ABCs of Urbanism - Yurbanism

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June’s Top Posts

Here are my top posts in order of unique page views from June 2011. They are a bit down again. I still haven’t settled into a new routine after my move.. Also, I’m loosing some of my Phoenix readers and haven’t gained many new Vancouver readers, yet.

Overall, I had 1,940 visitors and 6,474 page views. While my visitor count is slightly up from May, my page view count is significantly down. I expect both measures to improve in the next few months as I get back into a groove and build a local readership base.

Overall, I had 1,828 visitors and 7,819 page views. Like April, this is a bit down from other months as I have been getting settled in Vancouver and have not able to post as often.

Did you catch-all of these posts the first time around? If not, here’s chance to read what others have found most interesting over the past month.

Is your favorite post in this list? Let me know in the comments section.

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Best of Yurbanism: Urbanism

As I mentioned earlier today, I’m taking a Reading Break this week. In lieu of new content, please enjoy this selection of some of my most read and shared posts on urbanism:

Urban Design in 10 Easy Steps

Darryl Chen’s Urban Design DIY offers an irreverent yet astute list of ten easy steps to creating an urban-design plan.

ABCs of Urbanism eBook

An eBook compilation of my ABC’s of Urbanism series.

Urban Fabric: The Form of Cities

Urban fabric is the physical form of towns and cities. Like textiles, urban fabric comes in many different types and weaves.

A Brief History of Urbanism in North America: 1700s

During the 1700′s cities began to be planned according to central visions. Here are three examples, plus the first land use legislation.

Apps for Urbanists

As smart phones get more ubiquitous, so too do location based apps. Almost every app on your phone these days asks to know your location.

More of my most popular posts can be found on my Best Of page.

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More Alphabets for Urbanists

Thanks to all of you who followed my ABC’s of Urbanism series or downloaded the compilation eBook that I recently published. The reception so far has been great!

For those of you who haven’t gotten enough of the alphabet yet, here are a few other urban planning related alphabet lists out there, each with a slightly different twist:

5197360443 184b668b0e More Alphabets for Urbanists

Photo Credit: Michael Verhoef (nettsu) on Flickr

The Planning ABC’s by Laurence Gerckens

Last year, the Planning Commissioner’s Journal published a similar series by planning historian Laurence Grecians. This series provides an informative overview of 26 urban planning topics from Automobile to Zoning, along with original illustrations by Paul Hoffman.

The 26 posts are available free online on the PCJ site, or you can download the complete set in pdf format for $7.95.

The Urban Landscape from A to Z

In her 2010 year-end roundup, Sarah Goodyear (@buttermilk1), the cities editor for Grist, published an A to Z list of the urban ground the site covered in 2010 (along with a couple of peeks ahead). It’s a great list of issues that anybody interested in the current state of out cities should be familiar with.

ABC’s of 21st Century Cities

Cynthia Frewen Wuellner (@urbanverse), a Kansas City based architect just started this month-long series. She plans on marrying her background as an architect with her interest in the future to try to understand where our cities are headed.

Throughout the month of January, Cynthia will offer us an alphabet of future cities, twenty-six slices that reveal, explore, and imagine what we might build and how we might live, work, and play in 2020, 2030, or 2050. She’s only on the letter C (co-creating), but I’m hooked already!

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101 Urbanisms

Photo credit: jvc on flickr

My recently completed ABCs of Urbanism series looked into 26 fields of urban studies. While this may have seem an exhaustive list (and it certain felt like one when writing it!), it is only a small sample.

To illustrate the number and diversity of thinking on urbanism, I have created this list of 101 urbanisms. Lest you think I pulled these from thin air, I made sure that each one has at least one meaningful link on Google; several have books or serious academic journals dedicated to them.

The asterisked (*) text refers to the urbanisms included in my ABCs. The other linked items are books with that title on Amazon (affiliate).

Accessible Urbanism

Adaptive Urbanism*

Agrarian Urbanism

Agricultural Urbanism

Agora Urbanism

Anti-Urbanism

Augmented Urbanism

Behavioral Urbanism

Big Urbanism*

Border Urbanism

Braided Urbanism

Bricole Urbanism

Bypass Urbanism

Clean Urbanism

Collaborative Urbanism*

Dialectical Urbanism

Digital Urbanism

Disconnected Urbanism

DIY Urbanism*

Ecological Urbanism

Emergent Urbanism

Everyday Urbanism*

Exotic Urbanism

Future Urbanism

Fractal Urbanism

Fine-Grained Urbanism*

Generic Urbanism*

GeoUrbanism

Green Urbanism

Guerilla Urbanism

Gypsy Urbanism

Healthy Urbanism*

Holistic Urbanism

Holy Urbanism

Indigenous Urbanism

Informal Urbanism*

Infrastructural Urbanism

Instant Urbanism

Integral Urbanism

Introvert Urbanism

Inverted Urbanism

Living Urbanism

Market Urbanism

Networked Urbanism

New (Sub)Urbanism

New Urbanism*

Noir Urbanism

Nonconforming Urbanism

Nuclear Urbanism

Occupancy Urbanism

Open Source Urbanism*

Opportunistic Urbanism

P2P Urbanism

Paid Urbanism*

Parametric Urbanism

Participatory Urbanism

Political Urbanism

Post-Modern Urbanism

Post-Traumatic Urbanism

Propagative Urbanism

Provocative Urbanism

Queer (anti)Urbanism

Quasi-Urbanism*

Radical Urbanism

Real Urbanism

Recombinant Urbanism

Relational Urbanism

Resilient Urbanism

Retrofit Urbanism*

Retrofuture Urbanism

Second Rate Urbanism

Slum Urbanism

Social Urbanism

Stereoscopic Urbanism

Suburban Urbanism

Sustainable Urbanism*

Temporary Urbanism*

Trace Urbanism

Transnational Urbanism

True Urbanism

Unitary Urbanism

Utopian Urbanism*

Vertical Urbanism

Village Urbanism

Vernacular Urbanism*

Walkable Urbanism*

Water Urbanism

Web Urbanism

Xeriscape Urbanism

X-Urbanism*

Yuppie Urbanism*

Zoomorphic Urbanism

Zip Car Urbanism*

Amazingly, even this lengthy list is by no means exhaustive. MONU, the Magazine of Urbanism has published 13 issues to date, many on urbanisms not listed here, such as Beautiful Urbanism and Exotic Urbanism. Moreover, during my research into the ABCs of Urbanism, I discovered even more urbanisms that intrigued me, including micro urbanism and pop-up urbanism. I hope to explore these in future posts.

I’m sure I am missing even more. If you have a favorite urbanism that is missing from this list, let me know in the comments section.

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X-Urbanism: Catchy but not Compelling

Photo Credit sulamith.sallmann on flickr

X-Urbanism is a theoretical framework for analyzing the American city and it’s architecture, particularly that of the late 20th century. The term was coined in the 1999 book X-Urbanism: Architecture and the American City by architect and professor Mario Gandelsonas. The book provided a new way of envisioning cities by examining various configurations of urban space. The term serves as a visual representation of the formal properties of American urbanism—fabric, void, grid, wall—that reveal the hidden structure of urban areas.

While an interesting premise (and a great term), it never really caught on outside academic circles. This is, in part because while Gandelsonas’ research is exhaustive, it is also somewhat convoluted. Another shortcoming is it falls into a common architecture trap by describing the city solely as the object of architecture, without mentioning realities such as land ownership, property values, or even urban design. Finally, as it took over 15 years to research and write, by the time it was published the book’s methodology and graphic representations were dated.

Indeed, while Gandelsonas was researching books such as Joel Garreau’s Edge City and Jonathan Barnett’s books The Elusive City and The Fractured Metropolis were published. These books cover much of the same theoretical ground as X-Urbanism, but in a more compelling manner. Indeed Edge City has become a classic study of ex-urban sprawl, and ‘edge city’ appears to have taken the place that ‘x-urbanism’ sought in the urban lexicon.

Nevertheless X-urbanism remains a compelling concept; it just needs a new, updated perspective. Perhaps it is time for Mario Gandelsonas to revisit his framework. After all a lot has occurred in American cities in the 25 years since the book was conceived and the decade since it was published.

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Walkable Urbanism: Back to the Future

Photo Credit: Eva The Weaver on Flickr

Walkable urbanism focuses on creating and enhancing pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use and mixed-income places.

While many observers connect walkable urbanism with large, high density places like Manhattan or downtown Chicago, walkable urban places have great variability. They are found in lower-density small downtowns like Lawrence, Kansas; suburban town centers such as Dublin, Ohio, and higher-density neighborhoods in larger cities like LODO in Denver. Such places are often characterized by efficient mass transit systems and higher density, mixed use developments. These factors enable residents to walk almost everywhere for everything— whether it be home, work, the grocery store or the movie theaters.

Walkable urbanism is nothing new; it was the way towns and cities were from the first urban settlements about 5,500 years ago to the mid 20th century. After World War II, government policy began encouraging drivable suburbanism. This led to the sprawling, low-density cities most North Americans are familiar with.

In recent years, interest in suburbanism has begun to wane. The pendulum is swinging back towards more compact walkable neighborhoods—the type of places that existed before the wide-spread use of the automobile. The return to walkable urbanism is due to several factors:

A car dependant lifestyle does not serve an aging population well.
The need to drive everywhere has begun to take its toll on our health and environment, with driving and long commutes being linked to an increased rate of obesity and higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
Creative young professional, influenced by television shows like “Seinfeld” and “Friends,” are seeking a more connected lifestyle, for both economic and social reasons.

This return to pre-war urban form has led Christopher Leinberger, author of The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream to coin walkable urbanism as “Back To the Future” in reference to the fictional community of Hill Valley.

Other ‘W’ Urbanisms

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Vernacular Urbanism: Creating Meaningful Places

Ver·nac·u·lar: of, relating to, or characteristic of a period, place, or group…

Most cities—even those with grand plans like Burnham’s Chicago or Haussmann’s Paris—derive much of their character from their locality. Their urban fabric is largely defined by factors such as local building materials, climate, access to water, history and most importantly, culture.

Alas, for most of the past 60 years, cities, especially those in North America have forgotten to look back. Instead, buoyed by quick and easy access to a variety of building materials and the dominance of the automobile, they have created generic places without reference to a city’s location, history or even its residents. These places have focused on the needs of business and commerce and ignored the necessities of people.

Vernacular urbanism is the antithesis of generic urbanism. It is an urbanism that is local in character, meaningful for its inhabitants, rooted to its surroundings and connected with history. It is based on the idea that the a city needs to know where it came from and how it relates to its past if it is to be successful in moving forward.

While the roots of vernacular urbanism are found in the history of a place, it isn’t simply about the old fashion and traditional. Instead, vernacular urbanism integrates the old and the new. It combines what a city has with what it needs based on local factors. By thinking this was, a city can economically, socially and environmentally sustain itself for generations to come.

On a philosophical level, vernacular urbanism can help us understand not only where we are, but who we are as a community and why we are this way. To borrow a line from the late historian Christopher Lasch, vernacular urbanism teaches us about “our basic disposition to the world around us.”

Other ‘V’ Urbanisms

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Utopian Urbanism: The Impossibility of Perfection

Throughout history, there have been many attempts to create the ideal environment for the ideal society; in other words—utopia. Utopian urbanism is based on a concept defined in Sir Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ (1518). In this book, Utopia is the name of a fictional island in the Atlantic that is home to an ideal community with a perfect social, political and legal system.

Many architects preoccupy themselves with designing the perfect city. They believe that a rationally planned environment will lead to a more ordered and efficient society. In the 20th century proposals as Sir Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City (1902), Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (Radiant City—1927 and Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Broadacre City” (1952) were all inspired by the concept of utopian urbanism.

Utopian urbanism views separating structures by function as the most rational way of ordering space. As a result, residential areas were completely separated from business are service areas. Road network connected the various functional areas.

From a contemporary urbanist perspective utopian urbanism has significant shortcomings. No single plan can anticipate the needs of millions of people. Real cities have grown organically and reflect the variety, diversity and interactions of society over time. Moreover, utopian urbanism is dehumanizing as the put form and structure over the needs of residents.

For these reasons (and others), few utopian communities were ever built. Those that were attempted failed to live up the their creators expectations This is a somewhat fitting outcome as Utopia has a dual meaning. Not only was it a perfect place (eutopia) as envisioned by the planners mentioned above, it was also ‘no place’ (outopia)—a place that does not exist and ultimately never can.

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Temporary Urbanism: Incubating New Ideas for City Living

Today’s urban cores are redefining themselves in remarkable and lasting ways. Neighborhoods are no longer defined by only one or two activities. City dwellers are increasingly seeking a fine-grain urban fabric, with a blend of culture, commerce and housing. Empty lots—whether filled with cars or covered with trash and weeds—acts as holes in this fabric.

Developers often talk of empty lots as short-term blanks that will be filled as soon as the economy improves. But “temporary” conditions have a way of becoming permanent, as countless examples in cities across North America show. As a result, many city centers are blighted with lasting scares on their urban landscape that damper the very civic revitalization the developers once promised.

A movement called temporary urbanism is looking to change this. It is showing how—with a lot of ingenuity and a little investment—cities could transform these urban voids into urban oases. Some lots could be turned into instant parks, landscaped with fast-growing trees and shrubs that offer environmental benefits. Others could be transformed into outdoor markets,’pop-up’ retail spaces or event locations. Still others could display art or offer casual spots for social interaction. The concept of temporary urbanism is also being taken to the streets through events, such as monthly Critical Mass bike rides or the annual Park(ing) Day events. The goal is to inspire peoples’ imagination to the potential of not only these vacant sites, but for urban life overall.

Temporary urbanism goes beyond exhorting what should be done. It focuses is on what CAN be done by creating tangible—if temporary—alternatives to the status-quo. The temporary nature of these transformations enable citizens to think ‘outside the block’ and use the spaces as testing grounds for new ideas about urban living. In the process, it encourages cities to move beyond developers’ empty lots (and promises) and engage residents about their city’s future.

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Sustainable Urbanism: Creating Resilient Cities

Photo credit: Rafal Kiermacz on Flickr

By now, most people know that a majority of the world’s population live in cities and urban areas. Yet current urban planning systems are not equipped to deal with many of the challenges this population growth has brought. Some of these include: climate change and resource depletion; economic instability and poverty; and, social marginalization and exclusion.

Sustainable urbanism is an emerging discipline that combines creating multi-modal places, nurturing diverse economies and building high-performance infrastructure and buildings. It is more than a synonym for green or ecological urbanism. Rather, it looks at the triple bottom line by making sure that our urban centers are socially inclusion, economically dynamic and environmentally conscious.

Some key tenants of sustainable urbanism include: compact forms of residential development; mixed use centers with homes, jobs, services and shopping in close proximity; integration of transportation and land use; and, the reduction, recovery, re-use and recycling of waste materials.

Many cities and urban planners are already looking at one or more of these issues. The problem is they usually look at them in isolation. This singular approach fails to recognize the overlapping and interrelation between issues. By taking on these challenges in a holistic manner, sustainable urbanism can create resilient cities that are better able to withstand the economic, social and environmental shocks of the 21st century.