Symposium Talk Grim, Not Hopeless : Urban design: The shape of U.S. cities was cause for concern at the UCSD conference, at which the speakers urged their colleagues to put people first.

It’s time to give the cities back to the people.

At Saturday’s “Shaping the City” symposium in UC San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium, four internationally respected speakers hit relentlessly on the problems that those who shape cities--architects, urban designers, planners, developers, politicians--must solve if our planet, our country and Southern California are to be saved from self-destruction.

The day served as a powerful warning that all is not well in U. S. cities. The heavy dose of social awareness came as a pleasant surprise, considering that last year’s inaugural symposium was dominated by bold, egotistical designs rather than proposed answers to society’s ills. Both events were intended as the single most visible means of generating interest in the university’s new architecture school, scheduled to open in the fall of 1992.

This year’s special guests’ greatest works harmonize with cities. Uniformly, they called upon architects to think first of the people who use their buildings, instead of the grand illusions they can create.

Los Angeles architect Barton Myers is a professor at UCLA and heads his own large architecture firm.

Urban planner and architect Stanton Eckstut has become legendary in architectural circles in recent years for his people-oriented master plan for Battery Park City, a huge development on the edge of Manhattan.

Developer James Rouse has built huge retail projects, often on waterfronts, that have helped revitalize such cities as Boston, Philadelphia and Tampa and Orlando, Fla. Having retired from development, he founded the Enterprise Foundation in 1982, which has the lofty goal of housing all of America’s estimated 30 million poor people within the next generation.

San Francisco architect and urban planner Daniel Solomon has written design guidelines for cities in California and Arizona. Much of his work has reintroduced courtyards and other human features to multifamily housing.

(An exhibition of the speakers’ work will be in the campus’ Mandeville Gallery through Sunday.

Introductions and transitions between speakers were handled by moderator Richard Bender, former dean of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, who played prominent roles in writing a new master plan for UC San Diego and setting up the new architecture school.

Bender set up the day’s agenda by introducing two ways of viewing the contemporary city: “catastrophic” and “optimistic.”

“Recently, most of what they’re building is junk,” he said.

Having acknowledged extensive problems in today’s cities, including foul air, Bender said that, even so, he is not pessimistic. New technologies in biology, materials and social and ecological awareness, if properly applied, can serve as “the impetus for a new generation of innovation,” he said.

Myers called for a “regional collective effort” from Santa Barbara to San Diego, a big-picture government coalition to coordinate the future of Southern California’s 200 cities. He said impoverished state and local governments have foisted community planning on developers, and that some new form of regional government needs to take back this responsibility.

He coined the term vacant lottery to refer to existing zoning and planning ordinances “so crude and blunt” that they have a minuscule chance of producing good cities.

Bad planning, not density and rapid growth, is the problem, Myers said, noting that, during the 19th Century, London doubled its population gracefully in 10 years.

Myers derided the 1960s notion of urban renewal through scraping down blocks of small, old buildings and replacing them with block-size developments. He called for a blend of old and new, a move away from skyscrapers as the dominant downtown building type. Allowing more and smaller developments, instead of mega-block monsters, would let more people participate in making cities, and this diversity would be healthy.

In his idealized vision, Southern California could become an efficient series of small- and medium-size towns, knitted together by more efficient transportation systems.

Eckstut carried on the theme of designing cities with their users in mind, with wonderful public spaces and street-scapes, not grandstanding buildings, as the most important goal for architects and planners.

An explanation of his work on Battery Park City underscored how Eckstut feels about architecture. He set out to make a “real city, not an attraction.” Noting that the most successful buildings surrounding Central Park are the most retrained, he said, “New Yorkers rely on buildings which are not famous.”

Fifty percent of Battery Park City’s 92 acres were left as public open space, the most significant being a waterfront esplanade for pedestrians. Both cars and pedestrians move through the project; Eckstut believes urban vitality is enhanced by carefully mingling the two.

Perhaps the strongest evidence of Eckstut’s success in creating a peaceful, homey urban environment at Battery Park City is the building designed by architect Charles Moore, who has a tendency toward cartoonish abstraction.

“Most people are not moved by it,” Eckstut said of Moore’s low-key New York building, “and that’s good.”

Rouse, at 76 the senior expert at the conference, summed up his philosophy when he said that “it’s not shape, form, space, structure. It’s people we’ve got to be building for.”

His talk, the only one presented without the aid of slides, came off more as a moving sermon on social responsibility than the practical advice handed down by other speakers.

Rouse quoted these figures to make his point about the low-income housing crisis: a 26% annual increase in the nation’s homeless, of which there are now perhaps 750,000; an estimated 42,000 people in Los Angeles sleeping in cars, garages and other makeshift shelters; abut 16 million American households surviving on less than $10,000 a year, half of which goes toward rent.

“Things have got to change in America,” Rouse said. “The people at the bottom have to become more important than the people at the top.”

Solomon drew applause when he opened by describing the “problem of affluence, the poverty of what affluence has bought,” the mediocrity of expensive new developments.

Local notables on hand included San Diego City Councilman Ron Roberts, San Diego City Architect Mike Stepner, developer Ernest Hahn, Centre City Development Corp. Executive Vice President Pam Hamilton and home builder Tawfiq Khoury.

At day’s end, Bender led the four featured speakers through a joint discussion with the new dean of the UCSD architecture school, Adele Naude Santos, who was sitting in to glean ideas for the new school.

Santos stressed her commitment to making the school a “think tank” for solving social problems, and an active part of the community, rather than an “elitist, hermetic school sitting on top of the mesa.”

One left with some hope that, during the ‘90s, more architects will use their talents to address pressing urban problems they often ignored during the ‘80s.