urban fabric
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Urban Fabric - The Form of CitiesTRANSCRIPT
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You are here: Yurbanism » Blog » Urbanism » Urban Fabric: The Form of Cities
Urban fabric is the physical form of towns and cities. Like textiles, urban fabric comes in many different types and weaves.
For simplicity’s sake, I am going to divide the multiple of different urban fabrics into two typologies: coarse grain and fine
grain:
COARSE GRAIN
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“Long blocks isolate the users of one street from the next one over. This isolation reduces the capability of those
living on these streets to jointly support retail establishments.” —Jane Jacobs
Coarse grain urban fabric is like burlap: rough, large-scale weaves that are functional, but not usually comfortable. Such
places consist of one of two things. Large blocks, predominated by big box stores and other car contract retail and corporate
centers, or multi block mega project dropped on a city without integrating the surrounding city or community. In downtown
Phoenix, developments like Arizona Center and CityScape come to mind.
Not only do coarse grain fabrics NOT provide many opportunities for interconnecting; the fabric itself is usually inhospitable to
interaction. Instead of asserting control over the street, such places turn inward, fortifying themselves against the perceived
dangers of the outside. This begets yet more undesirability. In this regard coarse grain acts as a barrier for all but those who
are there for a specific purpose. Just as we are not comfortable wearing a burlap shirt, we are not comfortable spending more
time them necessary in coarse-grained places.
…the effect of putting an enormous single-purpose entity within this fine network of the city core is the same as
putting a huge field of a single crop in the middle of an ecology: it renders the whole thing essentially sterile,
incapable of generating anything new. —James Howard Kunstler
FINE GRAIN
Street patterns must be easily navigable and lattice like, with blocks that are not too big and intersections that
are not too far apart. —Roger Lewis
On the other hand, there is fine-grained urban fabric. Like high count egyptian (or perhaps pima) cotton; fine grain urban
fabric can feel luxurious and want to make people linger in or around it. Fine grain urban fabric consists of several small
blocks in close proximity. Within each block are several buildings, most with narrow frontages, frequent store fronts, and
minimal setbacks from the street. Streets and opportunities to turn corners are frequent, and as a result, so are storefronts.
This offers many opportunities for discovery and exploration. There are virtual no vacant lots or surface parking. Also, as
there are more intersections, traffic is slower and safer.
Fine grained urban fabric is not imposed on a community like its coarse cousin. Rather, it evolves over time in a piecemeal
way, responding to what came before, and adapting to what came afterwards. This evolutionary process creates place that
are not frozen in the era when they were built, but are dynamic and reflective of a neighborhood’s changing needs. This
creates an urban fabric that can seamlessly evolve over time from lightly developed residential areas to mixed-used retail to
dense urban core, if that’s what the community desires. In this way, there are far more resilient than the mega projects
mentioned above who, when they lose a single tenant, often fail.
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Related posts:
Urban Terroir: The Qualities of a City1.
Urban Textures2.
Radiate Phoenix September Gathering: Urban Grocery and Wine Bar3.
From Car Spaces to People Places: Park(ing) Day is coming to Phoenix4.
Recent Readings: October 24-295.
Tags: cities, community, intersections, James Howard Kunstler, Jane Jacobs, Mixed use, urban fabric, urban planning,
Urbanism
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