Topic: The New Urbanism

Architects and urban planners are as divided as everyone else about how development should best shape the future of Los Angeles. Two of the leading players in the dialogue are architects Stefanos Polyzoides, a proponent of the New Urbanism school of making a city more livable, and Margaret Crawford, who is skeptical about that approach. They spoke last week on the radio program “Which Way L.A?” on KCRW-FM, from which these excerpts are taken. Warren Olney is host of the program.

Olney: What is the New Urbanism?

Polyzoides: This is a very important question because the press has really fixated over the last couple of years on aspects that have to do with stylistic or generally consumer-related issues, like front porches and the appropriate location for garages. I would like to give you a much broader definition.

First of all, the New Urbanism is based on a critique that sees the decay of the city, too much money being spent on transportation, the collapse of school systems, problems of unsafe streets. It’s all related to the process of suburbanization and exurbanization. Its program is based on the idea of linking appropriate development within the city around neighborhoods and districts, consolidating towns and cities and trying to conserve the countryside.

A lot of things are happening in Southern California that I think one can be extremely optimistic about. You can look at projects such as Pasadena Old Town, the attempts by Pasadena to convert its arterial roads into boulevards recently, the reconstitution of neighborhoods around Old Pasadena. You can look at many other places in Southern California where retail is consolidating around open space. I can count Pine Street in Long Beach, Third Street in Santa Monica, the recent efforts of Glendale to undertake a mass of such projects. These are all attempts by towns to consolidate and to take advantage of their strengths. All of those are very important steps in the right direction.

Olney: OK, I think what we’re tuning in to here is a dialogue that has been going on between architects and urban planners for a long, long time. . . . [Margaret Crawford], what are the problems you see with what is called the New Urbanism?

Crawford: The rhetoric is extremely compelling. They are focusing on very real problems; it’s just the solutions that I have problems with. I think that in many ways the solutions are constituted primarily in terms of image. For example, Old Town Pasadena is an illusion of an old Main Street but is actually a shopping mall. Near where I live in Hollywood is the Beverly Center, which has actually created and attracted a whole group of other little malls around it that I would say is just as vibrant as a place. I go there a lot, I find it very appealing, but it doesn’t have the image, the neo-traditional image of small town life and community. And I would say that visual unity and coherence really isn’t what constitutes rich urban life. In fact urban life has been characterized as being messy, but that’s part of it’s vitality.

I think community can happen in a lot ways. The New Urbanists, just in my mind, aren’t able to see community because it doesn’t look the way they think it should. I have a mini-mall across the street from my house where I go. They know me, I see my neighbors. It’s actually very much of a community venue. And certainly it could be better--it could have some green space, it could be landscaped. But in many respects I consider this to be a community place. I consider it, in many ways, to operate as a public place.

Monterey Park, one of the most vibrant and exciting communities in Los Angeles, is basically constituted around mini-malls and broad boulevards that the New Urbanists would totally reject. Yet I think that it has developed its own character. So I think that in many respects the architectural and urban language of the New Urbanism is an elite language that really has to do with a particular social group.

Olney: Let me go back to professor Polyzoides. What’s your response to this--the idea that what you are talking about is really in some ways an illusion and one fostered by people in the white upper middle class?

Polyzoides: Well, I think again the emphasis on style is not exactly an appropriate way of thinking about the subject. In 1973 I bought a bungalow in South Pasadena, my first house, for $32,000. Last year I bought two cars for more than that. And it was an option to buy a house, it was a necessity to buy the cars. I’m trying to point out that the cost of organizing lives around a form of transportation which is really gnawing away at the roots of this society is an issue that transcends class.

I completely reject the sense that the New Urbanism is about the making of architectural unity around certain projects that need to be understood or marketed in a manner that only one kind of class of people understands. My vision of how this could come to bloom in a place like Southern California is that every neighborhood could in fact be organized or be designed by the people who live there, in the manner that they see fit, in a perfect opportunity to express both their similarities and their differences from other people.

Olney: Professor Crawford, what do you have to say with regard to this notion that we’ve had to organize our lives around transportation, so that cars become a necessity, houses an option--and what should we do about that?

Crawford: Well certainly no one could argue that the car isn’t a necessity in Los Angeles. At the same time I think that the car is a piece of 20th century technology that is not going to go away. I don’t want to simply be a mindless advocate of the car. At the same time it seems to me, rather than the kind of either/or position to the car, you could have a both/and position--where you say, let’s have a car-based city but let’s also have pedestrian possibilities. I don’t want to incorrectly characterize Stefanos as a person who doesn’t support buses, but I would say typically the New Urbanism has been very much focused around the idea of fixed rail. And I think fixed rail again is one of these physical elements that designers adore because of their very physicality.

I would say we need to have more choices rather than fewer and probably we might agree on this. At the same time I have to say that I like driving very much and certainly one of the advantages of Los Angeles for me has always been that it’s been a city that you can get around very easily. And I know there’s been a lot of talk about gridlock, but actually statistics show that over the past few years in fact, the traffic situation, in spite of many people’s perceptions, has improved.

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