miles of federally owned desert surrounding the city gradually became more desirable to the city’s developers. Strangely enough, however, it took an environmental crisis in the neigh-boring state of California to convince the federal government to sell.

The Burton-Santini Boundary

California Congressman Phil Burton represented the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1970s. At that time, the region’s greatest natural treasure, Lake Tahoe, was un-der threat from overdevelopment. In order to protect the lake and its surrounding landscape, the government would have to buy up as much expensive waterfront land as possible. And this is where the newly desirable federally owned land surrounding Las Vegas would play its part.24 In 1980, working closely with Nevada Congressman Tom Santini, Burton made a proposal: by selling land to developers in Las Vegas, the government could make enough money to buy up the threatened shoreline around Lake Tahoe. Land sales would be limited to no more than seven hundred acres each year from lands immediately surrounding Las Vegas.25

The proposal was implemented by federal land managers, who drew a square around Las Vegas to delineate which lands could be selected for sale. The Burton-Santini

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square was approximately ten miles on each side, and became, almost by accident,

an urban growth boundary around Las Vegas.26

Unlike Portland’s UGB, however, the Burton-Santini square was not elastic. Soon

developers began once again to clamor for more land beyond its lines. The bound-

ary started to look vulnerable—though the law had symbolic strength, there was no

language in it that explicitly forbade the Bureau of Land Management from selling

land outside the boundary.27 Then, in 1986, a new Nevada senator stepped up ready

to tackle the problem.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada was always known as pro-growth, and this was an

advantage when it came to protecting undeveloped land around Las Vegas. From the

late 1980s on, Reid insisted that the future success of Las Vegas rested on provision

of suffi cient outdoor space for recreation and wildlife preservation. In order for the

city to sustain growth, it must retain open space. His choice of language was the key

to success, and it was Reid’s insistently pro-growth rhetoric that led, by the end of

the twentieth century, to a fi nal, legally fi xed reiteration of the Burton-Santini square.

The shaping of the new boundary was incremental. North of the city, the Desert Na-

tional Wildlife Refuge had been established in 1936 to protect bighorn sheep. Reid

began his mission in 1990, when he convinced Congress to consolidate two hundred

thousand acres to the west of Las Vegas as the Red Rock Canyon National Conser-

40 Projections

Figure 5. Revised Burton-Santini Square around Las Vegas. Map created by the author in Arc GIS using US Census data and map layers courtesy of the Southern Nevada GIS Management Offi ce.

vation Area. Next, by 2002, Reid had gotten further legislation through to protect an

additional fi fty thousand acres of mountains and desert to the south of the city as the

Sloan Canyon National Recreation Area.28

Environmental debates infl uenced the shape of the boundary on all sides. The lon-

gest-running of these began in 1990, when decades of habitat destruction put the

tortoise on the Endangered Species List. The day the tortoise was listed, a develop-

ment moratorium immediately fell on all desert tortoise habitat nationwide. Much of

this habitat was in the low-lying desert surrounding Las Vegas, the federally owned

land so desirable to the city’s developers.29

Again, Senator Reid played a key role in fi nding a solution that would both appease

developers and increase protected land around Las Vegas, all while affi rming his

reputation as a pro-growth politician. Local developers, further frustrated by the po-

tential development acreage taken from them with the tortoise listing, were at last

ready to compromise on a habitat protection plan that might release at least some of

the lost land for development. The plan that developed expanded the Burton-Santini

boundary to a fi nal, permanent perimeter, while all lands outside the revised boundary

became fully protected tortoise reserves.30

Today, the revised Burton-Santini square—shown in Figure 5 as a dotted green line—

still contains the entire city of Las Vegas, though development is starting to sneak out

towards Henderson in the southeast. Annual auctions continue to put new, undevel-

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Figure 6. Extent of privately owned land in and around Las Vegas. Map created by the author in Arc GIS using US Cen-sus data and map layers courtesy of the Southern Nevada GIS Management Of-fi ce.

oped land within the boundary up for sale at a slow but steady rate. The city and its

politics are still pro-growth, and little conventional “urban planning” is taking place.

Yet the city is contained: GIS data shows that the fi gure drawn by the boundary is

borne out in actual land ownership, as can be seen in Figure 6, which shows privately

owned land in red. There is enough space for the time being, and residents seem to

accept increasing density as a good thing. The city was hit hard by the foreclosure

crisis beginning in 2008, and many of the subdivisions planned and constructed over

the past decade have emptied out or been cancelled—a devastating loss in the short

term, but in the long term, perhaps an opportunity to make better use of a limited

supply of land.

III. Analysis & Conclusions

The literature available on Portland’s urban growth boundary is vast, whereas that

on Las Vegas’s is virtually nonexistent. Most authors writing on the subject seem to

take Las Vegas at its word—as a pro-growth city, how could it possibly be of interest

to advocates of restraint? Yet, as discussed, the growth boundary surrounding Las

Vegas is at least as legally defi nitive as the one surrounding Portland. And, from the

data available on the two cities, it can be shown that the Las Vegas boundary has

also been at least as effective as Portland’s with regard to the two critical indicators:

the rate at which development drops off at the boundary edge, and the density of

development within the boundary.

Key evidence can be found in a recent study on urban growth by Dr. Stephen M.

Wheeler of the Landscape Architecture Program at University of California, Davis.

In this study, Wheeler analyses growth patterns in six major American metropolitan

areas, using historic maps, aerial photographs, and GIS software. Among the cities

analyzed are Las Vegas, Nevada, and Portland, Oregon.

Wheeler’s data on development patterns in Portland and Las Vegas was generat-

ed through direct interpretation of visual information, mostly satellite images found

through Google Earth. As a result, the data he produces for each city pertains not

to any pre-established metropolitan area defi ned on paper by those jurisdictions, but

rather to the physically urbanized areas as visible in the photographs. In this context,

“urbanization” is defi ned as “subdivision of land for primarily non-agricultural use.”31

Accordingly, the edge of each metropolitan area was determined to be “the place

where substantial land subdivision had no longer occurred.”32

Wheeler identifi es seven main types of historic urban landscape, outlined in Table 1.

In addition to these seven, separate categories are included for commercial and in-

dustrial/offi ce landscapes, for a total of nine types. Focusing on the data for Portland

and Las Vegas, shown in Table 2, the results are striking. Of the nine development

patterns, fi ve are equally prevalent in both Portland and Las Vegas. Both cities are

42 Projections

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Current

Residential

Forms

Street Pattern/

Block Size

Land Use Mix Residential

Density

Typical Unit Size

and Lot Layout

Subdivision Scale

Rural Sprawl Haphazard street

pattern; street

connectivity

varies; little or no

block structure

Low Very low density;

lot sizes typically

between 1 and 5

acres

Small to midsized

houses; 1,000-

2,500 square

feet; wide variety

of structure type

and lot layouts

Small scale; 1-20

lots

Upscale

Fringe

“Loops and

lollipops”; loose

Low street pat-

terns; low con-

nectivity; large,

irregular blocks;

high amenity

level (pools, golf

courses, trails,

etc.)

Low Low density; lots

typically 10,000-

40,000 square

feet

Large houses;

2,000-5,000

square feet; lot

layouts often vary

due to custom

construction

Small to medium

scale; 10-100

lots

Suburban

tracts

“Loops and

lollipops”; tight

street patterns;

low connectivity;

moderate block

size ; irregular

blocks

Low Low to moderate

density; lots

typically 4,000-

10,000 square

feet

Midsized houses;

1,500-3,000

square feet;

repetitive housing

forms and lot

layouts

Medium to large

scale; 20-1,000+

lots

Multifamily Looping access

roads; moderate

block size and

street con-

nectivity

Low Moderate to high

density; 8-60+

dwelling units

per acre

Small to midsized

apartments and

condos; 500-

1,500 square feet

Medium scale;

20-500 lots

Trailer Parks Very tight,

linear lanes; small

blocks; moderate

connectivity

Low Moderate to high

density; lots typi-

cally 1,500-3,000

square feet

Small units; 500-

1,000 square feet

Medium scale;

20-500 lots

New Urbanist Grid-like street

pattern; small

blocks; high

street con-

nectivity

Low but some

addition of retail

and offi ces

Moderate

density; lots typi-

cally 2,500-6,000

square feet

Varying housing

forms including

second units

and row houses;

a range of lot

confi guration

Large scale; 100-

1,000 + lots

Incremental

Subdivision

Haphazard street

pattern; incre-

mental adition

of streets; block

size and street

connectivity vary

Low to moderate;

frequently has a

variety of small

business

Low to moderate

density; lots are

irregular and

sizes vary

Small to

midsozed; 1,000-

2,500 square feet

Small scale; 1-20

lots

Table 1. Wheeler’s categorization of U.S. urban landscapes. Source: reproduces data from Stephen M. Wheeler, “The Evolution of Built Landscapes in Metropolitan Regions,” (Journal of Planning Education and Research, no. 27, 2008) 408.

dominated by the suburban tract development type (44% and 51%, respectively),

which Wheeler defi nes as low- to moderate- density, with low connectivity and the

stereotypical “loops and lollipops” street pattern. This result is no surprise when it

comes to Las Vegas, but one might have expected a denser type of development to

predominate in Portland. Furthermore, the 7% difference between the two is over-

shadowed by the larger realization that approximately half of the urbanized area of

both cities consists of suburban tract development.33

Most surprising, however, is the data on the development type termed “rural sprawl,”

which, in theory at least, should be eliminated by urban growth boundaries. Rural

sprawl is described as very low-density development, with large lots between one

and fi ve acres. The street pattern is loose, and large areas of open land are passed

over between subdivisions. According to Wheeler’s results, not only does Las Vegas

contain a signifi cantly lower percentage of rural sprawl than Portland, at a mere 5%, it

has the least rural sprawl of all six cities in the survey.34 Portland, by contrast, contains

20% rural sprawl, the same percentage as Atlanta, Georgia.35

The remaining two development types that differ signifi cantly in prevalence between

Portland and Las Vegas are the “incremental” development type, and industrial/offi ce

development. Incremental development is defi ned as having “varied or haphazard

street patterns and a diversity of block sizes, housing forms, lot confi gurations, resi-

dential densities, and land uses.” It is generally the result of the piecemeal sale of

small agricultural parcels over time, which are then each independently developed

in a variety of styles and for a variety of purposes. Along with New Urbanist-style

development—which Wheeler found hardly any evidence of in the six cities he looked

at—incremental development is one of only two development types described as

specifi cally mixed-use.36 Las Vegas, having grown in fi ts and starts around a watering

44 Projections

Form (Period 1980-2005) Portland Las Vegas

Tract 44 51

Rural Sprawl 20 5

Upscale Fringe 5 5

Multifamily 3 3

Trailer Parks 1 0

Incremental 5 21

Commercial 5 6

Industrial/Offi ce 19 9

New Urbanist 0 0

Table 2. Per cent of developent in Wheeler’s nine urban form categories in Portland and Las Vegas. Source: Stephen M. Wheeler, “The Evolution of Built Landscapes in Metropolitan Regions,” (Journal of Planning Education and Research, no. 27, 2008) 408.

hole for much of its early history, contains a relatively large proportion of incremental development, at 21%. Portland, perhaps because of its more hospitable location, contains only 5% incremental development.37

Industrial and offi ce development, on the other hand, is highly drawn to Portland—yet another blow to the supposed success of its growth boundary. Such development tends to be scattered down the length of arterial roads or freeways. Buildings have large fl oorplates and parking areas, and are often surrounded by extensive landscap-ing. There is little connectivity between adjacent structures. This development type makes up a considerable 19% of the urbanized area of Portland, by far the greatest proportion of industrial and offi ce development found among the six case study cit-ies.38 Las Vegas, by contrast, contains the average proportion of 9% industrial and offi ce development.39

The relative prevalence of these various development patterns in the Portland and Las Vegas metropolitan areas strongly implies that, by both of our criteria, the Port-land boundary is not having as strong an effect as its advocates might hope. In particular, the comparatively large percentage of rural sprawl surrounding Portland suggests that urbanization is not dropping off completely at the edge of the growth boundary. The proliferation of big-box offi ce and industrial development along transit corridors in and around Portland is likely to encourage rural sprawl, while contributing only low levels of density to the landscape within the boundary.

Conversely, Las Vegas appears to be remarkably well contained, especially with re-gard to rural sprawl. There are a number of possible reasons for this. First and fore-most, of course, is the growth boundary of federally-owned and protected lands. Other side-effects of desert living may also play a signifi cant part. For one, the scar-city of water means that urban development is limited to the reach of an already stretched infrastructural network. Furthermore, the hot climate may reduce demand for large yards. In Las Vegas, even luxury housing developments are built at a rela-tively high density, trading individual grounds for shared pool clubs, tennis courts, and golf courses.40

Density statistics for both cities are also found in Wheeler’s research, and these num-bers corroborate the intuition that Las Vegas is denser than most would expect, and Portland more dispersed. In fact, of the six regions in the Wheeler study, the Las Vegas area is the only one that increased in density between 1980 and 2005. While Las Vegas was increasing in density by 18%, metropolitan Portland was experiencing an almost equally dramatic drop in density of 16%. As of 2005, the Las Vegas area had a density of 6,000 people per square mile, up from 5,100 in 1980. In the same time period, the density of the Portland area dropped from 6,900 people per square mile down to 5,800, leaving Las Vegas as the denser city.41 It is also worth noting that Portland’s drop in density and the implementation of its growth boundary took place simultaneously.

45Catenaccio

To what extent can growth boundaries be held responsible for the surprising dif-ferences in sprawl and internal density between Portland and Las Vegas? Review of a large body of historic planning literature and research done over the past sev-eral decades reveals that, in fact, the differences between the two cities might well be expected, even in the absence of growth boundaries. In their paper “Causes of Sprawl: A Portrait from Space,” most recently revised and published in 2005, Marcy Burchfi eld, Henry G. Overman, Diego Puga, and Matthew A. Turner conduct such a review, and then seek to prove the logical conclusions of many years of urban economic theory through extensive analysis of satellite imagery covering the entire United States.

The results of this study fi nd many conclusions of the previous literature to be borne out by the actual development patterns of American cities between 1976 and 1992. Five key points from this research are directly relevant to the Portland-Las Vegas comparison, namely:

• Cities specializing in sectors where employment tends to be more centralized will be more compact.

• Cities that have been growing faster will tend to experience less sprawl.

• Cities with few aquifers underlying the urban fringe will be more reliant on cen-trally supplied infrastructure, and therefore less likely to sprawl.

• Cities surrounded by high mountains tend to be more compact, whereas cities with more generally rugged terrain will be more dispersed.

• Cities with a pleasant temperate climate experience more sprawl.

All fi ve of these points suggest that Las Vegas should be less susceptible to sprawl than Portland. The concentration of jobs along the Las Vegas Strip means that most workers in that city still work downtown. In Portland, as has been demonstrated, of-fi ces and industrial complexes tend to instead be dispersed along arterials and other roads outside of the city center. While both cities have seen their populations grow rapidly over the past few decades, for much of that time Las Vegas was the number one fastest-growing metropolitan region in the nation. The question of water has already been addressed: in Las Vegas, short supply of water ties development to the limited capacity of municipally supplied infrastructure. Portland, conversely, enjoys a more than adequate supply of groundwater.42 Las Vegas is in a broad desert valley surrounded by high mountains; Portland lies over several smaller rolling valleys with scattered volcanic hills. Finally, Las Vegas has an extremely hot desert climate where summer highs typically rise above 100 degrees Fahrenheit; Portland is often consid-ered to have one of the most pleasant climates in the United States, with summer highs in the mid-eighties, and winter lows rarely dropping below freezing.43

46 Projections

Can we still believe that growth boundaries make a difference when it comes to sprawl and urban density? There remains evidence that Portland’s growth boundary has contained growth and increased density in a location that is physically, climacti-cally, and economically predisposed to sprawl. The city’s position just south of the Oregon-Washington state line makes it an ideal test case for the effectiveness of an urban growth boundary, and, indeed, the portion of the Portland metropolitan area that lies under the auspices of Oregon’s growth-management laws is markedly less dispersed than the portion across the Washington border. Data from the Wheeler survey again confi rms what is evident in aerial photographs of the region: rural sprawl accounted for only 13% of new land urbanized in the Oregon portion of the region between 1980 and 2005, the period since implementation of the UGB, but for 34% of new land urbanized in the Washington portion in the same time period. If only land under the jurisdiction of Portland Metro is considered, the percentage of rural sprawl drops to 11%.44

What is the role of planning in effecting successful growth boundaries? This study may be taken to imply that the earnest rhetoric and concerted efforts that have earned Portland its reputation are not critical for the success of a growth boundary. In fact, the more recent efforts by Portland to use poly-centric planning techniques and transportation corridors to boost the effectiveness of their growth boundary may be compounding the problem: evidence from the Burchfi eld study shows that the monocentric city model is far more conducive to the promotion of density.45

However, it has also been shown that Las Vegas is, for a variety of reasons, predis-posed to the density it has attained. Its location in a desert with limited access to re-sources has created a natural boundary to growth, which has since been formalized. The very fact that the federal government was able to impose a growth boundary on Las Vegas, is, indeed, itself intrinsically related to the city’s desert location. Had the city been located in a more hospitable environment, the land surrounding Las Vegas would have been snatched up by homesteaders long ago.

In conclusion, it appears that growth boundaries are effective at curbing sprawl and promoting density, if only to a limited extent. Their effectiveness in these regards does not seem to be tied to their position within a larger progressive planning agenda, nor to the enthusiasm of local residents. Rather, the effectiveness of growth boundaries, to the extent that this effectiveness is under human control, is determined by the power and breadth of the larger body that controls their implementation. In Oregon, urban growth boundaries have succeeded as a state-wide land-use planning policy, and their effectiveness immediately dissipates at the state’s borders. In Las Vegas, the urban growth boundary is controlled by the federal government. As a result, it is far less subject to local interests than even a state-mandated boundary would be.

Cities grow and spread in response to a wide variety of factors, many of which are beyond human control. Yet it would be absurd to suggest that we build all our new

47Catenaccio

cities in the most inhospitable environments possible so as to protect them from

sprawl. As the planet’s limited resources become more clearly defi ned, a future of

cities sustained by artifi cial climate control and piped-in utilities appears increasingly

implausible and unwise. Urban growth will continue to cluster in areas, like Portland,

with pleasant climates and abundant natural resources. We will be left to control our

natural pioneering tendency and the market forces that encourage it with a limited

palette of policy and planning tools.

In this projected future, growth boundaries will remain a critical tool for urban plan-

ners, primarily for their infl uence on sprawl and density, but also for a variety of other

reasons. For example, studies have shown UGBs to have a positive infl uence on

public health, fi nding an association between strong urban containment policies and

higher participation in leisure time physical activity and active commuting.46 Others

suggest that UGBs have the potential to promote equality and revitalize inner-city

communities, both by incentivizing redevelopment and by broadening legislative in-

fl uence to the scale of the metropolitan area or region.47 And urban economists have

long argued that, in cases where cities are unable to institute congestion-charging

measures, urban growth boundaries can act as second-best tools for managing traf-

fi c congestion.48 49

The ability of urban growth boundaries to effect any of these positive changes in ur-

ban development patterns, however, is contingent on a variety of factors—not least

the interests of those enforcing them. If any policy recommendation is to come out of

this discussion, it is that the federal government should return to the subject of land-

use planning and urban growth at the national scale. Only the federal government

has the scope of infl uence and broader vision necessary to require enforcement of

such policies, and to avoid falling prey to the short-term interests of local economics.

ENDNOTES

[1] U.S. Census Bureau, www.census.gov

[2] Bruce Babbit, Cities in the Wilderness: A New Vision of Land Use in America (Washington, DC:

Island Press, 2005) 75-76.

[3] Ibid, 77.

[4] Oregon Metro, www.oregonmetro.gov.

[6] Ibid.

[8] Established priorities and protections determine which land is eligible to be brought into the bound-

ary at each fi ve-year review. Urban reserve lands receive fi rst priority for inclusion, by defi nition. Second

priority lands include so-called “exception land” or “non-recourse land.” Exception land is land next to

the urban growth boundary that is not farm or forest. Second priority could also include farm or forest

land that is completely surrounded by exception land but that is not considered “high value” farm or for-

est land. Third priority for inclusion goes to designated “marginal land” a classifi cation of non-resource

48 Projections

(exception) land unique to Washington County that allows dwelling units on exclusive farm-use land. Finally, farm or forest land is always last to be considered for inclusion within the boundary (Oregon Metro, www.oregonmetro.gov).

[9] Ibid.

[11] Babbit, 77.

[12] Ibid, 77-78.

[13] Thomas McCall, “Opening Address to the Oregon Legislature,” 8 January 1973.

[14] Oregon Metro

[15] Oregon Metro

[16] Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001) 109.

[18] Ibid, 119; Oregon Metro.

[19] Ibid, 121-124; Oregon Metro.

[20] Barbara Land and Myrick Land, A Short History of Las Vegas, 2nd Edition (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004) 21-22.

[21] Land, 37.

[22] Land, 49.

[23] Babbit, 80.

[24] Ibid, 80.

[25] Ibid, 80.

[26] Ibid, 80.

[27] Ibid, 80.

[28] Ibid, 81.

[29] Ibid, 82.

[30] Ibid, 82.

[31] Stephen M. Wheeler, “The Evolution of Built Landscapes in Metropolitan Regions,” (Journal of Plan-ning Education and Research, no. 27, 2008) 402.

[32] Wheeler, 403.

[33] Ibid, 408.

[34] The six cities in Wheeler’s study are Albuquerque, New Mexico (52% rural sprawl); Atlanta, Georgia (20% rural sprawl); Boston, Massachusetts (71% rural sprawl); Las Vegas, Nevada (5% rural sprawl); Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota (40% rural sprawl); and Portland, Oregon (20% rural sprawl). The aver-age percentage rural sprawl for the six cities is 35% (Wheeler, 408).

[35] Ibid, 408.

[36] Ibid, 407.

49Catenaccio

[37] Ibid, 408.

[38] Industrial/offi ce development percentages for the six cities are, as follows: Albuquerque, 4%; At-lanta, 9%; Boston, 6%; Las Vegas, 9%; Minneapolis-St. Paul, 7%; Portland, 19%. The average per-centage industrial/offi ce development for the six cities is 9% (Wheeler, 408).

[39] Ibid, 408-409.

[40] Ibid, 411.

[41] Ibid, 411.

[42] U.S. Geological Survey. “Ground Water Atlas of the United States,” http://pubs.usgs.gov/ha/ha730/ch_h/index.html

[43] Western Regional Climate Center, “Historical Climate Information,” (Desert Research Institute, Ne-vada System of Higher Education) http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/

[44] Wheeler, 412.

[45] Marcy Burchfi eld, Henry G. Overman, Diego Puga and Matthew E. Turner, “The Determinants of Urban Sprawl: Portrait from Space” (unpublished manuscript, 7 October 2005) 16-17.

[46] Semra A. Aytur, PhD, et. al. “Urban Containment Policies and Physical Activity: A Time-Series Analysis of Metropolitan Areas, 1990-2002” (American Journal of Preventative Medicine, no. 34, vol. 4, 2008) 320-332.

[47] Alex Anas and Hyok-Joo Rhee, “When are urban growth boundaries not second-best policies to congestion tolls?” (Journal of Urban Economics 61, 2007) 263–286.

[48] Regarding the relationship between UGBs and traffi c congestion, more recent papers have shown that this positive effect is only applicable in the ideal case of the mono-centric city, a fi nding that proves this boon irrelevant to cities such as Portland that have pursued poly-centric patterns of development (Anas and Rhee).

[49] David Pines and Efraim Sadka, “Zoning, First-Best, Second-Best, and Third-Best Criteria for Al-locating Land to Roads.” (Journal Of Urban Economics 17, 1985) 167-183.Jan K. Brueckner, “Urban growth boundaries: An effective second-best remedy for unpriced traffi c congestion?” (Journal of Housing Economics 16, 2007) 263–273.

WORKS CITED

Anas, Alex and Hyok-Joo Rhee. “When are urban growth boundaries not second-bestpolicies to congestion tolls?” Journal of Urban Economics 61, 2007, 263–286.

Aytur, Semra A, et. al. “Urban Containment Policies and Physical Activity: A Time-Series Analysis of Metropolitan Areas, 1990-2002,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine, no. 34, vol. 4, 2008, 320-332.

Babbit, Bruce. Cities in the Wilderness: A New Vision of Land Use in America. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005.

Brueckner, Jan K. “Urban growth boundaries: An effective second-bestremedy for unpriced traffi c congestion?” Journal of Housing Economics 16, 2007, 263–273.

50 Projections

Burchfi eld, Marcy, Henry G. Overman, Diego Puga and Matthew E. Turner. “The Determinants of Urban Sprawl: Portrait from Space.” Unpublished manuscript, 7 October 2005.

Calthorpe, Peter and William Fulton. The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001.

Land, Barbara and Myrick. A Short History of Las Vegas, 2nd Edition. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004.

Oregon Metro, www.oregonmetro.gov.

Pines, David and Efraim Sadka. “Zoning, First-Best, Second-Best, and Third-Best Criteria for Allocating Land to Roads,” Journal Of Urban Economics 17, 167-183, 1985.

U.S. Census Bureau, www.census.gov

U.S. Geological Survey. “Ground Water Atlas of the United States,” http://pubs.usgs.gov/ha/ha730/ch_h/index.html

Western Regional Climate Center. “Historical Climate Information.” Desert Research Institute, Nevada System of Higher Education, http://www.wrcc.dri.edu

Wheeler , Stephen M. “The Evolution of Built Landscapes in Metropolitan Regions,” Journal of Planning Education and Research, no. 27, 2008, 400-416.

51Catenaccio

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F I V E P R I N C I P L E S F O R G R E E N W I C H S O U T H :A S T R AT E G I C F R A M E W O R K F O R L O W E R M A N H AT TA N

STEPHEN CASSELL AND ANNIE BARRETT

Architecture Research Offi ce

ABSTRACT

Architecture Research Offi ce’s Five Principles for Greenwich South presents a valu-able and innovative paradigm for urban design, an approach to planning that is en-gaged with its constituents and aligned to the complexities of growth and devel-opment in twenty-fi rst century cities. Greenwich South is an underdeveloped and overlooked part of Lower Manhattan widely regarded by downtown residents, em-ployees, and tourists as an obstacle to either avoid or ignore. Asked to create a masterplan for the neighborhood by the local business improvement district, ARO instead proposed a strategic framework that could frame its future around a few key overarching concepts. ARO developed a hierarchy of ideas that engage the project’s specifi c planning issues—a matrix of scales, scopes, and timeframes for actors to work within. These ideas, hierarchies and a series of hypothetical projects, com-missioned from well known architects, were communicated to the public through publications and exhibits.

Greenwich South

53Cassell and Barrett

Introduction

In May 2008, Architecture Research Offi ce was invited to design a master plan to guide the growth of ‘Greenwich South’ – the area of Lower Manhattan bounded by the World Trade Center, the West Side Highway, the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and Broadway. An underdeveloped and overlooked part of the city, Greenwich South is widely regarded by downtown residents, employees, and tourists as an obstacle to either avoid or ignore. This attitude appears to be an unintended consequence of Lower Manhattan’s uncoordinated growth from a colonial settlement to a global busi-ness district, in which a legacy of large-scale infrastructure projects has rendered the area isolated from the city which surrounds it. But Greenwich South’s location and its store of developable air rights give it the potential to act as a lynchpin for Lower Manhattan if these current challenges are overcome. It was with this in mind that the Alliance for Downtown New York, Lower Manhattan’s Business Improvement District, commissioned this project to create a plan for Greenwich South’s growth that would guide the area toward the realization of its potential.

It was clear to us that this mission would be ill-served by a traditional master plan, a process which typically presents a singular vision for the future and is dependent on comprehensive implementation in order to achieve its goal. Instead of a master plan, we proposed the design of a strategic framework – a living document that could coordinate planning and development efforts at multiple scales across the short- and

54 Projections

Area of BID

Greenwich South

Figure 1. Greenwich South comprises a signifi cant proportion of the Lower Manhattan Business Improvement District that is managed by the Alliance for Downtown New York.

long-term future. Working with a team that included planner Neil Kittredge of Beyer Blinder Belle, graphic designer Scott Stowell of Open, and journalist Marc Kristal, and with contributions from additional groups of thinkers and designers, we developed Five Principles for Greenwich South, an adaptable tool designed to guide incremental change in the long- and short-term.

The implementation of urban design is a complex and messy process. It involves overlapping actors and agendas. Five Principles for Greenwich South is an urban design proposal that responds to the unique conditions of Lower Manhattan and the economic climate of past two years. Yet Architecture Research Offi ce and its collabo-rators are confi dent that both the process used to create this strategic framework and also the structure of the framework itself constitute a valuable and innovative paradigm for urban design, an approach to planning that is engaged with its constitu-ents and aligned to the complexities of the growth and development of twenty-fi rst century cities.

Context

The form of development in Manhattan is not the product of a master plan. Rather, its base condition is a framework: the 1811 Commissioner’s Plan nurtured a city whose characteristic juxtaposition of inconsistencies and contradictions, what Rem Kool-haas termed ”Manhattanism”, is both enabled and coordinated by the gridiron. While Lower Manhattan is emblematic of New York in its density, diversity, and drive for prosperity, its urban fabric is different from the rest of the city. It preceded the Com-missioner’s Plan, so the colonial era’s narrow, winding streets still defi ne it today (Fig-ure 1). Without the grid, the City’s oldest and densest district has had no mechanism to coordinate growth, producing both spectacular and defi cient urban conditions.

Two hundred years of ad-hoc development in Greenwich South have generated an agglomeration of diverse building types and urban morphologies, giving the area a rich architectural character. One of the oldest Federal townhouses in the city is at 67 Greenwich Street. The historic Curb Market Building, constructed in 1921 to formalize the unregulated trading that formerly took place on the street, still stands on the north edge of the site. The former Downtown Athletic Club, which encapsu-lated Koolhaas’s theory of Manhattanism, has been converted to condominiums and overlooks the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel approach that occupies the southern half of the site. A long history of uncoordinated growth has also burdened Greenwich South with a succession of urban-scale infrastructure projects. The site’s western edge was once defi ned by an elevated railway, constructed in 1929, where today the West Side Highway begins. To the south, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel approach makes it diffi -cult to traverse Greenwich South safely below Rector Street. To the north, Greenwich Street has been blocked since the construction of the original World Trade Center superblock in 1977(Figure 2).

55Cassell and Barrett

Today, narrow dead-end streets and the presence of large infrastructure projects on all sides make it diffi cult to enter and depart Greenwich South, and harder still to cross along its east/west axis. The area lacks basic amenities and suffers from a lack of programming to support its 7,000 residents and anticipated additional 80,000 workers and 10,000 tourists expected with the completion of the World Trade Center complex and memorial. Development and improvements are occurring to the west (Battery Park City and the Hudson River Park), the south (Battery Park and the Staten Island Ferry Terminal) and the north (World Trade Center) yet Greenwich South has seen little development and no amelioration of its myriad planning defi ciencies.

These conditions as well as its prime location and millions of square feet of develop-able air rights merit new attention to Greenwich South’s future. The site has potential to thrive by connecting four distinct neighborhoods to its north, south, east, and west, and this possibility is made more likely with the reopening of Greenwich Street as part of the World Trade Center site’s reconstruction. However, control of Green-wich South is held by multiple private land owners and public agencies, which sets a complicated context for the design and implementation of a large-scale planning effort. Although the Alliance for Downtown New York holds important infl uence over the district’s landowners, agencies, and authorities, as a business improvement dis-trict it neither owns the land nor possesses the authority to control its development.

These conditions made Greenwich South an ideal candidate for a strategic frame-work: a document that could provide the site not with a singular vision for the future, but, like Manhattan’s grid, with numerous possibilities guided by core principles. As

56 Projections

Figure 2. Greenwich South’s boarders have been constructed by large-scale infrastruc-tural projects, including the World Trade Cen-ter (1977), the West Side Highway (1970s), and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and MTA Garages (1929-51).

opposed to a comprehensive, static master plan, the strategic framework is a docu-ment that can evolve over time, informing and advising future growth and change in Greenwich South1.

Process

We created the strategic framework through a unique process—an iterative feedback loop in which we engaged constituents, design collaborators, and outside experts – and successively put forth and refi ned hypotheses and conjectures. Our process led to a project that engages stakeholders and coordinates participation in Greenwich South’s future in a broad range of directions (Figure 3).

To frame and understand the problem, the study commenced with a research and analysis phase. Our interdisciplinary team took multiple approaches to assembling information and analyzing the site. Zoning, land use, and FAR studies revealed nearly ten million square feet of developable air rights latent in Greenwich South as well as strategies for unlocking this potential. A comprehensive survey of existing conditions demonstrated the under-use of the area by residents, tourists, and area workers on all sides. Information-gathering on current and planned future projects to the south, west, and north helped set the scene for Greenwich South’s future (Figure 4).

Out of this research, the team established a set of key questions and operating hy-potheses. As a mechanism for testing our assumptions and expanding our outlook, we convened an event with a group of New Yorkers concerned for the future of Lower Manhattan—engineers, historians, arts professionals, architecture critics, restaurant owners, and business people (Figure 5). Presenting and discussing our preliminary work with this group, the Greenwich South Brain Trust, helped calibrate our approach to the problem. For example, we knew that dealing with extant infrastructure was one of Greenwich South’s primary challenges. The discussion not only helped us frame how that infrastructure could be re-invented in the future, but also maintain parts of it to provide a shared memory of the past. From a programmatic standpoint, these dis-cussions developed our working defi nition of Greenwich South as a future ”lynchpin” with an emphasis on its integration with surrounding areas rather than its defi nition as a unique neighborhood. This refi ned set of key questions and challenges served

57Cassell and Barrett

Figure 3. A unique process enabled an unconventional and adaptive planning proposal.

58 Projections

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Landmark Building Sites

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Unbuilt SF up to max. 15 FAR

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56

Landmarks Air Rights Recieving Sites

Existing Non-Landmark Development on Site: 7.06 million sf (excluding 5 WTC)

Existing Landmark Development on Site: 5.81 million sf

EXISTING DEVELOPMENT

Potential As-of-Right Development 15.0 FAR (excluding 5 WTC and Landmark sites): 6.53 million sf

Potential Max. Bonus FAR Development 18.0 FAR(excluding 5 WTC and Landmark sites): 1.77 million sf Potential Max. Landmark Transfer 21.6 FAR (excluding 5 WTC): 1.37 million sf Total Potential Development(excluding 5 WTC and Landmark sites): 9.67 million sf

POTENTIAL DEVELOPMENT

Figure 4. Research included programmatic, architectural, zoning, land use, and circulation studies of the neighborhood.

as the foundation for the draft strategic framework written with our client and with feedback from various constituents and government agencies.

A Strategic Framework for Greenwich South

The framework had a delicate task to complete: to set forth a vision for the future in spite of an unstable present and many unknowns about the site and its surround-ings; to resonate with the Alliance’s constituents, business owners and investors who would be key partners in achieving the goals of the framework; and, wherever pos-sible, to work in concert with planning efforts already underway in neighboring areas of New York City. Architecture Research Offi ce’s solution was based on a set of key overarching concepts, big ideas that embody the site’s main planning goals. From there, we developed a hierarchy of ideas that engage the project’s specifi c planning issues - a matrix of scales, scopes, and timeframes for actors to work within. This hi-

59Cassell and Barrett

how do you build neighborhood connections across an 8-lane highway?

sou

can a giant piece of traffic infrastructure be a friendly neighbor?

in 300 years, this could be underwater

300 years ago, this was underwater

arturo di modica’s charging bull is the most iconic piece of public art in lower manhattan

what does it mean to be “off the grid”?

how do you get there from here?

Figure 5. Invitations to the ‘Brain Trust’ - the goal of the discussion was to examine how we were framing the problem and to make sure we were asking the right questions.

Figure 6. Five Principles for Greenwich South; a strategic framework for the neighborhood and district.

erarchical matrix became our strategic framework for Greenwich South, a document comprised of Principles, Objectives, and Opportunities which work together to build guidelines for short- and long-term growth at all scales (Figures 6; 9-13).

At the top of the matrix are fi ve Principles, fi xed goals that encapsulate the Frame-work’s response to the myriad challenges facing the site and form the basis of growth and change of the site’s internal development and integration with its surrounding neighborhoods. The fi ve Principles we developed for Greenwich South are broad ideas about the cohesion of Lower Manhattan that may be interpreted in architectur-al, programmatic, and economic terms. They are independent from any specifi c ac-tion or initiative and can remain relevant over time and through changing conditions. Principle One (Figure 9) speaks holistically to Greenwich South’s synthesis with and contribution to Lower Manhattan, emphasizing the integration of businesses, resi-dents, and tourists to produce environmental, economic, and programmatic prosper-ity. Principles Two and Three (Figures 10, 11) contend with issues of connectivity: Principle Two sets an agenda to capitalize on the reconnection of Greenwich Street through the World Trade Center site, and Principle Three establishes a set of goals to strengthen river-to-river connections between the neighborhoods to the east and west through Greenwich South . Principle Four (Figure 12) deals with the millions of square feet of developable air rights sitting latent in Greenwich South and organizes a set of planning and zoning goals to guide development in a way that benefi ts all of Lower Manhattan’s constituents. Principle Five (Figure 13) addresses programmatic defi ciencies in Greenwich South, aimed towards the development of the area as a place that provides pragmatic, pleasurable, and entertainment amenities for resi-dents, workers, and tourists.

Each Principle is a reduction of a complex set of dynamics and agendas that are expanded in the Objectives and Opportunities underlying each Principle. The sim-plicity behind the Principles ensures that they are easily communicated though also durable. But it is only in conjunction with the rest of the framework matrix that their content and meaning are clearly revealed.

Three to fi ve Objectives describe the key components of each Principle, grounding the Framework in the specifi cities of the site. For example, Principle 2: Reconnect Greenwich Street – is elaborated in terms of scale, scope, and program through three Objectives that describe the application of the Principle at the scale of the building, the neighborhood, and the street. Objective 2A addresses infrastructural, land-scape, programming, transportation, and architectural initiatives that could capitalize on the planned reconstruction of Greenwich Street through the new World Trade Center site. Objective 2B calls for the re-conception of the base of Greenwich Street as a landmark for Lower Manhattan and gateway to both the district and the city. Objective 2C looks towards initiatives to make the street a center of activity for the area (Figure 10).

60 Projections

Associated with each Objective is a list of Opportunities. It is at this smallest scale of information that design, policy, and planning initiatives are specifi cally recommended. Unlike Principles and Objectives, the Opportunities can be executed and are intended to be embraced, rejected, re-written, adapted, developed, changed, and replaced. Opportunities represent the many ways, from the pragmatic to the speculative, to achieve a given objective. For example, Objective 2C includes as Opportunities retail strategies, arts installations and zoning guidelines (Figure 10). The proposed Oppor-tunities serve as examples to additional future changes that may be suggested and executed by others. Indeed, we assume that many of the opportunities described in Five Principles for Greenwich South may never be executed.

61Cassell and Barrett

Figure 8. The Visioning Challenge Projects were tied to the Principles of the framework and assigned throughout the district across a range of timeframes.

Figure 7. Participants of the Visioning Challenges at an interim pin-up. Including, clockwise from left, Jejon Yeung (ARO) Kim Yao (ARO) David Lewis (Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis) Brian Kramer (Coen + Partners) Shane Coen (Coen + Partners) Marc Kristal, David White (Transsolar) Paul Lewis (Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis), Clark Manning, Anna Kenoff (WorkAC) Amale Andraos (WorkAC), Dan Wood (WorkAC), Craig Scott (Iwamo-toScott), Scott Lee (Morphosis), Adam Yarinsky (ARO), Sapna Advani (Beyer Blinder Belle).

62 Projections

1. Encourage an Intense Mix of Uses

1A. Foster the growth of a diverse economy

1B. Create a neighbor hood within a business district

1C. Make Greenwich Street the Spine of Greenwich South

INCORPORATE WiFi into public spaces

CREATE a “Green Exchange” trading !oor for emerging green economy businesses

CREATE new spaces or reprogram older o"ce spaces as co-working, live/work or incubators, which attract and accomodate diverse budiness sectors

INSTALL artist workspaces in the bases of new towers and vacant o"ce spaces

INSTALL bike racks throughout Greenwich South

LAUNCH a retail attraction campaign to bring moreresidentially focused services and amenities

CREATE a community garden and start a Greenwich South garden club

INCENTIVIZE development projects to provide community resources such as sports and #tness facilities, schools, artists’ studios, libraries and playgrounds

TRANSFORT Washington Street into a “shared street” with programmed public events

CREATE a neighborhood icon that can be a meeting place or “North Star”

CONVERT the existing West Street Garage into a public facility with recreation #elds on the roof

DESIGN district-wide pilot systems for heating and cooling that capitalize on alternating cycles of residential and commercial peak power demand

MODIFY zoning to enable the creation of pocket parks along Greenwich Street and improve streetscape with plantings and new street furniuture

DESIGN a district-wide pilot storm watermanagement initiative that includes rainwaterharvesting, bio#ltration and reuse forlandscaping irrigation

WORK with energy providers to develop an e"cient energy system or “SmartGrid” for Greenwich South

CREATE a district-wide green roof incentive program

UPGRADE the energy e"ciency of existing buildings, including more e"cient windows and daylighting

EXPLORE widespread use of natural gas micro-turbines and co-generation to drastically reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions

Figure 9. Principle 1.

63Cassell and Barrett

2A. Restore Greenwich Street from the Battery through the World Trade Center

2B. Create a Gateway to Manhattan at the base of Greenwich South

2C. Make Greenwich Street the Spine of Greenwich South

2. Reconnect Greenwich Street

CAPITALIZE on the new market of WTC workers to attract retailers and restaurants that service the business community

COMMISSION temporary arts installations in vacant spaces

CREATE a spine of public art on Greenwich Street such as a series of large-scale sculptures

LOCATE major programmatic elements on Greenwich Street including arts and entertainment venues and public space

CREATE a sidewalk cafe district

MODIFY zoning to enable the creation of pocket pars along Greenwich Street and improve streetscape with plantings and new street furniuture

COORDINATE with streetscape, signage and lighting design of Battery Park to lead pedestrians to and from Greenwich Street

ESTABLISH a Lower Manhattan information kiosk at the bast of Greenwich Street

CAPITALIZE on existing and planned attractionsand transportation infrastructure

MAKE improvements to the base of Greenwich Streetincluding plantings and lighting, starting with smalle!orts and adding to them over time

INTEGRATE the concept of “it all starts here” into a new branding strategy

REPURPOSE ground "oor spaces facing Greenwich Street as retail, restaurants,entertainment venues and other public uses

ADVOCATE for vehicular access through the World Trade Center along Greenwich Street

DESIGN security measures that are compatible with pedestrian and vehicle "ow between the WTC and Greenwich South

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENT a new sustainablepublic transportation route linking the Batteryto Tribeca and the High Line alongGreenwich Street

REDESIGN sidewalks, landscaping and crosswalks along Greenwich Street to mirror Tribeca’s “Greening of Greenwich” program

IMPLEMENT way-#nding to orient people from the WTC site and along Greenwich Street into Greenwich South

Figure 10. Principle 2.

64 Projections

3. Connect East and West

3B. Reprogram side streets as magnets of activity

3C. Create visual connections from outside-in and inside-out

3A. Reprogram side streets as magnets of activity connections

BUILD a bridge over West Street fro mWest Thames to JP Ward Street

USE tra!c-calming measures to reduce speed of tra!c along West Street

INCREASE the number and easeof at-grade crossings at West Street

REDESIGN streetscape on Rector Street to reinforce its function as a primary pedestrian route

COMMISSION a grapohic design, landscape and/or arts installation at Edgar Street crosswalk and through the MTA garage to improve the commuter corridor in the short-term

BUILD a new bridge over the tunnel approach to realign Morris Street

CREATE a uni"ed way-"nding system for West Street, Greenwich South and the World Trade Center

WIDEN the sidewalk and add landscaping to the streetscape to improve the pedestrian environment along the east side of West Street

EMBED one side-street with water and energy infrastructure to suppor markets and other seasonal activities and events

EHNANCE the pedestrian route de"ned by Edgar Street by providing stronger midblock passage through a recon"gured ground #oor of the former American Stock Exchange building

DESIGNATE Exahange Alley as a long-term site for rotating site-speci" installations

DONATE side streets to a rotating list of local arts- and community-organizations one day every weekend

CREATE pocket parks that drive activity to underused streets

USE decking or green roofs to establish upper level public spaces and create river views

CURATE temporary art at strategiclocations within the district to attract visitors

CREATE design guidelines that enhance pedestrian view corridors and encourage developers to follow those guidelines in new or redevelop-ment projects

COMMISSION permanent public artwors that are highly visible from side streets and points beyond the district, drawing people into the interior of Greenwich Street

TARGET AND INCENTIVIZE potential developers and investors to build iconic, visible buildings that de"ne Greenwich South in the composition of Lower Manhattan’s distinctive skyline

LOCATE eye-catching architecture to establish a presence in the Lower Manhattan skyline

Figure 11. Principle 3.

65Cassell and Barrett

4. Build for Density, Design for People

4A. Enable dense, large-scale develop-ment

4B. Encourage active building bases

4C. Leverage the air rights of the BBT

4D. Integrate infrastructure planning and design with Community needs

CREATE a special zoning district for Greenwich South to allow the transfer of air rights from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and historic buildings across the entire district

IDENTIFY sites of appropriate size and location for commercial development

REDEFINE tower height, massing and dispersal to avoid the canyon e!ect and to capture views, light and space

ENCOURAGE new residential units of varying types throughout the district

EMULATE Hong Kong’s zoning strategies to create generous bonuses based on publicly-programmed building bases

CREATE design guidelines to correspond with streets that encourage active ground "oor use by design in Greenwich South

ESTABLISH a #ne gran of continuousand engaging public-oriented activity atthe street level

EXPLORE opportunities to adaptively reuse historic buildings that enhance development potential

INCENTIVIZE the inclusion of cultural and public programming above street level

DEVELOP design guidelines to expand the public realm into building bases, and coordinate with streetscape to create and immersive pedestrian experierience

CREATE intensity of public-oriented activity in building bases

REPURPOSE ground "oor spaces facing Greenwich Street as retail, restaurants, entertainment venues and other public uses

CAPITALIZE on the new market of WTC workers to attract retailers and restaurants that service the business community

COMMISSION temporary arts installations in vacant spaces

CREATE a spine of public art on Greenwich Street such as a series of large-scale sculptures

LOCATE major programmatic elements on Greenwich Street including arts and entertainment venues and public space

CREATE a sidewalk cafe district

MODIFY zoning to enable the creation of pocket pars along Greenwich Street and improve streetscape with plantings and new street furniuture

IMPLEMENT a comprehensive strategy for the long-term planning and redesign of Lower Manhattan infrastructure

ENSURE that the pedestrian experience is foremost in the design and planning of future improvements along West Street

ADVOCATE for innovative methods of funding and design to support integrated and diverse modes of public transit

CONNECT public and private partners to explore options for the tunnel approach site

Figure 12. Principle 4.

66 Projections

5. Create a Reason to Come and a Reason to Stay

CREATE a network of public parks and plazas throughout the neighborhood

ENCOURAGE the creation of public facilities - markets, performance spaces, sports !elds, outdoor movie theaters

CREATE strong architectural character with existing and new buildings by encourageing design excellence in adaptive reuse and new construction

COMMISSION a district-wide public art program

CREATE a new signature community open space for area residents

CREATE an iconc meeting place in Greenwich South

WIDEN sidewalks and improve storefronts alongthe west side of Trinity Place to createa Shopping promenade

MAXIMIZE retail uses throughout the district with attractive street corners, incentives for new tenants and improved storefronts

REDESIGN Rector Street to make it a stronger connector between the WTC site and Wall Street

GIVE West Street a human scale and functional identity by retro!tting and programming the east side of the street with services and retail

REIMAGINE Washington Street as a shared street neighborhood amenity

PROGRAM Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel approach site to capitalize on the major destinations surrounding Greenwich South

DESIGN Edgar Street Park with space for small outdoor performances

ATTRACT institutions and activities with contemporary and dynamic programs to maximize return visits

INCENTIVIZE creation of rehearsal, studio and/or performance spaces for small and medium-sized organizations within existing and future mixed-use buildings

CURATE a district-wide art installation

RENOVATE Edgar Plaza and commission an art installation to create an icon and place for gathering

COMMISSION temporary art installations over the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel approach and on the ventilation facility

HOST a rotating architectural design competitionat the Edgar Plaza or Greenwich Gateway site akinto the Serpentine Gallery in London or PS1in Queens

BUILD a tall iconic structure that is not a building - like the St. Louis Arch - to enable a new perspective on Lower Manhattan and to establish a new datum for Greenwich South

BUILD a new public space for the long-term future of Lower Manhattan

5A. Create public spaces to support new development and a growing population

5B. Establish identities for north-south streets

5C. Compliment Lower Manhattan’s cultural destinations with dynamic programming

5D. Create icons that establish a new identity and sense of place for Greenwich South

Figure 13. Principle 5.

Envisioning Greenwich South

Like an open-source application, the strategic framework is designed to inform pub-lic consciousness, able to evolve, adapt and engage with diverse constituencies and forces at work in Lower Manhattan. Following the completion of our fi nal draft of the strategic framework, we submitted the document to a fi nal phase of testing and refi nement before releasing it to the public. We invited teams of architects, environ-mental engineers, artists, planners, landscape architects and graphic designers to join our internal team in a “Visioning” phase2 with two objectives: fi rst, gain feedback from our peers that would help us refi ne the framework, and, second, produce mate-rial that would serve as an illustration of the principles themselves (Figure 7).

67Cassell and Barrett

Figure 14. Iwamoto Scott proposed a mixed-use tower that responds to its immediate site context while establish-ing a strong relationship to the larger form of Manhattan. The towers’ design seeks to reinstate Edgar Street as an east-west public way, bifurcating at the base to recon-nect Greenwich and Washington Streets. The space of this passageway through the building twists upwards, rising through the body of the towers, pinching at the mid level to allow for larger floorplates, and culminating at a rooftop sky lobby and civic space. Edgar Street Towers’ program-matic mixture serves the local neighborhood while enhanc-ing the public realm of Lower Manhattan. It is envisioned to include spaces for living, working, art, performance, retail and a branch public library. The program is organized by the towers’ central atrium, enhanced by daylight channeled from above via an integrated transmitting fiber-optic array. By night, the light-flow is reversed, whereby the fi ber-optic array is lit from integrated solar-charged battery packs. On a macro scale, Edgar Street Towers takes advantage of the visibility and prominence offered by its site, where its dy-namic form acts as a civic landmark and beacon for those coming to and leaving the city.

Each team was assigned one of ten hypothetical projects in Greenwich South that engaged key challenges of the site and aspects of the fi ve Principles, and asked to approach the problem using the framework as a guide. The challenges were broken down into three temporal categories – short-term, medium-term, and long-term – and encompassed a range of scales, from site-specifi c arts installations to district-wide strategies for sustainability (Figure 8). Most importantly, the design challenges were purposefully organized so as NOT to fi t together into a cohesive whole, but rather to overlap in both space and time. This encouraged a reading of the framework as a source of multiple possible futures based on numerous factors. It also meant that no one image came to characterize the project, and this enabled our client to use progressive, provocative work to illustrate the framework without being attached to specifi c proposals (Figures 14-16). The materials produced in the visioning exercises were bound with our research, analysis and strategic framework in the fi nal deliver-able, Five Principles for Greenwich South: A Model for Lower Manhattan.

The nature of the framework is such that its success depends on both awareness and interest to participate on the part of different communities — designers, public offi cials, developers, community organizations, and the general public. To connect with this range of potential users, we designed two publications—a tabloid newspa-per (What If?) geared towards all audiences, and a formal, bound report (Five Prin-ciples of Greenwich South) oriented to public and private individuals and groups who might play a role in its implementation (Figures 17-18). Similarly, we mounted two exhibits. We designed an open-air exhibit for the general public at a downtown park, adjacent to the World Trade Center site through which 20,000 people pass through daily. A second exhibit, geared towards the urban planning community at the Center

68 ProjectionsProjections

Figure 15. Open’s proposal for a district-wide way-finding system celebrates the idiosyncrasy of the neigh-borhood, combining traditional signage forms with the unexpected to draw attention to the history of the area and create an identity for and intrigue in Greenwich South.

for Architecture in New York, displayed work from the Design Challenges in full detail,

including models and a series of drawings for each project (Figures 19).

A Framework for Urban Design

We view Five Principles for Greenwich South as a living document, an ongoing proj-

ect for the future of Lower Manhattan. Just as many voices were incorporated into

the process of generating the strategic framework, ARO and the Alliance set forth a

proposal crafted to engage the city’s heterogeneous users, stakeholders, and ac-

tors—from global fi nancial fi rms to private local developers, from residents to tourists.

69Cassell and Barrett

Figure 16. Our proposal for ‘Market/Park’ reconnects Lower Manhattan across the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel approach while creating a major destination for residents, tourists, and visitors. The building is designed as an occupiable deck that spans the Tunnel trench. To the south end of the site, where clearance above the roadway is greatest, a public market would contribute a significant new public program to the district – a place you might stop to grab lunch, run into a friend, or pick up groceries on your way home. Linking city and country while strengthening the availability of locally-grown and –produced foods, the market would also create a much-needed culinary destination Downtown. As the tunnel roadway rises to the north end of the site, the deck fl attens to support a neighborhood park. Accessible from West Street, Washington Street, and Greenwich Street, the park is also a new crossroads for those who live in, commute to, and visit Lower Manhattan. At the south, a broad Visitors’ Plaza would create both a gateway and a meeting point for Downtown’s growing tourist population. In addition to creating three major iconic public spaces in the city, Market/Park could be a key step in the future development of Greenwich South, The transferable air rights created by the construction of the deck will increase in value by virtue of their proximity to the deck, such that the project is mutually beneficial to both the public and the private realm.

Five Principles for Greenwich South is a unique project created for a unique client.

But we believe that both the process and the project itself contribute more than a

solution to a particular planning problem in Lower Manhattan. Our process mobilized

stakeholders, constituents, thinkers, and designers in collaboration, broadening en-

gagement in Greenwich South while incorporating multiple viewpoints and agendas.

In doing so, a robust document emerged, offering the clarity of core principles as well

as the adaptability of objectives and opportunities. Our experience revealed that this

planning process and the structure of the strategic framework function in parallel to

each another. It is our hope that they also mirror the collaborative, dynamic achieve-

ment of Greenwich South’s potential by many actors, at all scales, in the near future

as well as in decades to come.

70 Projections

Figure 17, 18. Two publications were designed to record and publicize the study to multiple constituents; a tabloid geared toward the wider public at-large and a full study binder oriented towards public and private agencies and individuals who might potentially partner in Greenwich South’s future.

Figure 19. A public exhibit in Zuccotti Park, adjacent to Greenwich South, used a combination of supertext, vi-sioning images, and fi ne-grained information from the Framework. The exhibit was designed to communicate at multiple scales, and asked visitors to imagine What If? Greenwich South were to grow in alignment with the Framework.

ENDNOTES

[1] The concept of using a framework rather than a master plan to guide the integrated growth of Lower

Manhattan is not new. It was fi rst introduced in 1966 when the New York Planning Commission pub-

lished the Plan for Lower Manhattan to resolve disparate and uncoordinated efforts then underway. The

Plan for Lower Manhattan was published during a time of massive change—Lower Manhattan was in

a construction boom and large areas of the district, including the World Trade Center, Civic Center, and

the Financial District were undergoing major development, often including sweeping changes to traffi c

and the city map. The infl uential but never-realized Plan was organized as a framework for growth that

would be open to multiple players and interpretations. Conceived of as “not merely a project, or even

series of projects, but [rather] a system of development” It proposed a massive, district-wide infra-

structural effort that would comprehensively address vehicular and pedestrian circulation, land use, and

development.” Rather than setting forth this proposition with a static plan, the document encapsulated

“an approach, a process, and an organizing concept,” setting forth recommendations and goals which

were anticipated to be achieved “in a number of different ways, at different times in different places”.

The Lower Manhattan Plan. The 1966 Vision for Downtown New York, a Reprint of the 1966 report by

the New York City Planning Commission. Carol Willis, Editor. Princeton Architectural Press, New York /

The Skyscraper Museum, New York. Page iii

[2] The visioning charrette included Coen+Partners, DeWitt Godfrey, IwamotoScott, Lewis.Tsurumaki.

Lewis, Morphosis, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Transsolar, and WorkAC.

71Cassell and Barrett

!"#$%&'(#)*

M AT U R B A N I S M :G R O W T H A N D C H A N G E

JAIME J. FERRER FORÉS

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

ABSTRACT

The paper aims to re-evaluate a modern strategy of formal organization in architec-

ture and urbanism called ‘mat-building’, exploring its potential to contribute to the

contemporary discourse of sustainable built environments. The discourse of mat-

building emerged from the Smithson’s fascination with the traditional Arabic Kasbah

(Smithson, 1974). In her search for signs that identify ‘mats’, Alison Smithson goes

back to Katsura, Sinan, Honan, the vaulted constructions of Greek and Arabic archi-

tecture, as well as Mies van der Rohe’s work in America. The Kasbah also embodies

a metaphorical reference: “full of starts and stops and shadows… with a high degree

of connectedness to allow for change of mind and the in-roads of time” (Ibid). Team

10’s work in the late 1950s and during the 1960s became heavily infl uenced by mats,

their urban structure, environmental identity, patterns of mobility and transformability.

The infl uence of the Kasbah can be seen in Candilis-Josic-Woods’s project for the

reconstruction of central Frankfurt and the Free University of Berlin in 1963, both

proposing horizontal buildings that Shadrach Woods referred to as ‘groundscrapers’.

Mat-building is a process, a growing structure of additive elements characterized by

a delicate interplay between variations and repetitions of form. Retracing the formal

evolution of mat-buildings, this paper tries to point to the typology’s relevance in the

contemporary discourses of sustainabile urbansim and land-use planning.

73Ferrer Forés

Introduction

Mat-building emerged in the late 1950s as a consequence of the debates within CIAM over principles of functional zoning. A group of younger architects, called Team 10, suggested an alternative to the functional city described in Le Corbusier’s Athens Charter (1933), in which the four functions of daily life — living, working, circulation and recreation — were segregated from one another. Alison Smithson described the mat concept and defi ned mat-building as follows: “mat-building can be said to epitomize the anonymous collective; where the functions come to enrich the fabric, and the individual gains new freedoms of action through a new shuffl ed order, based on interconnection, close knit patterns of association and possibilities for growth, diminution and change.” (Smithson, 1974)

It is through their insistence that modern urbanism could express a higher degree of particularity and identity that Team 10 argued for a greater individual focus over the universalizing approach of the functional city (Figure 1). Instead of a static architec-tural composition, mat-architecture is the installation of a generative structure: urban forms shaped by the unique characteristics of particular places, specifi c patterns of human association, open to transformation, respectful of local nature and climate. The mat was intended to provide fl exibility in planning for a range of functions over time, thus assuring its own longevity; its very realization is spread out over time and subject to revision and adaptation. “The systems will have more than the usual three dimensions,” argued Alison Smithson, “They will include a time dimension.” (Smith-son, 1974)

Mainstream mat-building became visible in Team 10’s work with the completion of the project for the Frankfurt-Römerberg center (1963) and the Berlin Free Univer-sity (1963) by Candilis-Josic-Woods, where their work attempted to demonstrate the environmental responsiveness of mat-building in the context of a large and rap-idly evolving institution (Figure 2, 3). The principles of these and other mat struc-tures are now reappearing in the contemporary debates on sustainable architecture and urban development. According to Hashim Sarkis, “today mats are appearing everywhere. We call them fi elds, grounds, carpets, matrices. The mat answers to the recurring calls for effi ciency in land use, indeterminacy in size and shape,

74 Projections

Figure 1. Cluster of overlapping functions. Source : Smithson and Smithson, 2005.

fl exibility in building use, and mixture in program. In the face of these challenges, and

in every other design published in every other magazine, the mat claims to address

a wide range of problems preoccupying contemporary architecture” (Sarkis, 2001).

Stan Allen has recently also re-evoked mat-building principles to meet the design

challenges of contemporary architecture and urbanism, characterizing mat-buildings

as “a shallow but dense section activated by ramps and double-height voids, the uni-

fying capacity of a large open roof, a site strategy that lets the city and the landscape

fl ow through the project, a delicate interplay of repetition and variation and the incor-

poration of time element as an active variable in urban architecture” (Allen, 2001).

This paper aims to re-evaluate the mat-building strategies of formal organization in

architecture and urbanism, exploring their potential for contemporary sustainable

environments. The paper traces a formal analysis of mat projects in the following

thematic order: from cell to cluster, from cluster to stem and from stem to mat, pre-

senting worked examples by Candilis-Josic-Woods and Alison and Peter Smithson.

From Cell to Cluster

The re-conceptualization of the urban tissue in Team 10’s work started with a single

dwelling cell. The cell — an individual building or space that accommodates human

activities — was organized through the ‘from cell to cluster’ principle, which sepa-

rated the urban tissue into its smallest components, cells, and re-assembled them

so as to establish intricate spatial variation between private and public space (Figure

75Ferrer Forés

Figure 2. Competition for the reconstruction of Frankfurt-Römerberg centre, 1963, Source: Joed-icke, 1968.

Figure 3. Competition design for the Free University, Berlin, 1963, Source: Joedicke, 1968.

4). This essential characteristic of the traditional European city was put to practice by Candilis-Josic-Woods in their extremely diversifi ed low-rise, high-density court-yard housing in Aulnay Sous Bois, France (1960) and in their competition entry for semi-urban housing in Algeria (1960), which the authors considered “an attempt to discover structuring principles which might be applicable to the organization of the physical environment” (Avermaete, 2005). The typology, which was forward-looking in its innovative treatment of vehicular traffi c and site climate conditions, used the courtyard house as the organizing cell of the development, and the courtyard itself as a vital center and climate regulator of the house. The courtyard plan can adapt to different climates – in hot areas, exposure to the sun can be avoided by keeping courtyards small and overshadowed by high walls, wide eaves and foliage. The ex-posure of vertical surfaces to the sun is minimized by sharing the external walls with neighboring houses. Thick walls and small windows of the courtyard layout keep in-teriors cool, while allowing cross ventilation with shady verandas and patios facilitate outdoor living. The resulting cluster typology creates a rich variety of spatial experi-ences and a formal framework for changing patterns of use.

From Cluster to Stem

In his declaration of the four functions of cities at the 4th CIAM Congress in 1933 – living, working, recreation, circulation – Le Corbusier proposed a comprehensive city desing framework for a Modern society. By the 1950s, the younger members of CIAM were advocating a planning approach that would better account for diversity — social, cultural, climatic and ethnic — in the built environment as well as its users (Statement on Habitat/Doorn Manifesto, 1954). Shadrach Woods, one of the oppo-nents of functionalist zoning, argued: “The implantation of isolated housing projects or of dormitory towns makes as little sense as the building of educational or industrial parks. Public and private are contiguous and continuous, each supporting the other, but each limited to its own domain... when either clearly dominates over large areas, the fabric of life is discontinuous, creating zones of blight” (Woods, 1962). According to the Smithsons, “the forms and patterns derived from the garden city movement or the rationalism of the 30’s [were] endlessly repeated in contradiction to the climate, human habit, location and common sense”. For Team 10 architecture is not a ‘mag-nifi cent play of form in light’, as defi ned by Le Corbusier, but rather an attempt to create spaces for particular human activities over time. Architecture’s aim is to defi ne a ‘carrying order’, an infrastructural project capable of variation and growth.

Figure 4. Cluster diagram of Fold Houses, 1955, Source : Smithson and Smithson, 2005.

76 Projections

In line with their response, the Smithson studied groupings of dwelling that would foster community and develop a natural relationship to their environment: “this might be termed the ecological concept of Urbanism, a concept of obvious value when we are dealing with the problem of ‘habitat’”. (Smithson and Smithson 2005) Re-thinking the basic relationships between social life and mechanization, they searched for new patterns of Habitat for a new urban reality. Their work suggested that the structure of cities lies not in their geometries but in the activities within them. These activities are articulated or materialized by buildings and spaces, by paths and places, and by the careful articulation of public and private control. In contrast to standardized architecture that ignores the particularities of its location and uses, they argued that architectural order should derive from comunity hierarchies and contextual associa-tions. The system of relationships and patterns of encounter, which the cells and stems of the cluster generate, provide the spatial framework for these hierarchies and associations.

Instead of ‘new monumentality’, grand piazzas and the ‘hearth of the city’ presented at the previous CIAM by Sert and Giedion, the Smithsons put forward the streets of London’s working class neighborhoods as inspiration for a new form of architecture and urban design. The idea of the street as a stem of public life was developed further in their competition entry for a new housing block at Golden Lane in 1952. The project’s ‘street in the air’ concept was designed as an ample gallery that gives access to fl ats, but at the same time also functions as a place for human encounter

77Ferrer Forés

Figure 5. Diagrammatic plan of a small city from the Golden lane project, 1952, Source : Smithson and Smith-son, 2005.

Figure 6. Cluster diagram of Close Houses from 1955, Source : Smithson and Smithson, 2005.

and play (Figure 5). Instead of the rue intérieure proposed by Le Corbusier in his Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, the Smithsons proposed to move the circulation space to the façade of their buildings, thereby accentuating the public character and spatial autonomy of the stem.

Placing the stem along the periphery, rather than the center of the cells, also allowed the stem to grow or change with greater ease over time. The Fold House ideogram, presented in 1954 as an infi ll to the fabric of an existing city, connected dwelling units by a straight ‘stem’ that could grow, shrink or change in response to needs over time (Figure 4). The stem is also the basic structuring device in the Close Houses of 1955, where multiple parallel stems start forming a network of covered passages that link various dwelling types and activities in a loosly defi ned grid (Figure 6). The nucleus of the project, in each case, is a stem, rather than a ‘hearth’.

From Stem to Mat

Eventually the concept of autonomous stems gave way to a two-dimensional net-work of stems and cells – a mat. Through its organizing network of circulation routes and support systems, the mat provides even greater fl exibility for unifying diverse clusters of activity in multiple directions. It can grow along any of its stems in two dimensions, while stimultaneously maintaning a coherent and systematic interconnected order.

Mat-buildings were strongly infl uenced by the dense historical tissue of traditional cit-ies. In parallel to their design work, the mem-bers of Team 10 studied the spatial structure and functional layout of traditional Islamic cities. As George Candilis pointed out, “in Morocco with Shadrach Woods, we began to work on an idea of a special conception to create place. Certainly the special concept was infl uenced by the Souks of Marrakech.

These had two phenomena: two which always existed; spontaneity and diversity; with the ‘main street’ of the Souk as ‘the skeleton’” (Risselada and Heuvel, 2005). For Candilis and Woods, the mat typology became the vehicle for generating the spatial and functional density of the traditional city. Aldo van Eyck described Woods’ and Candilis’ inspiration of the Arab city as follows: “Shadrach Woods and George Candilis, in a different way since they are so different, both tended to project their

78 Projections

Figure 7. Interior of bazaar in Kuwait City and perspective of a gallery, 1968-72, Source : Smithson and Smithson, 2005.

experience – one in Morocco and one in Far East – into the souk and into the bazaar: they believed in the bazaar, in the souk and in the stem... We just used that one word ‘casbah’ as an image, as a poetic image. We were referring to any kaleidoscopic society where all the functions are more or less mixed, and always said the ‘casbah’ was the fi nal limit. We don’t have to literally make a casbah, imitating a period of hu-man history when things were mixed and closed knit, but we need to be a little more ‘casbahistic’, by putting things together: and letting things penetrate into each other again. That is what we meant by casbah.” (Tuscano, 2005)

The Smithsons too were fascinated by the traditional Arabic casbah, its rich texture, “full of starts and stops and shadow… with a high degree of connectedness to allow for change of mind and the in-roads of time” (Smithson, 1974) (Figure 7). Building on the spatial quali-ties of the ‘casbah’, mat buildings became con-densed into continuous structures of interlinked stems. The Smithsons even had an opportunity to propose mat structures in an arabic context as part of their 1968-72 Kuwait Urban Study (Figure 8)2.

The mat’s structuring concept of mobility and connectivity was developed in collaboration between the Smithsons and Peter Sigmond in their competition entry for Hauptstadt Berlin (1958). Through its particular focus on urbanity and mobility, the project emphasizes the insep-arable relationship between an individual and the city, between the part and the whole. The project illustrates the Smithsons’ ideas about mobility networks in post-war cities; instead of divisions, which characterize CIAM’s previous concepts of functional cities, the Smithson’s suggest that new forms of mobility demand physical patterns of connectivity. According to the Smithson’s, “the urban forms of Berlin Hauptstadt have as their basis the idea of mo-

bility, of absolute maximum mobility, achieved by a layered movement pattern that separates the various means of expression and gives to each its own geometry, its own formal expression.” (Smithson and Smithson, 2005) The mat’s indefi nite circula-tion network is the project’s generator.

The proposed pattern can fl exibly accommodate growth and changes in use over

79Ferrer Forés

Figure 8. Peter Smithson presents the mod-el of the mat-building to the Crown Prince of Kuwait, Source : Smithson and Smithson, 2005.

time. The Smithson’s emphasized “the feeling for change, so that buildings, roads and services can develop freely according to their own laws without compromising the development as a whole” (Smithson and Smithson, 2005), which the two-dimen-sional circulation network of the mat generously provides. There are two interrelated

geometric systems of movement — the upper-level network for pedestrian paths and — platforms of vistas that integrate existing historical remnants of the city, and which are accessed by escalators over the street grid; and the lower-level fabric of vehicular streets (Figure 9). By overlaying movement systems, the Berlin Hauptstadt project jointly addresses the relationships between mobility, growth and change, producing an urban network that anticipated the mat concept. “Architecture and planning”, ar-gued Woods, “which are each part of the other, are concerned with the organization of places and ways for the carrying out of man’s activities. The architectural process begins with a way of thinking about organization in a given place-time, then establish-es a system of relationships and, fi nally, achieves plastic expression.” (Woods, 1962)

In Candilis-Josic-Woods’ competition entry for the reconstruction of Frankfurt-Römerberg centre (1963), an area that was destroyed in the Second World War, the spatial organization also takes the form of a multi-level grid of pedestrian walkways that link public activities at the lower level with the private dwellings on the upper lev-els (Figure 2). The project brief asked for the reconstruction of a historical city centre in a ruined area between the city hall and the cathedral. For Candilis-Josic-Woods, structuring of new urban development in a historical urban tissue called for new spatial practices: “Such diversity of activities needs to be housed, that if all of these had to be considered separately, the result would be chaos. These diverse elements must be made into a whole, a single organism.” Using a mat typology enabled the partners “to organize the multitude of activities called for in the program, into a clear, comprehensible, adaptable order.” (Candilis, Josic and Woods, 1964)

80 Projections

Figure 9. Competition for Berlin Haupstadt, 1958, Source : Smithson and Smithson, 2005.

The Frankfurt mat was not only meant to accommodate growth and change within

its limits, but to also adapt to its surrounding context. Despite the apparent com-

plexity of its grid, the scheme demonstrates that the scale, grain and traces of the

surrounding urban fabric are reinterpreted on the ground level of the project as an

attempt to harmonize the project and the neighboring urban tissue. The circulation

grid of the mat corresponds to the existing network of pedestrian walkways on the

site. Relationships with context are further intensifi ed by the sequence of interrelated

open spaces, courts and patios that permeate the entire project.

The structuring concept of the mat was developed further in Candilis - Josic - Woods’

design for the Free University in Berlin (1963). The project was handled as a ‘city in

miniature’ that is structured around an orthogonal double-level pedestrian grid, with

most public functions located on the ground fl oor (Figure 3). The scheme proposed

a series of wider pathways, stems, which serve the most active areas of the building,

with a secondary system of perpendicular pathways serving the less traffi cked areas

of the building. The resulting ‘groundscraper’ organization ensures abundant op-

portunities for communication and exchange between various parts of the mat with-

out sacrifi cing their autonomy. Ample pedestrian pathways, ramps and escalators

connect clusters of rooms into a two-layer mat that extends over the entire project

site. The juxtaposition of platforms, open spaces and covered pathways generates a

continuous and spatially diverse structure. Alison Smithson later recounted that: “the

Berlin Free University makes mat-architecture recognizable” (Smithson, 1974). She

defi ned the term “mat-building” as a structure whose order is based on three param-

eters: interconnectivity; relational patterns; and opportunities for growth, decline and

change (Ibid).

Discussion

By exposing the evolution of mat structures in the work of Team 10, this paper has

tried to outline advantages of mat confi gurations that may offer renewed interest for

contemporary architecture and urbanism. The mat concept is a critique of both the

functional separation of urban land uses in post-war Europe and the widespread

adoption of high-rise buildings during the same period. It was a reaction, common to

many Team 10 contributors, against the orthodox zoning of cities into discrete func-

tional areas, advocating that urbanism be more than merely an organization of build-

ings and activities into coherent zones with limited connectivity. Rather than giving it

defi nitive form, the mat is a planning instrument that allows the urban environment to

be mixed and structured over time (Avermaete, 2005). As an effort to escape from

earlier CIAM dogmas, the mat typology signaled an emerging awareness of the com-

plexity and richness of the urban fabric, evident in historic vernacular environments,

but lacking from mainstream Modernism.

The mat typology also offers a fl exible framework for relating to a site through

81Ferrer Forés

an uninterrupted continuation of the urban fabric into its own spatial network. The network of pathways, courtyards and platforms allow the neighboring urban or natural fabric to fl ow seamlessly through the project. Mat-buildings thus establish a system of relationships, present and potential, between the built and the natural. The spaces of transition and connection offer ‘poetry of movement’ and a ‘sense of connectivity’. The very essence of mats is urban: architecture made of relationships rather than form.

Future Research

Mat-typologies have been realized in large-scale institutions, such as the Free Univer-sity and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as in housing projects, such as the Agricultural City by Kisho Kurokawa (1960). The typology has been recently re-introduced in Foster and Partners’ plan for the Masdar City in Abu Dhabi (2007-2023) as a structural blueprint for sustainable development3. The typology has thus been mainly applied in singular institutional projects, and it remains unclear whether mats could be equally suited to more decentralized forms of development that are shaped by multiple owners over time. The case of Masdar City, which will need to transcend multiple institutions, might provide a partial answer to this question. Yet, it is also unclear whether mat-structures are bound to remain unique and rare for large-scale development, or whether their benefi ts can attract larger interest and adoption in dispersed, small-scale developments in rapidly urbanizing cities. Due to a number of challenges, mat buildings have not yet entered mainstream urban design practice. The need for costly up-front infrastructure investment compared to conventional pat-terns of development, and the procedural diffi culties involved in separating the per-manent infrastructure from the more fl exible and adaptable parts, have so far limited the widespread adoption of mat structures. More research is required to understand and desirably overcome these challenges.

ENDNOTES

[1] The Kasbah is a dense historic urban development typology encountered in many Islamic cities.

[2] Four international architecture teams were invited by the Emir of Kuwait in 1968 to participate in the Kuwait Urban Study. Besides the Smithsons, participants included Candilis-Josic-Woods; Reima Pietilä; and BBPR. Jørn Utzon, whose proposal won fi rst prize in a restricted competition for Kuwait Na-tional Assembly, also proposed a growing mat structure. For Jørn Utzon “traditional Arab architecture will have an enormous infl uence on the future architectural development of the world and it is, therefore, a natural thing that the concept of the Kuwait National Assembly complex has been based on some of the major elements of traditional Arab architecture, such as the covered street -the bazaar street- the interior courtyard, the succession of structural arches” (Ferrer Forés, 2006).

[3] Though no provisions for long-term growth and change have been outlined in Fosters & Partner’s project.

82 Projections

WORKS CITED

Allen, S. (2001). Mat Urbanism: The Thick 2-D, in Sarkis, S., Allard, P. and Hyde, T. (eds) Case: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival. New York: Prestel.

Avermaete, T. (2005). Another Modern. The Post-war architecture and urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers

Candilis, G., Josic, A. and Woods, S. (1964). ‘Reserches d’Architecture’, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, no. 115.

Candilis, G., Josic, A. and Woods, S. (1964). ‘Berlin Free University’, Le Carré Bleu, no. 1.

Ferrer Forés, J.J. (2006). Jørn Utzon. Obras y proyectos. Works and projects. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili.

Joedicke, J. (1968). Candilis-Josic-Woods, a decade of architecture and urban design (Stuttgart, 1968). The offi ce was responsible for the structure of the book and the description of the project.

Risselada M. and Heuvel D. (ed.). (2005). Team 10: 1953-81: in search of a utopia of the present, Rot-terdam: NAI Publishers.

Sarkis, H. (2001). Introduction, in Sarkis, S., Allard, P. and Hyde, T. (eds) Case: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival. New York: Prestel.

Smithson, A. (1974). ‘How to Recognize and read Mat-Building. Mainstream architecture as it devel-oped towards mat-building’, Architectural Design, no. 9.

Smithson, A. and Smithson, P. (2005). The charged void: Urbanism. New York: The Monacelli Press.

Tuscano, C. (2005). The underlying reasons. Interview with Giancarlo de Carlo, Ralph Erskine and Aldo van Eyck in Risselada M. and Heuvel D. (ed.) (2005). Team 10: 1953-81: in search of a utopia of the present, Rotterdam: NAI Publishers.

Tuscano, C. (2005). Everybody has his own story. Interview with Aldo van Eyck in Risselada M. and Heuvel D. (ed.) (2005). Team 10: 1953-81: in search of a utopia of the present, Rotterdam: NAI Pub-lishers.

Woods, S. (1962). ‘The Web’, Le Carré Bleu, no. 3

83Ferrer Forés

!"#$%&'(#)*

T H E O B J E C T I F I C AT I O N O F I N F R A S T R U C T U R E :E L E M E N T S O F A D I F F E R E N T S PA C E A N D A E S T H E T I C

F O R S U B U R B A N A M E R I C A

ALEXANDER D’HOOGHE

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

ABSTRACT

One can look at infrastructures of mobility as a system, or one can look at it as a series of artifacts. This paper argues that rather than a system of transportation plan-ning and engineering, we may read infrastructures as objects of cultural production with a spatial content not unlike that of architecture or sculpture. Obvious as this statement may seem, it has far-reaching consequences on our own conventions and aesthetics in urban design. The reduction of infrastructures of mobility to a transpor-tation system, blurring its recognition as a cultural stage (artifact + space) in its own right, may be to blame for the current disillusion Americans have with their suburbs, because this reduction depleted these suburbs of a consciousness of what they have in common: these bulky objects called roads.

85D�Hooghe

Hippopotamus Tinguely. Source: The Tinguely Museum, Switzerland.

Introduction

“the road … also exists as a static, bulky object in the landscape, a substantial piece of the urban scene for those who live along its borders.. it is a problem that we will not consider here.”

– Kevin Lynch and Donald Appleyard in “A View From the Road”.1

This article claims an intellectual space for the road in its ‘static, bulky objecthood. In

doing so it aims to complement Kevin Lynch’s analysis of the modern road. It specu-

lates about infrastructures of mobility as cultural artifacts rather than technocratic

systems. In doing so it argues not only with the world of transportation planning /

engineering, but also with a powerful tradition internal to urban design and social

studies. Territorial design of infrastructure should abandon its instincts towards the

systematic (or the anonymous, absolute, dehumanized, totalizing), and replace it with

the cultural (authored, fi nite, crafted, subjectively positional).

Not Systems but Objects?

The last hundred years of English and American urban planning literature describes

roads and other infrastructures of mobility primarily as systems of distribution (‘trans-portation’), or of cinematographic sequences of views of the surrounding picturesque

country (‘highway as parkway’). Both attitudes make the material presence of the

road itself subservient to its bigger purpose as conductor of fl ows of goods and

people.

Against this reductive interpretation exists another, which reads infrastructure not

as a system but as an object, not as a logic but as an artifact, not as a tube but as

a space. From this point of view, infrastructures of mobility are prime candidates for

becoming public spaces, or, better yet, public forms that are true and proper to the

exigencies and demands of a modern urban society. Such an approach would privi-

lege infrastructure by imposing on it all the demands that culture and the arts usually

reserve for themselves but rarely apply to the technocracy that structures the very

society in which they operate.

A Short Archeology of Infrastructural Thinking

The ‘systems turn’ in infrastructural thinking occurred about 100 years ago, when the

American Planning Association turned from a City Beautiful attitude to a more func-

tionalist approach of the city as a system. City Beautiful architects had aimed to

restructure and grow the American city with architecture, monuments, and public

86 Projections

spaces. Increasingly inadequate to the demands of speed, fl ow control and scale increases, this approach was abandoned in favor of a more systematic approach through a tool called ‘the comprehensive plan’. To this corresponded a shift in the design of roads from one where architects and artists were often involved, to one dominated by engineers and policy maker — the fi eld of culture was purged from what was to become suburbia’s main public realm: the roadway surrounded by green buffer zones. Planning’s technocratic turn coincided with widespread suburbaniza-tion, effectively bereaving the new fi eld of a modern civic idiom uniquely adapted to its own spatial structure. Suburban roadway design, as emerged in the new roadway typology of the ‘parkway’, never developed an aesthetic consciousness about itself: “As urban sprawl, industrial development, and rising traffi c began to diminish the ap-peal of suburban pleasure driving, however, it became necessary to create artifi cial landscapes to simulate the appeal of traditional vernacular roadways”.2 As a result the exodus from the city avoided the development of a conscious presence. How-ever, this self-denial could only last for a while. By the 1950s, after decades of ‘marked suburbanization’3 and against the techno-cratic sterility of the expanding universe of post-war suburban roadways, a series of new approaches attempted to reconcile infrastructure as a distribution system with infrastructure as a humanist conception. We can distinguish three attempts at such reconciliation.

Architecture as an Infrastructural System

In 1962, Team X argued for a closer relationship between modern infrastructure and Modernist building.4 After focusing on the problem of the greater number and the as-sociated questions of identity, change and growth, they saw a need for a designer’s conception of infrastructure. Van Eyck brought the ‘Noah’s Ark’ plan by his favorite student Piet Blom to the group’s 1962 meeting in Royaumont and explained it in terms of a ‘tree-leaf’ diagram. Van Eyck tried to demonstrate the inseparable reci-procity between the house and the city, a reciprocity he saw expressed in an exem-plary and poetic fashion in Blom’s design. His presentation drew a vigorous dismissal, particularly from the British members of the Team X group. Though Blom’s plan might operate as ‘identifying structure’, Bakema later observed, it gave insuffi cient expres-sion to the idea of ‘freedom of choice’.

Arguably, Blom’s proposal was to produce a total infrastructure, subsuming and ex-ploding the objects of architecture within an infrastructural system. In fact, we could argue that he fi rst naturalized infrastructure as a ‘new nature’, and then proceeded to integrate and dissolve architecture within this new totality. In other words, he natu-ralized the ‘new’ qualities of infrastructure as a technocratic, anonymous and total system by endowing it with organic terms such as ‘the stem’ (Candilis, Josic and Woods), by drawing it as an expanding system with roots and branches, and transfer

87D�Hooghe

88 Projections

that total system to architecture, injecting as it were the old body of architecture with the modern properties of infrastructure. In doing so the objecthood of infrastructure, its authored subjectivity, its lack of homogeneity, its self-consciousness, and its lack of belonging were destroyed. This attempt towards systematization can be discov-ered in much of the work done at MIT in the 1960-70’s under the aegis of Habraken’s ‘structure-infi ll’ system. ‘Structure-infi ll’ was nothing else but a way to blow up archi-tecture’s objecthood, reconstituting the building as a series of layers with different life-spans in which structure corresponded to the urban design concept of infrastruc-ture – long lasting, invisible and total support platform of the building. By dissipating infrastructure in the total body of urban production, which itself had turned every act of urban production into a infrastructural extension, infrastructure became to the city what water is to the fi sh — total.

Infrastructure as the Scenography of the Territory

Kevin Lynch and Donald Appleyard’s “A View from the Road” (1964) constituted another contribution, almost setting the script for the design of the new city of Milton Keynes in 1968-1969. The planning and design team of this project, brought togeth-er by Richard Llewelyn-Davies and led by John de Monchaux, deliberately twisted and deformed the proposed grid of roadways in order to account for the topography of rolling hills, and the preservation of woods and ancient villages. Rather than a mathematical operation to optimize grading, the roadway design operates accord-ing to the principles expounded by Lynch and Appleyard, organizing shifting views into a cinematographic experience of the surrounding territory. Lynch and the team at Llewellyn-Davies knew each other, and John de Monchaux would join Lynch’s faculty group at MIT a decade later. Lynch and Appleyard, as well as the designers of Milton Keynes, were amongst the fi rst to bring infrastructure into design culture. Their projects take on the logic of the suburban road in a more immediate way than ever before. Lynch and Appleyard speak about ‘aesthetics of the highway’, but in fact they restricted themselves to an aesthetic from the highway. They themselves are extremely clear about this:

“While the road makes a dynamic impression on the driver and his passengers, it also exists as a static, bulky object in the landscape, a substantial piece of the urban scene for those who live along its borders. This presents a two-faced problem, much as if a theatrical designer had to be concerned with the visual form of his backstage apparatus. However important, it is a problem that we will not consider here.” 5

In hindsight, the prioritization of the view from the road over that of the road is not a coincidence but a re-articulation of traditional landscape picturesque roadway design principles, proper to the English landscape tradition that were previously explored by Robert Moses’ 1920’s parkway designs around New York City. The road has become a system, and while Lynch acknowledges its importance as an object, he never got

89D�Hooghe

to analyzing it as such. Who, then, attempted to objectify infrastructure during the

systems era?

Early Attempts to Objectify Infrastructure

Louis Kahn’s work on bee-hives — enormous transfer stations functioning as high-

way exits, ramps and parking garages around Philadelphia — may serve as embry-

onic, poetic and naïve declarations of intention towards such an architecture.6 What

happened after that?

A generation of designers, more or less overlapping with practice that Kenneth

Frampton has deemed ‘critical regionalism’, have also attempted to contextualize,

localize, and objectify Modernist infrastructure systems. These practitioners have in-

cluded Manuel De Sola Morales, Joan Busquets, Marcel Smets, and others. The

embryonic objectifi cation of infrastructure by these authors resulted in the down-

playing of the hegemony of transportation as the primary function for the object.

Instead of traffi c along lanes, they have looked for transversal connections within

infrastructure objects. Instead of a zone of speed, they have looked for means to turn

the infrastructure itself into a civic space, shifting the attention from designing for one

particular fl ow to organizing and negotiating between multiple fl ows. This tradition

has identifi ed infrastructural design on a human scale as the primary target of archi-

tectural intelligence. Almost each of their projects has emphasized multi-modality, the

capacity of infrastructure to welcome several different speeds and modes of occupa-

tion, as one of the primary strategies to make them a public realm.

Towards an American Approach for Suburban Infrastructure Objects

Unfortunately, the bulk of the Mediterranean Modernists’ work only targeted infra-

structures in historical city centers. Both qua scale and qua complexity, this differs

from the contemporary infrastructure challenges of American suburbs and periph-

eries. The vast brown fi elds, half-developed fragments of civilization and decaying

environments that constitute the middle-ring suburbs of the American city – the Pas-

saics, Patersons around New York or the Maldens, Medfords around Boston – may

well form a fi eld ready for the critical insertion of a series of infrastructural objects.8

That is because these middle ring suburbs have become a demonstration par excel-lence of the endgame of infrastructure resulting from a systematic obsession with

transportation mobility. The ubiquity of transportation infrastructures in the middle

ring, whether roads, highways parking lots, interstates or residual spaces between

them, may demonstrate that automobile infrastructure as a means to increase mo-

bility has realized itself maximally, exhausted itself, and thus lost its critical edge.

Indeed, the very reason that the American middle suburb has lost its appeal may well

90 Projections

be attributed to its strangling excess of access, spaghetti of often redundant and overdesigned roadways. The outcome of the gradual pavement of what was once meant to be green is nothing else but a vast tarmac. To consider, under such circum-stances, systematic mobility as a critical project seems inadequate. Quite the oppo-site, the middle ring demonstrates how the generational task of urban designers and architects graduating in America today, will involve the radical re-conceptualization of infrastructure as a series of fi nite, concrete objects that are simultaneously places: in short, a series of discrete stages.

Suburban Stages

The fi ne, small scale of infrastructure interventions proposed by Mediterranean Mod-ernists in Barcelona need to be re-scaled and re-considered for these terrains; their intelligence made more inclusive of the automobile logic and multi-modal exchange, yet kept as project of objects rather than of systems.

The objectifi cation of infrastructure in American suburbs would celebrate and, with limited means, civilize and monumentalize moments in which the thin strands of civic life clot into moments of conscious coexistence – moments of publicness. This be-ing-in-coexistence does not come about automatically, it needs to be actively worked at and created by re-wiring traffi c fl ows, stops, intermissions and crossings and es-pecially by colliding and designing their temporary co-existence in one single space. Such spaces, as singularities where different fl ows co-exist, form the public essence, yes the very raison d’ être of the project of the infrastructure objects. In that sense, the project of infrastructure objectifi cation will rely on the intertwining of two sets of knowledge and intelligence: (a) curating fl ows and (b)designing singular objects in which these collide. On the one hand, the curating and designing of fl ows implies our capacity to organize their re-wiring, their staging, their intersecting. This knowledge obviously needs to draw on the fi elds of transportation engineering and planning. However, rather than using insight into the hydraulics of human circulation in order to maximize one logic only (automobile use only, or pedestrianization only), we may use this knowledge in a more deviant manner towards the deliberate staging of frictions and forms of co-existence, which from a traffi c management point of view may make no sense, but from a public interest point of view are imperative. In other words, the weaving together of disparate thin strands of movement and existence into actual moments of public existence.

On the other hand, the role of the architect becomes clear in objectifying this re-wired moment into a singular space which gives that moment a form, a presence, an eleva-tion and a boundary:

Infrastructure, instead of continuous, breaks up into a sequence of fi nite mo-

91D�Hooghe

ments or bubbles of experience, corresponding to particular spatial and formal

confi gurations.

Infrastructure, instead of ubiquitous, would be deliberately absent in certain ar-

eas, thus restating a degree of wilderness, while simultaneously raising aware-

ness and consciousness about its very existence.

Infrastructure of being about one-dimensional movement becomes about the

resolution of confl ict between opposing fl ows and modes.

Infrastructure, instead of articulating a smooth fl ow, would instead take advan-

tage of the moments of friction and begin to articulate those into delineated

public spaces.

Infrastructure endings and entry / exit points, rather than anomalies of a circula-

tion system, would become the primary anchors of civic life.

Infrastructure as we understand it here would, within the confi nes of Marxist

theory, actually be categorized as superstructure.

The Aesthetics of Infrastructure as a High Art Project

Finally, the cultural sphere of an American stage object is so radically different from

that of a historical European city (such as Barcelona) that the aesthetics and formal

consistency of the latter cannot simply be copied. But the current approach of so-

called ‘beautifi cation of infrastructures’ may not succeed either. For in aesthetics,

kitsch means the representation of something as that which it is clearly not – e.g. a

cigarette lighter in the form of a tiger cub. With ominous kitsch in mind, the ‘beau-

tifying infrastructures’ constitutes a form of aesthetic betrayal, a populist cop-out

against the underlying aesthetic problem of design in our time. All attempts at beau-

tifi cation of roadways (benches, fl ags, pavements, etc.) are kitsch. Avoiding kitsch

is one of the ways to achieve an integrity that we usually associate with so-called

‘high design’. Against the populism of low expectations, I would argue that our last

vestiges of public space deserve the highest and best of our efforts. Furthermore,

the continuing abstract quality of the Modernist aesthetic is the best guarantee to-

wards its value as a collective form – for everyone reads and reconstructs the open

aesthetic of the abstract differently when lacking obvious semantic clues.

With the sensibility of kitsch in mind, a design that strives towards a non-kitsch in-

tegrity becomes a piece of labor to formalize artifacts in a manner that does not

deny their own, perhaps ugly but nevertheless honest, functional nature. The infra-

structural object is in this sense doomed to celebrate its own technocratic origins.

However, the self-conscious approach of culture and art may well have to consist of

simple and modest tweaks and shifts in the existing language of American infrastruc-

ture, albeit tweaks that turn functionality on its head. There exist precedents in recent

art history. The art works of Marcel Duchamp, Vladimir Tatlin, but most importantly

and more recently, Jean Tinguely and Panamarenko, illustrate an existing lineage of

absurd machine art. Tinguely’s auto-destructive and de-humanized machine art of

the early 1960ies uses parts of machines, re-assembles them differently, destroying

the functionality of the machine, but opening up different and subtly anthropomorphic

interpretations of the machine – all while maintaining its machine-ness and avoiding

the violation of the kitsch principle. Already in 1954, Michel Carrouges theorized this

approach in ‘Les Machines Celibataires’.9

To Tinguely’s use of machine parts could correspond our use of technocratic codes

and forms in infrastructure design. Any design of a contemporary infrastructure ob-

ject should begin and end with an acknowledgement of the object crafted. The high

design of an infrastructure object would have to directly address its own subject mat-

ter as a coded piece of technocratic, anonymous production. As a collective form,

technocracy – the apparatus of codes and laws as enshrined in vast libraries and

endless pdf’s that have governed roadway construction – has effectively created a

true collective form: a form without any clear authorship of its own, without a ‘subject’

at work. The road, in its current form, lacks self-consciousness. It is almost as natural

to modern society as water is to fi sh. A critical design project will then consist of the

creative appropriation of these codes, forms and the entire syntax of bureaucratic

order, in order to re-invent and re-build them as authored systems with a human

poetic element. Using the same technocratic elements that gave rise to the original

form of the infrastructure system, but re-arranging them in a way that multiplies their

functionalities and directions of potential use, will enable a consciousness of their

existence as cultural objects. Doing this would reconstitute the technocratic formal-

ism as a quintessentially theatrical stage upon which the big dramas of America’s

suburban life could unfold.

ENDNOTES

[1] P.4, ‘the highway experience’ in Appleyard, Donald; Lynch, Kevin; and Myer, John R. The view from the road. (Cambridge, MIT Press 1964)

[2] Davis, Timothy, “A Pleasant Illusion of Unspoiled Countryside”: The American Parkway and the Prob-lematics of an Institutionalized Vernacular (pp. 228-246). In ‘Constructing Image, Identity and Place.’

Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, Vol.9, 2003.

[3] As Chauncy Harris called the 1920s and 1930s, in: pp.1-14 in: Harris, Chauncy D. in: The American Journal of Sociology, (Chicago, July 1943).

[4] Notes from the meeting at Royaumont (France, 1962). In: Heuvel, Dik Vanden. Team 10 Meetings. Retrieved June 14, 2010, from Team 10 Online:http://www.team10online.org/team10/meetings/1962-royaumont.htm#2

92 Projections

[5] P.4, ‘the highway experience’ in Appleyard, Donald; Lynch, Kevin; and Myer, John R. The view from the road. (Cambridge, MIT Press 1964)

[6] These images have been published widely. Kahn presented them also in 1959 : Louis Kahn, “Talk at the Conclusion of the Otterlo Congress,” in CIAM 59 in Otterlo, edited by Oscar Newman (ed). Text republished as: Twombly, Robert (ed.) EssentialTexts. (New York, London: W.W. Norton, c2003). Im-ages republished as: Ronner, Heinz; and Jhaveri, Sharad. Louis I. Kahn: Complete Work, 1935-1974.(Birkhauser, 1987)

[7] Especially during Oriol Bohigas’ leadership of Barcelona’s planning and development. See also: Bo-higas, Oriol. Ten points for an urban methodology. Pp. 91-97 in Marshall, Tim. Transforming Barcelona. (Routlege, 2004)

[8] See also: defi nition of ‘grey goo’ in: D’Hooghe, Alexander, et.al. Crisis? What Crisis?, Volume, nr. 9, November 2006.

[9] See also: Hulton, Pontus; and Gunnar, Carl (ed.). The Machine as seen at the end of the Mechanics Age. ( New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968).J. Fonce, [ Transl: Panamarenko. At closer inspection: a structural-iconographic approach.] Panama-renko. Bij Nadere Beschouwing: een structureel-iconografi sche benadering. Pp. 83-92 in: Van Damme, Claire (ed.). [Ten Ways of Drawing in Contemporary Art.] X manieren van tekeningen in Hedendaagse kunst. (Gent: Academia Press, 1997).

93D�Hooghe

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ABSTRACT

The consequences of world economic development and global warming will force the suburbs of the United States to densify. If there is not an adequate design response to these pressures these residential settings will be destroyed by slide-in small apart-ments, packaged accessory buildings, and heedless remodeling. This article pro-poses the creation of state-funded design teams to fashion place-sensitive land, structure and street reconfi gurations in cooperation with existing neighborhoods in order to preserve the green suburbs of America.

A P U B L I C S E R V I C E R O L E F O R P L A N N E R S A N D A R C H I T E C T S

SAM BASS WARNER

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

95Warner

A Public Service Role for Planners and Architects

A major local planning challenge for the reworking of American suburbs now con-fronts planners and architects. The challenge grows from a series of global and national problems that together threaten today’s commonplace ways of life in the United States. Since the 1980s, global warming has proceeded unabated. Forests everywhere have been reduced, oceans trashed and acidifi ed, and the northern ice is melting at an alarming rate. If the nations of the world continue to emit pollutants at their present rate, catastrophes will surely ensue. (McKibben, 2010)

This same polluting global economy also over-consumes existing natural resources of water, timber, grass, oil and natural gas and places excessive demands on wheat, corn and rice production. Consequently, the price of the basic materials of modern life will rise steeply and soon. The current economic depression can suppress these price rises for at most one more decade. (Schor, 2010)

Since the 1980s employment has grown more uncertain and three quarters of all American families have seen their incomes decline. Costs for housing, food, trans-portation and education have increased substantially. These sharply rising prices will place further stress on already burdened family budgets. The direction of the world’s economy and global warming thus press down upon the circumstances of American life. (Chan & Carbone, 2010)

To address this challenge properly, planners and architects will need to work in new ways to address the coming press for densifi cation. The goal of such efforts must be to redesign and to rebuild existing single family suburbs to make residential environ-ments that are more energy effi cient, more convenient and less expensive for Ameri-can families to occupy while at the same time providing new kinds of green amenities for the residents. Among other changes, block-by-block attention to alter streets, residential landscapes and efforts to design satisfactory accessory apartments and structures will be needed. Fortunately, the suburban segments of urban regions can be substantially improved to cut family costs by at least 5% per year.

Although thoughtful planners and architects have been calling for denser, more tran-sit-friendly residential neighborhoods for years, little has been accomplished. There has been little or no progress in retrofi tting existing single family suburbs. The failure to institute new ways, however, cannot be placed at planners’ and architects’ doors. Federal and state initiatives necessary for support of local suburban action have not been put in place. There are no extensive federal policies for public transportation: neither plans nor adequate funds. The states are penniless and their public transpor-tation agencies operate at a loss. Oil, gas, automobile and highway interest groups prevent the reduction of carbon emissions. Metropolitan land owners and developers resist the laying down of urban growth limits, and few have considered a materials

96 Projections

policy that might reduce the nation’s demands for costly resources. Thus, global

warming goes forward unchecked and steep price increases for the basic materials

of the economy can be expected by 2020. (Stern, 2010)

The shock of these twin forces may in time breach the national political log-jam. But

when this moment arrives, will change come to the suburbs in a way that will improve

conditions there? Or will it come as a series of corporate building packages that will

worsen suburban environments? In the past, building packages for remodeling have

not respected the variety of circumstances and possibilities that prevail in existing

suburbs.

Currently there are no institutions in place within our suburbs capable of carrying out

a comprehensive planning, infrastructure and home rebuilding process of the mag-

nitude the coming crisis will demand. Planning is separated from architecture, and

property law and fi nance treat existing lots as isolated entities rather than interdepen-

dent parcels. Homeowners, themselves, also treat their property as an independent

entity. They do not generally behave in a cooperative manner with their neighbors in

order to maximize the possibilities of their holdings. Of course, local planning boards

could instantly alter zoning regulations to authorize two families to occupy an exist-

ing single family lot. Such a change, however, demands a revolution in the outlook

of suburban residents. The culture of a single family house and lot is deep and long

established. To affect change requires a patient approach. The immediate response

to such a change would be cries of, “I paid my hard-earned money to live in a single

family neighborhood and the proposed change to two families will ruin my investment

in my house.”

With these issues in mind, I would like propose here a process for the purpose of

opening a discussion of how planners and architects might meet the densifi cation

challenge. In putting forth this proposal, I am guided by my experience as a member

of a planning board in a suburban town and by evidence from an excellent review of

accessory unit policies in metropolitan Boston. (Stege, 2009)

My planning board experience tells me that suburban towns contain a wide range

of quality in building design, a range that extends from simply awful to handsome.

Recently, stock plans and manufactured housing have been replacing the work of

private architects. Surely a few packaged designs for accessory apartments and

structures cannot adequately serve such variety. Landscape architecture, for its part,

is divorced from town design of streets, infrastructure and open spaces. Time-based

fees drive services to towns by private planning fi rms. Such institutional patterns

seem woefully inadequate to guide a shift in public beliefs and changes in residential

arrangements.

The record of building accessory apartments and structures reveals further gaps be-

tween good intentions and action. Over 100 cities and towns in metropolitan Boston

97Warner

have enacted accessory unit laws, but the laws have brought little response. Several

reasons account for the want of action. Many homeowners lack suffi cient credit to

fi nance a remodeling or addition. Others need aid in obtaining good plans and pass-

ing through the many steps needed to advance from fi nance to building permit and

construction. The most common and formidable obstacle, however, is the fear of

alienating the neighbors.

This evidence leads me to believe that a successful densifi cation process will require

sustained education about alternatives to existing single family neighborhoods and a

great deal of attention to the details of adding units. The program will necessarily be

slow and detailed--a combination of needs that the fragmented planning and building

institutions of the suburbs are ill-fi tted to provide.

Therefore, I propose a state-fi nanced planning and design process to follow on from

federal-state programs for public transportation improvements. The location of en-

larged public transportation services will indicate where in the suburbs densifi cation

can most usefully take place. The next step envisions that professional societies of

planners, architects and landscape architects set forth panels of qualifi ed members

that cities and towns can chose from to form three-person teams for densifi cation

work. The team members must be state civil servants so that their work can be sus-

tained over a number of years and so that they will be secure from real estate con-

fl icts in particular places. The team’s task would be to work with town administrators

and local landowners to transform the initiatives of private investment in accessory

units into a town process of neighborhood betterment. The team’s process would

begin with a succession of neighborhood or block meetings designed to stretch over

several years. The goal would be to move from education of neighbors to bit-by-bit

densifi cation joined to municipal improvements that could add the benefi ts of a green

neighborhood to the new effi ciencies of transportation and housing additions.

A likely scenario would anticipate that team members move in two directions at once:

toward town offi cials and toward the neighborhoods. Review of design alternatives

for the improvement of existing streets and streetscapes with town authorities – es-

pecially the engineering department, the department of public works and the planning

board—is especially needed. Current efforts to create traffi c calming and child-safe

streets offer a variety of patterns for greening existing neighborhoods by narrowing

streets and altering their confi guration. Cities and towns when they participate in

densifi cation can recapture the costs of their improvements in increased residential

and retail land assessments.

Should a block or neighborhood request such changes, these new patterns could

compensate for some of the yard loss caused by residential densifi cation. (South-

worth & Ben-Joseph, 2003; Kaplan, Kaplan et al., 1998)

The approach to neighborhoods or blocks might best be a voluntary process. For ex-

98 Projections

ample, if four landowners requested meetings with the team the consultation process could begin. A discussion of the values of residents would constitute the essential starting subject of the meetings. What do people like about their surroundings and how do they use the block or neighborhood? How do the children use the spaces? What are the shortcomings? Problems? The values embedded in these issues make up the foundation upon which the team’s later design suggestions can build so that these value discussions should not be rushed.

After a series of such meetings the team might begin to offer suggestions for alterna-tives that would add housing units here and there and also improve the neighbor-hood. Suggestions would be made for adding an apartment to an existing home, for accessory structures – either a remodeled garage or a new building--and for alternatives to improve yards and the street. In the end what is being sought is a vote among the majority of homeowners (not unanimity) to support such improvements and a willingness to support one or more neighbors who undertake to add a unit to their property.

Of course, discussions can break down and a majority not materialize, but if several blocks or neighborhoods are in play it seems likely that the momentum for change will build after a few demonstrations. After all, added units bring rents to their owners and the public improvements make a pleasant green setting. Single family homeowners have much to gain, but their values must be respected if their fears of property loss are to be overcome.

The team members also stand to reap substantial rewards for their patience and skills. They have secure employment in a public service role that allows them to design freshly and at the highest standards for each particular house, lot and street. In addition to having a sustained opportunity to practice, they will reap a long run satisfaction from reworking whole towns into greener settings and more convenient and effi cient ways of life than are now possible.

WORKS CITED

McKibben, B., 2010, Earth, making life in a tough new planet, New York: Henry Holt.

Schor, J., B., 2010, Plenitude, the New Economics of True Wealth, New York: Penguin Press, Ch. II.

Cahn, N. and Carbone, J., 2010, Red Families v. Blue Families, New York: Oxford University Press, 3, 39.

Stern, N., “Climate Earth,” New York Review of Books (June 14, 2010, p.37).

Stege, E., H., 2009, What’s Next for Accessory Dwellings, Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology, Master’s Thesis in City Planning.

99Warner

Southworth, M. and Ben-Joseph, E., 2003, Streets and the Shaping of Towns & Cities,Washington, D.C.: Island Press, Ch. V

Kaplan, R., Kaplan, S., Ryan, R. L., 1998, With People in Mind, Washington, D.C. Island Press.

100 Projections

C O N T I N U I T Y A N D C H A N G E I N T H E U R B A N T R A N S F O R M AT I O NO F O L D D I S T R I C T S –

A C A S E O F S H A M S H U I P O , H O N G K O N G

PUI LENG WOO / KA MAN HUI

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

Urban structure not only represents the past but also conceals catalytic drivers for the growth of a city in the future. With massive redevelopment of old districts in many rapidly changing cities, the structure of old neighborhood fabrics is often ignored and destroyed. Uninformed by history, contemporary urban redevelopment often leads to the loss of a sense of place and displacement of communities. This paper examines continuity in the built environment by identifying and analyzing catalytic elements of historic transformation in the Sham Shui Po district of Hong Kong. It identifi es tangible evidence of permanence as the basis of a generative urban development armature. It attempts to demonstrate that certain land features, buildings, and public spaces can act as generators of historic continuity and should therefore be preserved as guides for future development decisions.

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Introduction

The question of permanence was poignantly revealed through the demolition of Hong Kong’s Lee Tung Street in December 2007. Known colloquially as the “Wedding Card Street”, Lee Tung Street was famous for its concentration of print shops. Laid out perpendicular to topographic contours, the street represented the fi rst phase of Wan Chai District’s land reclamation of 1902. Rebuilt after the Second World War, the street consisted of typical nineteen-fi fties four to six-storey reinforced concrete buildings of Hong Kong. Replacing these buildings will be a project of four high-rise towers with one thousand luxury residential units and a shopping mall around three conserved historical buildings.1

Behind the project is the Urban Renewal Authority (URA), a government statutory body responsible for site clearance and redevelopment in Hong Kong. Having spent HK$3.58 billion to prepare the land, the authority will receive ‘the best benefi t’ of HK$6.2 billion from a consortium of two private developers selected for the site. It hopes that business will return to help recreate the “wedding city” theme in the redevelopment project.2

Before Lee Tung Street’s demolition, denizens of the city made pilgrimages to the site, photographers took countless pictures, and protestors held demonstrations. After the buildings were torn down, the gaping hole reminded people of a loss, but brought in sunlight and hope for desirable change, at least until the construction be-gan. Most people have now resigned their hope for a transformed street. Widespread dissatisfaction with this and other urban renewal sites suggests that Hong Kong needs a better approach in transforming its old districts.

Located in the northern end of the Kowloon Peninsula, Sham Shui Po is another old district, and the poorest one in Hong Kong. (Hong Kong Census and Statistics De-partment, 2009) Sham Shui Po currently contains ten urban renewal projects, which call for the demolition of all existing buildings and the construction of high-rise mixed-use residential towers. How can a place like Sham Shui Po be renewed without losing its history, identity, and community?

We believe that a city is neither historic nor modern, but evolutionary. A city is made up of buildings, streets, and spaces that have been constructed, demolished, and re-built. Certain constructions have become reference points in the process of change. Some have acquired the status of historical monuments, others have evolved to become catalytic elements in the transformation of a city. This study illustrates a method for identifying and working with the elements that could inform the processes of change involved in urban renewal.

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Theoretical Proposition

Traces of urban growth are visible in the physical discontinuities of numerous cities. New infrastructure interventions in old neighborhoods, segregated land-uses, high-rise developments replacing traditional buildings and privatized public spaces are now ubiqutous in Chinese cities. Many parts of Beijing, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou are becoming generic and seemingly instantaneous, artifi cial, and disconnected from their histories. Occasional public outcry and targeted policies lead to a designation of selected buildings or districts for conservation. But general planning strategies that address continuous urban transformation are lacking. This paper seeks to examine the persistent question of how cities can be designed for growth and change without losing their sense of time and place.

A desirable image of a city is one that celebrates and enlarges the present while making connections with past and future. (Lynch, 1972) The architecture of a city includes not only the visible image of the present built environment, but also traces of its construction over time. Aesthetic continuity and strive for better living conditions are permanent characteristics of architecture, which remind us of the close relation-ship between the form and history of cities (Rossi, 1982). Planning and city design require wider recognition as critical links in the continuous evolution of cities. In other words, we need to look backward in order to project forward (Blau & Rupnik, 2007) .

At least two directions in the theory of city design have consciously addressed the sense of time and place in cities. The fi rst of these – Urban morphology – is a sys-tematic study of the evolution of urban form. By providing an analytical framework for understanding and monitoring change, it recognizes the need for continuity of some built-form, and argues for the management of change rather than preservation (Pendlebury 2009). It is possible, through a morphological study, to identity elements of the city, which via their nature, history, meaning, and design have endured time and become catalytic elements for surrounding historic development. Such elements are not only “pathological”, they can be “propelling.”3

Second, the practice of Town Planning, the roots of which go back to 19th century garden cities, offers a basis for greater community involvement in urban transforma-tion. Despite the differences of scale, and complexity between contemporary cities and garden cities, the latter’s theoretical underpinning of civic art as an expression of community life still appears to hold (Unwin, 1909). Unwin’s emphasis of civic art as an outward expression of a community’s needs, rather than decoration, still seems ap-plicable to rapidly growing modern communities whose needs and aspirations seek expression in the form of their habitat. In order to foster social cohesion and avoid alienation, the contemporary dense and diverse city requires greater community ex-pression in the design of its streets, public buildings, and open spaces. By working with these relatively permanent elements, the contemporary city can reinforce its connections with the past, while satisfying its collective aspirations of the present.

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Urban Renewal in Hong Kong

Numerous districts of Hong Kong, which were rebuilt to higher densities after the Second World War, have once again become targets of urban renewal. These dis-tricts are mainly comprised of low-rise buildings of varying conditions that support a large number of low-income families, elderly people, recent immigrants, and minority groups. These districts support the social, economic, and residential needs of work-ing class communities that are emblematic of Hong Kong’s history. Yet, under the pretext “to create quality and vibrant urban living”4, the present redevelopment proj-ects of the city appear to be displacing and eliminating these communities through eminent domain, demolition, and reconstruction.

The URA’s stated goals are “to provide better living environments and neighbour-hoods”, “to sustain local characteristics”, and “to revitalize through enhancing and strengthening the socio-economic and environmental fabric for the benefi t of our ur-ban communities.”5 The rhetoric is widely contradicted by a massive replacement of buildings in targeted sites by large high-rise podium structures. Much of the “socio-economic fabric” of old districts is made up of small businesses and street markets. Demolition of these buildings destroys the “environmental fabric” that supports their economic life and social potential. The replacement of this fabric with shopping malls and exclusive residential towers is, in fact, the opposite of sustaining “local charac-teristics”. With the current practice of redevelopment, the original “neighbourhoods” disappear.

There are currently ten urban renewal sites in the Sham Shui Po District. The sites contain mostly four to six-storey reinforced concrete structures built in the nineteen-fi fties. The ground fl oors of these structures typically contain shops with upper fl oors subdivided into tenements. The housing conditions vary from moderate to poor. The new projects are planned at Floor Area Ratios (FAR) of eight to nine – twice that of the existing buildings, typically producing more than two hundred thousand square metres of gross fl oor area per project. The result is the familiar Hong Kong podium-tower with forty to fi fty-storeys of apartments on top of a three-storey podium shop-ping mall.6

Hong Kong is well known as a a city of skyscrapers and rapid change (Abbas, 1997). Real estate development has always shaped the political economy and culture of the city. However, with Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997, its people have come to view the city, its history and form, with a heightened sense of belonging. Authorities that forge drastic change are now met with increasing resistance from residents, activists, and academics. The public concern with the life and architecture of their city is encouraging and calls for new methodologies to understand growth and change in relation to a wider public aspiration for continuity between the city’s past, present and future.

104 Projections

Defi ning Permanence

We defi ne two properties of permanence in city design. The fi rst is the duration of physical infrastructure through time, its continuity and long-term existence. The sec-ond is the persistence of social processes – their durability and continued function-ing. Permanence thus refers to the endurance of both physical objects and social ac-tivities from the past to the future. The opposite of permanence is temporary, mortal, and transient. Analogous defi nitions of permanence are known in other disciplines. In digital technology, for instance, permanence is a measure of the life of digital data storage. In psychology, object permanence describes the awareness of existing ob-jects even when they are no longer visible during a stage of cognitive development.Permanence in the built environment implies continuity for both static objects and dy-namic processes. “Persistence is revealed through monuments”, argued Aldo Rossi, “the physical signs of the past, as well as through the persistence of a city’s basic layout and plans… sometimes these artifacts persist virtually unchanged, endowed

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Figure 1. Images of Sham Shui Po.

with a continuous vitality; other times they exhaust themselves, and then only the permanence of their form, their physical sign, their locus remains”.7 Edmund Bacon argued, on the other hand, that “If the architect deals with movement systems…the chances of their survival, and indeed of their strengthening and extension over time, are very good indeed, even if the structures along them are torn down and rebuilt”.8

The Growth Of Sham Shui Po

The urbanization of the Kowloon Peninsula is clearly evident in the physical fabric of Sham Shui Po. Piers and reclamations, street layouts and speculative buildings, temples and markets, police stations and military camps, industrial buildings and public housing have transformed a number of villages on a jagged coast into a vast expanse of interconnected urban districts along Kowloon’s waterfront. The gridiron streets of Sham Shui Po are known today for their trade of electronic goods and clothing supplies. The area houses a community of working-class, low-income, and immigrant families in a variety of apartment buildings and public housing projects.

Sham Shui Po Village (1824-1898)

Prime areas of Hong Kong Island began to develop with the cession of Hong Kong Island to Britain in 1842. The district of Sham Shui Po, still a part of China on the fringe of Kowloon, initially remained rural. It was made up of a number of villages surrounded by a bay and mountain ranges. Separated by hills and water, the villages were linked by footpaths and waterways. Sham Shui Po, one of the villages with a strategic location near a coastal pier, became the center of the entire district. Sham Shui means deep water, Po refers to a bay with interlocking land and waterways (Cheng, 2007).

The original village, located at the intersection of present day Nam Cheong Street and Yee Kuk Street, no longer exists. It was a hamlet in the bay with a winding main street and several side streets. It contained dwellings, a market, two temples, shops, workshops, lime kilns, a custom house, and ten gambling houses (Smith, 1995). A boundary line (Boundary Street) south of Sham Shui Po marked the extent of Kowloon’s cession in 1860 from China to Britain (Figure 2). Located at the border of the two countries, Sham Shui Po attracted both legitimate and illicit business, and became known as a haven for criminals and smugglers (Smith, 1995).

Sham Shui Po New Town (1899-1944)

The leasing of the rest of Kowloon and the New Territories in 1898 for ninety-nine years was to have the greatest impact on Sham Shui Po. In order to grant new leases, the British Government drafted a new plan for Sham Shui Po in 1900. The

106 Projections

scheme was executed by private developers, mainly contractors, using land recla-mation and building projects (Smith, 1995). Two streets, Nathan Road and Boundary Street, played a critical role for the layout of Sham Shui Po. Nathan Road was the fi rst major road built in Kowloon, while Boundary Street was merely a line of high bamboo fences. The regulating line for the orthogonal layout of Sham Shui Po was set by bisecting the angle formed between Nathan Road and Boundary Street (Figure 2).

Another wave of development for Sham Shui Po was brought about by a fi re in one of the villages (Apliu Village) in 1912. The resulting Sham Shui Po Improvement Scheme, which followed the fi re, called for the removal of the village (Smith, 1995). Three hills were leveled and a nullah was built at Nam Cheong Street for drainage. The fi rst stage of reclamation began in 1914. A gridiron of streets was laid out between Nam Cheong Street and Kweilin Street and building lots were sold to construct early two

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Figure 2. The growth of Sham Shui Po.

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to four-storey Chinese residential tenements with shops on the ground fl oor.

The second stage of reclamation between Yen Chow Street and Tonkin Street began in 1919. The expanded layout and public amenities shifted the town centre northwest from the Boundary Street towards Pei Ho Street, where a new market was built in 1918 (Smith, 1995). A ferry service to Hong Kong Island was introduced in 1919 from the pier at Boundary Street, and relocated in 1924 to the Sham Shui Po Ferry Pier at the junction of Pei Ho Street and Tung Chau Street (Cheng, 2007).

Reclamation of Sham Shui Po was mostly complete by 1927 (Cheng, 2007). The area between Yen Chow Street and Tonkin Street was planned for public uses. The plan included a post offi ce, a police station, a school and open spaces. A military camp was added with the increase of British troops in 1927 (Smith, 1995). The camp was later used for the internment of British prisoners of war during the Japanese oc-cupation of Hong Kong between 1941-45 (Smith, 1995) (Figure 2).

Sham Shui Po District (1946-2008)

After the War, Sham Shui Po attracted a large number of refugees and immigrants, producing a rapid growth of squatter settlements on the hill slopes. A major fi re in 1953 in nearby Shek Kip Mei launched the fi rst public housing programme in Hong Kong. The military camp was closed in the late nineteen-seventies, and its land used for the additional construction of public housing estates (1981-1993) and the Dragon Centre shopping Mall (1994) (Figure 2). Large tracts of land were reclaimed in the nineteen-eighties for the construction of highways, a railway, housing developments, open spaces, and port facilities. The center of Sham Shui Po shifted inland towards a newly developed mass transit system. The waterfront attracted new large-scale developments. The once hamlet-by-the-deepwater-bay is located somewhere be-tween the center and the bay.

Exploring the Permanence of Sham Shui Po

The following presents an attempt to outline spatial elements of Sham Shui Po, whose continuity could establish a desirable armature for maintaining a sense of the area’s past while simultaneously guiding future growth and change. We attempt to reveal the permanence of Sham Shui Po through tangible elements that have guided its growth and change between 1902 and 2007 and tell the history of the neighbor-hood’s transformations today.

Natural landforms and villages of the nineteenth-century marked the beginning of Sham Shui Po. The early twentieth-century gridiron layout of streets and blocks formed the armature of its urban structure that continues till this day. Markets and

108 Projections

temples marked the economic and religious expressions of the local population, while a police station and a military camp revealed the control and power structure of the government. A ferry pier and subway stations situate the area in a metropolitan mobility network, while public open spaces reveal the character and condition of its diverse inhabitants. Following a Lynchian tradition, these elements can be represent-ed as points, lines, and planes. Points refer to the area’s landmarks and nodes; lines to the paths and edges; and planes to the physical forms of districts (Lynch, 1960). A combination of these points, lines and planes suggests a spatio-temporal structure, which appears to have guided the historic urban evolution of the area.

Points

Mo Tai Temple [Figure 3, Index 1]

Built in 1899 on Hai Tan Street, the Mo Tai Temple is one of the oldest temples of Sham Shui Po. Having resisted the 1922 Sham Shui Po Improvement Scheme, it still stands at an oblique angle to the orthogonal layout of the district. In front of the temple, facing the bay, lay the fi rst marketplace of Sham Shui Po Village in the ninetheen-century (Smith, 1995). The temple thus marks the only place in the district, where the original coastline of Sham Shui Po is revealed.

Sam Tai Tsz & Pak Tai Temples [Figure 3, Index 2]

First built in 1898, the Sam Tai Tsz Temple is another historic symbol in Sham Shui Po. It was rebuilt and relocated to its present location on Yu Chau Street as part of the 1915 Improvement Scheme, which combined the Sam Tai Tsz and Pak Tai Temples into a single complex (Smith, 1995). Villagers believed that Sam Tai Tsz (The Third Prince) helped dissipate the area’s plague outbreak of 1894 (Cheng, 2007). It is the only temple in Hong Kong devoted to Sam Tai Tsz and it keeps attracting numerous worshippers. The Pak Tai Temple was built in 1920 by fi shermen to worship Pak Tai (God of the North). The complex has now been registered as a Grade II historic build-ing by the Hong Kong Antiquities and Monuments Offi ce (Figure 1).

Tin Hau Temple [Figure 3, Index 3]

Though there are over seventy temples dedicated to Tin Hau (Goddess of the Sea) in Hong Kong, the Tin Hau Temple on Yee Kuk Street can be traced to only one of two such temples in the Sham Shui Po Village in 1867. It was relocated from its original location and rebuilt in 1913 under the Improvement Scheme (Smith, 1995). Like many Tin Hau temples in Hong Kong, it has lost its connection to the sea and

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currently faces a narrow sidewalk and a busy street. The temple is registered as a Grade III historic building.

Pei Ho Street Market [Figure 3, Index 4]

The markets of Sham Shui Po are the area’s centres of economic and social life. We have already noted the fi rst market, which was an open area in front of the Mo Tai Temple. As part of the Improvement Scheme, a new market consisting of two elon-gated buildings with a space in-between was constructed in the centre of Sham Shui Po at Pei Ho Street. Enlarged in 1928, and spilling onto surrounding streets, it formed one of largest concentrations of retail activities in Kowloon (Smith, 1995). The market was reconstructed in 1995 into a multi-storey Municipal Services Complex with a gymnasium, a library, and various community services. Like many similar buildings in Hong Kong, the complex is massive and inward-looking, its blank walls look harsh

110 Projections

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Figure 3. Map of Sham Shui Po showing imporatnt streets and landmarks.

and trite in comparison to the surrounding apartment buildings. Nonetheless, the complex provides vital community services and continues to generate vibrant street life in its vicinity (Figure 1).

Dragon Centre [Figure 3, Index 5]

Built in 1994 on the site of the old military camp, the Dragon Centre was the fi rst shopping mall to bring large-scale air-conditioned retail activity to Sham Shui Po. Its corridors are lined with mini-stalls that evoke the feeling of a marketplace. An ice-skating rink located on the top fl oor offers area’s working class people an opportunity try exotic winter sports. With two huge masts, a curved glass atrium, and a collage of architectural features, the Dragon Centre is bombastic and incoherent in appear-ance. Nevertheless, this shopping mall brings people in the community together, and ‘announces’ that Sham Shui Po can fi nally offer a contemporary Hong Kong experi-ence (Figure 1).

Sham Shui Po MTR Station [Figure 3, Index 6]

Ferries used to provide a historically important mode of access to Sham Shui Po. However, the completion of the subway system in 1982 led to the closure of the ferry pier on Pei Ho Street in 1992. The Sham Shui Po Mass Transit Rail (MTR) Station has shifted and enlarged the centre of Sham Shui Po from the market towards Cheung Sha Wan Street (Figure 1). Next to the subway entrances are the famous Golden Computer Arcade and the Apliu Street electronic goods market.

Lines

Boundary Street [Figure 3, Index 7]

Initially developed as a bamboo fence that marked a political line on maps, Boundary Street captures a physical and emotional divide in Hong Kong’s history. It reminds people of the loss of sovereignty, the expansion of a colony, and eventually the unifi -cation of a country. It cuts into the orthogonal grid of Sham Shui Po, forming irregular streets and blocks. The experience of Boundary Street symbolizes fragmentation, disorientation, and ambiguity. It is a broken line that few like to recall, yet it is intri-cately bound to not only Sham Shui Po’s history, but also of Hong Kong’s (Figure 1).

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Nam Cheong Street [Figure 3, Index 8]

Nam Cheong Street was one of several streets constructed to drain the area in 1912. The drain was covered over sometime in the nineteen-sixties. Squatter huts used to occupy the land in the middle of the street, which is now landscaped with pergolas in their place. Nam Cheong Street gives a feeling of openness and grandeur rarely seen in urban Hong Kong. More importantly, it serves as a reminder of the area’s coastal geography and the early urbanization of Sham Shui Po (Figure 1).

Pei Ho Street and Kweilin Street [Figure 3, Index 9]

These two parallel secondary streets that run from the hills to the coast share many similarities. Both were formed between 1915 and 1924 under the Improvement Scheme (Cheng, 2007). Between them is the Municipal Services Complex and both host three MTR entrances respectively. The streets also reveal the characteristics and disparities of three sub-districts. Northeast of Cheung Sha Wan Road, the center of electronic products, attracts a more prosperous and younger population. Between Cheung Sha Wan Road and Lai Chi Kok Road, the market of Apliu Street and the Municipal Services Complex mainly draw tourists and local residents. An area of dilapidated buildings between Lai Chi Kok Road and Tung Chau Street Park, is a gathering place for the elderly, peddlers, and the homeless (Figure 1).

Ki Lung Street [Figure 3, Index 10]

Perpendicular to Pei Ho and Kweilin Streets, Ki Lung Street cuts through the heart of Sham Shui Po. The street is composed of four sections. The fi rst section, near Boundary Street, is relatively quiet. The second, between Boundary Street and Nam Cheong Street, is lined with many tiny stalls selling rolls of colourful fabric. The third section, between Nam Cheong Street and Kweilin Street, is marked by imposing ur-ban blocks from the nineteen-fi fties and sixties. On closer examination, these blocks express numerous signs of life through advertisement, curtains, laundry, and potted plants (Figure 1). The last section, between Kweilin Street and the Dragon Centre, attracts throngs of people to cheap goods, illegal trade, as well as shopping oppor-tunities at the mall.

Planes

The streets of Hong Kong’s old districts are urban rooms. The rooms have clear spa-tial enclosures and fuzzy surfaces. Moveable and box-like stalls occupy the ground; balconies, laundry racks and planters extend from buildings; large overhead signs stretch into the void of streets. Seemingly unplanned, these colorful expressions of

112 Projections

habitation are actually supported by a regulatory structure of the city. The buildings of Hong Kong are shaped by regulations that maximize permissible density. Buildings constructed in a similar period thus generate an urban fabric that is coherent both in plan and in elevation.

A typical building in Sham Shui Po is fi ve to nine-storeys high with a common stair-case shared by two adjacent units on each fl oor. The elevation of the building is simple and contiguous, which due to the small width of the street is perceived more often as a street wall than a façade. Landlords have pierced the façade to widen their units by three to four foot enclosed extensions (Habraken, 1998). Though this practice is now prohibited with stringent building regulations, awnings, laundry racks, signage, and balcony enclosures are still permitted.

Apart from providing light and ventilation to the apartments, the wall plane of the street is also the surface of additions and alterations. Its functional nature stands in contrast to the sleek façades of the contemporary podium towers. The simple and malleable façades of apartment blocks produce planes of expression that register the imprints of habitation over time.

Discussion

An examination of Sham Shui Po’s transformation over the last several decades sug-gests that traditional elements of urban form have given way to more complex and elusive spaces, buildings, and technologies that often exceed the traditional focus of preservation strategies (Livesey, 2004). Outlining the morphologically structural elements of the site suggests that an armature of points, lines, and planes can be defi ned that could guide future development without compromising a holistic image of time and place in Sham Shui Po. Rather than ignoring the development generators of the past, present and future changes in the built fabric of a neighborhood could benefi t from a better spatial, social and economic integration by following, rather than reversing, the course of decisions and customs that have withstood the test of time till now. By doing so, the area might achieve what Lynch has called a desirable image of the city – “The desirable image of a city is one that celebrates and enlarges the present while making connections with past and future”.9 Discrete points, as well as the armature of lines and planes outlined above are meant to stimulate debate on defi ning a generative structure that can guide the future growth and change of Sham Shui Po.

The historic analysis of the area suggests that such a structure has always been somewhat dynamic, expanding and shifting, with certain elements disappearing over time to give way to others, continusouly refl ecting the aspirations of the area’s users at any given point in time (Figure 4). The list described above contains places and quali-ties, some of which date back to 1902, with others less than a decade old. These ele-

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ments should thus be taken as generative rather than constraining, inspiring rather than regulating, considered as part of an evolving whole that bridges the neighbor-hood’s past to its future. As in the course of an person’s lifespan, certain experi-ences are remembered and retained more vividly than others because they continue to offer guidance to daily life, so too should one carefully consieder the combination of these elements as collective experiences cristallized in the stones and habits of the neighborhood. A heightened awareness of their forms and histories could allow us to shape the present and future decisions of redevelopment without eradicating the historic wisdom embodied in the urban structure of a place.

Conclusion

Urban transformation creates opportuni-ties for architecture and urbanism. Sham Shui Po was created at the turn of the twentieth-century through land reclama-tions, demolition of temples, and the dis-placement of residents. Can Sham Shui Po be renewed without destroying all of its original architecture, eradicating its pub-lic spaces, and displacing its inhabitants again? In this study, we have explored the elements of Sham Shui Po’s urban struc-ture that have played a key role in its his-toric transformations through the study of the area’s morphology and planning.

Change is necessary for sustaining cit-ies. Hong Kong has transformed from a landscape of villages into a preeminent hub of global trade. Change in the last one hundred and eighty years has greatly improved the lives of its people. However,

114 Projections

Figure 4. Evolving structure of continuity.

2005

1990

1964

1947

with higher standards of living and an increased sense of belonging, people now question the changes introduced by recent practices of urban renewal. Given the increasing concern to reatain the traces of Hong Kong’s history through urban re-newal, we contend that contemporary transformations could benefi t from a deeper understanding of the city’s continuous transformation in the past. We have tried to emphasize that not only has transformation always occured, but that it has occured in certain ways, with some of the city’s elements withstanding changes longer than others due to their continued capacity to guide the more rapidly changing fabric around them. A better understanding of these elements is required in the present urban renewal projects of old districts.

ENDNOTES

[1] URA notices, http://www.ura.org.hk/html/c1002092e323e.html, download on 1 July 2009.

[2] Wong, O., “HK$6b bid wins Wedding Card Street”, South China Morning Post, 24 June 2009.

[3] Rossi, A. The architecture of the city, p.21, 1982. [4] URA website, http://www.ura.org.hk/html/c204000e1e.html downloaded on 19 September 2010.

[5] URA website, http://www.ura.org.hk/html/c204000e1e.html downloaded on 1 July 2009.

[6] URA website, http://www.ura.org.hk/html/c800000e1e.html downloaded on 1 July 2009.

[7] Rossi, A., Architecture of the city, p.59, 1982.

[8] Bacon, E., Design of cities, p.306, 1974.

[9] Lynch, K., What time is this place?, p.1, 1972.

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1928 1932

1940 1941 1942

1957 1965 1967

1983 1990 1994

1916