A dense carpet of woodland perennials. Thomas Rainer, a landscape architect, calls plants “social creatures” that thrive in particular networks. Credit Mark Baldwin
Thomas Rainer and
I have both been doing the botanical thing for decades; we know, and use, many
of the same plants — and even much of the same horticultural vocabulary. But
what he and I see when we look at a butterfly weed or a coneflower, or what we
mean when we say familiar words like “layering” or “ground cover,” is
surprisingly not synonymous.
It turns out I’ve
been missing what the plants were trying to tell me, failing to read botanical
body language and behavior that could help me put plants together in
combinations that would solve challenges that many of us have: beds that aren’t
quite working visually, and garden areas that don’t function without lots of
maintenance.
As we gardeners
shop the catalogs or the just-opening local garden centers with an eye to
finally “fixing” that bed out front that has never quite cooperated, I asked
Mr. Rainer, a landscape architect based in Washington, D.C., to lend us his 3-D
vision.
In his career, Mr. Rainer has
designed landscapes for the United States Capitol grounds, the Martin Luther
King Jr. Memorial and the New York Botanical Garden, as well as gardens from
Maine to Florida. He is an author with Claudia West of the 2015 book “Planting
in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes.”
He is a principal in the firm Rhodeside & Harwell, but will leave soon to
start a new firm with his wife, the landscape architect Melissa Rainer, and Ms.
West. He advocates an ecologically expressive aesthetic that interprets rather
than imitates nature.
Q. You visit a
lot of gardens, and probably hear from gardeners like me with beds that just
aren’t working. What’s the most common cause?
Traditional garden design often isolates plants, setting them “as individual objects in a sea of mulch,” Mr. Rainer said. “We place them in solitary confinement.” Credit Thomas Rainer
A. First, we have
to understand that plants are social creatures. Our garden plants evolved as
members of diverse social networks. Take a butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa,
named this year’s Perennial Plant of the Year by the industry
group the Perennial Plant Association), for example. The height of its flower
is exactly the height of the grasses it grows among. Its narrow leaves hug its
stems to efficiently emerge through a crowded mix. It has a taproot that drills
through the fibrous roots of grasses. Everything about that plant is a reaction
to its social network. And it is these social networks that make plantings so
resilient.
So if we think
about the way plants grow in the wild, it helps us understand how different our
gardens are. In the wild, every square inch of soil is covered with a mosaic of
interlocking plants, but in our gardens, we arrange plants as individual
objects in a sea of mulch. We place them in solitary confinement.
So if you want to
add butterfly weed to your garden, you might drift it in beds several feet
apart and tuck some low grasses in as companions, like prairie dropseed, blue
grama grass or buffalo grass.
Start by looking
for bare soil. It is everywhere in our gardens and landscapes. Even in beds
with shrubs in them, there are often large expanses of bare soil underneath.
It’s incredibly high-maintenance. It requires multiple applications of bark
mulch a year, pre-emergent herbicides and lots and lots of weeding.
The alternative
to mulch is green mulch — that is, plants. This includes a wide range of
herbaceous plants that cover soil, like clump-forming sedges, rhizomatous
strawberries or golden groundsel, and self-seeding columbine or woodland
poppies.
Intermingling plants can also foster more flowering plants in a smaller space.Credit Thomas Rainer
Q. If I want
to try to do it more as nature does, what am I aiming for? Where do I take my
cues?
A. The big shift
in horticulture in the next decade will be a shift from thinking about plants
as individual objects to communities of interrelated species. We think it’s
possible to create designed plant communities: stylized versions of naturally
occurring ones, adapted to work in our gardens and landscapes. This is not
ecological restoration, it’s a hybrid of ecology and horticulture. We take
inspiration from the layered structure in the wild, but combine it with the
legibility and design of horticulture. It is the best of both worlds: the
functionality and biodiversity of an ecological approach, but also the focus on
beauty, order and color that horticulture has given us. It’s possible to
balance diversity with legibility, ecology with aesthetics.
And it is a shift
in how we take care of our gardens: a focus on management, not maintenance.
When you plant in communities, you manage the entire plantings, not each
individual plant. This is a pretty radical shift. It’s O.K. if a plant
self-seeds around a bit, or if one plant becomes more dominant. As long as it
fits the aesthetic and functional goals. We can do much less and get more.
Q. Sort of
gives new meaning to the phrase “community garden,” doesn’t it?
A. Yes. And
plants each also have particular behavior — whether it wants to hang out with
other plants of its own species or not. So many gardening mistakes are a result
of not paying attention to this.
Q. You make
them sound like social animals, which makes me think I’ve been shallow,
objectifying plants — choosing among them for just another pretty face, instead
of reading their body language to get at their true nature.
A. One of the
most useful ideas that came out of our research was this German idea
of sociability, developed by Richard Hansen and Friedrich Stahl. They rank
a plant’s predilection to spread on a scale of 1 to 5. A low-sociability plant
is one that in the wild is almost always found by itself (Panicum virgatum, for
example, is almost always found by itself in a meadow). A high-sociability
plant is one that spreads into large colonies (Epimedium or Tiarella cordifolia
are Level 4 plants; Carex pensylvanica and Packera aurea are Level 5). You
arrange plants according to their sociability level: Plants of lower levels (1
and 2) are set individually or in small clusters. Plants of higher levels (3 to
5) are set in groups of 10 to 20-plus, arranged loosely around the others.
A meadow-like display of greenery on an urban deck designed by the HM White landscaping firm. Credit Aaron Booher
It sounds geeky,
ranking plants on a scale, but it’s useful because it informs which you should
mass, and which you should mingle. It’s why a mass of 50 echinacea (Level 2)
tends to flop. They’re just not meant to cover ground. But if you scatter a
handful of echinacea in a mass of prairie dropseed or sideoats grama, it will
look great.
For years, I
would pack together large grasses like switchgrass, or flowers like garden phlox
(both Level 1 plants) and wonder why they got rust or powdery mildew. But if
you find phlox in the wild, it will never have mildew. It’s growing out of a
lot of lower plants, so it gets good air circulation. This idea changed the way
I look at plants and pay attention to how they behave.
Q. I know that
nature doesn’t plop a 50-foot tree in a mowed lawn (or mow its lawn at all,
actually), so that’s not the winning design tactic. I also know that more
diverse layered designs are richer ecologically — and now you are saying they
are easier to manage, too. But how do I figure out how to fit the right plants
together?
A. We need to
start thinking about how, not what. So many garden books focus on what to
plant, but so few focus on how to arrange plants to fit together in ecological
combinations. When we fit our plants together like a tight jigsaw puzzle, the
maintenance goes way, way down. They start becoming resilient systems rather
than random objects.
To do this, we
need to pay attention to a plant’s shape. Its shape is often an indication of
where it grows in the vertical strata of a plant community. Upright plants with
low or minimal basal foliage like Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium) or spiky upright
plants like beargrass (Nolina bigelovii) have adapted to growing through other
plants. Horizontally spreading rhizomatous plants like Pennsylvania sedge
(Carex pensylvanica) or beach strawberry (Fragaria chiloensis) have adapted to
grow underneath others. You almost have to look at a plant from the vantage
point of a chipmunk to see its shape.
A grouping of plants by sociability: Foamflower (a very sociable Level 5) dominates, followed by wild ginger and trillium (Levels 2 to 3) and just a few ferns (more independent at Level 1). Credit John Roger Palmour
What I love about
this layering idea is that it gives gardeners flexibility. Those lower layers
should be very biodiverse: lots of different plants covering the ground and
providing stability. But diversity in this layer does not really look messy,
because most of these plants are growing underneath our taller ones, so you
don’t really see them.
In my garden, I
have a corner with dry shade where I have a handful of shrubs that screens a
busy road. Lately I’ve been adding white wood aster (Eurybia divaricata),
Appalachian barren strawberry (Geum fragarioides) and Pennsylvania sedge and
watching them fill the gaps. Upper layers, on the other hand, are the ones I
consider the “design” layers because they shape your impression of the
planting. You can arrange them naturalistically, or in neat clumps — whatever
style you like. That’s the flexibility: The order and legibility of the upper
layers combines with the diversity and functionality of the lower ones.
The really cool
thing is you can combine this layering idea with the sociability idea. Those
Level 1 and 2 sociability plants tend to be those taller upright plants you use
in the top layers of your garden because they like to grow through others. The
Level 3 to 5 plants tend to be your lower spreading ground-hugging species.
Q. So I am not
shopping for plants solely as decorative objects, but for plants with a purpose
— for instance, as a living mulch or a good companion to others. Of course none
of that, neither the “sociability” nor the plant’s layer, is on the plant
labels. A tag might say “for containers or landscapes” or that the plant is
“trailing” or “upright” or “mounding,” but that’s about it. What should the
label say to help me put plants together successfully?
A. My dream label
would describe things that are actually useful to understanding how it grows.
It would describe its shape, its root system (taprooted, deep fibrous roots,
shallow horizontal roots); its life span (a short-lived pioneer like columbine,
or a long-lasting lavender); its sociability level; its adaptation to stress
(quick-establishing, but short-lived ruderal species like Gaura lindheimeri or
Nassella tenuissima; a thuggish, fast-spreading competitor like Monarda didyma;
or a slow but steady stress-tolerator like Hosta or Calamintha). These are
really the factors that explain how it will grow in our gardens.
A. The Mt. Cuba Center, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
and the California Native Plant Society
websites all have excellent information about how a plant grows in the wild and
what it grows with. But mostly, I think gardeners can get to know their plants
by going outside and getting reacquainted. Take a look at their shape, how they
spread and see what they are trying to show you. You can learn a lot.
Lush vegetative planting at the Floating Gardens; credit: Turenscape
Alan Reisman’s gripping book“The World Without Us”details what would occur after a sudden vanishing of human life from the Earth. Nature would reclaim the built environment through processes that would begin within hours of the end of human intervention. But what if there were a world without “us,” as in those of us who guide change in the landscape, both throughout history and going forward? Here we will explore how things would have been different, as well as potential consequences going forward if the world was without landscape architects!
Urban Design
The idea of a “central park” is not unique to New York City. Many other cities of all shapes and sizes have developed around a communal green space that provides people with an area of respite away from the hustle and bustle of city life. Without landscape architects, what would have taken the place of parks? Government centers, massive transit hubs, and superstructures may have become the centerpieces to urban form. Without parks and public spaces as integral parts of daily life, perhaps people would have fled cities altogether in search of less claustrophobic surroundings.
Access to Nature
Landscape architects have played a crucial role in the planning of hiking trails, bikeways, and jogging paths that provide humans with a means of connectivity and recreation. Given the option, many people have opted to make a scenic bike ride to work a relaxing part of their day. On a larger scale, design has allowed for a wider audience to experience wonders of nature that were previously off limits or difficult to get to. By creating environmentally sensitive plans for state and national parks and other natural areas of interest, there is now incredible accessibility for all to take in the sights and sounds of the world’s most pristine places.
Ecology
The development of urban, rural, and suburban areas has reduced biodiversity at varying levels, but would have been much worse without ecologically minded people as part of the design team. By selecting native plantings and advocating for the removal of invasive species, we have prevented the total destruction of many of the Earth’s unique ecosystems. Just the existence of plants in cities helps filter air pollution and maintains a healthy air quality for urban inhabitants. On the fringes, strategic preservation and planting have saved species of plants and animals alike from extinction. Many of these are essential parts of biological cycles that provide food and medicine that we rely on heavily.
Erosion
The erosion of riverbanks and cliffs is a natural process, but the rate at which it occurs has been accelerated by human activities. Many rivers were dammed, widened, and dredged, leading to higher volumes of water. Although the speed of the water was slowed, the new barriers were not nearly as durable as the previous, naturally occurring edge conditions. Because of this, a large portion of landscape architectural work over the past century has been to stabilize riparian zones to prevent rivers from becoming too wide and subjecting developed areas to constant flooding.
Flooding
Stormwater management has been the hot button sustainability issue of late, but without the less flashy water solutions of the past, we would be in some serious trouble. Flooding would be rampant in areas with no natural drainage solutions, where we would have to rely on retention and detention ponds designed to function in different storm events. The loss of wetlands reduces the amount of absorbent surface in the landscape. Incorporating floodable marshes and riverside buffers into master plans has prevented overflow and instituted diverse ecosystems. In the city, bio swales and rain gardens are assisting and replacing crumbling sewer infrastructure. If these sustainable methods of water catchment were to suddenly disappear, the rise in global urbanization would quickly overwhelm existing systems.
Granted, landscape architects weren’t the only ones involved in these innovations. Ecologists, horticulturalists, civil engineers, and architects have all played a role in the process. We have certainly taken the lead on bringing everyone to the table, and should continue to so. Can you think of other situations that would be very different without the presence of landscape architects?
Remarkably, the past week saw the release of two major publications detailing the condition of American cities, both from respected authors but each taking a very different view of things. Let’s compare them. (Warning: this is not a short blog post; there is too much meat in these publications to address glibly.)
This is a very upbeat book. It argues that, in the 21st century, metropolitan regions provide the true scale of “cities,” not the archaic boundaries that separate formal jurisdictions from each other. I couldn’t agree more: we sometimes have to work with political jurisdictions to get things done, but neither economic nor environmental factors respect those boundaries. Indeed, Katz and Bradley go so far as to argue that there is no “American” economy; to the extent that a national economy exists, it is a composite of metropolitan economies.
Moreover, the authors posit, cities and metros are the true economic leaders, especially in the post-recession, still-recovering economy. They are no longer waiting for a dysfunctional federal government or inconsistent and fickle state governments to assert leadership. Indeed, much of the new energy in our economy isn’t about political institutions at all, but rather about other kinds of leadership, about networks. The result is that cities and metros are happening, and Getting Things Done:
“The real, durable reshaping is being led by networks of city and metropolitan leaders—mayors and other local elected officials, for sure, but also heads of companies, universities, medical campuses, metropolitan business associations, labor unions, civic organizations, environmental groups, cultural institutions, and philanthropies. These leaders are measuring what matters, unveiling their distinctive strengths and starting points in the real economy: manufacturing, innovation, technology, advanced services, and exports . . . They are remaking their urban and suburban places as livable, quality, affordable, sustainable communities and offering more residential, transport, and work options to firms and families alike. And they are doing all these things through coinvention and coproduction.”
Katz and Bradley cite example after example of the Creative Class – knowledge-based and new-technology workers – bringing a new era of accomplishment. The passage below, although a bit long for the usual blog post, is very worth reading to get the positive, enthusiastic tone of the book with regard to both the economy and the environment:
“With innovation the clear driver of economic growth and productivity and federal innovation funding at risk, metros like New York are making sizable commitments to attract innovative research institutions, commercialize research, and grow innovative firms. With human capital the necessary ingredient for successful firms and places, metros like Chicago are overhauling their community college systems to ensure that students are trained for quality jobs that offer good wages and benefits. With infrastructure the platform for global trade and investment and no national freight policy in place, metros like Miami and Jacksonville are modernizing their air, rail, and sea freight hubs to position themselves for an expansion in global trade.
“With companies and consumers demanding communities that are more spatially efficient and federal funding for transportation uncertain, metros like Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago are largely self-financing the building and retrofit of their own transit systems. With global demand rising and the future of federal trade policy unclear, metros like Portland, Syracuse, and Minneapolis–St. Paul are reorienting their economic development strategies toward exports, foreign direct investment, and skilled immigration.
“With the world undergoing a systemic shift toward sustainable growth (a third industrial revolution) and federal energy and environmental policies under siege, metros like Seattle and Philadelphia are cementing their niches in energy-efficient technologies. And with immigration altering the social fabric of American society and national immigration reform seemingly impossible to achieve, metros like Houston are taking innovative steps to integrate tens of thousands of new immigrants into economic and community life.”
The theme is clear: our cities aren’t deferring to other levels of government, and they certainly aren’t waiting for the feds and some states to get over their current partisan paralysis. Oklahoma City (by: Serge Melki, creative commons)Note also the references to companies and consumers demanding more spatial efficiency, and the emphasis on energy-efficient technologies. This is what Katz in Governing called “the synergy between enterprise and the ecosystem.”
I can relate to aspects of this in my own career. I began it as someone quite enamored of the potential of public policy to get things done, particularly at the federal level. Indeed, I still believe strongly in the importance of federal and state regulation to guard against excesses of business, and in government support for innovative private action. Business frequently lacks economic motivation to do the right things for the environment and for human welfare on its own.
But, if that is still frequently true, it is no longer always true. Today, in many cases business interests do align with the public interest in a clean, fair and healthy environment. Regulation, while important to prevent bad activity, has seldom been good at advancing innovation (though it has been sometimes). Today, I personally find more excitement and potential for accomplishment by working directly with the more creative parts of the private sector, on the ground in neighborhoods and metropolitan regions.
Regions, say Katz and Bradley, provide the right scale for innovation. The Metropolitan Revolution puts it succinctly:
“Cities and metros aggregate people and places in a geography that is large enough to make a difference but small enough to impart a sense of community and common purpose.”
Even in places such as Detroit and northeastern Ohio, Katz and Bradley are finding reason for optimism.
I, too, am optimistic about cities and metros, for many of the same reasons that the Brookings authors cite. I also see a resurgence in the growth of inner cities and suburbs, a slowing of suburban sprawl, and demographics that are only going to strengthen urban places. The road will be bumpy in some places, and care will have to be taken to ensure that benefits flow to all sectors of society, but all the trends are in the right direction. I confess that I haven’t yet read all of Katz and Bradley’s book – I was limited to the portions that were made available to the press in advance of formal publication – but I like what I have seen so far. A lot.
This video presents the gist in 46 succinct seconds:
The glass is draining quickly, and it’s worrisome
One gets a far less robust picture of the condition of American cities from State of the City: 5 Trends Impacting America’s Cities, released on Monday by Living Cities, a consortium of philanthropic institutions working “to improve the lives of low-income people and the cities where they live.”
Here are the five trends detailed in the report:
Fiscal strain is causing city governments to reduce services and scale back capital investment.
Failing infrastructure is inhibiting economic growth, sustainability and overall mobility of goods, people, and information.
Stagnant educational outcomes have implications for talent production, attraction and matching to jobs.
The changing economic landscape is creating unemployment and shifting centers of job creation.
The collapse of the housing market and the tightening of the rental market are creating material pressure on household economics and the health of communities.
In other words, where Katz and Bradley see excitement, innovation, leadership, and economic recovery, Living Cities sees declining city services, crumbling infrastructure, a failing educational system, unemployment, and struggling households.
The purposes of the two reports are quite different, explaining part of the differences in tone. The Brookings Metropolitan Center, which Katz heads, has for years been stressing that we now live in a metropolitan world, not an “urban” one, and The Metropolitan Revolution is designed, in part, to strengthen that case. State of the City (courtesy of Living Cities)Living Cities, by contrast, is focused on poverty, and only incidentally on the larger economy. And, as a philanthropic collective, it may be stressing (more by implication than direct language) where philanthropy might spend its resources to produce the greatest results from limited resources. If The Metropolitan Revolution emphasizes the creative class and innovation, State of the City emphasizes the plight of those left behind by the creative class and innovation:
“Many books and organizations have emerged touting the key role of cities in building tolerance among people, spurring economic growth nationally, and accelerating new ideas that improve how we live. The level of attention being paid towards American cities is long overdue, but noticeably absent from these conversations is the fact that low-income people face tremendous hurdles to accessing the opportunities that cities create.”
Among the more specific details cited by Living Cities are these:
City budgets are strained particularly by rising health care and pension costs, and rising costs for maintenance and repair of water, electric, sewer, and transportation infrastructure.
Our educational system is broken, its dysfunction compounded by a changing workplace whose skill needs are evolving too rapidly for schools to catch up (“the skills we’re teaching people are not necessarily the skills the global workforce demands. This skills/job mismatch trend, therefore, must be considered an extension of the education trend. We can no longer rely on the outdated education and worker training systems that no longer consistently lead to employment opportunities”).
At the same time as lower-income citizens struggle to afford for-sale housing, there is an undersupply of rental properties, ”as multifamily home production is at its lowest in 17 years.”
The report is surely correct in observing the near-tautology that economic hardships fall disproportionately on lower-income Americans. For the most part, it does not address environmental issues, but it does discuss inefficiencies in public transit service. And Living Cities doesn’t shy away from controversy, attacking rail transit investments as siphoning resources away from buses, for example, and asserting that “low-income transit riders tend to live further from the urban core, resulting in less access to transportation.”
As an advocate of both bus and rail transit, I don’t share the implication of the first assertion that the two are inexorably in competition for the same dollars; in fact, some research suggests that the two have synergistic rather than competitive impacts, with cities with the most rail service also having the most bus service. As to the latter, lower-income transit riders in the far suburbs do face ridiculously bad service in many cases. But it would come as a surprise to many low-income residents of inner cities that most low-income transit riders are in the far suburbs. bus transit in Culver City (Los Angeles), CA (by: Javon Stoneham, creative commons)(Maybe the author meant to say that most transit riders in far suburbs are low-income; that is undoubtedly true, if a very different statement.)
In and around Washington, DC where I live, for example, lower-income residents tend to live on the east side of the inner city and in the eastern inner suburbs, while higher-income residents live to the west, both within the city and in the far suburbs; it’s not about who lives closest to the core. These quibbles aside, I certainly don’t dispute that our nation’s dispersed land use patterns and limited public transit systems create gross inefficiencies in travel time, distance and convenience for transit-dependent Americans.
The report observes that many of the challenges faced by cites and their lower-income residents are due to or profoundly influenced by large social and economic forces, and are so fundamental that new, more systemic approaches are needed to achieve reform. Indeed, Living Cities has some sharp words for the place-based world of community development, which it seems to view as largely obsolete in today’s world. These is from the report’s lead paragraphs:
“In the decades following World War II, the challenges the urban poor have faced in the U.S. have primarily been blamed on geographic isolation in blighted neighborhoods. Conventional wisdom had it that if leaders improved such neighborhoods — by upgrading buildings, attracting employers, and delivering programs to strengthen the social fabric — residents’ opportunities and incomes would improve as well . . .
“However, the world has drastically changed over the past few decades. Jobs that once flourished in downtown factories and offices have moved beyond city limits to the suburbs and abroad; technology has changed how people interact and what defines community; and poverty is no longer concentrated solely in the urban core, with failing schools, foreclosed homes, and high unemployment rates plaguing all communities.
“Despite this reality, the community development sector has failed to keep up with these enormous changes. . . . Place-based efforts, while beneficial to some, are not sufficient to reaching the scale necessary to fix these broken systems.”
I know from personal conversations that this point of view is not limited to Living Cities. I’ve heard it from at least two other largephilanthropic institutions.
The report is less clear on what new remedies should be addressed to these new realities, though at the end of the discussion of each trend it includes brief mentions of “emerging responses” that, if not sweeping, are innovative.
The glass is murky, but maybe brighter than in the recent past?
I have really struggled with how to comment on these disparate views of cities. There is truth in both views, I think, but where does that leave us?
homebuilding for low-income residents in Payson, UT (courtesy of Local Initiatives Support Corporation)I’ll start by saying that I’m not sure the shot at place-based community development is entirely fair, even though I’ll concede that it seems to be gaining currency in the philanthropic field. While I couldn’t agree more that we require systemic change to address chronic poverty (and, for that matter, a deteriorating environment), and that the geography of socio-economic challenges is changing, in my opinion we continue to need place-based efforts as well. Indeed, it’s possible to simultaneously address places and systems, for example, through an instrument of change such as LEED for Neighborhood Development, which provides aspirational but achievable standards for better development in particular places; LEED-ND at its core is a system designed to affect positive change, but it operates in particular places. Some are using the system in its traditional (and somewhat complicated) role of certifying new development, but its greater power may lie in more creative applications, as model standards for municipalities and as an informal planning framework for distressed neighborhoods.
LEED-ND is now in the implementation stage, both formally and informally, and it is critical that it be deployed and evolved in a way that establishes models for better living conditions where poverty exists, be it in inner cities or suburbs. The establishment and spread of those models then becomes systemic change.
The same is true, by the way, for the Green Communities program of Enterprise Community Partners (disclosure: I worked on both LEED-ND and Green Communities), which sets voluntary criteria for greening affordable housing. It has proved enormously useful in providing lower-income families with healthier and more environmentally sustainable homes, but it has done so through the instrument of community development in particular places. The work that another major supporter of community development, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, has done with NRDC to reconceive low-income neighborhoods around principles of green development is enormously exciting. Yes, we’ve worked in particular places, but the idea is to establish models that can be applied more broadly. Neither LEED-ND nor Green Communities is mentioned in the report, even as “emerging trends.”
GreenMarket, Kansas City, KS (courtesy of Local Initiatives Support Corporation)Does place-based community development need to add more geographically diverse approaches, and more holistic approaches that go beyond bricks and mortar? (On the latter point, the report cites with approval HUD’s Choice Neighborhoods program, which addresses the needs of communities with multi-faceted approaches.) Absolutely, and kudos to Living Cities for saying so. But let’s don’t write off the model. Personally, I see a lot of positive energy in the field right now; I don’t see it as obsolete or lacking approaches that can achieve scale.
I also think there are risks as well as potential benefits in newer, more systemic approaches. I’ve been through enough funding cycles and strategic planning exercises to know how seductive broad, systemic reform appears, promising more “bang for the buck” from limited resources. And the strategy can deliver, at least in theory, when it works and works quickly.
But sometimes putting one’s eggs in the basket marked “systemic reform” can come at a price. The environmental community was delivered a lesson in political reality as a result of our devoting a large portion of our resources to a decades-long effort to secure systemic federal climate legislation that, for reasons beyond our control, ultimately proved unsuccessful. That was followed by huge philanthropic and environmental-community investment in hoped-for systemic reform of federal transportation law. That, too, produced less than optimum results. In the end, both of those efforts, which appeared promising when initiated, carried opportunity costs. (Both outcomes also strongly support Katz and Bradley’s central thesis that the federal government is too broken to be available any time soon as an instrument of change; philanthropies and NGOs alike are now struggling with what the right non-federal approaches are.)
It has been said that life is what happens while we’re making big plans. So we had better pay some attention to the here and now, too. Frequently, the best opportunities for change are going to come in places where the right ingredients are aligning for added value to make a difference. While we may not be able to afford to be anything less than strategic in choosing the right locations, we also may not be able to afford lengthy periods of concentrating on systemic efforts that don’t pan out while largely neglecting the local level.
Boston (by: Nicholas Erwin, creative commons)Moreover, I would argue that innovation is inherently local in nature. Katz and Bradley make a very interesting point to the effect that the strengths and innovations that can emerge in Pittsburgh will likely be very different than those that emerge in, say, San Diego. How can groups like the one I work for – and indeed, Brookings, and the partners in Living Cities, too – harness that innovation to the right social and environmental ends? In a lot of cases, it will be because of ingredients that first exist in a particular place and time, and then spread from there.
All that said, it’s hard to disagree with the well-documented problems cited by Living Cities in its report. Anyone unaware that the US public educational system is horribly broken, for example, simply hasn’t been paying attention. Although I am paid to advocate for the environment first, I’m not sure there is a more important problem for either innovation or philanthropy to help solve. (Heck, I believe that inferior city education is an environmental problem.) Too many of our disadvantaged kids are losing ground compared to affluent kids, and nearly all of our kids are losing ground compared to those in other countries.
I don’t disagree with other big trends, either – diminishing municipal capacity, aging infrastructure, unemployment, household strain – but those problems are so daunting that I’m not sure they are soluble by an exclusively big-picture approach. I keep coming back to experimentation, innovation, and the propagation of models that are locally developed.
When you come down to it, the folks at Brookings know a lot more about the new metropolitan economy than I do (though I know more than a little), and the folks at Living Cities know much more about poverty and community development than I do (though, again, I know more than a little). Who is right? Should we be optimistic about the future of cities, or pessimistic? I’m notorious for being the latter – I’m always convinced my favorite sports teams will lose – but, when it comes to cities, I’m more with Brookings.
I believe the state of cities (or, if you prefer, the future of metros) has never looked brighter in my lifetime. Yes, the inequality created by wealth distribution in our country is appalling; so is our educational performance; and many people are still hurting from the recession.
Community celebration in Chinatown, San Francisco. Photo: Jeffrey Bruce
But, if you think cities are hurting now, you should have seen them 20 or 40 years ago, when whole districts were being burned to the ground and people of means were fleeing as fast as they could, taking their tax dollars and businesses with them. Crime was so rampant and scary in inner cities that smug suburbanites would have friendly debates about whose inner city was the real “murder capital” of the country.
By comparison, it’s amazing how much positive energy there is in cities (and, to be sure, in metro areas) today. Suburban sprawl has been slowed considerably. Inner cities are growing again. People of means, especially young people, want to be in cities today. While that carries its own set of challenges, I would submit that addressing the challenges of gentrification is a far better problem to have than coping with massive abandonment and rampant crime. It’s telling, by the way, that crime is not mentioned even once in State of the Cities: 20 years ago the report would have been considered hopelessly naïve without discussing it. There is a lot of good news about cities, but you’ll have to read the Brookings book to learn much about it.
On what do the authors agree?
A significant point on which both The Metropolitan Revolution and State of the City agree is that there is no longer a bright-line demarcation between “cities” and “suburbs.” But that’s because if suburbs – especially inner suburbs – are now dealing with problems once thought to be located only in inner cities, our inner cities are now enjoying a resurgence of social and economic activity once thought to be the hallmark of suburbs. To me, there’s more good news than bad in the new paradigm.
Which is certainly not to say that we can afford to ignore the very real negative trends that threaten our most vulnerable citizens. To the contrary, we should find ways to harness the positive energy in cities and metros to address the problems afflicting those left behind by progress.
My guess is that the Brookings authors and Living Cities authors wouldn’t disagree much on the underlying facts. They just each believe they have a story that needs telling. If their two stories have very different points of emphasis, they are both worth knowing.
New Urbanist Revives Battle with Landscape Urbanism.
By Michael Sorkin
The High Line in New York, designed by James Corner Field Operations with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is criticized by Andres Duany for being too expensive and over-designed.
It's hard to keep up with the musical deck chairs in the disciplines these days. The boundaries of architecture, city planning, urban design, landscape architecture, sustainability, computation, and other fields are shifting like crazy, and one result is endless hybridization–green urbanism begets landscape urbanism, which begets ecological urbanism, which begets agrarian urbanism–each “ism” claiming to have gotten things in just the right balance. While this discussion of the possible weighting and bounding of design's expanded field does keep the juices flowing, it also maintains the fiction that there are still three fixed territories–buildings, cities, and landscapes–that must constantly negotiate their alignment.
This has several consequences. The first is that the theoretical autonomy of the individual disciplines remains fundamentally uninfringed. The second is that new forms of a much-needed transdisciplinary practice are stymied by rigid intellectual bureaucracy. And finally, the opportunities for turf warfare are multiplied. A tiny skirmish has just been unleashed by the New Urbanists in the form of a book edited by Andres Duany and Emily Talen–Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents: Dissimulating the Sustainable City–which singles out that inoffensive school of thought for withering opprobrium.
But why? And why now? In their preface, the editors wistfully suggest that this was a book that should have been compiled 15 years ago. They're right: the project is pervaded by the sense that the nag being flogged long since passed through the glue factory. Their critique is antique: Landscape Urbanism is just the continuation of CIAM and its misguided principles by other means. The collection thus winds up as another–and completely unnecessary–iteration of that beloved chestnut, New Urbanism vs. Modernism. The current screed is obsessively focused yet again on what is seen as the leadership role in urbanism of a powerful and invidious cabal at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), an effete elite that just doesn't get it. This weirdly fetishistic animus has gnawed at Duany's craw for years. What's up with that? Give it a rest!
The anti-intellectual schtick–that those academics are fey and fashionable compromisers without real values–plays repeatedly throughout the book. There's an especially puerile riff by James Howard Kunstler, which reaches the startling conclusion that Harvard is a bulwark of the status quo! Talen bemoans the Landscape Urbanists for their reversion to misconstructions of post-structuralist, Marxist, and ecological discourses as gauzy camouflage for their designs for world domination and weird, uninhabitable cities. That academics would speak in the lingua franca of their own community is hardly more surprising than the New Urbanists' adopting the language of developers. Their book is, indeed, full of hard-nosed whinging about the bottom line, which, in the end, is the only substantial riposte offered to actual “Landscape Urbanist” projects. Duany particularly reviles the High Line, which he thinks would have been better–and cheaper–with Adirondack chairs from Home Depot instead of all that “design.”
Because there's no real case, there are more straw men in this book than at a casting call for The Wizard of Oz. The most cited include GSD professor Charles Waldheim, landscape architects James Corner and the late Ian McHarg, Frederick Law Olmsted, the University of Pennsylvania, and various fellow travelers in the promotion of … what exactly? The foundational offense is clearly Waldheim's statement in his 2006 book The Landscape Urbanism Reader that “Landscape Urbanism describes a disciplinary realignment currently under way in which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism.” This is simply tendentious, another way of saying, “It's the environment, stupid.” But the Newbies rise to the bait. Let's get ready to rumble!
They've been preparing the battleground for years, insisting that they alone have found the one true condition of equipoise. New Urbanists defend their superior wisdom in three areas: the preferability of the “traditional” city of streets and squares to the universally discredited Corbusian model, a claim to special access to knowledge of sustainability, and a faux-populist derision of practices that are “avant-garde.” None of these arguments is interesting or particularly controversial. No designer of conscience (or consciousness) resists the idea of cities with streets built for people on foot or fails to pay at least lip service to a sustainable–even equitable–environment. Insisting otherwise is just disingenuous.
But there is something interesting going on in thinking about the design of cities, informed by questions of sea-level rise and climate change, massive pollution of air, earth, and water, and a broad realignment of public consciousness about the limited bearing capacity of the earth. Like virtually everyone in the disciplines, both Landscape Urbanists and New Urbanists recognize this and have produced projects that address it. It's the war over formulae that's a waste. The New Urbanists continue to dine out on the enervated notion of a regulating “transect,” a gradated wash of conditions from rural to urban, derived from Patrick Geddes, which they serve up with all the nuance of Creationism.
But “more or less urban” is only one of many ways in which the city can be discussed and the idealist structure of the transect has been thoroughly unpacked by many writers. One key deficit of the New Urbanists' model is that their picturesque conceit is both nonlinear on the ground and disrupted by exceptions in the form of special districts. Landscape Urbanists, though, are excited by such zones of difference, which include “traditional” parks, as well as the “dross-scape” of rail yards, industrial zones, edge-city squalor, and other areas not easily assimilated to the historic order of streets and squares. The recognition that such territories constitute a huge component of the built environment locates an urgent question for design.
While many of the usual New Urbanist suspects contribute to the book, there's a clear divide among them between the unabashed assailants and those with a more conciliatory position, who won't be provoked into a death match. It's entertaining to see how many of the book's essayists tiptoe away from the bluster. Duany wants the High Line and Freshkills Park in New York and Downsview Park in Toronto to be seen as pretentious, but his cohort is unconvinced. Dan Solomon wisely finds these projects not just praiseworthy as places but understands they are simply parks, not “urbanisms.”
Likewise, Jason Brody sees the valuable contribution of an evolving set of landscape practices, all of which are engaged in infusing city-making with our increased understanding of the planetary crisis.
If there's a bright spot in the schools and the professions nowadays, it rests in landscape architecture's ability to introduce the urgency of ecological analysis into design's atmosphere and to pioneer forms of representation and discourse that freshly depict territories and phenomena from microclimates to regions. While McHarg may have gotten it wrong in the end, with his overly anthropocentric schema, the ecological insights in his mappings were seminal. The beautiful work done by James Corner and others in bridging the gap between datascapes and landscapes has opened new approaches to planning and building, and been critical in establishing new forms of analysis. We all want to be the mother of the arts, but why can't we just get along?
“The battle for life on earth will be won or lost in cities.” United Nations 2008
Experience tends to take place against a background of expectations. In his studies of perception in the arts, E. H. Gombrich describes how our responses become shaped by what he calls a “mental set,” a form of selective attention – a filter to avoid being overwhelmed by an inescapable mass of sensations. In practice, it primes the senses and frames perception until much of what we see is what we expect to see. Our minds are predisposed to mobilize past experiences and often years of study – or just as often, visions aroused by advertising language and judgments of peers – to prepare for identifying the “distinctive features,” the characteristics of a place that are most likely to be relevant to our immediate intentions for advancing a “personal project.” With different levels of intensity, propensities to plan or to improvise – differing by age, gender, health or intent – we often enjoy surprises, but we still crave the pleasure of a basic predictability, to anticipate what a place – like a person we encounter – will do to us or for us.
In other words, we naturally bring into play another basic survival skill, the ability to think ahead. We draw on both our literal “explicit” long-term memories and the momentum of “implicit” ones that fill our conscious mind to imagine a future experience in a place. And we often find as much pleasure, or anxiety, in the structured anticipation as in its actual, complex, challenging presence.
Because a “mental set” tends to create a context for responses, naturally it may become self-fulfilling. And because it’s shaped by the places where we live and the biases built into the languages we speak every day, the mental images we’ve formed can fill the brain’s networks until they override an on-the-spot experience with easy habitual patterns of judgments or stereotypes. But just as often the preconceptions are repeatedly penetrated and updated by feedback from the qualities of the place itself, and the mental set, for better or worse, is re-primed by the design. In the end, the mind that remembers a place is no longer the one that encountered it.
Looking for evidence
Many of the most effective designers are the ones that have educated themselves about, and analyzed the likely expectations of their intended audiences. Thoughtful research into the likely stresses and fears brought by people to hospitals and schools is now a routine part of many design processes and has produced pleasing, welcoming – more “humane” – user-friendly, child-friendly places. Sophisticated architects and landscape architects have learned how to design convincing first impressions and sequences of experiences, composing signs and symbols, light and color, scale, soft or warm places, the presence of non-threatening sounds or people, and the presence of nature – all in ways that tell a story of empathy, understanding, and security – offering a sense of refuge, and neutralizing “perils” and fear – in advance, almost like the refuge of home.
It works. But using “research” in to human feelings in this way has been so unusual that it’s even being called a “movement” and given its own name, “evidence-based design,” as if it were a breakthrough. It’s hard to believe, but in large sectors of the design professions “evidence” of deep human responses has simply not been in the mainstream of practice. Again, we tend to work with a narrow kind of humanism.
It’s another obstacle raised by our inward-looking professional pride. All around us, our publics’ intentions and expectations – their innate propensities and motivations of the moment — are clearly expressed and precisely measured everyday in billions of transactions in commercial marketplaces. Of course, we expect and educate design professionals to apply their artistry to projects that exceed those market-bound ideas – places that haven’t even been imagined. But for virtually every design team producing today’s great places, their creativity is built on a respect for and understanding of the evidence-in-action of human experience and responses out in the field. It’s not difficult. We apply well-researched evidence when our own interests are at stake: designers and artists competing for recognition and awards naturally study and respect the anticipated mental set of design juries, critics, and patrons, and respond with great care and often success.
