Philadelphia: 1947

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1947: the Better Philadelphia Exhibition An attempt by young urban reformers, creating hope for an overcrowded city of 2.1 million. A city choked by cars, rampant unemployment, and a decreasing population. Basically a city where you didn't ever want to live in. These city planners, notably Oskar Stonorov, Roy Larson, Walter Phillips and the notorious Edmund Bacon sought to inform disillusioned Philadelphian's about what city planners could do for them. Their mandate was to gain the confidence of a public made cynical by utopian futuramas and the inertia of local politicians. Their vision was one of movement, of a modern age, of a proactive, industrial government that just won a world war.

Better Philadelphia Exhibition

The extensive Better Philadelphia Exhibition was seen by almost four hundred THOUSAND people, 20% of the cities residents. Displays led the viewer through the planning process, using titles like To get things done you need to plan for them, and progress must be bought and paid for. Small models of public utilities like fire stations, schools, railroads were displayed with a price tag, to help inform the public. In all, the project started to involve the general residents in the sleeping giant that was city planning, albeit on the monumental scale.

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However, the centerpiece of the exhibition was a 30 by 14 foot scale model of Philadelphia. twenty five thousand cars and forty five thousand houses awed visitors, but the critical part was entire sections that would flip upside down, showing what a rebuilt Philadelphia, thirty years in the future, could look like. This was not the vision of Beaux Arts that had built the nearly useless Benjamin Franklin Parkway, nor that of the Garden City of Sir Ebenezer Howard. Instead, this was a Philadelphia designed for movement, for businesses, for a modern age. Thinkers like Le Corbusier, George Howe and Louis Kahn defined this movement, and its great practitioner, nay, enabler was Edmund Bacon. We will get back to Bacon soon, have no fear, but for all his

advocates, its important to note that his ideas failed. He, and his followers, failed to make a good pedestrian experience. It is my mission today to make sure you do not forget sidewalks and streets either! I am not nearly qualified enough to propose my own city plan (we cant all be Jon Argaman), instead, I seek to change the way you regard the plans of others. To that end, I will focus on examples of great cities. You may ask what a great city is, well, it's effectively a utopia - by luck, hard work or the dreams of skilled planners, it is a city that does extraordinarily well in creating an effective environment. As such, my primary example is Philadelphia: we all know it well, and it provides many valuable comparisons to other cities. Should you choose to build another Philly anew, or simply fix the existing City of Brotherly Love, the lessons we learn here are applicable to any and every city around the world.

1) Modernist City Planning failed at creating good sidewalks 2) Human Scale is critical and essential for pedestrians 3) Sidewalks that emulate tunnels are most successful

The lessons are this: First: modernist, macroscopic city planning has failed at creating good sidewalks. People may scream at me for saying this, but based on the framework of the pedestrian, Le Corbusier was just plain wrong! Second: Human scale is critical and essential. This is a rarely disputed idea: it makes intrinsic sense to you and me, but is oft forgotten by planners in their designs Third and most contentiously: Sidewalks that are like tunnels are most successful. This idea has little intellectual grounding. Indeed, it

is a theory that I have developed while considering the plight of walkers in the great (and not so great) cities of the world. By the end of tonight, hopefully you will agree that this is critical and may implement this philosophy in the streets of your future utopia!

Le Corbusiers Ville Contempraine -19322

Before moving directly to sidewalks though, what is this modernist, macroscopic ideal I seek to shoot down? Edmund Bacon defined it as total vision for a city. Note that his vision became become the defining agenda for Philadelphia through the 1990s. It's fundamental principles were: removing impediments to private investment, creating generators of economic activity around railways, improving physical circulation and encouraging residential development downtown.

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For our purposes, we will consider the Penn Center as the primary example of Bacons total vision, a vision that works well as the baseline for pragmatic application of the modernist movement. Located across the three blocks directly west of City Hall, the Penn Center is this collection of skyscrapers that act as a financial center for Philly. It was the first massive public-private partnership in Philadelphia, sparking the renewal of the West facing Market Street and JFK Boulevard area as an hub of financial vibrancy for Philadelphia to this day. Following Pennsylvania Railroads withdrawal of their main train station to the newly built 30th Street Station in the 1930s, Bacon saw an opportunity to build a massive series of office

buildings, along with extensive pedestrian areas to reinvigorate the area. And reinvigorate the area it did. I will skip over the extensive legal and financial battles that led to these massive structures being planned, authorized and built (you can imagine they get every urban planners blood running hot!), and instead look at their result. Massive, ugly, scary buildings. They worked well for businessmen, they work well for the economy and they work well for the mayor, and certainly did wonders for the architects and planners who dreamt it up, but they created empty streets.

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Gone were the bustling people, the parked cars, the strange, eclectic mix of buildings and facades and street furniture, replaced in the belief that rationalization would fix Philadelphia. You walk down 19th and John F Kennedy Boulevard and it feels weird! Your body silently wishes that it was somewhere else, that you were somewhere else. This discomfort is exactly the focus of my talk. *pause* At this point, it is worth noting that Edmund Bacon was also responsible for creating the plan of the highly debated Crosstown Expressway, again emphasizing his beliefs in creating economic hubs, improving physical flow of traffic through Philadelphia, and removing impediments to private investment (the impediment here being devastating traffic

through the narrow streets of Philadelphia). His solution? Build highways and bulldoze a vibrant pedestrian and retail based community on South Street. It may have brought money to center city, but at what cost? Creating empty streets.

This is the critical part of any city plan, the fatal flaw in Edmund Bacons philosophy, the same philosophy that Le Corbusier promoted in Ville Contempraine, and that of Louis Kahn, Robert Moses and countless other planners. Indeed, it is a version of the same flaw that dooms City Beautiful, the Garden City and other theories of urban planning the growing rubbish pile of utopian ideals. And that is the street life is immensely hard to define, and impossible to do so on a grand scale. Daniel Burnhams diction make no little plans is fundamentally unsuccessful in attempting to rationalize pedestrian life. Yet, without successful pedestrian life, no city has a chance of success.

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So what do I mean by successful streets? Well, old is good! but not because old is intrinsically better, but because old designs had something right, something that was lost in the modernist movement, starting right at the beginning of the City Beautiful movement, where people lost their idea of human scale. When the modernists realized they could build buildings way above William Penns statue on City Hall, when cantilevers, glass facades and flush, revolving doors became the norm, the pedestrian was forgotten and maligned!

1) Modernist City Planning failed at creating good sidewalks 2) Human Scale is critical and essential for pedestrians 3) Sidewalks that emulate tunnels are most successful

I reiterate my three premises for tonight. One: modernist, macroscopic city planning has failed at creating good sidewalks. we have seen this described in the last few minutes, and I will continue provide many more examples Two: Human scale is critical and essential. Third: Sidewalks that are look like tunnels are most successful. However to understand this idea of Tunnels, we must first discuss Human Scale.

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These are some gorgeous buildings. Yet standing below them makes one feel like terrible. We are ants, we are nothing compared to the artistic, corporate entity who gifted this work of art to the city. They are fundementally humbling, an amalgamation of steel, glass and reinforced concrete that is focussed solely on the macroscopic plan proposed by Edmund Bacon, Le Corbusier and Baron Haussman of Paris. Skyscrapers have a deleterious propensity for ruining the sidewalks they are built on. Instead, consider Jane Jacobs, whose eyes on the street attacked directly this grandiose ideal. However, I challenge you not to think of eyes on the street but eyes from the street. Considering the city from the perspective of a pedestrian and everything changes.

The giant 30 foot by 14 foot model of Philadelphia has no relevance if you live in a tiny house on the edge of it. Your worry is about biking to work, not getting caught in a tram line track, and not getting mugged on the way home from the bar.

Paul Levy
http://www.phillymag.com/articles/paul-levycreated-center-city/

So this is where Paul Levy comes in. A historian by training and temperament, his thesis was on radical 19th century German Poets, the perfect background for an urban planner! Indeed, Albert Camus and Heinrich Heine struggled to balance the life of the mind with an urgent calling to engage in the public sphere, a struggle reminiscent of Plato, or Mumford, of Habermas. His first appointment as a city planner came in this most peculiar episode: the Bellevue Statford Hotel was being renovated in 1983, and the anchor tenant was to be Tiffany & Co. However, to bring the Tiffany executives from 30th Street Station to Broad and Walnut, they would need to pass by mountains of trash. The stench (I am told) was unbelievable.

However, Paul Levy was hired to work with the Mayor and remove the trash for that single day. And Lo and Behold, the streets were clean! The executives were impressed, the deal got signed and the Hotel was set to have a brand new, high end retailler. But the event started to drive Levy, who took it upon himself to sooth Center Citys grievous wounds.

The more density, the more walkability, the more energy, then the more opportunity, the more jobs; thats my starting point for what a successful city is.

First he made Center City clean. Then he made Center City safe, and from there, he remade Center City itself. This model, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly what works. His hundreds of Teal clad Center City District officers clean the streets every day, making them more attractive to pedestrians and making the city seem safer. This was broken windows theory in action - a clean sidewalk made crime go down, and late night walking go up! So from this we learn that clean and pretty streets help. They help tourists, they help us feel safe and they help building small businesses. But this is a remedial move, ladies and gentlemen, one that occurs after the streets are built. We here are looking to create a UTOPIA, so how do we plan streets to

have this vibrancy we see here? The other area Levy focussed on extensively was human scale. Following forty years of Edmund Bacons massive structures and parks being built, Philadelphia had wonderful infrastructure, yet none of it was being used. Levy realized that this was because all the buildings and sculptures and parks were not based on proportions we like (golden ratio anyone), nor at a height scale that makes sense to the random jogger. He realized that usage required excitement, energy, and a space that made intuitive sense.

Penn Center Plaza

To fix the desolate Penn Center Plaza, Edmund Bacons brainchild, he had to create benches, trees, things to break up its stark, modernistic lines. He had to make it human again!

Lets see some other examples: notice how every image of the AT&T Tower in minneapolis is from a distance? Thats because the entire building is INTIMIDATING.

Notice its oversized maw of a entrance, engulfing the individual? Scary! Instead compare the new New York City Municipal Center, an equally impressive facade, but much more welcoming. This is because it has this magical human scale.

The clearest examples of effective human scale are on old residential buildings. The first three floors have a fancier brick work, because you cant see higher than that when standing on the street. They all have windows, even if they have closed blinds, because that suggests pedestrians can understand the inside of the building. They have overhanging awnings, to protect pedestrians from weather and define their space on a sidewalk. They are buildings designed around the sidewalk. Using Human Scale in architecture means buildings and streets intuitively make sense to their user, instead of making some grand intellectual gesture, like a skyscraper does. (You may notice,I, a New Yorker, am currently attacking skyscrapers).

So now we know that big buildings could be intimidating for pedestrians. We realize that clean and pretty streets can help cities. This idea of human scale might be relevant to good sidewalks. But what actually makes a good street? Actually no, lets look at shitty streets. Lets look at pictures!

We can all agree that walking along this bridge is not the nicest thing to do, it just feels strange, empty, maybe even dangerous! A good test I have found, is what is the latest time you would walk down a certain street. This one? 4pm? 5pm?

But the Brooklyn Bridge, it just feels nice. Still not the safest, but aesthetically, we can emote with it much better. Maybe that narrowness helps? The crowds?

How about Market Street? Still feels scary. Something is wrong here. Hard to identify what exactly. Maybe those wide car lanes? No people?

But three blocks away, this cute residential street is awesome, pleasant. My grandma probably wants a house here!

This Parisian street is also empty, but it seems to work, you are drawn into the image, down the street, maybe peering into the shop windows a little bit. Even if on your own, you dont hurry down this alley, you linger.

But this alley is one you sprint down. It has graffiti, garbage, no windows. Trully terrifying. Strangely enough however, this Mexican town feels more like Paris! Sure the stores are a bit more sketchy, the pavement is rough, the paint chipped, but we dont feel broken windows theory making us feel unsafe. Wealth does not appear to be a factor here. Again, a striking feature is the narrowness, but also how tall the buildings are in proportion to the width of the street. Same goes for lots of windows and doors, and different facades. Not like the monotony of the picture on the left. Maybe we are getting something here!

And here is my favorite street. 76th and Amsterdam. New York. Right next to where I grew up. The parked cars. The large, protruding steps. the occasional awning. The planters around the trees. The amalgamation of different shapes, materials, colors. But what about looking at straight lines (I am not a photographer, so forgive me if this is an incorrect interpretation). As a pedestrian you are enclosed, surrounded by the cars and trees on your right, and the offset buildings on your left. The brick and stone pattern changes every few feet, each house looks, feels and smells different. The variability created by occasional trees, different colored cars, and steps means you never feel trapped in the street.

Instead you are drawn onwards. Always welcome, always inquisitive, but also with forward motion. The eye is drawn to the end of the street. What is that down there? An avenue? A restaurant? A friend?

Our own Locust Walk is similar. We have the variability, the breaks in the pattern that mean we never feel enclosed. Yet we are clearly walking along a tunnel, towards something. My freudian colleagues say it is entering back into the womb. Believe what you will. But the sense of purpose is clearly here. We can move sideways, or stop, but we intrinsically want to progress down this street, this sidewalk, this well designed pedestrian zone.

My last example is a series of two other beautiful arches. One is the only physical arch I will show you, but again, the heavy stone is used lightly, with clear purpose, with sunlight, with ways to escape ON BOTH SIDES. Cherry blossoms are the same. We can look right and left, even walk that way. But the aesthetics drawn us onwards, forwards, peacefully, purposefully.

Going back to the Brooklyn Bridge, the quiet residential neighborhood, New York, Locust, Mexico, Paris, they all have this same spatial relationship, of interrupted arches. Its not about the amount of light, nor the property value of thebuildings on the street, nor even the amount of greanery, but instead something spatial. All of these streets are builton a human scale. All are designed (consciously or not) for the human pedestrian. So now you want me to propose my laundry list for planning a Utopian city, sure: build streets designed for pedestrians, with a variety of users and uses (thank you Jane Jacobs), a strong spatial grammar, a relationship that fits well with human senses. Build streets that look like tunnels, but have objects that breaks up sightlines, so we always feel that we can

escape said tunnel, but actively choose not to. So we choose to continue along our way. I will not discuss street furniture much tonight, but designing and using good planters, benches, fire hydrants, trashcans, awnings, all these things can be varied from street to street, neighborhood to neighborhood. And all of these things contribute strongly to the arch/tunnel aesthetic, while providing perfect methods of breaking up monotony. The same goes for parked cars. They slow traffic down, and strongly reinforce the idea of a pedestrian zone, a separate, planned for, purposeful sidewalk for humans to use. In short, they function as a type of street furniture to be embraced, not removed. This street furniture is a critical part of effective street life, but the trends vary hugely based on funds, aethetics, even climate. But street furniture is an integral part of planning a successful sidewalk, just like building zoning and intelligent 'total vision'. *pause*

Human Scale describes buildings with sightlines, acoustic properties, task lighting, ambient lighting and spatial grammar that fit well with human senses. It describes architecture and planning that fits humans.

2014: We have come a full circle. The field of urban planning has been churning out books by the hundreds. Theories are created, debunked and debated ad nauseam. But today, I have helped show how one major theory that pervades city planning, Modernism, fails to take account of the pedestrian. Instead, an anthropomorphic approach, human scale is critical in designing effective streets. I present no deep philosophical theories here, solely suggestions, like creating broken arches, using street furniture, but most importantly, always remembering the pedestrian. With this, good luck in designing your city, and I look forward to wandering its streets soon! Thank you.