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Authenti-City
Text: Nan Ellin : Photo: N/A
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Synthetic Urban Fabrics
Driving down Mill Avenue in Tempe recently, I asked myself why I am not inclined to wander around and explore this hub of activity. It is, after all, the urban fabric we so desperately crave in our cities--that densely woven warp and weft of retail, restaurants, cafés, cinemas, workplaces, and housing, along with a university presence. It is decidedly not the hodgepodge of big box retail, sports arenas, parking structures, and tract housing connected by 6-lane streets and highways that dominate the Phoenix metropolitan area and discourage a vibrant 24/7 environment.
Mill Avenue offers a lively streetscape and for this we are grateful. Yet its appliquéd turrets and sundry pastiche appear contrived and imposed, dragged from another place or time and dropped into Tempe. More significantly, the businesses are predominantly large corporate enterprises with exact clones around the country, if not the globe. Their headquarters are elsewhere, like the urban design, not from this place. Partly resulting from the lack of retail diversity is a lack of social diversity on the street, preponderantly representing a narrow demographic of the white middle class from the teens through 30s.
My own disinclination to wander and explore this swatch of urban fabric parallels, I believe, is the reason why many businesses do not survive on Mill. It is not for lack of people. This is the most pedestrian-trafficked area in all of metro Phoenix thanks to the 60,000 students and employees at ASU. Rather, it is for failure to offer a unique experience. It is for lack of authenticity. Form has followed finance and fiction. As a result, an urban fabric has been produced, but the fabric is synthetic, not real.
Urban Thread Counts
We seek authenticity in a place just as we’d rather slip between all cotton rather than polyester blend sheets at night. And, as current sheet trends suggest, the higher the thread count the better. Just as higher thread count improves the comfort and quality of our sheets, so higher urban thread count—that fine-grained as opposed to coarse grain fabric--improves the comfort and quality of our cities. In the Phoenix metropolitan area, there is something of a consensus now around this, with the mantra “we want a fine-grained urban fabric” chanted by politicians, developers, neighborhood groups, artists and urban designers alike.
But how can we avoid the polyester blend environments and achieve this highly sought-after authentic urbanism? Should we step aside and allow the city to grow and change without any guidance whatsoever? No, that would be simply allowing market forces to drive urban development. And, as Paul Hawkens eloquently cautions in his book Natural Capitalism, “Markets were never meant to achieve community or integrity, beauty or justice, sustainability or sacredness—and by themselves, they don’t.”
Rather, an authenti-City results from a combination of large-scale and small-scale interventions, both systematic and the serendipitous. How it happens is just as important—and goes hand in hand—with what happens. An authenti-City is responsive to community needs and tastes that have to do with local climate, topography, history, and cultures. This means that a wide cross-section of the entire community should be meaningfully involved in shaping the city. Does this mean that outsiders should not design our cities? No. While local knowledge is essential to any planning process, outsiders are usually the best at facilitating an unbiased inclusive process and bringing fresh eyes and ideas towards creative problem solving.
The best plans contain both urban design and policy frameworks upon which a city can grow and change in a never-ending dynamic process. Like a good parent, a good plan nurtures healthy growth and change without being “over-involved,” without determining everything, allowing the city to blossom and define itself. While providing some overall defining guidelines that express the rich diversity of the larger community, the frameworks should not prescribe every land use and every architectural detail. Like all healthy organisms, an authenti-City is always growing and evolving according to new needs that arise thanks to a self-adjusting feedback loop that measures and monitors success and failure. When people hatch an idea for improving the city such as a network of linear parks, a public market, better crime prevention and educational opportunities, the conversion of right-of-ways into lively streetscapes, or the development of small business incubators, an authenti-City has the ability to implement these ideas.
As Jane Jacobs intoned in her 1961 urban bible The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “Dull, inert cities, it’s true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving, and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties…. Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”
Real Realty
This “search for the real” has been underway among urban designers over the last decade. A recent symposium in Savannah, Georgia focused on the topic, stating: “In an age of simulation, cynicism, and self-absorption, western society at the end of the 20th century is obsessed with authenticity. For contemporary architectural critics, authenticity has replaced the Vitruvian triad of firmness, commodity, and delight as the primary standard of judgment.” The quest for authenticity among urban designers has taken various directions. One is towards revealing undesirable aspects of our world that we have been hiding or denying, a tendency suggested by deconstructivist architecture. The New Urbanism is a more popular approach, seeking reality in the past and building new homes, neighborhoods, and shopping areas inspired by older ones. Local examples include Verrado, Agritopia, Kierland Commons, and parts of DC Ranch. A third approach looks forward to the creation of “e-topias” with the faith that new technologies will offer finally the key to unlock what is truly real. Yet another attempt is “everyday urbanism” which seeks inspiration from local cultures, environments, and spontaneous forms of popular expression. Whence this obsession with authenticity?
In society generally, perhaps this obsession derives from a sense that our grasp on reality is slipping. This sense, in turn, derives from our increasingly sophisticated defense mechanisms that protect us from the uncomfortable bombardment of our senses, or over stimulation. The casualty is that as we shut out the unpleasant, so we may also shut out the pleasant and in the process, shut down. The German philosopher Georg Simmel described this as the blasé attitude in his classic 1902 article on urban life in Berlin. As urbanization has proceeded apace over the last century, so has the extent to which we are “rendered indifferent due to the abuse that we sustain” (the definition of blasé) to the point where change may be occurring at the expense of our psyches, our communities, and our environment. Rapid globalization over the last few decades has accentuated this process. In reaction to the numbing and homogenizing impacts of urbanization and globalization, we seek distinction and intense feeling through unique experience and expression.
In the highbrow world, the poststructuralist vogue of the 1980s and 90s also contributed to the reality obsession. Its insistence that there is no “real,” only individual perceptions and interpretations, contributed to a pathological relativism that discouraged taking a stance and acting upon one’s convictions. The most poststructuralists could usually muster was to say that something is “highly suggestive” and recommend that more research be done. Poststructuralism teamed up with the accelerated change wrought by globalization to make irony the tenor of the day, inciting a search for meaningful connections and subsequently (currently), a shift away from irony to sincerity.
Yet another source of our reality obsession is the intense blurring of real and fake enabled by new technologies. From digitally retouched photographs, we now create “synthespians,” or “cyberstars,” computer-animated human characters such as Dr. Aki Ross of “Final Fantasy.” On TV, “reality shows” dominate the ratings, most with extensive internet components so fans can follow these “real” people even when the show is not being aired. The executive producer of reality shows “Survivor” and “The Apprentice,” Mark Burnett, has described this genre as “dramality,” a blend of drama and reality. The blurring of real and artifice extends beyond film and TV to the visual and performing arts, music, fashion, and the built environment. Uptown New York drag queens use the term “realness” to describe the quality of their impersonations. Retailers hawk pre-washed (and often pre-torn) jeans that appear already lived-in and imbued with sentimental value. And New Urbanists explain that they are building new towns to look like old ones because people want authenticity.
All of this begs the question: What is authentic? Though a particular concern of the moment, this existential question it not a new one. A story many of us were read as children to later read to our own children who may read to their children explores this question. In The Velveteen Rabbit, written by Margery Williams in 1922, the Rabbit asks the Skin Horse:
“What is REAL? . . . Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick out handle?” “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
Like the Skin Horse, a city becomes and stays real through ongoing meaningful connections, not through cosmetic quick fixes or through massive “urban renewal” projects that wantonly raze large swaths of the existing urban and social fabrics. Love certainly doesn’t hurt, the strong feelings a place evokes in its inhabitants--how often do we find ourselves and others declaring how much we “love” or “hate” a place? Becoming real signals a transformation from isolation to integration, from numbness to feeling, from boredom to excitement, from cynicism to caring, and from complacency to engagement. It occurs when, to paraphrase George Carlin, we are making a life, not just a living, and when we add life to years, not just years to life.
At the risk of being reductive, I would say that our search for the real reflects a desire for interconnectedness with the places we live—both natural and human-made—and with a community of people. In the headlong rush not to fall off the treadmill of progress, these most obvious of qualities have become increasingly elusive. Though integral to most pre-war landscapes, it will not do to copy older buildings and cities for we have changed. What we need to recover is the ability to understand how best to satisfy the desire for interconnectedness today. This calls upon city planners and architects to listen carefully and honor the local community and local landscape as their greatest source of inspiration rather than a hindrance to overcome or an obstacle to surmount.
Good design is important for the health and well being of a place but even more important is ongoing maintenance and reinvestment. We have all seen neighborhoods that started out identically but have had vastly different fates because one has been the lucky recipient of TLC while the other has suffered neglect and disinvestment. When this occurs, what we are witnessing is usually an unraveling of both the urban and the social fabrics that are largely symbiotic. What makes the difference between the well maintained and the neglected neighborhood is the pride that people take in a place. It is not a question of economic wealth—this scenario is played out in rich and poor neighborhoods alike--but of willingness to take care of and invest in a place.
Effectively bringing the community into the planning process is the first step towards building pride of place that, in turn, is the best indicator of urban health and well-being. This does not mean endless meetings where every detail is cleanly ironed out, but a fully-inclusive process that builds community while building consensus regarding a set of policy and design frameworks upon which to grow, to monitor growth, and to effectively implement change.
Planning is an investment. Done properly, it saves time and money in the long-term by bringing the local experts (the people who live and work in a place) on board and benefiting from their knowledge and expertise; by building trust and goodwill amongst all parties to urban (re-)development; and by producing quality environments the first time around that do not require massive retrofitting and that bring pride to the users and induce ongoing reinvestment. This initial investment pays off handsomely towards the creation of an authenti-City with the tightly knit social and urban fabrics in which we are most comfortable.
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