Left Brain vs. Right Brain Dialogues:

David Mayernik
July 2002

NEW URBANISM, OLD URBANISM, AND HUMANISM:

On the Ideal and the Real in City-Building Today

"Deprived of a legitimate poetic content, architecture [in the 18th century and after] was reduced to either a prosaic technological process or mere decoration."

Alberto Pérez Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science , MIT Press, 1990, p.11

δ There are so many American university architecture programs in Rome, but few seem very clear on what it is the students are supposed to be learning there. At the root of the confusion is an unanswered question: How can one reconcile what Rome is with what America is and wants? What can Rome practically teach us?

µ If one accepts the fullness of Rome's meaning as an ideal or model city, the lessons are numerous, but apprehending them is relatively straightforward--measuring, drawing, reading; if, however, we feel the need to fundamentally adapt or transform Rome to suit our needs--water it down, so to speak--or if we're not willing to change very much, then what there is to learn there becomes more ambiguous and difficult to grasp.

δThe issue seems to be at one level qualitative--how good do we want to be in an absolute sense--which assumes we're not comparing apples and oranges; in other words that Rome is better than, say, Atlanta, or even Charleston, not simply different. Can one, for example, be a successful New Urbanist if one's standards are so different than those applied today?

µ I suppose I'm an Old Urbanist in principle, because I value Rome literally; to me, the greatest cities in the Western world owe the bulk of their best fabric and monuments to, mostly, the centuries before the 19th. Elsewhere on this site we find the culture behind those centuries defined as humanist. So Rome represents the value of Humanist Urbanism, where meaning (Pérez Gomez's "legitimate poetic content") drives form: that to me is the essential difference in perspective between the Old and the New Urbanism. If we can bring ourselves to judge cities in an absolute sense, then great cities like Rome, Florence, Siena, Venice, Pienza, Prague, Paris, Dresden before the war, Salamanca, Segovia and Seville, are the standards, uncomfortable as it may be to confront, by which any later attempts at city-building have to be defined.

δ But how do you reconcile what seems like impossibly high standards with the practice of town planning today? Doesn't New Urbanism, for example, offer the beginnings of a recovery of the ability to make Segovias and Sienas again?

µ Indeed it does, and as a movement it has accomplished much in the way of groundwork, and has built some fine projects; but New Urbanism is young and seems to me to be in crisis. Faced with hitting the wall of cultural "absorption", to use the term they've adopted from real estate developers, New Urbanists are forced to confront the reality that, for all their desire to be welcomed among the mainstream, they are destined for the foreseeable future to be one alternate among several, and perhaps even in danger of being out-packaged by developers who are happy to adopt the gloss of building communities without actually doing so. If that is true, how much do we want to surrender now in principle, acknowledging that practice is another matter.

δ Are you saying engaging in the world dooms any ideal to failure by the implication of compromise in working out the practical in practice?

µ Not at all. The Ideal and the Real perforce exist in tension. We really only know each of them through opposition to the other, and in engaging each other they are potentially made powerfully clearer, and richer. The issue is really in revelling in that tension, not surrendering either the Ideal or the Real, but conducting a series of skirmishes on each other's territory to test the opposition's strength.

δ Then has New Urbanism, by overestimating its ability to succeed, lost the battle before it really could be fought? In other words, does it have much left to distinguish itself from its opposition?

µ It certainly does, if we look at it in relation to the disasters of mainstream development. But, we also have New Urbanists arguing for fixing the World Trade Center's urban flaws by reintroducing the street grid over the site and packing out the blocks with 50 story buildings. Now, what do 50 story buildings have to do with the community-oriented and ecology-minded arguments of NU's other projects? Not enough, I would say, to warrant making the tent large enough to accept anything that is not the worst of modern planning.

δ Obviously, it's a dangerous dance. But who's to say legitimacy in 21st century America doesn't come with the price of hard-headed pragmatism?

µ Maybe. But who also is to say that the big battle can be won at all in the near term, and wouldn't it be better to maintain our credibilty by arguing for the mostly impossible, and by building where possible the occasional, eccentric, small, good project, working through the next several decades with a growing legacy of isolated, as-good-as-it-gets models, to represent the argument someday with clearer standards?

δ Applying critical standards inevitably implies a clear Model or Ideal to which one aspires; so to return to Rome, the question is, what can be learned there if it is not the Model or Ideal to which we aspire? And if it does represent the best in qualitative terms, how do we credibly introduce it into the debate about how we build our cities? How far are we willing to push things?