Michael Southworth

The Evolving Metropolis: Studies of Community, Neighborhood, and Street Form at the Urban Edge

Abstract This paper examines the form of the evolving metropolitan fringe by means of comparative case studies of fringe development in the San Francisco Bay area at three scales —the community, the neighborhood, and the street and house lot. The study identifies underlying organizing principles and spatial typologies and analyzes patterns of growth, land use, and street layouts for several periods of suburban development beginning early in the twentieth century and continuing into the 1990s. As the scale of development has grown, there has been a parallel growth of self-contained, single-use developments and an erosion of the public street framework. This shift has serious implications for the character, convenience, and adaptability of new urban environments.

Walkable Suburbs?: An Evaluation of Neotraditional Communities at the Urban Edge

Abstract One of the few alternatives to the suburban sprawl approach to development in recent years has been the “neotraditional” community, characterized by somewhat higher densities, a greater mix of uses, provision of public transit, accommodation of the pedestrian and the bicyclist, and an interconnected pattern of streets. How well has the neotraditional model performed? Two recent prototype neotraditional communities—Kentlands and Laguna West—are analyzed and compared with a traditional turn-of-the-century streetcar suburb—Elmwood—and with conventional late-twentieth-century suburbs, in terms of patterns of built form, land use, public open space, street design and circulation, and pedestrian access. Also considered are issues of transit access; relation to existing metropolitan development; livability for children, teens, and elderly; and market success.

Street Standards and the Shaping of Suburbia

Abstract The current surge of interest in reassessing the physical form of the American suburb is heightening awareness of the physical and social impacts of local street design. Yet one hundred and fifty years of ideology are so thoroughly embedded in the making of suburban streets that challenges to traditional street layouts and design usually meet with outright rejection. How did the design process and built environment become so dependent on certain regulations and criteria? The historical evolution of suburban residential street standards is traced here through a review of professional and technical publications, as well as historical precedents. Urban designers, planners, and engineers should work together to develop street designs that are more responsive to the diverse users of streets and to varied social and geographic settings.

Cities Afoot—Pedestrians, Walkability and Urban Design

Over the past century pedestrian access has declined steadily in most cities. With some exceptions, such as underground metro systems, each advance in transportation technology—from horse-drawn streetcar, to electric streetcar, ongrade and elevated railways, automobile and superhighway, airplane and airport—has degraded the pedestrian environment. High-speed traffic broke up the fine-grained pedestrian network and imposed barriers to free movement on foot. In ignoring the pedestrian experience, the street lost its intimate scale and transparency, and became a mere service road, devoid of public life. Modernist planning and design separated pedestrians from the automobile, shunting them off to raised plazas, skywalks, barren ‘greenways’, and sterile pedestrian malls. Alternative designs such as the pedestrian/automobile separation of post-war new towns such as Vallingby and Cumbernauld were eventually dismissed as failures or at best quirky examples from a past time. Downtown pedestrian spaces—from pedestrian malls, to festival market places and indoor shopping centres—either failed to attract pedestrians or when they did, were attacked as disconnected bubbles of activity. The automobile-oriented values of classical modernism have been codified in the transportation and street design standards that we struggle with today. Street patterns of most residential areas in the US built after 1950 (and emulated in new development worldwide) are based on the discontinuous cul-de-sac or loop pattern rather than the interconnected grid. Block sizes are too large to permit a range of route choices and land use patterns are coarse with activities widely spaced and segregated by type. Streets are over-scaled and frequently lack sidewalks in order to reduce construction and maintenance costs. Pedestrian linkages, present in classic designs such as Hampstead Garden Suburb and Radburn, are absent. Even in Asia and Europe, traditional centres of nonmotorized transportation, automobile use is on the rise. For decades urban designers have advocated more walkable cities but without much success in most locations. Finally, with new health research, governmental incentives and new regulations, as well as increased activism by pedestrians and bicyclists, the situation has begun to change. The case for better design and planning of the pedestrian environment is strong. Walkability is the foundation for the sustainable city. Like bicycling, walking is a ‘green’ mode of transport that not only reduces congestion, but also has low environmental impact, conserving energy without air and noise pollution. It can be more than a purely utilitarian mode of travel for trips to work, school or shopping, and can have both social and recreational value. It is also a socially equitable mode of transport that is available to a majority of the population, across classes, including children and seniors. Many recent health studies have demonstrated that walking Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 13. No. 1, 1–3, February 2008

Reinventing Main Street: From Mall to Townscape Mall

The design of public space in US cities has experienced a major transformation over the past five decades. As traditional urban centres have declined as foci for civic and economic activity, new centres—usually shopping malls—have emerged on the urban fringe. As old malls age and decline in market appeal, new forms are appearing that mimic many aspects of the abandoned town centre, although in private rather than public contexts. Emerging forms of suburban public space are examined by means of case studies of several US shopping centres including reinvented old malls (‘mall-overs’), new main street malls (townscape malls), malled main streets and hybrid forms that combine aspects of main street and mall. The analysis focuses on spatial form, symbolism and imagery, pedestrian friendliness, connections with the larger context, public uses and limitations on use. Urban designers, landscape architects and planners can learn much from malls in making old main streets work. They can also learn from successful main streets how to reshape old malls and create more successful new main street shopping centres.

The suburban public realm I: Its emergence, growth and transformation in the American metropolis

Abstract This two‐part essay analyses the changing nature of the public realm in the evolving edge of the American metropolis and the implications for urban design and planning. Many forces are changing the form and use of public space in cities—concerns for safety and liveability, increasing dependence on telecommunications, decline in public revenues, the privatization of many amenities, and an increasingly pluralist society. The essay specifically focuses on the historical influence of planning and design practices on suburban form: density levels, land use and zoning patterns, suburban layouts and streetscapes. Field surveys and morphological analyses of urban edge patterns from the San Francisco Bay area document the current state of the suburban public realm. The second part of the essay will examine how physical planning can contribute to restoring a more vibrant public realm amidst raging debates over its changing nature and relevance.

The suburban public realm II: Eurourbanism, new urbanism and the implications for urban design in the American metropolis

Abstract While the first part of this two‐part essay portrayed the bleakness of the suburban public realm in the USA, the debate over how physical planning can contribute to making it more vibrant is the subject of this second part. Eurourbanism, or the practice of looking to European cities for a design paradigm, has been criticized on the grounds that the USA has its own distinct public realm which is either non‐spatial in character or is located in ‘non‐traditional’ public spaces, such as shopping malls, in contrast with the more ‘traditional’ European sites such as streets and squares. But there are questions about whether the distinctive ‘American public realm’ is as democratic, or can offer the diversity of experience of the ‘traditional’ public realm. A more recent addition to the debate has been ‘new urbanism’ or ‘neotraditionalism’, whose proponents have put forth a set of planning guidelines for suburbia by drawing on design principles embodied in the traditional American small town. The essay c...

People in the Design of Urban Places

This issue of the Journal of Urban Design focuses on research related to social issues in urban design. Concern with social issues in urban design and planning arose in the 1960s in response to modernism’s flawed abstract, universal conception of human needs and blindness to social differences. A whole generation of sociologists and urban commentators emerged in response to inhumane urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s, including Herbert Gans, Marc Fried, Jane Jacobs, William F. Whyte, Michael Young and Peter Willmott. At the same time from the design perspective, people such as Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard and William H. ‘Holly’ Whyte began exploring the psychological, social and cultural dimensions of place, and developing new methods for assessing them that would be relevant to design, with important early elaborations by Amos Rapoport, Clare Cooper Marcus and others. Environmental psychologists such as Kenneth Craik, Kurt Lewin and Roger Barker and the anthropologist Edward T. Hall also developed new ways of thinking about the role of space in intrapsychic and interpersonal life. The field of environmental psychology was born. The Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) was founded in 1968 and Environment and Behavior began publication in 1969. Research ranged widely, exploring the social and psychological dimensions of urban experience, from children’s conception and use of the city or the behaviour patterns of women in public spaces, to perception of the urban soundscape or social differences in cognitive mapping of the city. Prior to that, social scientists rarely dealt with space and place, and designers had not seriously attempted to understand the users of the environments they planned and built. The idea that design professionals and experts might learn from people who were not trained in architecture was uncommon, even unthinkable, and to this day some professionals continue to resist that idea. When architects and planners first invited social scientists to join their faculties the motive might have been to ‘fix’ the embarrassment of award winning projects such as Pruitt-Igoe being declared unliveable. Could social scientists help architects and planners avoid making such mistakes again? Since then the diversity and complexities of social research in the environmental design fields have tempered the myth that architecture and planning alone caused the social problems of that public housing in St. Louis. Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 17. No. 4, 461–465, November 2012

Learning to make liveable cities

Urban designers have the unique background to deal with the experiential qualities of cities. Worldwide unprecedented urban growth strains the quality of life on many levels ‒ walkability of streets, sociability of public spaces, access to recreation and nature, the journey to work, assault from urban noise, safety, health and much more. This cluster of qualities might be termed ‘liveability’. Through their training and special professional orientation urban designers can improve urban life through the design and management of many of these dimensions. While urban designers are often called upon to develop plans for large-scale new developments that focus on patterns of land use and transportation, economic feasibility and aesthetics, today a paramount concern of the field that transcends functional planning and design is the creation of liveable cities. The components of liveability are multiple and complex, including not only the built environment, but also social, economic and natural factors. They vary somewhat across cities and cultures, and certainly are not absolute. Urban design can address many of these factors, but not all. The form of residential, civic, commercial and work places contributes significantly to a city’s liveability and desirability as a place to live and work. Convenient access systems are essential including walkability and bikeability; connectivity of the street grid and block size; convenient access to parks and recreation, schools, libraries, local shops and services; and transportation systems that allow us to move about efficiently by a variety of modes. Other dimensions include the quality and character of its public spaces as well as of its built form. Residential environments need to be comfortable and safe to live in, and designed to support the needs of diverse age, cultural and economic groups. A highly liveable city respects its natural setting and builds on its landscape qualities as well as on its history, providing visible connections with its past. Design that responds to micro-climate factors such as solar access and wind are especially important in high density urban settings to assure comfort at the ground level. Finally, protection from hazards such as earthquake, landslide, wild fire, flood, tsunami or sea level rise is fundamental to sustaining urban life. The healthfulness of an urban environment, a fundamental liveability value, depends upon many of these dimensions. What knowledge does an urban designer need to design and manage for liveability? To understand the urban design dimensions of liveability and to become adept at enhancing it through design and planning, students will benefit from knowledge of theories and histories of urban form; methods for observing and measuring liveability; the role of urban

The Educative City

Most people are familiar with their own neighborhood and with the customary paths they travel, but the rest of the city is strange and sometimes even dangerous turf. To be sure, with limited time and energy, we can never profit from more than a very small chunk of the world in which we live. Nonetheless, we know far less about that world than we could, and we explore and enjoy it less than we might.