In their first substantive dialog, landscape urbanist Charles Waldheim and new urbanist Andres Duany reveal that the issue is less about sprawl than what lies beyond everybody’s front door: The street.
Author: Robert Steuteville
New Urban Network
For the better part of a year, an Internet controversy has simmered over the relative merits of New Urbanism, the most influential urban design movement for the last two decades, and Landscape Urbanism, embraced by Harvard but still the “new kid on the block.”
With too many planners, developers, and public officials, the debate must sound academic if they are aware of it. Yet the outcome could shape the built environment for decades to come.
Much of the discussion has focused on whether Landscape Urbanism, which specializes in expansive open spaces celebrating ecological features, represents a greener sprawl. However, based on the comments by Harvard’s Charles Waldheim, the biggest name in Landscape Urbanism, and a response by Andres Duany, the biggest name in New Urbanism, at the Congress for the New Urbanism on June 4, the sprawl accusation seems misplaced.
The real issue is the design of what lies beyond everybody’s front door. A little history is needed to explain how much is at stake.
In her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs praised the urban street, with its regular building frontages — a form of development that had been under assault since the 1920s from automobile-oriented planning and street design. That assault continued for nearly a half-century longer — until the recent housing crash — as sprawl marched across the land, lining thoroughfares with parking lots and garage doors.
The new urbanists took up the cause in the 1980s, arguing that well-ordered streetscapes were essential for walkability. Although new urbanists, who are champions of compact communities, have not defeated sprawl, they have succeeded in popularizing their ideas about walkable streets. Waldheim, a product of the University of Pennsylvania architecture program in the 1980s, noted that “New Urbanism has emerged as the default setting for urbanism in North America” throughout his career.
Now a professor and chair of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Waldheim addressed about 1,000 CNU attendees in Madison, Wisconsin. He joked that he was “traveling under diplomatic papers” — an acknowledgment of new urbanist hostility toward Landscape Urbanism. Nevertheless, he assured CNU that he fully supports “dense, low-carbon, low-emission development.” Moreover, he said landscape urbanists are “not apologists for sprawl,” responding to blog characterizations.
Waldheim presented a development called Lafayette Park — a 78-acre modernist undertaking built in Detroit from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s — that clarified the fundamental argument between Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism.
Despite looking vastly different from any new urban development, Lafayette Park meets many of the goals of the New Urbanism, Waldheim argued. It is compact, has a mixture of housing types and uses, and is built with a connected network of streets. But Lafayette Park, designed by modernists Ludwig Hilberseimer and Mies van der Rohe and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell, turns its buildings away from the road in favor of primary frontages of greenery. As a result, Waldheim said that Lafayette Park shows that you “can do without that one particular tool” of buildings facing the thoroughfare. He explained this is a “substantive difference” between new and landscape urbanists.
This remarkably straightforward assessment also provided Duany with an opening. Hilberseimer provided “neither a garden in back nor street life in front,” Duany said, adding, “Density and urbanism are not the same.” Duany explained: “Unless there is tremendous density, human beings will not walk,” except when there is appealing street frontage.
He criticized Landscape Urbanism renderings that show park-like settings full of pedestrians. “I doubt that the humans that have been Photoshopped in will be there” in reality, he said.
Waldheim took a brief shot at new urbanists’ love for interconnected street networks. “To the extent that you co-opt good new ideas, that’s to your credit,” he said, “but if each one of them maps easily on the 19th-century street grid,” it raises a question of whether shouldn’t there be friction between these ideas and the new urban vision.
Landscape urbanists’ determination to leave streams and wetlands undisturbed, regardless of location, “clips the grid,” Duany said, explaining that “the pipe is anathema to landscape urbanists.” For example, Manhattan has 2,700 streams in pipes, he said. He said that the city could not operate a taxi fleet if each of these streams were respected ecologically, and its residents would be scattered far and wide. In addition, the refusal to move water through a pipe to be processed elsewhere negatively affects density and increases automobile use — especially in urban centers. “Is not the urban core achieving environmental performance by other means?” he asked.
The Harvard professor’s most vital charge was leveled at the retro design tendencies of many new urbanists. “Your cultural program is circa 1979,” he said. According to new urbanists, he said, “the 20th century was meant to be seen as a historical anomaly. … There is still a latent and poor neoclassicism at the core of New Urbanism.” Waldheim argued that young architects have a right to be “engaged in architecture as the culture at the highest level” but to pursue environmentally conscious urbanism nonetheless.
Duany agreed that “our greatest deficiency is first-rate design.” However, he added that Waldheim “was astonishingly informed” about New Urbanism’s vulnerability on this front. Landscape Urbanism is sometimes indulgent, but it is “almost universally better designed and presented.”
In New Urbanism, there’s very little hostility to modernism except that it displeases the market, and therefore, modernism is generally avoided, Duany added. However, devotees of classical and traditional architecture, who gravitate towards New Urbanism, may disagree with Duany.
Waldheim said that proponents of the two “urbanisms” can agree on measuring greenhouse gases and other aspects of environmental performance. For example, one unbuilt project that he presented, the Lower Don Lands on the Toronto waterfront, included Ken Greenberg, generally thought of as a new urbanist, acting as an urban designer under project leader Michael Van Valkenburgh — a landscape urbanist. “I would put the density and carbon metrics” of that project “against any project in this room,” Waldheim said.
Waldheim also presented The High Line in New York City, which Duany said new urbanists “adore.” But costs are an issue — The High Line “costs $30,000 per linear foot. A good street costs $700 a foot,” Duany explained. “There needs to be a [Landscape Urbanism] cost-effective proposition.”
Landscape Urbanism, with only a handful of projects completed and these mostly parks, is untested in dealing with the problems of broad metropolitan areas — including downtowns, urban neighborhoods, and smaller cities and towns, where new urbanists have worked for decades. “We don’t have any dots on the map in the State of Florida,” Waldheim said, referring to scores of new urban projects in that state. “We have a lot of work to do to get to the position of hegemony that you enjoy.”
“As nonideological pragmatists,” Duany said, new urbanists “will absorb what works from Landscape Urbanism.” But, he told Waldheim,” If you don’t absorb [from new urbanists] the sidewalk street frontage and the ability to put a stream in a pipe. Then, the hegemony will be unchallenged.”
The decline and then revival — the Death and Life, if you will — of cities is one of the significant trends of our time. Much of this revival has focused on the urban street, as articulated by Jacobs and the new urbanists, who have driven home, to audiences of all kinds of citizens for the better part of three decades, the importance of building frontages to lively streets. Yet, as creative as the landscape urbanists are, the presentation by Waldheim will leave many in doubt as to whether this group has received the message — and the degree to which Landscape Urbanism will promote real urbanism.
