Three paradigms: everyday urbanism, new urbanism, post urbanism

Douglas Kelbaugh

Professor of Architecture and Urban and Regional Planning, University of Michigan

Keywords: New Urbanism, everyday urbanism, post-urbanism

In addition to the conventional, unself-conscious urbanism that is every day changing the face of American downtowns and suburbs, there are at least three self-conscious schools of urbanism: Everyday Urbanism, New Urbanism, and what I call Post Urbanism. They run parallel to contemporary architectural paradigms, although there would be additional schools of thought defined by tectonics, environmentalism, regionalism, historicism, etc. There are other urbanisms and architectures, such as environmentally inspired ones, (which is here subsumed under New Urbanism), but these three cover most of the cutting edge of theoretical and professional activity in these two fields. All three are inevitable and necessary developments in and of the contemporary human condition. A brief synoptic view of the three paradigms follows:

Everyday Urbanism is nonutopian, conversational, and nonstructuralist. It is nonutopian because it celebrates and builds on everyday, ordinary life and reality, with little pretense about the possibility of a perfectible, tidy or ideal built environment. Indeed, as John Kaliski, Margaret Crawford and others in Everyday Urbanism point out, the city and its designers must be open to and incorporate "the elements that remain elusive: ephemerality, cacophony, multiplicity and simultaneity."1 It is this openness to populist informality that makes Every- day Urbanism conversational. It is non-structuralist because it downplays the direct relation- ship between physical design and social behavior. It, for instance, delights in the way indigenous and migrant groups informally respond in resourceful and imaginative ways to their ad hoc conditions and marginal spaces. Appropriating space for commerce in parking and vacant lots, as well as private driveways and yards for garage sales can be urban design by default rather than by intention. Form and function are seen to be structurally connected in an open-ended way that highlights culture more than design as a determinant of behavior.

Vernacular and street architecture ("quotidian bricolage" by one account) in vibrant, ethnic neighborhoods with public markets rather than chain stores and street murals rather than civic art are held up as one instructive model. Everyday urbanism could be easily confused with conventional real estate development but it is more intentional, ideologically egalitarian and self-conscious than the generic "product" that mainstream bankers, developers, and builders supply to an anonymous public.

New Urbanism is utopian (or at least idealist and reformist), inspirational in style and structuralist in conception. It is utopian because it aspires to a social ethic that builds new or repairs old communities in ways that equitably mix people of different income, ethnicity, race and age, and because it promotes a civic ideal that coherently mixes land of different uses and buildings of different architectural types. It is inspirational because it sponsors public architecture and public space that attempts to make citizens feel they are part, even proud, of both a culture that is more significant than their individual, private worlds and a natural ecology that is connected in eternal loops, cycles and chains of life. New Urbanism also eschews the physical fragmentation and the functional compartmentalization of modern life and tries "to make a link between knowledge and feeling, between what people believe and do in public and what obsesses them in private."2 It is structuralist (or at least determinist) in the sense that it maintains that there is a direct, structural relationship between social behavior and physical form. It is normative in that it posits that good design can have a measurably positive effect on sense of place and community, which it holds are essential to a healthy, sustainable society. The physical model is a compact, walkable city with a hierarchy of private and public architecture and spaces that are conducive to face-to-face social interaction, including background housing and gardens as well as foreground civic and institutional buildings, squares and parks.

Post Urbanism, championed by architects like Rem Koolhaas, is heterotopian, sensational and poststructuralist. Koolhaas' Generic City projects, inspired to some extent by the city we are in, welcome disconnected hypermodern buildings and shopping mall urbanism. They are also heterotopic because they discount shared values or metanarratives as no longer possible in a fragmenting world composed of isolated zones of the "other" (e.g. the home- less, the poor, gays, militia, prisoners, minorities, etc.) as well as mainstream zones of atomistic consumers, internet surfers, and free-range tourists. Outside the usual ordering systems, these liminal zones of taboo and fantasy and these commercial zones of unfettered consumption are viewed as liberating because they allow "for new forms of knowledge, new hybrid possibilities, new unpredictable forms of freedom. It is precisely this distrust of 'ordering' that makes the post-structuralists so against conventional architecture and urban- ism."3 Traditional communities based on physical place and propinquity are claimed to be stultifying, repressive, and no longer relevant in light of modern technology and telecommunications.

As Andres Duany has pointed out, there is a widespread tendency within the architectural avant-garde to equate order with repression and, by extension, disorder with democracy. However, the modern conception of democracy, as set out by western philosophers such as John Locke, has been about civic responsibility as well as personal rights and freedoms. Only this century in America have individual freedom and license trumped civic responsibility and duty. Private rights now overwhelm group rights, at great cost to community. This trend has helped jump start counter movements such as communitarianism and, to some extent, New Urbanism.

Post Urbanism is stylistically sensational because it attempts to wow an increasingly sophisticated consumer in and of the built environment with ever-wilder and more provocative architecture and urbanism. Like Modernism, its architectural language is usually very abstract with little reference to surrounding physical or historical context. It also continues the modernist project of avant-garde shock tactics, no matter what the building site or program. It is sometimes hard to know if it employs shock for its own sake or whether the principal motive is to inspire genuine belief in the possibility of changing the status quo and of resisting controls and limits that are thought to be too predictable and even tyrannical. Koolhaas, Eisenman, Hadid, Libeskind, Tschumi, and Gehry are poststructuralists of different persuasions and passions, many of them in the thrall of Derrida and Deconstructionist literary philosophy. Gehry describes his exuberant insertions into the city as examples of open, democratic urbanism, despite the fact they usually ignore and overpower any local discourse. De Con projects are usually self-contained and microcosmic, with little faith in the work of others to complete the urban fabric, even a fragmented one. Post urbanist work embodies and expresses a more dynamic, destabilized and less predictable architecture and urbanism. The personal design portfolio of signature buildings, which are typically more self-referential than contextual, and a sprawling, auto-centric city like Atlanta are held up as the professional and physical model, although the very idea of type or model might be rejected outright by post urbanists.

References

1 Kaliski J, 1999 Everyday Urbanism (New York: Monacelli Press)

2 Zeldin T, 1994 An Intimate History of Humanity (New York: Harper Collins)

3 Dunham-Jones E, 2000, personal correspondence, January 2

4 Giamatti B, 1966 Take Time for Paradise (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press)

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