New life for old cities

John Norquist describes the effect today's urban form has on the basic principles of ton making

Organised by The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment with support from Rettie and Co., this evening event profiled the work of the internationally recognised civic leader and urban champion John Norquist, president of the Congress for the New Urbanism. From 1988 - 2004 Norquist was the Mayor of Milwaukee. Under his leadership, the city experienced a decline in poverty, saw a boom in the construction of urban housing and became a leading centre of education and welfare reform. He oversaw a revision of Milwaukee's zoning code and reoriented development around walkable streets and public amenities such as the city's Riverwalk. He also drew widespread recognition for championing the removal of a stretch of elevated freeway in the heart of Milwaukee, clearing the way for large- scale redevelopment. John is the author of The Wealth of Cities (Addison-Wesley, 1998) and teaches courses in urban planning and development.

By taking a role as an urban design champion, Norquist's time in elected office has clear lessons for cities around the world which, like Glasgow, are adapting to post-industrial futures.

John began the evening with a humorous and dark analysis of the state of cities in the US, highlighting trends that have strong synergy with contemporary urban Britain:

"The urban form isn't anything new - it goes back to the days of Aristotle. From a design standpoint, however, it seems that America had a stroke at the end of World War II: all the rules have been broken. The classical Greek form of terminating the vista, i.e. the street, with a monumental building was thrown out. Today, we have curvy roads with cul-de-sacs and giant commercial strip streets that you can't walk along, that generate no tourism whatsoever, and their apparently redeeming feature is convenient access to parking.

This new urban form has been created by a number of things. One is the near slavish devotion to the international designers who fled Europe before World War II, people like Mies Van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, who then sat at the head of the architecture and planning departments of major universities. Suddenly, the ten-year design phenomenon in Europe was imposed on the American landscape. We ended up with separated-use zoning, the automobile city of Corbusier; all this sort of exotic socialist-inspired architecture now embraced by right wing conservatives. It's certainly a strange phenomenon.

On top of that was the Interstate Highway Act, which had a huge impact on the American landscape. As predicted by [Lewis] Mumford in 1956 when the bill was passed, "It will do more damage to American cities in the next ten years than all the bombing did to cities of Europe in World War II."

I want to give you a view of Detroit, a city I think is most stigmatised, and tell you something good about it. My parents honeymooned in Detroit in 19_6, guests of a grateful government that provided POWs during World War II a week in a hotel. 
My parents were given a choice between Minneapolis or Detroit. Since they lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, they chose Detroit.  They stayed at the luxurious Book Cadillac Hotel. With the new Bell and Howell movie camera, my father recorded the first days of an enduring marriage in the heyday of downtown Detroit.  At that time, Detroit bustled with pedestrians and shoppers in scenes reminiscent of the great cities of Europe. There were three department stores - Hudsons, Kerns and Crowleys - all on Cadillac Square, which rivalled Manhattan's Bloomingdales, Macy's and Gimbels. Detroit's prominent skyline was surpassed only by those of Chicago and New York.

Fifty years later, Detroit has changed beyond recognition. The pedestrians are gone. The streetcars are gone. The department stores are gone. Most buildings are gone or boarded up. Hudson's is demolished. The 28-story Book Cadillac, now padlocked, has joined the Detroit acropolis of empty skyscrapers. The pedestrians are gone. The streetcars  are gone. The department stores are gone.  Most buildings are gone or boarded up.

If money is the measure, the federal government kept faith with Detroit during its decline. But if results matter, Washington's dollars were fool's gold. Billions of dollars flowed from Washington into Detroit in the form of concrete - the freeways that Lewis Mumford feared. Billions more built public housing in the city, and taxes subsidized middle-class housing in the suburbs. More was spent on urban renewal (demolition) and parking lots. So many parking lots that there are not many places left to visit. In a landscape of abandoned lots on the gridiron plan, Detroit was still demolishing 5,994 dwellings in 1995, a number that recalls the bombing of Rotterdam in 1940."

John went on to elucidate how the urban freeway (motorway) was the single most effective instrument of harm in a city, offering by way of example a slideshow of famous city waterfronts transformed by the addition of a hypothetical new road. The analogy was not lost on an urban audience still facing the arrival of the M74 motorway extension.

In the subsequent panel session, John confessed that he had not imagined Glasgow could have such a beautiful city centre with such a wealth of august Victorian and Edwardian architecture remaining. However, he was less than impressed with the ongoing regeneration of the Clyde, in particular the area around the Convention Centre. The monolithic, single- use approach down on the waterfront, which sees convention centre, convention hotel and new BBC headquarters all sitting in isolation, in a sea of car parking, does not fulfil the basic principles of town making whose proven value is championed  by both the Princes Foundation and Norquist's own Congress  for the New Urbanism.

John concluded: "You only need to look at Detroit and all its booster projects. They get big ideas like casinos but they don't work. Regeneration schemes need to embrace the complexity of the city and if they really want the waterfront to come alive they need small cafes, bars and retail outlets to reflect the people and
the culture. At the moment there's a lot of parking lots on the river's edge. Throwing away the riverside views in this way makes neither civic nor commercial sense. Give Glaswegians something that they love along the river - in the spirit of the tight knit, walkable, mixed use tenemented communities of the late 1800s.

This thought provoking evening also benefited from contributions from Dr Wolfgang Sonne from University of Strathclyde's Department for the Built Environment, John Bury, City Planning Manager of Glasgow City Council, and architect Niall Murphy, who sits on Glasgow's City Design Panel.

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