Close-Up: How to Read the American City

The first book on my reading list for the MIT Open Courseware's Intro to Urban Planning was Grady Clay's Close-Up: How to Read the American City. As the first reading assignment in an undergraduate introductory course, this book was a gentle introduction.

For me, this was an especially felicitous introduction given the author's background as a reporter / editor. Not only was Clay's direct journalistic writing style easy to follow, but it was good early assurance that an undergraduate education in journalism wasn't a bad choice for the budding urban planner.

Okay, my 'reviews' of these books are not going to be reviews in the traditional sense. I'm bound to make some value judgements and record some opinions about the content, but I'm also partly hoping to use these 'urban planning' tagged blog posts as a record for me. If this were a high-school book report, I'd fully expect to fail for perpetrating a plot synopsis.

This book was pretty much what the title says it is: an explanation of features of American cities. Why do many cities have slant street districts? When and why did strip development begin? What features (good and bad) are common to most or all cities? These are the questions that Clay answers.

Some things, the use of the term "indian paths" and his cute explanation of "Confravision" a "British Television version of the telephone conference call," were a tad anachronistic. Nevertheless, coming from IT, it struck me as refreshing that you could read a professional book from the dark days of the late seventies and still find much of it relevant. By contrast, I get a chuckle when I see Windows 98 manuals for sale in used book stores.

Fixes

The first bit of the book was titled "Fixes" and referred to perspective and background rather than "solutions." Here Clay cautions against maintaining an orthodox or static view of cities, but did cite some ways of discerning the way cities develop

His first "fix" talked about how aesthetics and common structural elements of European and American cities have informed the development of cities. European cities have been oriented to temples, arches, piazzas, palaces, cathedrals, and medieval requirements for defense. American cities have been oriented to (sometimes competing) grids, railroads, skyscrapers, etc.

Fix two was talked about taking "cross-sections" of a city. An example he chose was Patrick Geddes's "valley section" showing the production, transfer, and refinement of goods from hinterlands to city to port. Clay points out that the city is now a major source region. Cities aren't an aggregator for the hinterlands, they are their own. Now that more people are living in cities than in the country, it would appear that cities are even more in control now than before. This is illustrated by a good number of rural Montanans who make frequent journeys from rural areas to the big cities to stock up on urban goods at places like Costco.

Fix three talked about orientation to the urban center. Clay argues that centrality has waned with increased mobility. He's certainly right, but I wonder if things might be swinging back in the other direction. Maybe I'm imagining things, or maybe my own sense of aesthetics is tainting my view, but it feels to me like the American downtowns I've seen are seeing revival now? Maybe someone knowledgeable will read this and correct me. Or maybe one of the later texts will explain what the current national trends are. If peak oil turns out to be real, I'd guess that urban cores will become hot(ter).

Epitome Districts

"Epitome Districts" talked about microcosms within cities that typify the city or exemplify larger trends within the city. MIT's actual reading assignment was just for this section, so I decided to give this section a little extra attention as I was reading. For all I know, this reading assignment might have been given as an example of how not to read a city. Context is important. But I digress.

Epitome Districts starts with special ceremonial locations or "starts" as he calls them. Maybe it's marked by a small town monument if you are from the south. Maybe a larger monument will exist if you're up north (more money for the victors of the civil war). Clay claims that the central focus of the city in older grid layout cities is often the staircase at city hall.

Coincidentally, many a grid-layout city's beginnings orient the city grid to the natural topography of the land. Later planning oriented city grids to a north-south-east-west axis. That created interesting discontinuities such as the slant-street district in Missoula, or indeed, much of downtown. Other "breaks" as Clay calls them can be caused by hills, lakes, and other geographic features.

These breaks, Clay argues, are keen locations for development in many cases due to their often increased accessibility. The Kettlehouse's proximity to a "front" is all the proof I need. Broadway would be another good example of a developed front.

Another feature of some epitome districts are what Clay calls "venturi districts." Basically, the idea is that your political and business elite in a community transit along a predictable corridor. That seemed to be the case when I was at the Forest Service in MSO. I remember sitting at Sean Kelly's and mentioning to Gary the oddly Nazi-ish looking birds on one of the buildings we could see. A guy who was a city planner overheard me, stopped, and corrected me that it was, in fact, a thunderbird motif popular in, I think, the thirties. You had to be careful what you said when you were out to lunch. Oftentimes movers and shakers at the FS would be a table away from you.

Clay muses that venturi districts go through expansions and contractions. He didn't know what new fangled communications would do to these districts. They definitely still exist, I think, though Blackberries and the Internet seem to be nabbing their share of the action.

Next, Clay talks about Victor Gruen's approach to downtown revitalization. Basically, the idea is to wall off a portion of the central city 'aldt stat' style from cars. Pedestrian malls, cars parked on the periphery in garages, were part of Gruen's view for Ft. Worth, TX.

Finally, Clay talks about identities and epitome districts forms by razzle dazzle--adding an "e" to shoppes in Ye Olde Towne Centre, or bratwursting and lederhosening up a faux-German district. I gather that Clay is a little cynical about the ability of centrally-planned kitsch to produce an identity. I think what he's trying to get at, is that cities should be places of expression and creativity and will organically produce identity. Trying to superimpose identity rings false in most cases.

Fronts
The next section dealt with boundary zones. Clay uses the word "front" in both the military and the weather senses of the word. Several types of urban front are discussed along with their reasons for being.

Talking with my dad this morning via skype, we discussed the urban-rural continuum and how places like my dad's childhood home Huntley, Montana have gone from being rural communities with their own identities to slightly down-and-out bedroom communities for larger cities nearby. Roni's hometown of Three Forks is currently struggling to maintain its own identity other than as an inexpensive area for housing in the Bozeman area.

Clay also sites swarming as a type of front or a phenomenon of fronts. He argues that the ad-hoc temporary communities like Woodstock formed by young mobile people can provide insights to what the future of suburbia might hold. I think, however, that the current younger generation is more likely to swarm online than in the big blue room. The only swarming event I can really think of is burning man, and by all accounts that has gotten hugely commercial and has become extremely managed. Unless something changes soon, I declare dead swarming of the sort Clay talks about.

Interestingly, I think public opinion of the suburbia front is shifting somewhat from when Clay wrote his book. There are many reasons to buy a home in the 'burbs. You can buy a bigger, nicer, newer house further from town for one. But I don't think it has the same romantic appeal that it did in generations gone by. My friend Casey recently bought what looks to be a really nice home in the suburbs of Seattle. Casey has mentioned a number of benefits of buying where he did, but he also sees the downsides of the long commute and the Ned Flanders neighbors.

One of the more interesting parts of this section for me was the brief mention of natural and ecological fronts. I guess I'm a bit guilty of cerebrally thinking that nature is somehow separate from the city--even while I enjoy urban parks green space. But cities do have ecologies, and boundaries between urban biomes and more rural areas would, of course, have their own ecological traits. The first time I really got thinking about urban ecology was during my journalism studies when we were discussing Missoula's aging urban forest. I seem to recall that Missoula even had an urban forester.

Like most of the book didn't find any huge revelations in this section. Rather, "Fronts" succeeded by providing another framework with which to view phenomena that seem obvious.

Strips
This section started to give me that vaguely icky feeling about the prospect of planning. Strip development? Really? My own sense of aesthetics kind of reel at strips. I try to avoid them. They are largely devoid of character. The word strip conjures images of gas stations and dilapidated fast food joints for me. Clay seems to agree, and cites a precedent for this opinion among planners.

Nevertheless, Clay looks at strips, gives some background, and draws some conclusions. Clay explains that most strip development has its origins in the topology of the land. A road along a river is built and flooded, a second road is built, and in the final phases an interstate is built parallel to the other roads and further out. There are loads of towns that seem to simply be fueling stations for interstate travelers. These are the "blink and miss them" towns. When they grow up, they retain strip elements.

Rather than dwell too much on this section, I'll sum up the way Clay does. Strips persist because they offer convenience to automobile traffic. Reserve St., Missoula is a perfect example. Are strips tied to the automobile? What does public transit do to strips? If strips cannot be purged, can they be made accessible to non-motorized traffic?

Beats
"Beats" is Clay's somewhat old-school journalist way of referring to the regular movements of people. He assesses them by a number of characteristics including size, frequency, risk, etc. From what I remember of the city development conferences that I attended in Missoula courtesy of MIST, most trips are measured in vehicle miles traveled. Reducing this number for daily errands and commutes is a current goal for most cities, and rightly so.

As a side note, trip planning expertise a la AAA as mentioned in the book is all but dead for most people I think. Google maps and GPS navigation systems have made trip planning ludicrously simple. I've also read that UPS goes to great pains to eliminate as many left turns as possible from their routes, with an enormous savings in time and fuel. This is one area where information technology simply rocks.

There isn't much to say about this section. For the planner, predicting transit hotspots would be of keen interest. Again, this section seems obvious, but it would have been conspicuous had it been absent.

Stacks and Sinks
These two sections dealt with the industrial zones and social dead zones of cities. Simply put, stacks are piles of raw materials or waste product. Sinks are areas where Clay says the powerful stuff undesirable people and things. Both of these sections are rather short. I think they almost have to be in this book without getting into a deeper sociological discussion.

Many times, these areas are solidly blue-collar, and can be insular. Corporations generally don't like people rummaging around their garbage piles either. Clay says these areas are often typified by being difficult to get to from other parts of town. I've got my own feelings on the class component of these industrial areas, but I'm not sure of how or when to address development in them.

On the one hand, I don't like the idea that an area can be inescapable from an upward mobility standpoint. I also personally like pretty, picturesque parts of town more than these industrial areas. But if you simply go in and try to redevelop these areas to 'clean them up,' you can end up pricing out low-income residents. Ideologically, I like what I've read about Portland trying to redevelop to accommodate mixed incomes. Actually, I pretty strongly believe that society as a whole would be a lot healthier if our physical living proximity weren't so tied to our socioeconomic status.

Turf
This next short section toward the end of the book talks about how people mark out and defend territory as theirs. In his introduction to this section, Clay talks about a motel parking lot with "pubic hair greenery" to demarcate its borders. I love this imagery, and from the many nights I spent at city council meetings in Missoula, I know that public ordinances on private landscaping are a Big Deal.

In Missoula, it wasn't couched as beautification. It was about reducing the quantity of non-permeable surface in parking lots for environmental reasons. Reserve street had some pretty lame landscaping, but a trip to Billings Heights a few years ago demonstrated to me that Missoula was probably more aggressive in getting corporate landscaping concessions than other communities.

Of course individual homeowners demarcate their property in their own unique ways as well. In the older suburbs of Auckland, many people have beautiful stone walls or hedges. When I was a kid, we had some old telephone poles on their sides edging our front lawn to keep people from using our lawn to turn around at the end of our dead-end street. Other people such as Roni's grandparents use chain-link fence, garden gnomes, reflecting balls, and Disney-esque statues of fawns to mark out theirs. To each his own.

Vantages

Ever since North Americans got steam, oil, and then gasoline engines on their side, they have been over-running the landscape, filling it up with anything handy, putting boundaries to it, scattering it with themselves, their works, and tackle. By now, they are accustomed to using cities as devices for distributing surpluses of every sort, an adolescent spree stretched over generations, a way of life become an object of national idolatry. City and countryside alike have become mechanisms for living off capital while calling it income.

Clay predicts big changes--increased oil prices and greater dependence on the Middle East for it, expanded application of computers, environmental challenges, greater control of information by fewer people, etc. Of course these were exactly the things everyone was predicting back then.

As some of the biggest consumers of energy, I believe cities also have some of the best potential to benefit from the economies of scale. I have strong hopes that humanity will survive to reach the first rung on the Kardashev scale, but I think we have to proceed in that direction carefully. It would be a shame if we screwed ourselves over getting there. I think good cities are one good step toward that goal.

I probably won't write this much one every book I read, nor will I spend so much time philosophizing. I was inclined to write a bit more this go around simply because I'm just starting off. In the next year as I prepare for grad school, I hope to be able to look back and get an idea of my early impressions.