Tag Archives: Jane Jacobs

View On The City Of Utrecht

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View on the City of Utrecht by Joost Corneliuszoon Droochsloot. His name means “Dryditch.” Mijnheer Droochsloot. Well I think it’s funny.

JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.
DUTCH STUDIES DIV.

1984, just before I started my year in Edinburgh, I had a summer course in Dutch culture at the Nijenrode Institute, a converted medieval castle in the dorp of Breukelen, the original Brooklyn. To get a borreltje, a brewski, the best bet was to head upriver (which is the dreamy Vecht, a branch of the Old Rijn) to spend a few hours in Utrecht.

The moment you step out of the vast modern, Tannoy-blaring ding-dong- Central Station, the largest and loudest in the Netherlands, you are under the elms in one of the finest living, working, pedestrian cities in the world.

As with Edinburgh (or Philadelphia for that matter), a walk around town can be a master class in urban studies. What Jane Jacobs said about Lower New York, the very greatest of all the old Dutch cities, applies a priori to Utrecht, the very oldest of all the great Dutch cities:

“Wherever lively and popular parts of cities are found, the small much outnumber the large…[small shops], small manufacturers…small enterprises would not exist somewhere else, in the absence of cities. Without cities, they would not exist. The diversity…generated by cities rests on the fact that in cities so many people are so close together, and among them contain so many different tastes, skills, needs, supplies, and bees in their bonnets. Even small operations like proprietor-and-one- clerk hardware stores, drug stores, candy stores and bars can and do flourish in extraordinary numbers in lively districts of cities because there are enough people to support them at short, convenient intervals, and in turn this convenience, and neighborhood-personal quality, are their stock in trade. Once they are unable to be supported at close, convenient intervals, they lose this advantage. In a given geographical territory, half as many people will not support half as many such enterprises spaced at twice the distance. When distance inconvenience sets in, the small, the various, and the personal wither away.”

Jane Jacobs, the Life and Death of Great American Cities.
  • Jan Hendrik Verheye, View of the Choir and Tower of Utrecht Cathedral

“To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable: 1. The district must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common. 2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent. 3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained. 4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are living there for residence. The necessity for these four conditions is the most important point this book has to make.” 

Jane Jacobs, op. cit.
St. Maarten’s Dom, built 1381-1382; the tallest church tower in the Netherlands. It gives an unforgettable, life-changing View.
  • Utrecht University



“Historically treated, architecture has seemed too long but a description of buildings, like fossil shells and corals, past and dead. Yet as an evolutionary science it begins anew with the living and growing city reefs, as we have seen them in their growth overflowing whole plains, ascending innumerable valleys. In this synoptic vision we have as yet had too little touch with the actual living polyps…”

Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution

The above photos were not great pictures; but in b/w they seemed more interesting, and I now realize why. There are, combined. about 600 years worth of architectural styles for townhouses in these two street corner views, from High Gothic to to trap-gabled Renaissance, to 18th Century, to creamy white Art Nouveau, each distinctly a Dutch house.

  • The sea is of course an intermittent threat, but it was the alternately roaring and slackening Rijn channels that had to be tamed.

“I have often amused myself,’ wrote James Boswell in 1791, “with thinking how different a place London is to different people. They, whose narrow minds are contracted to the consideration of some one particular pursuit, view it only through that medium…but the intellectual man is struck with it, as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible.” Boswell not only gave a good definition of cities, he put his finger on one of the chief troubles in dealing with them. it is so easy to fall into the trap of contemplating a city’s uses one at a time, by categories. Indeed, just this — analysis of cities, use by use — has become a customary planning tactic…to understand cities, we have to deal outright with combinations or mixtures of uses, not separate uses, as the essential phenomena.”

Jane Jacobs, op. cit.

Click below for a brilliant urban studies blog which explains in a few simple maps the ever-changing channels of the Rijn-Maas-Waal delta. Every river in Europe, practically, runs within a few miles. The Utrecht achievement was turning silted-up old channels into the unique sunken canal system that winds through town, allowing downstairs private wharf tie-ups to almost every house in town. This determined Utrecht’s growth, trade, and evolution. It started as a Roman fort, Ultra Trajectum, (the further ford), the ruins of which were taken over by St. Willibord as a missionary outpost to convert the Frisians. Thus it also became the center of Netherlandish Christianity, and an ecclesiastical state, the Prince-Bishopric of Utrecht, one of the intellectual and artistic centers of Europe.

http://snailinthecity.blogspot.com/2014/03/utrecht-reworking-floodplain.html

I got another amazing chance to visit in 1997, when Sam Elias took me to Amsterdam (blessings!) and I took him to see Utrecht. He loves cities and architecture as much as I do. I took him to Het Kasteel de Haar; then he educated me, by taking me out to see Het Rietveld Huis, one of the landmarks of De Stijl in the leafy rich suburbs: another distinctly Dutch house, and it fits right in.

  • The Stadsbuitensingel, the old moat, was overdecked to lure car traffic into town in the 1980s.
  • …but in the last twenty years they realized their mistake and started putting the canal back.

The canal in-filling began as a redevelopment scheme that put one of the largest malls in the Netherlands, Hoog Catharijne, next to the train station, along the Catharijnesingel, the long straight stretch of the moat. The re-designed mall is an even glitzier behemoth in the town center, but the parking lots are gone, and now you can once again sail your jacht down the ancient, restored bed of the Rijn, as it flows right under the mall, and tie up right there, to buy your Coach bags and Hermes scarves.

https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-removed-to-bring-back-original-water/

“In our present phase, town-planning schemes are apt to be one-sided, at any rate too few-sided. One is all for communications, another for industrial developments. Others are (more healthily) domestic in character, with provisions for parks and gardens; even by rare hap, for playgrounds, that prime necessity of civic survival. But too many [developments] reiterate that pompous imperial art, which has changed so little from the taste of the decadent Caesars of the past or present. In their too exclusive devotion to material interests they present the converse of those old Spanish and Spanish-American cities which seem almost composed of churches and monasteries. What is the remedy? For each and every city we need a systematic survey, of its development and origins, its history and its present. This survey is required not merely for material buildings, but also for the city’s life and its institutions, for of these the builded city is but the external shell.”

Patrick Geddes, op. cit.

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THIS SHIT

Architectural gigantism in North Hollywood; and what’s being lost.

For over a hundred years Los Angeles led the world in designing and providing inexpensive, pedestrian-oriented low-income housing on a vast scale – while also, famously, enriching its landlords plenty. They’re still building, and getting even richer, but they’ve completely forgotten the pedestrian-oriented, inexpensive and low-income part.

California’s climate and vernacular design traditions  – verandahs, breezeways, courtyards, garden plots, sleeping porches, Monterey barracks-style porched galleries, even the Pacific Electric Railway – encouraged closeness with the soil and sun and surf and fresh air. LA’s openness to modernism aided such innovations as garden apartments and the bungalow court and the shopping plaza – dense and urban, but wholesome and with private green space abundantly available. WWII refined this idea with design innovations of its own, and filled Los Angeles with inexpensive but more-or-less charming galleries of breezeway apartments. Many filled their yards with all the wrong plants, or simply rolled out the lawn, but they also might have a pool, and they made the city cool and green.

This led to a city that became famous for a healthy quality of life, given all its many other discontents. By legend, Los Angeles is the place where rich and poor alike, can reach right out the kitchen window into the sunshine, and pluck a fresh orange to squeeze for breakfast. (A fine example is #3, on Magnolia Blvd.)

From this point of View, the new buildings they are putting up are simply ghastly. Gigantism, speculative inanity, and false boomer-ism are filling blocks and blocks, once green and quiet and shady (but still densely settled), with This Shit. 

This Shit assumes, and demands, automobile dependence. Because it’s so vast and monolithic, This Shit forces the whole neighborhood around it to become more automobile dependent, too. Without ground-floor retail where the tenants can at least get a quart of milk or some cat food, or shaded sidewalks and yards that allow for a peaceful rejuvenating walk down the block, these buildings force thousands of people to pay a massive carbon tax. They’ll have to get in the car for every little errand. That lazy choice kills EVERYTHING.

These are “bedroom apartments”, and most of them will become slums and transient housing. Nobody will ever want to live in them for more than three or four years, and only while they’re in their fuck-you twenties. 

But the old Googie taco stand – pedestrian-friendly, historically significant, comfortably human-scaled, and inexpensive, is being re-imagined as “Ruby’s Shake Shop” and has been given a bright new retro paint job. At least the hipsters living in their aqua-tint appliance of a condo will have some reason to cross the street.

Link

There is almost no public street crime. Cities are the safest they’ve ever been.

Irrational fears kill civilization.

Irrational fears about crime, in particular, have created chain-link, metal detectors, constant total surveillance, the light pollution caused by 24-hour illumination, and its attendant enormous carbon footprint. 

Irrational fears of crime are the reason our bipedal species doesn’t have a walkable Earth. Irrational fears of non-existent crime have removed public parks, public sidewalks, public restrooms, public transportation, public schools, and public drinking fountains from the public. 

Irrational fears cause the public to disbelieve in the public. The City becomes “Out There”, its citizens become “Those People”. Withdrawal is fatal to civilization – not crime. In fact, Jane Jacobs reminds us, withdrawal causes crime.

Irrational fears of non-existent crime created the car alarm, which has done more to degrade the American city in the past 30 years than bedbugs, heroin and prostitution combined.

TV plays upon our emotions; we become addicted to the excitement of having ancient instincts tweaked. The TV will show us a world of bad guys because thinking about bad guys excites us. But if it is on TV, it’s play, not reality.

Choose civilization.

Crime Is Down, So Why Do Most Americans Believe the Opposite?

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Most of Los Angeles makes you feel you’re leaving Nowhere and entering Oblivion. Valley Village feels reasonably distinctive among Los Angeles neighborhoods but since it is completely unlike just about any other area in the City, it can take a while to understand why. 

First: this is a working middle-class community. It was founded to be that, it still is that, and it never stopped being that. The whites here did not go into flight. They bought their houses in 1946, put in a picket fence, and, if they’re still alive, chances are they’re still living there. Small house lots with generous front-yard set-backs allow for the finest urban forest in the Valley; these things together, mean that people walk around the neighborhood.  The population is quite dense, but the lack of sidewalks (a 1940s “rural”ethic prevailed) makes it feel like strolling through Mayberry. Very few homeowners jagged up their property line with chain link or iron spikes in the 1960s; this is the original Land of the White Picket Fence. Bars or grilles on ground-floor apartment windows are unheard of in Valley Village; crime and ethnic trouble for 60 years have been negligible. Affordability has meant more people at home during the day, and out-and-about locally to do errands. In the 1930s, 40s and 50′s that meant housewives, now it means screenwriters and Pilates instructors. Not everyone in Valley Village has to work so hard to afford it that nobody’s ever there (though of course, that’s changing, too.) On the other hand, few residents make enough money to turn the neighborhood over into fancy boutiques and latte bars. By economic necessity, middle-class people have needed dry cleaners and drug stores and delis they can walk to. 

The street plan is a simple grid. Generally low-slung retail and service buildings in the business districts allow for nearly 360-degree mountain views. In Valley Village, you really FEEL you’re nestled in the hills and almost any street gives the pedestrian massive helpings of sun and blue sky (not today, of course…)

Many of the Valley Village retail lots are, in a word, tiny. Little more than booths, really: think, cobbler’s huts, sewing notion supply stores, watch repair, tailoring, ethnic groceries. The tiny shops are both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because it has invited and encouraged practical, locally-owned mom-and-pop businesses that tend to stay there forever, because the overhead is low. A curse because, on some corners for some years, the entire value of the property has been its value as a billboard for motorists driving by. Thus, multiple insurance brokers might be crowded into a retail strip, each not so much a business as a place to hang a sign that says “call 818-XXX-XXXX for Insurance.” Obviously, these don’t really serve the community very well; it’s a good sign that many of those have recently turned over to actual store-front businesses again.

In the 30s, 40s and 50s it was taken for granted that middle-class people, and middle-class neighborhoods, would be productive, That is, they would create economic activity and support themselves with the surplus by buying and selling services to their immediate local neighbors. Making those arrangements easy and convenient and efficient for everybody, was the goal of planners schooled by the mobilization of the War. Today, of course, nobody wants to be in the middle class; it’s hard work to wash your own dishes, plant and water your own tomatoes, walk your own child to school, rely on Metro, incinerate your own trash, or run across the street to do your own marketing. I believe this is why Valley Village has resisted gentrification so far. Today, those who aspire at all, aspire to automation, Audis, Amazon, and affluenza. Kitchens with large pantries and double sinks with garbage disposal, or a tilt-down ironing board or a whirling backyard clothes line; double-hung sash windows you can open yourself for cross-ventilation; these items don’t sound anymore like convenience and luxury. They sound like a Betty Friedan nightmare. 

Suburbs today are assumed to be for leisured consumers who have escaped personal toil, and so don’t need local shops or neighbors at all. It is assumed they have made their money, and will spend it, elsewhere, and live their entire lives in huge square-footage homes, sequestered by hedges and gates from even their next-door neighbors, with nobody going in or out but service people and delivery men. Suburbs are no longer seen as land that can be economical, cooperative, or productive. Thus neighborhoods are no longer designed to “work”: they just have to sell.

Valley Village was one of the first of the post-War American suburbs. But because it was early, by 1950 it was already completely passe and forgotten. The P.E. Red Car lifeline shut (abruptly and unexpectedly) in 1952; suddenly Valley Village was a street-car suburb with no street car. This helped it freeze in amber. Nobody could make any more money out of it, so the flash and bang of development in the Valley moved west, abandoning the old grid plan, abandoning the pedestrian focus, abandoning the “we’re all middle-class together” equality ethic that had been a hold-over from the war years. West of Coldwater Canyon, developers went in for cul-de-sac mazes, strip-mall sprawl, big-box obliteration, gated communities, “zoning,” garages in treeless front yards, smog, and the numbed social dysfunction that gave the San Fernando its grim reputation in the 1970s and 1980s. But in the middle of it all, pedestrian Valley Village just kept on working.