Rumbles on the Livable City Turf

Growing like a frail plant out of the varied slow-growth, preservation and community movements in Los Angeles and other major metropolitan areas across the country is the concept of the livable city.

The concept generally envisions a city of distinct neighborhoods with a sense of pride, place and history, bolstered by safe streets, good housing, shopping and schools, friendly playgrounds, revered landmarks and a host of cultural attractions.

In sum, it is a city that encourages walking, bicycling, saying hello to neighbors, smiling at passers-by, planting flowers in the front yard or in a window box, strolling along shopping streets, picnicking in parks, or not hesitating to go downtown.

There are fragments of this in most cities, even in auto-oriented Los Angeles; enough so to nurture the hope of more.

At the core of this hope is the thought that cities should be designed to serve and enrich the people who live there, not to fulfill some market-driven or textbook vision packaged by an architectural and planning elite doing the bidding of real estate interests.

The radical thought that cities should be first and foremost about people who live and work there, and not those who design, build and profit from them, has made “livability” a rallying cry here and elsewhere of residents and neighborhood groups doing battle against intrusive, destructive and insensitive development. It is a concept that to succeed must be of a neighborhood scale and sensitivity.

But in gaining increasing attention and acceptance, it was inevitable that those in the development community and their architectural and academic sycophants who ignored, disdained or distorted the neighborhood-based concept for decades, should now try to co-opt it.

An example is a conference scheduled this week in Pittsburgh, Pa., entitled “remaking cities.” Sponsored by the American Institute of Architects and the Royal Institute of British Architects, it promises to be another self-serving and congratulating exercise that has come to mark such efforts.

The problem is not the subject matter. According to a package of slickly designed materials I received to get me to write a glowing story to prompt “high-quality representatives from your readership” to attend, the conference will focus on how cities can become more livable to compete better for new businesses and people in the emerging post-industrial age.

Much of it sounded like one of my columns, right down to the statement that to achieve the “local pride and a sense of identity and uniqueness” that marks livability “new coalitions of public-private investment, especially in the neighborhoods, are top priority. Citizens must be enfranchised to determine policies that affect their local communities.”

And making the conference even more appealing is that scheduled to speak there is Britain’s Prince Charles, who, as I fondly wrote about recently, has become an outspoken advocate of more user-sympathetic and historically sensitive designs; in short, pro-livability.

It was Prince Charles a few months ago, who declared in a speech in London that for 40 years the planning, architectural and development establishment has been doing it their own way while “we, poor mortals, are forced to live in the shadow of their achievement.”

Everywhere he went the prince said, “It was one of the things people complain about most,” adding that “if there is one message I would like to deliver . . . in no uncertain terms it is that large numbers of us in this country are fed up with being talked down to and dictated to by the existing planning, architectural and development establishments.”

All this is quite enticing, except when you begin to note who, in addition to the prince, are the speakers, and read a background paper on the structure and anticipated results of the conference. It seems that our well-meaning, community-sensitive British friends have been had, and the rhetoric of livability appropriated by the American version of the establishment that the prince takes such strong exception to.

With a few exceptions, the conference’s speaker list is dominated by those who, at best, in the past have ignored the gut neighborhood issues on which livability is based, to act as apologists for antiseptic designs that have segregated our cities.

At worse, a few have been the hatchet men who chopped up neighborhoods they will now discuss how to save. And nearly all are cut from the patronizing, paternalistic weave of the corporate, bureaucratic and academic cloth, colored by a pandering journalist or two.

According to the background paper, the primary goal of the conference is to produce a set of policy recommendations to be, among other things, presented to legislators, developed into a national educational television series, debated “in a Fred Friendly forum on public television,” discussed in a book on the future of the cities, and, lastly, “packaged for presentation to local leaders and grass-roots participants in the community process as well as for use in colleges and universities.”

Give us a break. Indeed, give a break also to all those activists who are not paid to attend the interminable hearings and meetings involved in the shaping of their neighborhoods, and then have to endure the put-downs by self-proclaimed professionals whose egos won’t quit.

As if the conference organizers had not learned from the past fiascoes of urban renewal and similar ventures with which they were associated, such efforts as livability begins, and ends, at the neighborhood level. The days of master mega planning, mammoth multicolored reports, and intricate model making are as dead as the credibility of the big-bang conference.

To be sure, there will be some sound and fluff in Pittsburgh this week, but in all probability, the effort will produce nothing more than a pleasant few days for select civil serpents and others, a little play in the media, another line or two on the vitae of fawning academics, and an exchange of business cards.

Perhaps it would be too much to hope to expect that some of the conference funds be diverted to a grass-roots effort to improve the livability of one of Pittsburgh’s struggling neighborhoods; that in addition to the hot air, something of substance and value comes out of the gathering. To that end, I offer my proxy to Prince Charles.