$11.95 ISBN 1-56898-377-8 $11.95

TMxHSLFQIy983776zv;:":":*:; PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS

James S. Russell editor

Mark Robbins series editor

National Endowment 

for the Arts

The Mayors’ Institute 

on City Design

THE MAYORS’

INSTITUTE

EXCELLENCE IN

CITY DESIGN

Washington, DC
Distributed by:

Princeton Architectural Press

37 East Seventh Street

New York, New York 10003

For a free catalog of books, call 1.800.722.6657.

Visit our web site at www.papress.com.

© 2002 National Endowment for the Arts

05 04 03 02 4 3 2 1 First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

reproduced in any form by any electronic or

mechanical means (including photocopying,

recording, or information storage and retrieval)

without permission in writing from the publisher.

Design by M. Christopher Jones, The VIA Group LLC.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication 

Data is available from the National Endowment 

for the Arts.

ISBN 1-56898-377-8

NEA Series on Design

Other titles available in this series:

Schools for Cities: 

Urban Strategies

Sprawl and Public Space: 

Redressing the Mall

University-Community 

Design Partnerships: 

Innovations in Practice

Your Town: 

Mississippi Delta

Front cover:

Queensborough Public

Library, Flushing, New 

York; The Polshek

Partnership, architect

Photo: © Jeff Goldberg/Esto
I

The Disciplines

James S. Russell

II

The Elements

III

The Tools

Contents

Preface 1

Mark Robbins

The History of the 5

Mayors’ Institute

Christine Saum

How to Use the Mayors’ 7

Institute on City Design

Robert Campbell 

The Design Professions 12

The Architect 20

The Landscape Architect 25

The Urban Designer 29

The Urban Planner 35

The Artist 39

The “Civitas” of Seeing 46

Richard Sennett

Great Streets 62

Allan Jacobs

Elements of Success in 70

Downtown Revitalization

Donovan D. Rypkema

Civil Engineering for Cities 80

James S. Russell

Making a Place for Housing 88

James S. Russell

Life at the Water’s Edge 94

James S. Russell

Rules for Designing Cities 104

Alex Krieger

Design Competitions 112

Rosalie Genevro

Community Workshops 116

James S. Russell

Biographies 122

Image Credits 123

1

Preface

Mark Robbins

Director of Design, National Endowment for the Arts

The multiple disciplines of design—architecture and landscape architecture, graphic, fashion, and industrial design, planning and

preservation—have long been a component of funding at the National

Endowment for the Arts. Diverse programs serve varied constituents

through support for design innovations, community charettes, master

plans, and design competitions. As part of the Arts Endowment’s mission

to strengthen communities, NEA grants and special initiatives fund architects and designers, critics and historians, as well as the publications,

lectures, conferences, and museums and galleries that bring their work to

a broader public. These projects reach from Bozeman, Montana, to

Birmingham, Alabama, to New York City and Los Angeles.

Design professionals are clearly aware of their disciplines’

profound impact on the quality of the public realm and realize that their

participation can be critical in shaping the ways cities and communities

are conceived and built. Outside of the field, however, recognition of

design’s key role in the formation of cities, infrastructure, and public

space is more limited. A series of initiatives by the design discipline of the

NEA seeks to address this chronic situation, enhancing understanding of

design among political leaders and the public. 

One such program is the Mayors’ Institute on City Design

(MICD), founded in 1986 as an NEA Leadership Initiative. The MICD

offers a forum that brings mayors from across the county together with
2

design professionals to provide information about urban design that is

comprehensible and encourages action. Since its inception the MICD 

has provided design resources for over 600 mayors of American cities.

Design may not seem an obvious option for mayors grappling with the

rigors of city governance. Yet every day they address issues that an understanding of design could usefully inform: economic and community

development, zoning and other regulations, housing and transportation.

The MICD’s goal is to give mayors the expertise to become advocates 

for design, better attuned visually and practically to development opportunities and pitfalls. As stewards for their cities, they recognize that

design can be a powerful tool.

Recent efforts to broaden the impact of the MICD program have

resulted in partnerships with other federal agencies, helping to secure

broader conversations between elected officials and the agencies that have

an impact on the public environment. These partnerships have generally

focused on a particular topic, such as brownfields reclamation in a collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency. The General Services

Administration, the nation’s landlord, partnered with the NEA for an

MICD addressing the impact of federal building projects on city centers.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has collaborated

on sessions directed at encouraging housing in the downtown core, using

innovative approaches for the design of denser neighborhoods. 

Cities are the biggest and most complex things that we make as a

society, and each city is unique with its own character, strengths, and

potential. Consequently, there is no one instant solution (a stadium, an

entertainment zone, a pedestrian mall) that can be applied universally and

uncritically. We must not replace one orthodoxy with another regarding

the city plan, nor reduce our thinking to issues of style or taste. In a rush

for a believable urban center, a city cannot remake itself into a vision of

the last century but must value historic buildings and spaces of all periods

while also encouraging innovative new building solutions. 

Unless we can understand new models for making cities and suburbs that incorporate the way we live—complete with big box stores and

cars, as well as pedestrians—we will continue to perpetuate the kind of 
3

ill-considered commercial development one mayor of a western city

termed his “sacrifice zone.” Pre-existing models have lessons but without

transformation cannot accommodate forms, land uses, building types, and

a culture that have never existed before. Accommodating the car and the

pedestrian and retail and residential spaces with reasonable densities

requires careful thought. The Mayors’ Institute is dedicated to fostering

such thinking among both community leaders and design practitioners.

To this end, the MICD brings mayors in contact with the brightest, most

progressive thinkers and design practitioners the nation has to offer.

In recent years the NEA has introduced other new Leadership

Initiatives to nurture design talent and help improve the overall quality of

design across the country. The New Public Works program sponsors

national design competitions for public building and landscape projects.

Other initiatives have focused on possibilities for reworking out-of-date

suburban malls, revitalizing communities through the design of schools,

and enhancing the quality of life in rural areas. These initiatives are part

of a concerted effort by the NEA to develop public awareness about

design, serve all the design disciplines, and act as a conduit for design

expertise for local governments and federal agencies, perhaps the largest

consumers of design. In concert, these NEA programs seek to encourage

the engagement of design professionals in important sectors of our culture. Support for the production of design that is aesthetically and

materially rich, technologically innovative, economical, and socially active

must be within our reach as a nation. 

Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr., of Charleston, South Carolina, initially

envisioned the MICD’s unique program idea, working in concert with

Adele Chatfield-Taylor, my predecessor at the NEA. Both merit acknowledgment for their perceptive belief in design. The MICD has had a

consistent and far-reaching impact on elected officials and American

cities. Recognition is also due to Christine Saum, who in her role as

Executive Director of the Mayors’ Institute has shepherded this program

with great dedication and managed many vital aspects of the production

of this publication. Editor James S. Russell has brought both his

eloquence and insight to the endeavor. Christine, Jim, and I have worked
4

as a team to frame the book, ably assisted by graphic designer 

M. Christopher Jones of The VIA Group. We thank essayists Robert

Campbell, Richard Sennett, Allan Jacobs, Donovan D. Rypkema, Alex

Krieger, and Rosalie Genevro for their persuasive and stimulating 

comments. We also express appreciation to all those who have provided

visual materials, as well as to Casius Pealer, who kept those materials so

well organized. At the Princeton Architectural Press, Kevin Lippert,

Jennifer Thompson, and Clare Jacobson have offered guidance and 

support. Kristina Alg, the NEA’s Graham Fellow in Federal Service, 

has provided invaluable coordination of this volume and others in the

NEA design series. 

Thanks are also due to all the designers and other resource personnel who have dedicated time and energy to serving on the MICD’s

intensive three-day sessions. They are among our best advocates for

design and make the case for it at the most direct level. We hope that 

this publication provides examples of the best practices nationally for

architecture, landscape architecture, and the other design disciplines. 

The work of these design professionals affects crucial decisions that have

an impact on the way the public realm is used today and the way it will

accommodate the future. 
5

The History of the 

Mayors’ Institute

Christine Saum

I have often said that I am the chief urban designer of my city,” wrote

Joseph P. Riley, Jr., the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, to his friend

Jaquelin Robertson, who was then dean of the School of Architecture at

the University of Virginia. “I have many opportunities to affect proposed

developments...making them better for the city or allowing them to be

ordinary—or worse.” In this 1985 letter, he asked Robertson if there was

not some way a program could be devised to give mayors a more sophisticated understanding of how design could be used to improve the quality

of both public and private development. He wanted to give mayors the

tools to evaluate design and to proactively become involved with it as a

tool to improve the scale, diversity, and livability of the built environment

the city is responsible for creating or encouraging. 

The two presented the idea to Adele Chatfield-Taylor, then the

Director of Design Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts, who

agreed to fund it as one of the Arts Endowment’s Leadership Initiatives.

Over the next few months, the format was developed and refined, and the

first Mayors’ Institute session took place at the University of Virginia in

October 1986. The energizing effect of putting designers and mayors in

the same room together, apart from the day-to-day concerns of running a

city, was immediately evident. The national institutes have met twice

yearly since then. In 1990, four regional institutes were established to

“
6

increase outreach to a wider range of cities in the Northeast, Southeast,

Midwest, and West. MICD continues to be funded by the NEA as a

Leadership Initiative but is now carried out in partnership with The U.S.

Conference of Mayors and currently administered by the American

Architectural Foundation.

One participant, Daniel Kemmis, who was mayor of Missoula,

Montana, when he participated in an MICD institute, called it “healing

work.” He added, “In almost every problem brought to the Mayors’

Institute, you have the opportunity to make the city more whole, not only

in a physical way but in the way that you involve your citizens. You have

an opportunity to heal the civic structure itself.”
7

How to Use the Mayors’ 

Institute on City Design

Robert Campbell

The Mayors’ Institute on City Design has been such a rich and diverse

experience for so many people that it’s hard to sum up a single purpose.

But one goal is clear: it exists to encourage mayors to think of themselves

as the designers of their cities. Nobody else, we would argue, is designing

the American city. A lot of people are designing parts of it. Planners do

that, and so do architects and traffic engineers and public works departments and developers and preservation groups and many others. But no

one can put together the whole picture in any city quite the way the

mayor can. Mayors have a unique opportunity. MICD helps them seize it.

The Case Study Approach

MICD sessions are organized around case-study problems. Each mayor

presents a problem from his or her city for the other mayors and designers to discuss. Finding a solution isn’t necessarily the goal. Urban design

is a lengthy process that usually can’t be resolved in a brief session. The

real goal is for mayors and designers to learn from one another. Mayors

observe how designers approach a problem, what values they emphasize,

and what parallel cases they have experienced. Designers learn how cities

are seen by their mayors, who must take into account the full human
8

richness of city life with its multiplicity of issues and constraints. More

often than not, mayors and designers turn out to agree on the important

issues. As a result, mayors often go home feeling encouraged to trust their

own urban design instincts in the face of the many pressures with which

they must deal.

In the more than 15 years during which the MICD has existed, the

case study problems have exemplified the full range of issues that can fall

under the heading of “city design” or “urban design.” Should a historic

building be demolished—or preserved? Would a new monorail help the

downtown? How about a pedestrian street? Or a pedestrian skyway? Or

an in-town shopping mall? What about the declining central business

district? How can you control growth—or stimulate it? And so on.

The MICD takes on some pretty small problems. We’ve talked

about the best way to design sidewalks and how to expand a public

library. It also takes on big issues, the ones that tend to recur, such as the

problem of public access to the waterfront. Big or small, all are urban

design and all are important. Such issues land on the desk of America’s

mayors every day. We read of them in newspapers and see them on television. At MICD sessions, mayors get a chance to work with some very

experienced urban designers in thinking about these issues.

A city in Iowa is worried about a shopping center, including a

Wal-Mart store, that is proposed for a site three miles out of town. It will

bring jobs and money to the region. It may make shopping more convenient. But what will it do to Main Street? And if Main Street fails, what

happens to the city’s character, its awareness of history, its pride in its

identity? Does a remote shopping mall nurture a sense of community as

well as does a central Main Street? What about the cosmic design

issues—pollution and sprawl and the survival of the planet? The city is

right to be concerned. What is the best solution?

A city in Missouri hopes to build a new convention center to

“stanch the bleeding of jobs and business across the state line.” But

another city, Washington, D.C., finds that its new convention center is a

mixed blessing. It has driven up real-estate values around it to the point at

which small retailers, who it was hoped would benefit from it, are instead
9

being forced out of business. Are convention centers a good idea? Where

are they best located? How should they be designed?

The mayor of a state capital—stimulated as it happens, by a session of the MICD—proposes height limits on all new buildings in the

area of the capitol building, so that the building’s dome can continue to

rise symbolically above the world of commerce. Opponents argue that

lowering heights may push healthy economic growth out of town. Who is

right? Can growth be accommodated in low-rise buildings? Are design

controls a good idea? How do you write and enforce them?

Prince Charles of Great Britain argues that modern architecture is

too often ugly and we should go back to the more humane qualities of

older styles of building. Is this merely elitist nostalgia? Or are there lasting truths we can learn from the patterns by which buildings and cities

were put together in the past? The media raise issues like these, but often

without perceiving the implications of urban design. The MICD instead

considers design questions when viewing civic decisions.

A Word About Values

The MICD doesn’t push any particular dogma about how to design cities.

Instead, it assumes that the mayors and the faculty designers know cities

best and should be left alone to learn from one another. Nevertheless,

there is an underlying belief that urban centers—from small towns to

metropolises—are good places to live and work. That belief is sometimes

challenged in our society today.

The MICD believes, too, that cities needn’t just happen. They can

and, in general, should be designed. If nobody is designing them, they

become the chaotic and accidental result of a random collision of forces.

Design doesn’t mean, of course, imposing anybody’s single vision. It

means working through the democratic process toward a consensus view

of what the shape of the city should be.

We also maintain that a city isn’t something that can be

understood by charts and statistics alone. A city is a physical thing that
10

you have to engage with your senses. To understand it you have to see

and hear and smell and touch it, move through it, watch how people use

and cope with it. The physical city is billboards and trees and waterways,

boarded-up shop fronts and sparkling new boutiques, abandoned rail

yards and gleaming office towers, handsome streets and asphalt deserts,

historic homes and fast-food restaurants, traffic jams and bus routes,

street patterns that work and others that don’t.

Mayors spend much of their time dealing with aspects of the city

that are abstract rather than physical—taxes, budgets, and economic and

social issues of all kinds. All are important, and all interact with urban

design. But urban design itself—the shaping of the physical city as a setting for the life of its inhabitants—is the emphasis of the MICD.

Robert Campbell, FAIA, is a practicing architect, educator, and author in Boston.

His work as architectural critic for the Boston Globe was recognized in 1996 with

the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism.
11

I

The Disciplines
12

1

A glass pavilion opens

onto a Reading Garden at

the Allston Branch of the

Boston Public Library.

Machado and Silvetti

Associates, architect 

2

A curve of stone steps

defines a quiet place next

to the White River at the

Central Indianapolis

Waterfront Capital City

Landing. Sasaki

Associates, landscape

architect and urban

designer

3

A “park” that advertises 

its artificiality defines a

student gathering place in

New York City’s West Side

High School. Ellen and

Allan Wexler, artists

4

St. Paul on the Mississippi,

a development framework,

guides the future of downtown. Berridge Lewinberg

Greenberg Dark Gabor

Limited, urban planner

5

Restoring vibrancy to 

State Street, in Chicago,

included the strategic

targeting of aid to

individual properties.

Skidmore Owings &

Merrill, urban designer

1 2

3 4

5
13

The Design Professions

James S. Russell

Any endeavor with “design” in its name can seem mystifying because it

unites artistic creativity with problem solving and technological savvy. A

public official or agency head usually is more comfortable discussing

quantifiable issues (“we need 10 more classrooms here”) or the technical

side, because issues and criteria are objective. The intuitive side of 

design, in which designers use style and aesthetics to express an entire

community’s culture and ideals, can seem a difficult subject for public

consideration. Officials may fear that no single design can ever reconcile

the community’s varying aspirations and preconceptions. One of the main

reasons the MICD has been so successful is that it helps mayors understand how the subjective and objective threads of thinking are united by

the designer, and it also helps them speak to constituents and colleagues

about the benefits of design at the highest level.

To satisfy the quantifiable aspect of a project, the designer works

to make sure that spaces relate properly to each other or that people can

easily find their way through an urban square. Thousands of additional

decisions must also be made. What finishes that will be durable yet still

inviting can be used in a library? How should a stadium be placed so that

it seems to extend the city rather than lie isolated in a sea of parking?

Resolving the functional issues of a project should be considered a

baseline, something you should expect from any competent, experienced

designer. It is common to think that designers solve the pragmatic issues
14

then “add the aesthetics.” But a high-quality work of architecture isn’t a

box full of rooms wrapped in a pleasing package. A piece of public art

does not become meaningful if it is only decorative. The “art” of design is

the synthesis of aesthetic and functional issues—of beauty and meaning.

The intuitive side of the designer’s brain is often the side that

drives the designer’s passion to do his or her best. There’s an alchemy

available there to create a memorable public work that can emotionally

connect to the community and be embraced by it.

What Should You Expect of a Designer?

Aspiring to the highest quality of design can mean rewriting the project

script somewhat. The designer may question given circumstances rather

than accept them automatically. Is this the right site? Doesn’t this program miss an important issue? Does this project successfully anticipate

future growth? Sometimes a questioning, creative approach makes itself

felt more prosaically: If two public health agencies shared one reception

area, rather than each having a separate one, couldn’t you have a single,

more welcoming reception area?

A successful work of design looks like it belongs, which means

that, in any of a variety of ways, the designer has figured out what is

unique about the setting that can be expressed or brought forward in the

project. A work of design is distinctive when it integrates and transforms

the given circumstances so that they make a sum that is greater than the

parts. Design expresses the values of its community to the people that use

a building or just pass it by. A neighborhood library can look like a

fortress, conveying the idea that the city has given up, or that it is only

for those invited, or who are willing to do what it takes to breach its

defenses. Or a library can be welcoming, a beacon suggesting that struggle against decline has its reward, a place for meeting and socializing, as

well as for quiet reading and research.

Public officials in charge of a building program are responsible to

a budget and to a wide array of “publics,” many of whom have highly spe-
15

cific agendas. The path of least resistance can be to divvy up the project

into bits that please this or that constituency. The resulting building can

look like the cobbled-together evidence of the public passions of the

moment, speaking to the contentions of urban life rather than to the

many possibilities that unite us. Officials should not hesitate to use a good

designer’s integrative artistic bent to reconcile controversial aspects of a

project. Very often people exposed to the other interests exerting pressure

on a project will recognize that there are numerous ways to proceed.

Officials should encourage the designer to create at the highest

artistic level. People often fear innovative design simply because, in their

experience, the new (compromised a dozen ways in a vain attempt to

please everyone) has always been worse than the old. A creative design

can often exceed expectations and win approval, even from those thought

most likely to oppose it, especially if it expresses a serious effort to take

every relevant concern into account.

On a political level, the designer can act as an independent third

party, a person seen by conflicting factions as dedicated to finding the

best resolution and who can be an honest broker. A designer, planner, or

artist dedicated to serving the public will try out alternate approaches to a

project to accommodate the desires of its users. The very act of creating

alternatives often points the way to the best solution.

Judging Design Aesthetics

People tend to be most comfortable reviewing the objective qualities of

design: Does it have the rooms we need in the sizes we requested? In an

era of artistic pluralism, it can be hard for the public and for officials to

judge whether architecture is aesthetically appropriate, or even beautiful.

That the design is consistent or inconsistent with one’s personal taste is

not an adequate barometer. There are too many views of taste and style

today; catering to one or another doesn’t in itself guarantee a project

that is embraced by the community and that won’t seem dated in a very

few years.
16

A designer may propose a solution that makes some people

uncomfortable because it strays far from their own aesthetic sensibilities

or does not seem to fit into the community. But design criteria that apply

when decorating one’s own home do not apply when one is creating a

public building. Public places must find a means to express the idea of

people coming together; they are not domestic environments. 

Words like “dignity,” “gravity,” “welcoming,” and “community”

are often used to denote appropriateness for a public building. For some,

this means embracing historical styles in which columns, entablatures, or

domes denote a continuity with the past. Historical elements can more

deeply resonate if they are integrated and interpreted, so that the scale

and uses appropriate to modern life are not simply shoehorned into a

historical-looking shell.

Continuity with history is not the only way to achieve appropriateness. Communities change, and design that recognizes and expresses a

community’s changing identity helps maintain a community’s authenticity and sense of place. Indeed, so many places in America lack a specific

sense of place that the public work created with a fresh palette of materials and forms can uncover its unique mélange of history, environment,

and culture.

A useful stance in judging a design is to be open-minded but not

hesitate to question or criticize. If the aesthetic evokes discomfort, don’t

hesitate to ask the designer to explain it further. If you don’t understand

the design, ask the designer to find ways (through drawings or models or

through examples of similar designs) to enhance your understanding.

Whether the aesthetic attempts to blend in or offers a unique counterpoint to its surroundings, there should be a rationale that is both

comprehensible and sensible. Some ground rules apply in a public design

process: The designer should gracefully receive feedback and respond to

it in subsequent iterations. The citizen should recognize that not every

project can be all things to all people, and try to judge the compromises

the designer has made dispassionately.
17

Design Budgets and Schedules

In any project, decisions have to be made about keeping the project within the budget. Inevitably the desires of the community exceed the budget.

Public projects are often more expensive, on a per-square-foot basis, than

seemingly similar private sector projects. But public projects must contribute to, and make a statement about, their communities in ways private

construction is not required to do.

Still, there are times when the project needs to be trimmed to

meet the budget and times when the budget simply needs to be increased.

It is a key responsibility of public staff and officials to know which applies

in a given circumstance and to bite the bullet either way. Great design

cannot salvage an inadequately budgeted project.

Design and construction schedules may also be contentious. Public

structures should be erected to a realistic schedule consistent with that of

other projects of similar scope and complexity. Since ideal schedules are

not always possible, officials and the public must understand what may be

traded away. A short schedule usually increases the cost of the project. It

also risks unanticipated delays because barriers, in the form of public

resistance or unexpected physical conditions on the site, have a way of

sabotaging speed-driven projects. Great projects are sabotaged more

often than not by rushing to get them done. It is too easy to forget that

what we build today represents an investment in the public realm for a

long time to come.

Once a schedule is understood and agreed to, the client should

expect the design team to maintain that schedule. Although construction

projects often seem to take longer than projected, no unjustified or unreasonable delay should be regarded as acceptable. If the scope of the project

must be cut to achieve early occupancy, it should be understood by everyone involved so that the most intelligent decisions can be made.

In the struggle to meet budgets and timetables, it’s important for

officials and the community to keep in mind what’s at stake. A mistake in

the procurement of an ordinary service or product can almost always be

corrected; a public work installed in the “get it done cheap and fast”
18

mode will cast its dispiriting and dysfunctional shadow over a community for decades.

There are those who argue that public buildings should be procured and built to standards of private developers, but the development

community today builds to maximize short-term profit and ignores

high short- and long-term maintenance costs. These costs are unacceptable for a government agency that must hold a building for a

long time. A building that represents the government agency to the

public should express its community’s aspirations and demonstrate a

commitment to the community’s future.

Hiring a Designer

Design is a professional service, not a commodity. Within any community, there is enormous variety in capability and quality of professional

services available. That’s why a quality-based selection process will

almost always produce a superior, more cost-effective result over a feebid selection process. “Quality” can be understood and evaluated in a

number of ways. The client should look for a comfort-inducing combination of experience and expertise, a record of pleasing past clients by

delivering quality service on time and at reasonable cost, and a passion

and commitment to achieving the best possible design.

In this book, each design discipline is considered separately,

since most firms specialize in one area. Typically the architect, landscape architect, urban designer, planner, or artist assembles a team of

specialized consultants suited to the project’s requirements. But multidiscipline firms, such as an architect/engineer or a planner/landscape

architect/urban designer, offer a wide range of design, engineering, and

specialized services in-house (for example, lighting design,

environmental-impact analysis, and traffic studies). Either approach has

virtues: A team of independent consultants allows the community to

hire the best practitioners in respective fields, with the mix of

disciplines customized to the job at hand. Such an arrangement
19

demands a commitment among the participating firms to excellent communication. The “one-stop shopping” multiservice firm approach is

appealing for its convenience, and works well when there is a high level 

of expertise in each discipline, when appropriate disciplines are represented within the firm, and when internal communication is well integrated.

For the decisionmaker, the quality of the menu of services offered under

single-firm, multidiscipline leadership must be considered against the

ability to customize a mix of services obtained independently from several

independent firms.
20
21

The Architect

James S. Russell

In the simplest terms, architects design buildings. The contract between

architect and client usually says that the architect creates a set of documents based on a program (the rooms, spaces, and functions that address

the client’s needs). From these documents, the contractor constructs the

actual project. The best architects go far beyond drawing up workable

floor plans, however. The experience of moving through a building can

have drama or offer unexpected surprises. It can orchestrate informal,

unexpected gatherings or encounters for the public. It can invite people

who have not previously felt part of a community. Spaces within buildings

can express a community’s highest values like dignity, reconciliation,

neighborliness. 

The spaces required by the program can be arranged within an

envelope that has a unique quality of its own, that deploys materials in an

artistic way while keeping the rain out and the heat in. Expressive materials and detailing recognize what is special about a place, like a beautiful

patina that develops on a surface over time thanks to the local climate. In

the hands of a good architect, a site, however ordinary it may seem, is

something with innate qualities that can be brought forth in an expressive

way. Daylight is not just for illumination but has a beauty in its own right

that changes with the seasons and that can be choreographed by the artful

deployment of building openings.

Metreon is an emerging

type of building, the urban

entertainment center.

Though it is inwardly

focused, a kind of mall for

electronic and cinematic

entertainment, architect

Simon Martin-Vegue

Winkelstein Moris, with

Gary E. Handel Associates,

opens its several levels to

dramatic public lobbies

that draw passersby into

the excitement of what

goes on within. It takes

advantage of crowds

drawn to the adjacent

Yerba Buena Gardens in

San Francisco, a public

and private initiative that

includes a variety of cultural institutions, a park,

and a children’s center.
22

1 2

3 4

5 6 Photo: © AlanKarchmer/Esto Photo: © Jeff Goldberg/Esto

Photo: © Jeff Goldberg/Esto
23

It can be useful to involve the architect in predesign services like

site selection and program development. Determining financial feasibility

and securing financing, however, is usually best left to specialists. It is rare

for the architect to act as the contractor for a project, though standard

professional agreements call for the architect to represent the public

client during construction by monitoring that the design is executed

properly by the builder. Many public projects are managed without the

services of the architect during the construction phase, but this approach

often works poorly because the officially appointed person in charge lacks

the resources or knowledge of the architect. Some jurisdictions prefer to

use a single entity to design and build the project. “Design/build” as a

project-delivery method works best when the specific complexities of the

project demand specialized construction expertise. Under such circumstances, the contractor can offer critical advice throughout the design

process. In complex design/build projects, both the architect and the

builder should be selected on the basis of quality and expertise, not on

price alone. 

A skilled architect combines excellent analytical capabilities, 

technical experience, and a deeply held aesthetic sensibility. The appropriateness of the latter quality can be the most difficult to gauge. We live

in a particularly pluralistic era of architectural expressiveness. There is no

“typical” style and a high degree of expressive individuality has developed,

which, of course, can be confusing to communities trying to make a

choice about the appropriateness of a design.

What style is right for a given project? Today, many architects

work in a highly sculptural, expressionistic style. This design approach is

probably best suited to difficult settings where making a strong aesthetic

statement can create an identity where one doesn’t exist or project an

improved image for a troubled neighborhood. It can also be appropriate

where the project or site presents unique conditions that deserve a special

approach. 

Another contemporary strain of design is the near opposite—a

very discreet minimal and abstract approach that relies on careful proportions, elegant details, and impeccable use of materials. Such design is

1

The dramatic forms of 

the Diamond Ranch High

School, in Pomona,

California, recognize a

spectacular setting and

enclose an intimate

“street.” Morphosis

Architects, with Thomas

Blurock

2

Translucent canopies 

and “fishscale” cladding

welcome patrons to the

Buckhead Library in

Atlanta. Scogin Elam and

Bray, architect

3

A composition of glowing

cubes makes a new landmark of the Yerba Buena

live/work lofts in San

Francisco’s emerging

South-of-Market neighborhood. Stanley Saitowitz

Office, architect

4

The festive design of the

New Jersey Performing

Arts Center invites audiences to a once-derelict

corner of downtown

Newark. Barton Myers

Associates, architect, 

with Wilson Woodridge

Architects

5

Sunshades open to a

spectacular winglike form,

beckoning visitors to

Milwaukee’s Art Museum.

Calatrava Valls, architect 

6

A glowing sphere within a

diaphanous cube evokes

the universe’s origins at

the Rose Center for Earth

and Space at the American

Museum of Natural

History, New York City. 

The Polshek Partnership,

architect
24

often successful where the building needs to fit into a neighborhood: it

can make a fresh, welcoming, contemporary statement. It is also suited to

sites of unique quality or beauty; rather than draw attention to itself, it

offers a quiet, strong statement as a counterpoint to the drama or beauty

of the surrounding conditions.

A third design approach that communities often seek is a historicist style. Such designs use historical details or proportions to evoke an

existing historic neighborhood or remind people of familiar historic

images. This approach can succeed where there is a full and successful

integration of the contemporary uses in the historically inspired envelope

and where the scale of the program fits comfortably with historic proportions and details as well as the place within which the building is to be

set. One of the reasons old buildings are pleasing is that they are built

with an integrity endemic to their time and with a sense of materials and

craft that is palpable. A historicist approach that does not aspire to the

same integrity and execution of the structures it evokes will too often

seem like stage-set history.

Set within a park, the

barnlike forms of the

Heritage Park Community

Center anchor a new

planned community in

Chula Vista, California.

Rob Wellington Quigley

Architecture/Planning,

architect
25

The Landscape Architect

James S. Russell

Landscape architecture has its roots in the design of parks and gardens.

The profession has, however, extended its bounds considerably over the

decades. Many landscape architects design such “hardscapes” as plazas,

walkway systems, and other public environments, and their projects may

range from zoo-viewing structures to playground equipment to outdoor

paving systems. But the profession’s traditional palette is landform, plantings, and water features—as well as the site’s relationship to the local

environment and climate. Since landscape architects may be well attuned

to the local vagaries of climate, soils, vegetation, and topography, it is

often useful to involve them in site selection or site evaluation. 

While architects usually lead a project in which the landscape is

subsidiary in complexity or cost to the building, landscape architects may

lead a design team in park or open-space projects or when sites of significant environmental sensitivity are involved. 

They may lead large multidiscipline firms or assemble independent consultants in various design and engineering disciplines to plan and

design large greenbelt open spaces and lay out large-scale real-estate

development projects. Working with planners and civil engineers, they

may define strategies to apply to entire regions or ecosystems.

The growth of an environmental ethic has turned many landscape

architects into shepherds of wild places, where “design” primarily means

restoring that which the hand of man has damaged. Many are turning to
26

1

2 3

4
27

1

A former landfill in Palo

Alto, California, Byxbee

Park has become a work

of art as well as a green

refuge. Hargreaves

Associates, landscape

architect; Peter Richards

and Michael Oppenheimer,

artists

2

Special plants clean toxic

soils at Ford Motor

Company’s River Rouge

Plant, Dearborn, Michigan.

D.I.R.T. Studio, landscape

architect

3

The Central Indianapolis

Waterfront Capital City

Landing project has

transformed nine miles of

urban waterfront along

Indiana’s White River. A

tangle of leftover spaces,

and abandoned,

environmentally degraded

industrial sites has

become a new focus of

urban life. Instead of an

unwanted "backyard," the

waterfront has become the

symbol of the city and a

setting for new private

investment. Sasaki

Associates, landscape

architect and urban

designer

4

Fountains in a stone

terrace suggest an array

of stars at the Arthur Ross

Terrace of the American

Museum of Natural

History in New York City.

Kathryn Gustafson,

landscape architect

5

“Ecliptic,” at Rosa Parks

Circle, a cooling fountain

and pool in the summer,

becomes an ice skating

rink in the chill of the

Grand Rapids, Michigan,

winter. Maya Lin, architect,

Quennell Rotschchild,

landscape architect

5
28

“bioremediation” techniques to rescue polluted industrial brownfields for

viable new uses. An emerging hybrid practice, “landscape urbanism,”

attempts to unite more seamlessly the disciplines of landscape architecture, architecture, and planning. In such firms, open-space consideration

and pedestrian flows can more directly influence building design and

road-and-bridge engineering.

The greater breadth of the discipline means that landscape architects find themselves competing with architects, planners, and urban

designers, especially in complex, large-scale public projects. The question

becomes how to choose. Matching the needs of the project to the specific

experience and point of view of competing firms usually makes it easy to

narrow the field to a few good contenders. 

As in any profession, capabilities vary widely. But a job that

requires specialized planting expertise (a severely degraded landscape or a

garden of specimen plants) might better be handled by a trained horticulturist; garden maintenance is usually done by specialists in that field.

While landscape architects may be involved in the design and even the

contouring of large-scale land forms, it is usually civil engineers that

design the irrigation and drainage systems, as well as other engineered

infrastructure such as roads, for such landscapes.

Some landscape firms construct their own designs, but

design/build may be appropriate only for the most specialized public

projects. When a separate contractor is employed, landscape architects,

like other design professionals, should act as the agent to the public client

in assuring that the design is properly executed.

There is an enormous aesthetic diversity in landscape architecture

today. In some firms, the work looks more sculptural; others seek a seamless integration between the landscape and freestanding structures or

indoor spaces. Some firms prefer that the hand of the designer be nearly

invisible; others are highly assertive. A given firm’s aesthetic approach

may closely dovetail with an ethic about the land. A clear understanding

of that ethic and how it might be appropriate to the project at hand may

aid the public agency in selecting the landscape architect. 
29

The Urban Designer

James S. Russell

Urban design draws on the expertise in the planning and architecture

professions in the physical design of urban environments. Three decades

ago urban planning evolved away from the physical arrangement of urban

realms toward a focus on social, demographic, and technical aspects of

urban health. Urban design was born as architects and landscape architects sought to fill this gap and created academic programs that would

prepare them to take on the complexities of neighborhood or community

design. The urban designer, trained in both planning and architecture

(though some are landscape architects), can design small public spaces or

streets, entire neighborhoods, and even citywide or regional systems.

While urban designers may lay out an entirely new neighborhood

or district, most are engaged in the revitalization of existing built-up

areas. The “design” in the title correctly connotes an emphasis on establishing a desired quality, image, and identity, in physical form, but the

endeavor seeks to solve functional issues at the same time. An urbandesign scheme may address poor traffic circulation and poor connections

between parts of the city. Another might lay out a brownfield site in lots

and blocks to attempt to extend an existing adjacent neighborhood.

Urban designers have reworked public housing projects and laid out new

neighborhoods on abandoned military facilities. The urban designer’s job

may include laying out or reconfiguring streets and lots and organizing

vehicular and pedestrian circulation and parking. Designers may prescribe
30

new uses of space to augment those that exist in a neighborhood. They

may determine the location and character of parks or natural reserves;

offer detailed guidelines on building bulk, density, and form; lay out view

corridors; or call for the preservation of key natural or manmade features.

The urban designer sets the level of quality and amenities that will bind

individual land owners, developers, and architects over the long term as

the project is completed.

Often the urban designer’s job is to work with citizens and elected

officials to be sure key concerns are raised in a timely manner and

addressed. Urban design inevitably involves elected officials who must

understand what is being proposed and what the construction scenarios

will mean.

The physical form of urban design is often informed by detailed

studies of natural systems, transportation patterns, market studies, demographic and sociologic models, and local goals for diversity of users and

incomes. Defining the scope of an urban-design project will determine

what specialties must be present on the team. A neighborhood targeted

for arts facilities, for example, may demand expertise in the performingarts facility design or evaluation of the economics of publicly financed

cultural facilities.

The work of urban design can be performed by firms that call

themselves planners, landscape architects, or architects. While there are

degree programs in urban design, there is not a licensure requirement

(though most urban designers are licensed in another professional discipline). The client needs to consider carefully the capability and

experience the problem at hand demands. A firm that specializes in urban

design may be desirable, but an architecture firm may offer a unique

design sensibility that suits the project requirements, while a landscape

architecture firm may prove a better choice when a great number of environmental issues intrude. In many cases, all disciplines need to be

represented.

Because urban design entwines a great number of public interests

and private agendas, communication is key to its success. Urban designers

deploy a number of means, such as visioning sessions, charettes, and
31

The master plan developed in 1979 for Battery

Park City by Alexander

Cooper Associates has

guided construction on

this vast landfill site,

adjacent to New York City’s

financial district, for more

than 20 years. Its extension of the city’s traditional

street grid and its fine

grain have proven enormously influential.
32

1

A sports stadium is the

centerpiece of a new

district at the edge of

downtown Columbus, Ohio.

Myers Schmalenberger/

MSI, with Sasaki

Associates, master planners; Heinlein Schrock

Sterns with NBBJ, stadium

architects

2 / 3

The Cincinnati Riverfront

Park wraps a historic

bridge in a grand civic

greensward. It unites two

large sports stadiums

along the river and opens

a green front door to

downtown. Hargreaves

Associates, master

planner

1
33

2

3
34

hands-on workshops (see “The Tools” section of this book), to help citizens and private interests foresee possibilities and understand the

consequences of the choices the community makes.

In evaluating a firm’s urban design work, it is important to consider the degree to which the firm has offered solutions tailored to the

specifics of a situation. Be wary of guidelines that are either too loose (in

which case the vitalizing strategy of a unique identity is lost) or too prescriptive (too costly or functionally inappropriate for compliance). The

entities contracted to build out the plan must find it to be flexible and

workable.

The urban designer must often make assumptions about a mix of

uses or a configuration for given uses within a development. But circumstances change, and the designer’s assumptions may not prove true over a

long-time development process. An important measure of a design’s success is its flexibility to accommodate evolving development economies.
35

The Urban Planner

James S. Russell

Urban planning came of age in the early 20th century, an era that placed

great faith in science and technical professions to solve problems, including the perpetual obsolescence, inefficiencies, and unsanitary conditions

that afflicted cities. The planner’s job description was once to devise the

plan that would guide the development of the entire city. But the work of

planners has always been more diverse. Planners at various times have

turned their attention to traffic flow, public order, aspects of city life that

induce criminal and antisocial behavior, and overall quality of life. These

days, planners may make plans for a downtown district or a residential

neighborhood—or an entire region.

As the greater complexity of this endeavor has come to be recognized, planning has developed numerous subspecialties. Some are

technical, such as analyses of transportation, environmental impact, and

demographic change. Others are sociological: planners attempt to represent the aspirations of the many diverse populations that have a stake in

the future of the city, sometimes representing citizens’ groups directly

(community-based planning), sometimes devising means to reconcile conflicting political agendas. Within city government itself, planners are

usually responsible for managing the city’s master planning document and

for handling zoning changes and other regulatory tools that apply to

urban development.
36

132
37

1

Solving transportation

problems around New

York City means analyzing

all modes at once. Michael

Gallis & Associates with

James S. Russell, planning and strategy

2

Resized streets and new

uses are bringing life back

to Albuquerque, New

Mexico’s downtown. Moule

& Polyzoides, architects

and urbanists

3

The emerging form of

metropolitan New York

affects all the jurisdictions

it crosses. Michael Gallis

& Associates, planning

and strategy

4

Canal Walk used a historic

canal as an armature to

reconnect Richmond,

Virginia, with its riverfront.

Wallace Roberts & Todd,

planners

4
38

The tools of planning have become more various and sophisticated

over the decades. Few cities rely on zoning alone anymore. The planning

department may map a variety of special districts with specific requirements to maintain a certain character. Additional overlays may guard a

district’s historic qualities or require development techniques that

preserve precious environmental characteristics. A variety of incentives

may be deployed (ranging from tax abatements to permissions to create

extra floor area) to encourage development. Planners may prioritize and

guide public investment to strategic ends. While once planning dogma

prescribed a careful separation of urban functions into districts pursuant

to technologically deterministic criteria, today planners far more often

orchestrate the mixing of compatible uses to assure economic diversity,

quality of life, and a reliable tax base.

The role of planning is in some flux today. Many cities have dispensed with master plans, preferring to use planning strategically, to build

on opportunities or create them. On the other hand, many cities

dispensed with proactive planning along with their master plans, and now

find they have neither the data nor the plans in place to react to opportunities, such as a short-term federal or state grant program for projects for

which need has been established. Public officials, depending on budgetary

realities and governing style, must decide how many planning functions

should remain within government agencies and how many should be contracted to private professionals.

Urban design has taken on the physical design aspects of what

planners once did. Environmental analysis specialists compete with traditional planners where environmental considerations are highest. Some

planners have become pure community advocates, negotiating with government agencies to realize the aspirations of neighborhoods. Like urban

designers, planners must be able to facilitate communication. Community

involvement, interaction, and participation is critical to devising useful

planning strategies and implementing them successfully.

Planning remains essential for a city to proactively realize its

future in built form. No plan can do its job without the ongoing support

and effort of the public officials charged with executing it.
39

The Artist

James S. Russell

The days when public art meant bronze heroes astride their rearing horses are over. Art today finds its way into the public realm in ways as diverse

as the people it serves. Sculpture, whether figurative or abstract, is still

designed for lobbies, important public rooms, and plazas and parks.

Traditional media such as paintings, prints, and photographs often

enhance new public buildings. In addition, such ordinary elements of the

community landscape as retaining walls, lampposts, sidewalks, manhole

covers, bus shelters, sewage-treatment plants, and buses have become the

sites of well-received public art.

It is natural for the nonspecialist to feel intimidated by the sheer

diversity of methods and styles in art production today. The path to public art is not made easier by the occasional noisy controversies that have

arisen over specific pieces. The very passion public art can arouse, however, is important, because it testifies to how deeply people care about it. 

Communities should not resist art that draws on deep emotions.

Art is capable of humanizing our streets and sidewalks. It can do this in

ways that enhance or heighten our sense of our surroundings, perhaps

challenging us to see those surroundings in a new way. Art can create or

express the uniqueness of a public place and enrich the larger cultural life

of a community by encouraging artistic production. How communities

hope to use public art is often key to determining the type of art that is
40
41

suitable to develop and also defining the criteria for artist selection. 

Many public-arts advocates see the process of achieving a new work

of art to be as important as the product. In a new school-building project,

an artist may work with children to devise an expression of the community’s history for other children to experience and learn from over the life of

the building. Other artists make research or oral histories part of their

design process in order to bring forgotten artifacts or entire landscapes

alive in a contemporary way.

The means to acquire public art have widened in recent years.

Much art is still commissioned by communities through percent-for-art

programs, in which a fraction of a capital project’s construction cost is set

aside for the installation of art. Some communities require some provision for public art in projects by private developers, or ask developers to

contribute to a public-art fund. Private owners or donors will often lend

or give art to a community if the community will provide a suitable place

to display it and make the commitment to maintain it. Public/private

partnerships may make art for public places available on a rotating or

temporary basis. 

Since so much public art is procured as part of the process of

altering or creating new buildings, parks, or other public works, one of

the key questions public clients must ask is, “What is the role of the artist

in the project?” For a lobby or plaza, a work of art may be selected or

commissioned separately from the design of the building in which it is

placed. Other projects seek to incorporate the art seamlessly, to the point,

in some cases, where the line between the architect’s work and the artist’s

is difficult for the viewer to determine. Getting the artist involved early in

the process is a good way to ensure that the work does not appear to have

been dropped onto the site as an afterthought. In park or greenbelt projects, the artists selected can often be landscape architects, sculpting

landforms and “designing” wetlands to meet artistic and functional

requirements. At an urban-design or planning scale, artists, architects,

and industrial designers can create street furniture and sidewalk patterns,

or substantially define the identity of a neighborhood through the design

of a pedestrian bridge or neighborhood gateway.

Top:

The zipperlike

Embarcadero Ribbon,

though only a few feet

wide, unifies a long stretch

of the San Francisco

waterfront because of its

unique, arresting form.

Stanley Saitowitz, architect, with Vito Acconci and

Barbara Solomon, artists

Bottom:

A stream of water drips

into The Water Room, a

cooling place to pause

along an irrigation canal

path in Phoenix, Arizona.

The water seeps under

stones at the base of the

room, offering a poetic

form of natural air conditioning. M. Paul Friedberg,

landscape architect;

Jackie Ferrara, artist
42

1 2

3 4

5 6
43

A variety of models have developed to aid communities in selecting artists and works of art. For large art programs or citywide projects,

an arts commission or similar body, usually aided by outside consultants,

may devise a master plan that includes a description of how the community wants to use public art, its goals (such as making art a part of

growing areas or focusing on stagnating or overlooked neighborhoods),

and criteria for selection. These plans are often developed over a period

of time with considerable public discussion as well as input from the local

arts community. They can include guidelines and specify budget, location,

and maintenance criteria.

For the acquisition of individual works of art, a community may

make a broad call for submissions (inviting, essentially, any artist or

designer to apply) or limit submission criteria. Some submittal processes

are invitation-only. The work is best evaluated by a panel of recognized

national or local art professionals augmented, as circumstances warrant,

with a representative of the client or agency owner, community members,

and elected officials.

1 / 2 / 3 / 4

Glass blocks containing

local historical artifacts as

well as objects solicited

from embassies worldwide represent the range

of the world’s knowledge

in tangible form at

Stuyvesant High School, 

in New York City.

“Mnemonics,” Kristen

Jones and Andrew Ginzel,

artists

5 / 6

Engraved boxes urge

students to drop in paper

slips recording their own

dreams and wishes. They

are annually collated as a

student-designed artwork

at Walton High School,

Bronx, New York. "Your

Voices," Janet Zweig, artist
44
45

II

The Elements
46
47

The “Civitas” of Seeing

Richard Sennett

One problem in urban studies—probably the most vexing one—is how to

see socially and morally. A city is not just a place to live, to shop, to go

out, and to have kids play. It is a place that implicates the way in which

people derive their ethics, how one develops a sense of justice, and, most

of all, how we talk with and learn from people who are unlike ourselves—

which is how a human being becomes human.

First, I will define what I mean by “public” as a social and moral

term. “Public” meant to the ancient Greeks synoikismos, which is also the

word for “making a city.” The first part, syn, is a coming together, and the

second, oikos, was a household unit in Greece, something between a family and a village—maybe the word “tribe” captures it—with its slaves and

hangers-on. Greek cities were formed when these oiki migrated into a

central place. This happened for two obvious reasons: as long as people

were exposed out there on the Greek hills, they could be annihilated, and

their economies never grew until people combined their energies.

What synoikismos denotes, however, is a peculiar problem. It not

only describes putting people together functionally. The term literally

means to bring together in the same place people who need each other

but worship different household gods. The public problem for the Greeks

was how people who needed each other functionally could live in the

same place—even when they did not share the same values. It is a problem that persists in all Western cities: How can we let people live

Libraries have never been

such a focus of community

life as they are today.

Browsers hunting a meaty

novel (or a good CD) join

parents who are introducing toddlers to reading,

job-seekers who are

brushing up on skills, and

teenagers doing homework. Meeting rooms

serve senior knitting

circles during the day and

AA meetings in the

evening. The Polshek

Partnership designed

entry steps to signal

welcome for the

Queensborough Public

Library in New York City.

Photo: © Jeff Goldberg/Esto
48

together who worship different household gods? How do differing people

find a way to use the word “we”?

Different People Sharing Public Space

The meaning of the word “public” has been pretty debased. The practical

use of the term “public space” in cities, for example, connotes spaces

where people go to buy things. We think about shopping malls, downtowns, and so on in terms of consumption and pleasure. Missing is any

sense of the Greek notion of polis, which expresses something more consequent and political about the condition of people with differences being

concentrated in the same place.

How do people learn from each other’s differences? Most shopping malls depend on constant circulation of traffic. If people sit down for

two or three hours, as they might in a Parisian café, and just talk, they are

using the space, but they are not using it economically. One of the tricks

used by people who design malls is to provide few places where people

feel comfortable sitting for long without buying something.

Synoikismos also connotes the significance of peoples’ shared experience. For the Greeks, the agora was a place that came out of the

problem of having to be with people unlike oneself, a place for

confronting differences. The agora was a center for talk, discussion, and

shopping. (The market function was intermittent—the markets had

closed by nine in the morning—but the agoras were used all day). To put

it another way, the center is turf that people have fought for and in some

way suffered for. It develops the sense of belonging that Londoners had

after World War II. It was turf that mattered because something important had been lived there. To have a meaningful city center, something

has to happen in it politically. The Greeks discovered this principle, and

it is very simple and profound.

In the modern world we fear to use public space as the realm in

which we learn to reconcile difference—or at least learn to coexist with it.

One reflex action is to simulate past models of what public space looked
49

like. People will say, “Let’s do a Williamsburg. That’s a time-tested morphology, right?” The plan of Williamsburg, Virginia, came out of the

need to establish a colony in the midst of an alien and very threatening

wilderness. The play of right angles in its spaces expressed a protective

function. People created a certain kind of a center because they were in a

hostile place. We can make modern cities look like old places, but we cannot recreate the social and economic circumstances that generated those

models, even if we wanted to.

When we borrow only the look of history, we end up with Disney

World as public space. It is no accident that Disney World is the most

apparently successful, if simulated, public space created in the 1970s in

America. It is a place where nothing painful happens, a place that completely depoliticizes the experience of being in a public place.

Privatizing and Policing the Places We Meet

Another way Americans attempt to avoid the collision of differentness is

through the privatization of public space. If you want to assemble the

places people work, live, and attend school so that, for instance, workers

can have onsite daycare for their children, you go outside the city, find a

piece of land, and build a campus—some housing, a school, medical facilities, and a factory. That’s not public, it’s a company town. It doesn’t

represent any notion of shared experience and it doesn’t confront the fact

of difference. To be successful, some aspect of this place must be dissonant; it must require people to say, “This is one way to live, but that is

another.” Then you have created a public realm. We’re in trouble in

urban studies because we cannot honestly think of forms of the public

realm that are appropriate to the pains of our society.

Three specific problems emerge that must be considered if we are

to work through the role of “the public” in public space. The first, and

most elemental, is how to use public space so that people who are unlike

get to talk to one another. In other words, how do we use public space as a

forum for discourse? In thinking about the city as a place where people
50

have to learn to talk to others, what might otherwise seem the minutiae of

planning or design turn out to be incredibly important, like whether a park

bench faces another park bench or simply the passing stream of traffic.

Policing—the regulation of the public realm—is implicated, too. Police

today—and this is not their fault—are trained to think they’ve got someone

crazy on their hands if they get up and start speaking to a crowd of people.

You can’t have a public realm—you can’t have synoikismos—if people don’t

exchange with one another, and the element of exchange is talk.

The second issue is the geography of justice, that is, how we study

the ecology of the city in terms of questions of justice. David Harvey, in

his wonderful book, Social Justice and the City (Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1973), puts forward the notion that the seams of cities, where areas

join, is where all the public action is. Synoikismos should happen where

unlikes join. But we have devised a whole civil-engineering language for

sealing off the social edges of cities, because we are afraid of what might

happen at those seams. We are used to thinking that the best way to deal

with a “potentially explosive” situation is to segregate the possible combatants by fast-moving traffic. That depoliticizes the city, and everybody

loses because it means that people with differences don’t interact. We

need a way to reconceive the city so that we can locate the geography of

justice and injustice. How about capitalizing on synoikismos by manipulating the edges where poor and rich people are, where business and

residence meet? How about finding ways of making the city what it actually is, a place where those who are unlike find some sense of mattering to

each other?

Civic Ethics

The third bedeviling issue—the one that is most philosophical and 

therefore the one that is most practical—is how space can serve the community’s moral purposes. Space is subject to the moral constraints of

community. The problem is, we do not know how to translate the ways in

which we think ethically into any kind of physical equivalents. An exam-
51

ple is the question of drugs, which is a problem with a spatial dimension

in cities. Street-drug dealers essentially require a territory that only they

occupy. In New York City, they once colonized parks, such as Union

Square or Washington Square, gradually driving other people out. On a

purely practical level, we need to find a way to restore such homogenized

spaces to their role as places that serve many different kinds of people.

I, who was born left-wing and will die left-wing, have become a

proponent of police harassment. I now understand the logic of daily

arrests. The dealer who is arrested, even if he is out on the street the next

day, has not been doing business for eight hours, and eventually the people who buy from him may move on as they find their supplies disrupted. 

How we create spaces that operate morally (that is, serve diverse

populations) is a physical-design question as well. Union Square was a

happy haven for dealers of cocaine for so long because it had been

designed as, essentially, a podium, with its ground plane raised more than

three and a half feet above the surrounding streets. It was also ringed with

a nice fringe of boxwood. Both elements obscured surveillance from the

outside, so the dealers transacted business with little fear of passersby or

police. In redesigning the park, the city cut the box hedges down, ripped

out trees, and cut into the podium. They opened it up so that now the

The transparent 

envelope wrapping the

Queensborough Public

Library reveals the activities within, inviting the

city’s diverse ethnic population—including patrons

of the farmers’ market

across the street—to 

come in and give it a try.

Photo: © Jeff Goldberg/Esto
52

sightline from any part of the park is clear across. That gave old people,

of whom there are many in that area of the city, the confidence that they

could use the park without subjecting themselves to the dealers.

Now that is a kind of terrible example of the way in which moral

values can be enacted through design. You create visibility so that you can

displace the population that had colonized the space. A more positive way

of looking at this issue is to consider, for instance, how we can keep poor

people, but also lower-middle-class people and middle-class people, in

and near centers of cities that are growing or becoming more prosperous.

Gentrification tends to target people who have been around for a long

time, who have toughed out the hard times and kept neighborhoods alive

when others fled. Suddenly all this cash comes in—the dollar amounts

look incredible—and the neighborhood falls apart or becomes a wealthier

monoculture. If cities are to be civic or civil places, don’t we owe it to

ourselves to create a means akin to moral zoning to protect those most

vulnerable, those who have given of themselves to keep the city going

through the bad times?

If cities are to be anything more than ephemeral constructs of economic transaction, people must feel that something really important—

something absolutely critical to their lives—happens because they are in a

certain place. This subjects a host of political, economic, and zoning

questions to an examination that is not moralizing, but moral. Americans

are not comfortable conflating the political and moral in this way. It’s not

surprising, therefore, that so much of America is placeless. But much of

what urbanists do today is to try to get a sense of what it means to create

a public realm that is truly public—neither a simulation of a historical

model, nor the withdrawal implied by the little community where everything is controlled, the campus where everything is done in private. What

we should strive for is public work done in cities, and in public.

Richard Sennett is a professor of sociology and chair of The Cities Programme at

the London School of Economics. He is also author of numerous books, including

Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization.
53

Public Places 

Selected Projects
54

The ingredients of urban parks nowadays go far beyond trees and grass. The

19th-century idea of a park as a place of

passive recreation has given way to a

diversity of purposes. Active sports take

on ever-more diverse forms, but parks

are also gathering places, whether for

informal family picnics or huge summer

music and arts festivals.

The mist from a fountain envelops a

lone stroller at Harvard University, but

the water seeping amidst the rocks

might also draw a small child’s touch. 

Some parks remain quiet refuges, but a

waterfront park will draw a crowd on a

balmy day if careful design offers lots to

see and good places to perch, as does

the promenade that lines a cleaned-up

industrial canal in Milwaukee. 

Bryant Park has always been an oasis 

of green in the stone canyons of midtown Manhattan. Frequent public

events, and a design that discourages

drug dealers through more open sightlines, has made the restored park more

popular than ever. 

Giant spherical “beach pebbles” and a

miniature balance bar evoke Santa

Monica’s “muscle beach” past in an

ocean-shore play area for children. The

adult version, spruced up, remains a

beachside hot spot.

Parks 1

Tanner Fountain,

Cambridge,

Massachusetts; Peter

Walker and Partners,

landscape architect

2

Milwaukee RiverWalk,

Milwaukee, Wisconsin;

Ken Kay Associates, urban

planner and landscape

architect 

3

Bryant Park, New York

City; Olin Partnership,

landscape architect

4

Beach Improvement

Project, Santa Monica,

California; Wallace

Roberts & Todd, landscape

architect; Jody Pinto, artist

1
55

2

3

4
56

Design can help communities express

their unique character or it can symbolize widely held values. A public

building need not be imposing or grand,

but there is a place for dignity and civic

aspiration. 

Against the razzmatazz of the Las

Vegas Strip, for example, a single

monumental column, holding up a

light-filtering canopy, asserts the

dignity of the federal courts. 

The Bainbridge Island City Hall finds

inspiration in local rural building forms,

like the cedar-sided barns that have

long defined this small island’s rural

character. Large areas of glass and

high windows over a lofty entrance 

space create bright, inviting places for

gathering within. It conveys in every

detail a message that the government

exists to serve citizens. 

Important large public buildings can be

imposing, but they can also become

landmarks, places that feel like

emblems of their cities. This is the case

with the Phoenix Federal Courthouse,

where a high, glass-enclosed space

filters the strong desert sunlight into 

a grand, shadow-dappled public lobby.

Its serenity recognizes that the stress

of encountering the justice system—

as witness, plaintiff, juror, judge, staffmember, or interested observer—

requires the provision of a place of

calm and reassurance.

Public Buildings

1

Lloyd D. George United

States Courthouse, Las

Vegas, Nevada; Cannon

Dworsky/HCA with

Langdon Wilson,

architects

2

Bainbridge Island City

Hall, Bainbridge Island,

Washington; Miller/Hull

Partnership, architect

3

Sandra Day O’Connor

United States Courthouse,

Phoenix, Arizona; Richard

Meier & Partners,

architect

1 Photo: © Peter Aaron/Esto
57

2

3 Photo: © Scott Frances/Esto
58

Libraries, especially in suburban 

communities are much more than

repositories of books. They convey a

sense of uniqueness and community

solidarity that some very new places

otherwise don't have. They act as online conduits to the outside world for

those who can't get around much and

can’t afford computers. Their meeting

rooms, often open long after hours,

make them real community builders.

Amidst the cacophony of New York 

City's borough of Queens, the Polshek

Partnership installed a glass-clad

oasis—a dignified yet contemporary

image for a library. It gently rounds 

the acute-angled corner to create a

welcoming entrance and a sunny

breathing space on the crowded 

streets.

The Allston Branch Library fits into its

residential neighborhood by breaking its

mass into handsome, welcoming components. It is undoubtedly a public, not a

residential building but defers to the

fine grain of its surroundings through

an appealingly variegated, even sensual

use of wood and stone shingles. 

The exposed steel frame of the Philmon

Library, in Atlanta, is both inexpensive

and visually intriguing, while the richly

sculpted space and playful rhythm of

windows define appealing reading

places. 

Libraries

1

Queensborough Public

Library, Flushing, New

York; The Polshek

Partnership, architect

2

Allston Branch of the

Boston Public Library;

Machado and Silvetti

Associates, architect

3

Lee G. Philmon Public

Library, Riverdale,

Georgia; Scogin Elam and

Bray, architect

1 Photo: © Jeff Goldberg/Esto
59

2

3
60

Memorials

In recent years Americans have rediscovered a need to commemorate key

events and community values.

Memorials are among the most difficult

structures to design. But some truly

moving evocations of grief, hope, and

unity of national purpose have come out

of what can be protracted periods of

controversy during design. 

In Boston, for example, gently lit

obelisks along a busy boulevard insistently remind passersby of the human

cost of the Holocaust. Text incised on

the obelisks offers solace to those who

approach on foot. 

A metal-lattice fence signals a garden

devoted to the struggle to win women

the right to vote. To express both the

local and national nature of this commemoration, horizontal metal ribbons

interweave a timeline and the lives of

Minnesota suffragettes. Stools at either

end of the fence display explanatory

plaques. 

Letters from lost sailors have been

engraved on bronze sheets at the

Norfolk Armed Forces Memorial. But

the weighty material draws the attention of visitors because it has been

shaped like sheets of paper, which

appear to have wafted onto the plaza by

the breeze.

1

New England Holocaust

Memorial, Boston; Stanley

Saitowitz Office, architect

2

Minnesota Woman

Suffrage Memorial, St.

Paul; Loom, architect

3

Norfolk Armed Forces

Memorial, Norfolk,

Virginia; James Cutler,

architect

1
61

2

3
62
63

Great Streets

Allan Jacobs

In the United States, some 25 to 35 percent of a city’s developed land is

likely to be in public rights-of-way: streets. The percentages may vary in

the older cities of Europe and Asia, but the amount of space devoted to

streets is always significant. Streets are almost always owned by the public

and intended for public use. When we speak of the “public realm,” we are

speaking in large measure of streets.

So when we look closer at cities we think of as great we usually

find streets that are great. Bologna, Italy, is memorable for its gorgeously

arcaded streets. Can we even remember what its buildings look like? It’s

hard to think of Paris without its grand boulevards carved out of the

medieval city in the 19th century. The buildings that line these streets

may be elegant and superficially different from each other, but the buildings are not the point. The streets are full of traffic and bustling

passersby, strolling couples and window shoppers, all watched over by

patrons tarrying at café tables.

Some streets are better to be on; they are better for doing what

you came to do. In the Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris, stores, book

tables, and cafés spill out of similarly sized buildings, which are covered in

dancing light. It’s a much more pleasant street than Market Street in San

Francisco, which is somehow uncomfortable, in places shabby, and without much grace whether one walks or drives. Buildings and stores line

one side of Princess Street in Edinburgh. They look across to a park and

Lined with Chicago’s great

department stores and

spectacular movie

palaces, State Street has

been among America’s

great commercial

avenues. With the closing

of the movie houses and

the decline in downtown

department-store shopping over two decades, the

street seemed to have

fallen on permanent hard

times. After a concerted

effort to lure a diversity of

shopping and other commercial ventures,

augmented by an energizing redesign of the

sidewalks, lighting, and

other street “furniture,”

the street has staged an

impressive comeback.
64

to the old city and castle on the hill beyond. It is more compelling than

Regent Street in London, regardless of the latter’s unified architectural

expression and dramatic crescent at Piccadilly Circus. Both were

consciously intended to be great streets. On the other hand, Roslyn Place

in Pittsburgh, a short cul-de-sac with large trees and red brick houses,

pretends not at all to specialness, but its closeness is inviting and it is better to walk down and certainly better to live along than are countless

suburban residential streets the world over.

The Uses of the Street

You go back to some streets more often than to others, and not just

because one is more convenient or has along it places you need to visit

more often. A street can unlock memories or offer expectations of something pleasant to be seen. On some streets you are more likely to meet

someone you know or someone new. The street is movement, especially

of people. It is an ever-changing tableau of tiny vignettes: of fleeting

forms, faces, postures, dress. You stop to watch. They pass. They look

you over—or they don’t, absorbed in their own thoughts or

conversations. You may speak to no one, yet find yourself comforted by

other people’s presence.

Many streets are places to do business, but some transcend their

reason for being. They are public showcases, meant to exhibit what society has to offer, and to entice. The entrepreneur offers the goods, displays

them to the street, indeed pushes them as far into the street as is allowed.

The looker sees, compares, fingers, discusses a possible purchase with a

companion, and ultimately decides to enter the store or stall, and crosses

the threshold from the protection and anonymity of the public realm into

the private place of exchange.

The street is also a political space. Main Street may offer a setting

for a Fourth of July parade one day and an antinuclear march the next.

The street is as important in playing out people’s most cherished ideals as

it is for any of its everyday uses. Even in the age of email politics, we still
65

turn out on the street to make our views heard.

People understand that streets are more than a means for movement and access—that they have symbolic, ceremonial, social, and

political roles to play. Citizens often object to high-volumes of fast traffic

on their streets, but they will commonly tax themselves to make them

special, “great” places. In 1967, San Franciscans spent millions to turn

Market Street into a great street, designed specially to accommodate

parades. More than two decades later, they traded in the looming elevated

structure of the earthquake-damaged Embarcadero Freeway for a handsomely designed avenue. Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, Santa Cruz,

Sacramento, Toledo, and Iowa City are but a few of hundreds of large

and small cities that have recently made street design more important.

What Makes a Street Great?

A great street should help make community. It should help people to act

and interact to achieve in concert what they might not achieve alone.

Accordingly, better streets are accessible to all, easy to find, and easy to

get to. There you want to see other people, all kinds of people, whatever

their age, color, or class, and feel comfortable meeting them. Consider

Curitiba, in Brazil, where, for more than 15 years, people have been laying a long, long strip of paper down the main street every Saturday

morning. Wooden sticks, staked every meter or so, hold the paper in

place. Parents and friends bring children who, offered brushes and paint,

make pictures on the hundreds of white surfaces. It’s a scene of public

display and camaraderie, of easy conversation. Social or economic status

is neither an impediment nor an advantage to joining in. Desire is the

only prerequisite.

Streets come alive when people who occupy adjacent buildings add

something to the mix. Signs, awnings, flowers, a stoop for sitting—all are

contributions that elicit a response, or even a dialog from passersby.

The pattern of streets, blocks, and buildings gives character to

streets. Manhattan’s wide north-south avenues, lined with tall buildings
66

and street-level stores, contrast with the quiet, much-narrower, brownstone-lined side streets. A city made of one or the other would be dull;

together they are rich. The blocks William Penn laid out in 17th-century

Philadelphia are made more beautiful, many would argue, with the contrast offered by the many tiny alleys with equally tiny houses burrowed

through them by early American speculators.

There is magic to great streets. The best are as joyful as they are

utilitarian. They are symbols of a community and its history; they represent a public memory. They are places for escape and for romance, places

to act and to dream.

Allan Jacobs, an architect and city planner, has been planning director in San

Francisco and has worked in Pittsburgh, Boston, and Calcutta. Author of four

books, he has consulted the world over, most happily in Curitiba, Brazil. He taught

urban design at the University of California, Berkeley, for over 20 years.
67

Streets

Selected Projects
68

No one would mistake America’s ubiquitous freeways and commercial strips for

the boulevards of Paris, but designers

are finding new means of breathing life

into these vast landscapes of concrete. 

Spaced along the broad avenues and

freeway ramps that lead to the Los

Angeles International airport, brightly lit

pylons create a pleasurable entry

sequence. 

State Street, in Chicago, has been rescued from an ill-fated pedestrian

scheme with new attention to sidewalks,

wastebaskets, and street trees. 

Kettner Row, a residential project in San

Diego, enlivens its street with groundlevel units that can be used for living or

a home-based business.

Where once the din of an elevated highway drove people away from San

Francisco’s waterfront, a crescentshaped urban plaza now makes a grand

culmination to Market Street and an

entrance to the historic ferry terminal.

Designers collaborated with the local

port agency, the transportation department, and the transit agency to extend

an appealing boulevard along the route

of the demolished freeway, It coordinates traffic lanes and new trolley

tracks with handsomely designed sidewalks, bike lanes, and planting. Opening

the old Embarcadero to the harbor has

spurred new development along its

length. 

1

Approach to Los Angeles

International Airport; Ted

Tokio Tanaka architects

with Moody Ravitz

Hollingsworth Lighting

Design, artist Paul

Tzanetopoulos, and the

Lighting Design Alliance

2

State Street Renovation

Project, Chicago; Skidmore

Owings & Merrill, architect

3

Kettner Row, San Diego;

Jonathan Segal, architect,

developer

4 / 5

Mid-Embarcadero Open

Space and Transportation

Project, San Francisco;

Roma Design Group,

architect

1
69

2

4 5

3
70
71

Elements of Success in 

Downtown Revitalization

Donovan D. Rypkema

Over the last 15 years hundreds of downtowns in America have experienced

a remarkable comeback. In towns and cities of every size, in every part of

the country, city centers that were written off as nearly dead are today

thriving centers of living, working, shopping, and playing. It would be difficult, however, to identify an example of sustained success in downtown

revitalization that was a spontaneous result of the marketplace acting on its

own. Invariably, local actions were undertaken that first recognized the

inherent importance of the downtown to the city, and, second, took steps to

reverse decline that may have gone unchecked for decades.

While the approach to downtown revitalization varies from community to community, there does seem to be a set of common denominators—

elements of success in downtown revitalization—that emerges. While not

every revitalization success story includes every element, the vast majority

of sustained successes includes the vast majority of these elements.

Leadership and Government

Someone steps forward and says, “Downtown is important. The current

condition of our downtown is unacceptable, and we need to do

something about it.” Sometimes that initial leadership comes from an

The sight of cafes spilling

onto a street of handsomely restored buildings

was once a rarity, but is

now increasingly common

and popular, thanks to the

long-term efforts of local

activists and the historicpreservation community.

German Village, in

Columbus, Ohio, is one of

the oldest and most successful neighborhood

preservation efforts. 
72

elected official—the mayor or a council member—but frequently it comes

from the business community. A banker might see a declining value in the

portfolio of downtown real estate and in business loans. A chamber of

commerce president could recognize the adverse impact that downtown’s

deteriorating state has on industrial recruitment efforts. A mayor might

equate the health of the downtown with the image of the city overall. But

in nearly every instance the memory of the vibrant, active downtown that

once was triggers a consensus that the center city’s current condition is

unacceptable.

Whether or not a public official provided the initial leadership,

active support from and participation by City Hall is a central component

of nearly all successful downtown revitalization stories. Public-sector

investment, particularly in infrastructure and amenities, plays an important role in a downtown revitalization effort. However, there is often the

temptation to do too much—to make downtown “cute” rather than making improvements that are functional and appropriate for the context,

scale, and history of the downtown. Downtown leaders too often

convince themselves that physical improvements—the bigger the better—

are the answer to declining downtowns. Numerous cities have built new

brick walkways, added street trees, benches, decorative streetlights, and

parking garages, and made grants for façade restorations, and yet still suffer from vacant buildings and pedestrian-free sidewalks. Physical

improvements are a piece of a comprehensive approach to downtown

revitalization, not the total solution.

The Who and How of Reinvestment

Most downtown-revitalization strategies include a range of financial incentives that encourage reinvestment within a carefully defined area. The

particular incentives available vary from place to place and are often

dependent on enabling statutes in state law. Any of the following are beneficial (and there are numerous others) if targeted as part of a strategy

connected to the city’s unique circumstances: tax-increment financing, 
73

business-improvement districts, tax abatements, land write-downs, lowinterest loans, fee waivers, and public occupancy (of an office building,

say, to show commitment and spur other commitment).

The phrase “public-private partnership” is widely used to describe

the means by which downtown revitalization is organized. In reality,

however, an independent nonprofit organization usually manages revitalization efforts. This entity serves as the vehicle through which the public

and private sectors, as well as the nonprofit community, participate in

charting a new direction for downtown. If a city attempts to act alone in

revitalization, it is seen as “just another government program.” If the

business community approaches downtown revitalization as the sole participant, the public will perceive a motivation that is self-serving at best.

A nonprofit organization will rarely have the financial means or the

political muscle to undertake the effort single-handedly. But the mutual

efforts of the three sectors have proven to be dependably successful. 

Twenty years ago some experts believed that downtown could

cede its old role as a central business district and survive as the city’s government and financial center. Cities that pursued that strategy ended up

with downtowns virtually vacant 16 hours a day. Revitalization advocates

in more successful cities have promoted a multifunctional downtown of

great diversity. Downtown should be a center for business, government,

arts and culture, medicine, and education. It should be a place where

people live and shop and explore their various heritages, a place that

attracts tourists and locals, convention-goers, special-events attendees,

and sports fans. Diversity does not just make downtown fun and attractive, it generates the small firms that feed the big firms and creates a

location that can support specialized businesses that serve the entire

metro region. 

Buildings and People

The relative importance of restoring and adapting treasured older buildings

varies from city to city according to the wealth of historic structures that
74

exist. Any expert would be hard pressed, however, to identify a single example of sustained success in downtown revitalization where the preservation

and re-use of the city’s unique built environment was not a key component

of the overall strategy. It is a community’s historic buildings that provide,

more than anything else, a sense of differentiation, a sense of place, and constitute the physical manifestation of a city’s unique history and character.

As multifunctionality is a component of most successfully revitalized

downtowns, so too is mixing uses within buildings and projects. Adding 

residential and entertainment uses to the usual downtown blend of office 

and commercial uses extends the hours that both the building and the 

downtown are lively, provides a synergy between uses and users, yields

counter-cyclical use of parking, and even mitigates the natural ups and

downs in the real-estate market by diversifying risk. The value of mixed use

is true both for larger new projects and the adaptive re-use of older “whiteelephant” structures. To allow, for example, live/work lofts or permit

residential use next to commercial use may require changes in both zoning

ordinances and building codes.

Dozens of measurements can be used to judge the health of a downtown, but the answer to one question alone tends to reliably predict success:

are there people on the street? If the answer is “yes,” the downtown will

prove to be vital by most other measures; if the answer is “no,” it will not.

While successful downtowns are multifunctional with each component

adding value to the whole, the presence of people tends to attract more 

people. Four activities add great numbers of people to the street: retailing,

food and beverage venues, entertainment, and housing. Successful

downtowns re-establish the pedestrian orientation that cities had early in 

the 20th century. Automobiles are accommodated—for both circulation and

parking—but no longer at the expense of people on foot.

A Vision That Creates a Sense of Place

While officials understandably want to see dramatic success before the next

election, most downtown revitalization success stories are built one business,
75

one building, one block at a time. There is no “quick fix.” Success comes

gradually over a period of years. As there is no “quick fix,” neither is there a

single “big fix.” Megaproject advocates will claim, “It was our stadium/convention center/aquarium/children’s museum/hotel/sports arena/festival

marketplace/et cetera that spurred the rebirth of our downtown.” But such

is almost never actually the case. Revitalized city centers may include major

projects, but lasting success comes out of multiple catalysts for change,

beginning with small-scale efforts (like the rehabilitation of historic structures by students or artists) that take place over time.

In most instances an early step in the revitalization process is the

establishment of a “vision” for the downtown. It may be little more than a

wish list drawn up by a downtown committee. An extended and highly participatory process involving the entire community is a more ambitious

process that will not only identify a host of ideas, but also often produce a

kind of consensus that will help ideas move forward. However it is done,

establishing a framework that identifies goals and priorities for the revitalization process is common to most downtown success stories.

Cities with healthy and diverse museums, galleries, theaters, performance spaces, studios, public art, and festivals involve more of their own

people and attract more visitors. Arts and cultural activities bring more

people out over longer hours, with much more economic, racial, educational, and age diversity than any “big fix” megaprojects, such as convention

centers and sports stadiums. City leaders too often regard arts and culture

as nice but not critical to economic rejuvenation. In fact, cities are proving

that the arts are a key component of revitalization. Because many arts activities—particularly in the early and experimental stages—rely on relatively

low-cost space, downtown buildings where the rent levels are appreciably

lower than in the office park or the shopping center often serve as arts

incubators. This adds vibrancy to downtown and catalyzes growth in surrounding areas.

Successful downtowns have figured out that their revitalization

strategy should not make them like another city (or, worse yet, like a 

shopping center). Instead they capitalize on what makes them unique, 

differentiating themselves from anywhere else. They must first identify 
76

the distinctive elements of the local built and natural environments, including cultural, environmental, and economic attributes, then protect and

enhance them. 

In successful revitalization efforts there is a sense of public ownership that extends far beyond those who hold deeds to land. Downtown

becomes the place identified with the entire city, a place with which citizens

feel solidarity, the place that sums up all the diverse metropolitan communities—city and suburb alike. Festivals, celebrations, and even protests

organized in and for the downtown are vital elements in creating this sense

of ownership. The idea that “this is my downtown” must be broadly felt

within the community to develop the political and public support necessary

for what is inherently an ongoing and possibly costly process.

Downtown advocates and particularly elected officials don’t want

failures in their revitalization efforts. But a once-promising flop is evidence

that someone had confidence—in short it’s evidence that revitalization has

begun. Communities that don’t experience at least a few failures during the

revitalization process are probably taking too few risks and may find their

improvement efforts losing momentum.

The cobbled side street lined by row houses, with a café or a gallery;

the once-neglected alleyway filling with new, one-of-a-kind boutiques—

these are the special places that lure people to revitalizing downtowns and

that cannot be duplicated by chain stores in a mall. Part of keeping the

sense of discovery alive is having cleanliness without sterility, and offering a

sense of safety without losing a sense of adventure.

Donovan D. Rypkema is principal of Place Economics, a Washington-based 

economic development consulting firm.
77

Downtown Revitalization

Selected Projects
78

Big and small strategies by public

agencies and private enterprises animate once-struggling downtowns. To

diversify beyond office towers and parking lots, cities have added amenities to

draw in residents and attractions to

create a destination appealing regionally, nationally, and even internationally. 

At Yerba Buena Gardens, in San

Francisco, a park was placed on the 

roof of a sunken convention center. 

Two museums and a performing arts

center surround the park and have

drawn commercial development and

housing, and attracted additional cultural institutions. 

As part of a long-time series of 

downtown enhancements, Providence

uncovered a paved-over part of the

Providence River and installed in 

its place the Waterplace Park and

Riverwalk, promenades, bridges, and

plazas inspired by Venice. Its focal 

point is the aptly named WaterFire

installation. 

South Beach, in Miami, started small,

with the efforts of Art Deco building

aficionados to breathe new life into a

moribund neighborhood. The pace of

building restoration and new construction has skyrocketed in recent years. 

A center of fashion, retail, and media, 

it is now one of the liveliest and most

vital downtowns in America.

1/ 2

Yerba Buena Gardens;

San Francisco; MGA

Partners, architect

3

Waterplace Park and

Riverwalk, Providence,

Rhode Island; William

Warner, architect

4

Ocean Drive in South

Beach, Miami

1
79

3

2

4
80
81

Civil Engineering for Cities

James S. Russell

On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, as in so many other places, a

highway cuts off access between the city and the river. But unlike the

massive concrete conduits filled with hordes of vehicles found in so

many other places, the six lanes of the Henry Hudson Parkway exist in

a uniquely benign relationship to the city and the river. The parkway

runs through Riverside Park, and a combination of stone-faced walls,

handsome metal decorative fences, and beautiful arched bridges dampen the noise and give frequent inviting access to the river. Underneath

the park runs a two-track rail line. The promenade of Riverside Drive

forms the park’s inland edge, swooping in its own counterpoint to the

elegantly curved line of residential buildings along the drive.

Few people find a rail line and a freeway desirable neighbors,

but if more places in America were as sensitively designed as this strip

of land, they would be as sought after as Riverside Drive is today. 

The planning and construction of every public work presents a

community with an opportunity. More cities are recognizing that ordinary structures like roads, train stations, airports, parking structures, bus

stations, power-generating plants, and telecommunications towers, can

lend a place grace and identity. Until recent decades, public works were

deemed worthy of the highest level of design attention. Hoover Dam

would not be one of Nevada’s busiest tourist attractions today if it had

not been so exquisitely fitted into its canyon site. Coastal communities

The International Terminal

at San Francisco

International Airport must

move passengers not only

on and off planes but in

and out of autos, buses, a

rapid-transit line, and a

light rail line. A lofty ticketing hall delicately

diffuses sunlight through

trusses shaped like boat

hulls, wrapped with lighttransmitting fabric. But

the hall’s architecture aids

wayfinding, easing what

for many people is a

stressful, confusing, and

demeaning experience. 
82

cherish their prosaic lighthouses because the evocative quality of their

design has lived long beyond their functional utility. Consider the visitor who arrives at an airport that is spacious, well-maintained, and

light-filled. It shows you the way by the clarity of its layout, and

reunites you with your luggage minutes after your arrival. If you are

considering moving your family or locating a business in a city with

such an airport, it inspires confidence.

Added Value Infrastructure

While airport operators now recognize the importance of a welcoming

facility, the similar potential in other kinds of public works also deserves

recognition. A bridge can almost single-handedly define the identity of a

city, as the Golden Gate Bridge does for San Francisco. An interstate

highway can slice a city in two, or a park can be created over the freeway,

as Seattle did, to knit neighborhoods together and make a popular gathering spot at the same time. A recycling center may seem just another

undesirable building. But with some careful attention from artists and

designers, it can become—as it has in Phoenix—a visitor magnet and an

educational boon.

The value of a well-designed, well-loved infrastructure project is

nearly incalculable, but the initial costs are, unfortunately, all too real to

the officials who must ask communities to pay for them. Officials sometimes must overcome the limitations of state and federal grantmaking

rules, which too often view making public works publicly pleasing as a

frill. On the federal level, at least, this attitude has begun to change. It

is now permissible to use federal transportation funding for a variety of

enhancements, ranging from creating bicycle paths to restoring historic

transportation structures. Sometimes the ratio of design attention to

impact is impressive. In Los Angeles, for example, the Metro Rapid

express busses have been highly successful in part because the appealing

and highly recognizable graphics and bus-shelter designs constantly

remind traffic-jammed drivers that they have an option.
83

Various funding exists to lessen local problems associated with

the construction or expansion of critical infrastructure projects. Here

the inventiveness of the designer can often reconcile the project’s 

needs with the concerns of neighbors. The artful, concrete-framed,

shrubbery-filled contours that wrap the West Point Sewage Treatment

plant in Seattle not only screen the plant, but also have turned this

prominent spot into an attraction for beach strollers and hikers. What

about a parking structure and bus station in the middle of downtown?

The Leamington Municipal Transit Hub in Minneapolis is a stylish,

abstract composition that makes even parked cars part of the artwork.

Integrating and Collaborating

The Leamington hub is an example of another emerging infrastructure

trend, combining what were once regarded as unrelated facilities. The

idea is not new: 19th-century water reservoirs were frequently artfully

incorporated into parks. Today, bikeways link to bus-transit interchanges,

and rail-transit systems are increasingly extended to airports, where a

number of cities plan links to long distance trains. Such multi-modal

interchanges can also become commercial hubs.

Engineers usually lead infrastructure projects, but the most

community-oriented works usually result from the collaboration of

engineers with other design professionals. The Phoenix recycling project was designed with an artist, the Seattle sewage project with a

landscape architect. Such projects work best when there is a genuine

desire to collaborate, an understanding of respective roles, and a willingness to work with the community to realize its desires.

Infrastructure projects, perhaps uniquely, permit engineering to

come forward as a language of aesthetic expressiveness. Each element

of a road bridge—girders, abutments, columns, and decks—can be

taken as an opportunity to create a project that recognizes topography,

that fits into a built-up community, or that celebrates the spanning of a

river. The design of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System in the San
84

Francisco Bay Area and the Metro transit system in Washington, D.C.,

are both elegant and highly functional examples of engineering and

architecture operating almost seamlessly together. While communities

all over America battle unsightly cellphone towers and radio antennae,

many European cities have amalgamated these functions into telecommunications towers, which have often been created as award-winning

essays in elegant engineering. 

Infrastructure is so ubiquitous that opportunities are easily overlooked. A storm-water retention pond can be a pit lined by plastic

sheeting surrounded by a few straggly grasses or, with a little greater

attention, it can be a shrub-and-tree lined oasis for passersby and shelter for a seasonally changing panorama of wildlife.
85

Infrastructure

Selected Projects
86

Collaborations of artists, designers, and

engineers are breathing life into the

civil-engineering backbone of cities. 

Landscaped, undulating contours transform a drainage channel into a place for

people and wildlife in the Guadaloupe

River Park. A small amphitheater

serves double duty during severe

storms, absorbing the river’s overflow. 

The services of an artist and architect

turned a prosaic recycling center in

Phoenix into a dramatic sculpture 

and a teaching tool, while one in semirural Vashon Island, Washington, makes

the chore of sorting trash almost a

pleasure. 

The simple vault of a bus station roof is

a welcoming symbol for Winston-Salem.

Its openness also inspires a sense of

security for patrons. 

1

Guadaloupe River Park,

San Jose, California;

Hargreaves Associates,

landscape architects 

2

27th Avenue Solid Waste

Management Facility,

Phoenix, Arizona; Linnea

Glatt, Michael Singer,

artists, with Sterling

McMurrin, architect, 

and Black & Veatch,

engineers

1
87

3

Transportation Center,

Winston-Salem, North

Carolina; Walter Robbs

Callahan & Pierce, 

architect

4

Vashon Island Transfer

and Recycling Center,

Vashon Island,

Washington; Miller/Hull

Partnership, architect

5

International Terminal,

San Francisco

International Airport.

Skidmore, Owings &

Merrill with Campo &

Maru and Michael Willis 

& Associates, architects

2 3

4 5
88
89

Making a Place for Housing

James S. Russell

There are few communities that could not use more affordable housing. In

some, housing the needy and even the middle class is a chronic struggle.

Communities on their own cannot solve housing problems, but many are finding that they can take a tactical and strategic role to both provide more

housing and to use the development of housing as a catalyst to growth and

revitalization.

Housing growth often leads commercial and job growth; indeed it can

initiate it. The inner-city revival evident in so many cities began with artists,

students, and gays who remodeled deteriorated houses and transformed abandoned industrial lofts for live/work studios. Such residential gentrification

draws neighborhood commercial development, then spurs downtown revival

as white-collar businesses decide to locate near the most creative and highly

motivated workforce.

So if a community wants jobs or growth, it wants first to become an

appealing place to live. The housing-first growth formula works best when

affluent people choose a given neighborhood, but mixed-income housing

growth can also draw jobs because companies increasingly seek to locate in

places where positions at every level can readily be filled. Cities can aid revitalization or growth by targeting grants or tax advantages in those areas with the

greatest potential, by strategically improving services and infrastructure, and

by encouraging neighborhood-commercial businesses like grocery stores, drug

stores, laundries, and hardware stores to locate in targeted areas. In addition, a

It may share its busy

commercial street

frontage with car washes

and convenience stores,

but Pensione Esperanza

holds its own on the strip

with a glassy corner

entrance that is both

sculptural and lighthearted. (A neon sign reminds

passersby that the site

was once a used-car lot.)

The project serves one of

San Jose’s neediest populations by providing 110

single-occupancy rooms,

augmented by on-site

social services, a library,

community kitchen, and

other amenities. 
90

city can often encourage private housing development by purchasing land, rezoning, and providing improved infrastructure. Tax abatements or other aid may also

be required in early stages.

Most housing aid comes from the federal government in the form of tax

advantages offered to homebuyers. Government aid to families that cannot 

afford to own is far more limited and complex to secure, requiring communities

to be highly inventive in the way they encourage “affordable” (below-market) or

subsidized housing. A given development may use federal Section-8 vouchers,

low-income-housing tax credits, and public-housing subsidies, often combined

with similar state and local grant or tax-abatement programs.

For subsidized projects, communities today increasingly rely on locally

based nonprofit developers or for-profit developers that make a specialty of 

such housing. The for-profits are especially useful to augment local community

developers who may have insufficient expertise in the complexities of housing

development.

High-quality design can reduce neighborhood resistance to subsidized

tenants and improve the commitment of potential renters, who do not feel the

“project” stigma. Some of the most successful housing mixes market-rate and

subsidized tenants within the same development.

A design process that includes a great deal of neighborhood involvement

usually smoothes the way to approval. New housing development can bring with

it fears of gentrification, increased traffic, or, contrarily, fears that “government”

housing might reduce property values. Housing in a traditionally troubled community might have to be developed hand-in-hand with a strategy to address

problems in schools, public health, job training, and inadequate cultural and

recreational activities. New housing can augment its value to the neighborhood

by incorporating, for instance, a badly needed daycare facility, a recreational center, or—as in a recent project in Oakland, California—a farmers’ market.

Housing design must often walk a fine line. Local activists may demand

more from affordable projects than from market-rate ones; funders may expect

low-income projects to cost less to build; managers may want more costly institutional-quality finishes because they have fewer maintenance resources. Though

housing development is undeniably complex, its rewards are substantial, both to

individuals, now well housed, and to the civic and economic life of the city.
91

Housing

Selected Projects
92

Inventive architects and sponsors have

created housing below market rates of

enormous appeal and inventiveness in

spite of harrowing financial and bureaucratic barriers. 

Side stair entrances lead to heat-beating porches for low-income housing in

steamy Charleston. The Race Street

Row Houses evoke in a contemporary

way a type that has long characterized

the city. 

In San Diego, where housing costs are

high, Mission Terrace offers an affordable alternative for workers in the many

nearby hotels. The courtyarded structures step up the hill over a two-level

parking structure.

Top-floor apartments, reached by an

elevator and a zigzag walkway that

shades the quiet play court, surmount

townhouses in an income-assisted

project in Santa Monica. Even though

the project was built at high density, it

generously houses families. 

A group of local housing activists championed Langham Court, which affordably

matched the quality of adjacent homes

in its historic neighborhood, mixing

incomes to maintain community and

project stability. (There’s no visible

distinction between market-rate and

subsidized units.) 

Neighbors may "NIMBY" the idea of

single-room occupancy housing, but the

fresh, inventive design of Pensione

Esperanza, sponsored by a local

Catholic charity, won over skeptics. 

1

Race Street Row Houses,

Charleston, South Carolina;

Studio A and Mark Aln

Rawlings, architect 

2

Pensione Esperanza, 

San Jose, California; 

David Baker + Partners

3

Fifth Street Family Housing,

Santa Monica, California;

Koning Eizenberg, architect 

4

Langham Court, Boston;

Goody, Clancy & Associates

5

Mission Terrace

Apartments, San Diego;

Studio E Architects

1
93

2 3

4 5
94
95

Life at the Water’s Edge

James S. Russell

Few people can resist the changing reflections at the water’s edge or the

sound of waves breaking on a bulkhead. That’s why the Inner Harbor

virtually defines Baltimore and Chicago would be unthinkable without

Grant Park sprawling along the shores of Lake Michigan. But even cities

without the maritime history of San Francisco or Norfolk are learning to

make waterfronts a key aspect of their appeal and a magnet for residents

and visitors alike. The presence or the view of water isn’t enough, however. Waterfront design succeeds when it mingles with the very fabric of

the city itself, bringing the smell, touch, and sound of water closer. 

The form of Chicago’s park dates from the 19th-century idea that

parks were green, carefully ordered places for passive recreation. Thirty

years ago, Baltimore pioneered the transformation from industrial waterfront to commercial center and visitor attraction. But these are hardly the

only models cities can choose today. Indeed, officials must often be highly

creative in the way they transform waterfronts, because acquiring the vast

tracts that made both the Baltimore and Chicago projects possible can be

difficult.

Other barriers must be overcome to use waterfronts effectively.

There’s always been lots of competition for urban waterfront space.

Historically, shipping interests jostled with water-using industries, which

got in the way of fishing fleets and ferries. It was often easiest to run rail

lines or highways along river corridors and baysides, where they formed

What was once an

intensely industrial

riverfront is finding new

life as loft buildings

redevelop for residential

and commercial uses.

Milwaukee’s RiverWalk

offers a civic-scaled

means to stroll and boat

from one downtown

destination to another

along the cleaned-up river. 
96

effective physical barriers to many public uses. And the need to undertake

the costly cleanup of toxic residues can impede the conversion of former

docklands or other waterfront industrial sites.

The enormous appeal of water very often overcomes the political

and financial complexities. San Antonio remade itself through its

Riverwalk. Pittsburgh and Cleveland are steadily reclaiming riversides

that once teemed with pollutants, repairing their reputations for livability

in the process. Mills that once spilled tannery waste and raw sewage into

streams and canals have been transformed into chic loft residences facing

water bodies now clean enough for swimming. 

Part of the wonder of waterfronts is that success can be achieved

through a diversity of means. But some broad principles have been shown

to assure success. 

Cities need not create pure passive parks nor cram waterfronts

with amusements to succeed. Cleaned-up industries often make good

neighbors of water-oriented recreational uses like marinas or boatmaintenance facilities. Wildlife may thrive even in an island of estuarine

marshland adjacent to a busy shipping channel. Small beaches or lakeviewing docks can be erected at street ends. Powerboating, fishing,

kayaking, bird-watching, swimming, and excursion-boat tours can all

share the same stretch of waterfront, if the traffic (both landborne and

waterborne) is orchestrated with sensitivity. Passersby are attracted to

more activity and more diverse activity. 

Communities should aspire to make a sense of place. A dusty parking lot and a cracked sidewalk on a crumbling bulkhead with a view to a

murky, trash-strewn stream does not make a waterfront. Nearly every site

has unique aspects that can be drawn out by sensitive design: an attractive

grouping of wildlife-attracting native plants, an appealing confluence of

landform and sea, even something unique in the light reflected off the

water. Vistas to the open sea can be enhanced by height or enclosures that

frame and focus the view. Consider also how the city is seen from the

waterfront. The magic of Seattle’s, San Francisco’s, or New York’s waterfront is enhanced by the towers that rise up from their edges.

Don’t privatize the waterfront. Numerous commercial and private
97

uses can share shorelines with the public. A waterside boulevard, boardwalk, or promenade can serve diverse private uses along the waterfront

without precluding public use. Too many cities reap only minor benefit

from beachfronts walled-off by insensitively built condo towers, for 

example.

Recognize the dynamic nature of shore environments. Too many

ocean-front communities have entirely lost their beaches by permitting

construction that disregarded their ecology. Streams flood, tides flow in

and out; erosion (often exacerbated by human activity) will change a lakefront’s configuration. Floating docks, carefully placed log booms, and

water-edge plantings—along with boat-speed restrictions—can reduce

shore erosion.

What can be toughest about waterfront development is the

expense. Piers, bulkheads, and beach restoration are costly. Cleaning polluted industrial sites is even more expensive, and relocating railroads or

highways is often out of the question. But cities are finding lots of ways

around these barriers. Many waterfront projects can be done incrementally. Exceedingly modest improvements—street-end parks, a bike path, a

wildlife trail through a restored wetlands—can build a constituency for

more ambitious redevelopment. San Francisco has taken down its muchreviled Embarcadero Freeway, replacing it with an appealing auto and

transit boulevard and opening sparkling vistas to the bay. But Louisville

slid its Waterfront Park gracefully under the massive bulk of Interstate 64

to reclaim its connection to the Ohio River. 

The heritage of working waterfronts can often be incorporated as

they get adapted for new uses. Industrial towns along Pennsylvania’s

Monongahela River are considering how to maintain the fascinating hulks

of abandoned blast furnaces as they turn steelmaking sites into museums

of industrial heritage in parks and commercial developments along the

cleaned-up riverfront. 

There are bureaucratic barriers that can be overcome when there

is an early awareness of the complex requirements that must to be met.

Besides the usual local codes, there are state coastal commissions and

environmental boards. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has authority
98

over navigable waters, which it shares with the Environmental Protection

Agency when the alteration of wetlands is undertaken.

The fundamental appeal of water makes overcoming these barriers

worthwhile. A stream, lake, or bay doesn’t need much encouragement to

work its magic.
99

Waterfronts

Selected Projects
100

As cities diversify from smokestack

economies, they are transforming their

industrial waterfronts, creating amenities that citizens (and quality of

life–driven businesses) seek. 

Richmond’s Canal Walk turns a piece of

industrial heritage—a barge canal—into

an armature that unites the waterfront.

The designers added special touches to

break down barriers between adjacent

neighborhoods and the river. 

Art-festooned ramps, tucked into a 

35-foot-wide strip along a busy highway,

descend gently from downtown streets

to the calm of the Allegheny River, in

downtown Pittsburgh. 

Former mills and warehouses now open

onto a pedestrians-only riverside

“street” in Milwaukee. And in Louisville,

Hargreaves Associates found a way to

turn a massive freeway into a sculptural

element as it reclaimed the city’s connection to the Ohio River. 

1

Canal Walk, Richmond,

Virginia; Wallace Roberts

& Todd, landscape 

architect

2

Allegheny Riverfront Park,

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania;

Michael Van Valkenburgh

Associates, landscape

architect; Ann Hamilton,

Michael Mercil, artists

1
101

2 3

4 5

3

Milwaukee RiverWalk,

Milwaukee, Wisconsin;

Ken Kay Associates, urban

planner and landscape

architect

4 / 5

Louisville Waterfront Park,

Louisville, Kentucky;

Hargreaves Associates,

landscape architect
102
103

III

The Tools
104
105

Rules for Designing Cities

Alex Krieger

Comedian Woody Allen’s claim that he is “two with nature” contains a

useful insight into town design. The long-standing American yearning for

the middle ground, in which the virtues of urbanity and nature are simultaneously enjoyed, may at last be proving itself a form of fool’s gold,

devaluing both country and city. Stated more positively, we may be at a

point of understanding empirically what the early advocates of suburbia

hypothesized. The idea of the suburb should not be about simulating city

life amid nature. Rather, it is about maintaining proximity to both of the

realms believed to be necessary for civilization to be sustained. At the

center of suburban regions, cities might best nurture their own virtues

and give up their longstanding attempt to emulate the arguably tenuous

successes of suburbs. Following is an enumeration of several rules for

designing cities.

The Beauty of Diversity

Aggregate things. The essential ingredient of a town is its density—

not measured in square feet, but in the juxtaposition of artifice and 

activity. Engagement made possible by proximity is crucial, and much

more difficult to sustain where things are spread out across great

distances. You cannot have solitude and friendship and connection 

The spaces outside private

property lines deserve

as much attention as

those inside. The work of

urban designer Skidmore,

Owings & Merrill on

Chicago's State Street

included sidewalk paving

patterns, fenced planters,

street trees, and subwayentrance canopies.
106

to the larger society without closeness.

Beware of homogeneity. We are often charmed by a wonderful

diversity. Along a street, buildings need not look alike to be harmonious.

Buildings, like citizens, warrant their personalities and idiosyncrasies as

long as each behaves civilly toward the others. There is a kind of illusion

of autonomy about suburban buildings spaced at intervals of half an acre

or more; a civil presence seems less important when buildings are dotted

over a vast landscape, and so it is less-often offered. It is much harder to

be crass when you are arrayed cheek-by-jowl with your neighbor.

Believe in mixed use. Everyone talks about mixed use, but few

people build it. One of the most wonderful definitions of a city ever written was by Lewis Mumford, who described it as “that place where the

greatest number of activities takes place in the least amount of space.”

Nodding approval, we go so far as to label “central business districts” on

our maps. The demise of the American downtown parallels the rise of

that term, I contend. Why would anyone want to live, shop, dine, relax,

meet a friend, cruise in a convertible, attend a concert, see a movie, go to

school, take a walk with a sweetheart, or hang out in something called a

central business district? When we permit downtowns to become mere

“business districts,” their appeal diminishes for everyone—even businesses themselves, which eventually leave.

Let us not pine for the return of corporations to downtown towers. Instead, let us turn our attention to overcoming the absence of all the

other pleasures and places that have vanished from downtowns, whether

stores, nightlife, culture, or residences. We need no longer regard mixed

use as an unattainable ideal, but must, in fact, focus resources on realizing

it, because a true urban mélange is what spurs excitement, growth, and

revitalization—even the return of those white-collar managers to their

towers. We should extend the concept of mixed use beyond offices over

stores. Even some of our most remarkable early suburbs, like Forest Hills

Gardens in New York, contain a rich mixture of dwelling sizes and clusters. Density in house types is more likely to accommodate density of

social, economic, and age groups. Cities must overcome the unpopularity

of mixing people that prevails among residential developers, who almost
107

invariably segment populations in order to develop easy-to-build but simplistic “product.”

Fear Not Design

Use beauty as a criterion, and use the eye as an instrument of urban

design. Picture two streets that are about the same size—a suburban arterial and an urban boulevard. Both accommodate about the same amount

of traffic, both have parking lots, and both have trees and buildings. The

difference between them will have nothing to do with “old and new,”

although that is usually how it plays out. The difference is that one is

beautiful, and the other is not. The one that attracts us is the one along

which we would rather live or do business. Sometimes the best advice

that a design review board can provide a mayor or a developer is simply

to insist that things be more beautiful. When the Duke of Marlborough

decided to renovate his estate in the early 18th century, he summoned his

favorite architect, who, in a moment of modesty, said, “You must send for

a landscape painter.” We too often approach the city as an instrument to

be engineered rather than as a place to be nurtured and designed. Beauty

is a less abstract term than many used in the planning and design professions, and its useful life is far longer than yet another street widening or

tax incentive. So use beauty as a criterion of town planning.

Elaborate on detail whenever possible, but especially when it

affects the public environment. A little buffalo gargoyle on the face of

City Hall in Buffalo, New York, is not just endearing or perhaps over the

top—it places the person who stops to enjoy it in an epic of frontier

urbanization. Such seemingly frivolous touches are one of the ways a

sense of place is established, an aspect of urban life that endears us to it.

Our public environments can benefit from more of such excess. As Mies

van der Rohe said, “God rests in the details.”

Build landmarks and position them well. A statue of President

McKinley graces an otherwise graceless little town in western

Massachusetts. In some small ways, this one statue civilizes it. The center
108

of Riverside, Illinois, one of the early planned suburbs, has a strange little

railroad station with a marvelously idiosyncratic water tower. Landmarks

confer coherence, not status. Whether or not they are officially registered

as historic, they earn historic status in the minds of citizens, who recognize quality and commitment when they see it. Calling a strip center

“Landmark Square” or a megamall “Center Place,” as developers are

wont to do, does not make it so.

Rediscover the Street

Maintain a pattern of streets that is more redundant than hierarchical.

Conventional traffic-engineering wisdom is to build hierarchies of streets

from freeways to arterials to cul-de-sacs. But highways and multilane

arterials cordon us off from each other, while remaining the source of our

most frustrating traffic snarls. These regimented systems promise speed

but limit choice. They are necessary on occasion, but a network of

roads—even narrow and crooked ones—provides greater choice, both

actual and promised. Ask any city cabbie.

Emphasize the design of the street—a lost art, I’m afraid. In a typical contemporary suburban subdivision, everything outside of the street

right-of-way is carefully designed. On one side of the fence, there are

beautiful houses, beautiful lawns, beautifully maintained porches, and 

so forth. On the other side of the fence, along the street, there is only

characterless civil engineering. There is no reason that the street configuration, the curb, the sidewalk, the benches, lights, street trees, and other

public furniture cannot be as carefully thought through as what’s on the

other side of the fence. If you want fine towns and cities, emphasize the

design of the street once more.

Provide fewer—not more—parking spaces than logic dictates.

This is a very important rule, even though few people yet believe it. The

availability of parking is largely a psychological matter. There never

seems to be enough parking no matter how much is provided, and there

can’t possibly ever be enough parking, because the space 20 feet closer to
109

your destination is always preferable. This is why we have a parking problem: because the space in front of the door is always taken. By any

objective measure, every American city has many more parking spaces

available than cars to fill them. Providing less parking allows a clustering

of activities that attracts people, who become willing to walk or take mass

transit because their intended destination, and the way they get to it, is

unique and interesting.

Make places worthy of walking, and pedestrians will remember

that they have enjoyed the experience. Americans are known for their

dislike of walking, because they are daily asked to walk hundreds of forgettable yards through desertlike parking lots, characterless shopping

malls, and identically beige corridors of large buildings. It is not that

Americans don’t walk great distances—it is that they don’t remember that

they’ve done so, because the walking experience is a grim task. It is ironic

how much of this walking is made necessary by the car. If you make

places worthy of walking, you will find walkers there enjoying themselves

and each other. We still need to get from point A to point B, but seductions along the path make the effort rewarding rather than a chore.

Re-use places. I am not a preservationist—there are too many

preservationists. Few parts of a city warrant strict preservation, but virtually all parts of a city warrant re-use. So what we need are more re-users,

people who can see the potential in an unextraordinary piece of the city

that’s seen better days. Unfortunately, the useful existing building is often

overlooked in the zeal to build anew, somewhere else, under the dubious

supposition that something new will be better. There is a tremendous

movement around the country to build new “traditional” towns, like

Seaside, in Florida. But there is plenty of real tradition around, looking

for TLC. A few miles north of Detroit, there is a community called

Southfield, which, with its freeway-entwined, could-be-anywhere shiny

towers and massive malls, now boasts a daily commuting population

almost as large as that coming into Detroit, which has withered. Instead

of revitalizing well-built city neighborhoods, we build places like

Southfield, which defines itself principally as “not Detroit.” Who will

love such places when they are past their prime?
110

Yield to privatization only with reluctance. Big downtown shopping malls, like Toronto’s Eaton Center, are marvelous—perhaps the

eighth wonder of the world. But you learn you are not in a truly public

place when the guys in green suits throw you out for whatever they

regard as misbehaving. The streets outside Eaton Center, lowly as they

may be, are where you rejoin the town.

A Place for Edges, Boundaries, Greenery

Ban the term “open space.” When a development touts that “forty percent of the land is devoted to open space,” it is likely that forty percent 

of the land has been insufficiently considered. We actually have more

trash-strewn setbacks, scraggly buffer strips, fetid retainage basins, and

purposeless asphalted acreage—all “open space”—than we know what to

do with. What we can use is more parks, natural preserves, tot lots, 

recreational areas, baseball fields, and football fields. If space on a development plan is labeled only open space, you don’t want it.

Establish edges and define boundaries. An environment without

boundary is likely placeless and indistinguishable from the amorphousness

all around it. With apologies to Robert Frost, good fences may not make

good neighbors, but neither does their absence foster connectivity or

communality. So indeed, provide edges, as long as you also abide by the

earlier-stated rule: be sure to make that edge beautiful, and something of

equal value to that which is on both sides of it.

Reinstate Arbor Day as a civic holiday. Thomas Jefferson planted

poplars down the great boulevards of Washington, D.C., even before any

buildings had been erected there. Towards the end of the 19th century,

many citizens devoted one day each year to planting trees along their city

streets. Arbor Day was once a significant holiday, and it’s still a good idea.

Planting or maintaining street trees is one of the easiest ways we, as citizens, can improve the quality of the public environment by our own

actions. Nor is it a bad way to meet your neighbors.
111

Plan to Change

Zone stringently, but modify the zoning ordinance frequently. Planners

and advocates of regulation confuse the need for land-use controls with

their permanent applicability. Many ordinances are larded with language

that is a product of long-vanished circumstances, such as the archetypal

fear of the offal-spewing tannery moving onto your nice residential street.

Place a mirror to your local zoning ordinance and change it if it today no

longer produces the form of community its citizens desire. Don’t change

it by variance, overhaul it. Zone stringently to meet today’s real needs,

but do not be afraid to change the code as community needs change.

Do not overplan. Specifics of place, time, or desire should always

be allowed to intrude into the rational process of planning. Consider Las

Collinas, Texas, a new town placed midway between Dallas and Fort

Worth. Nothing about this place is unplanned. The parking, the public

spaces, the highway, the houses, the keys you use to get into the subdivisions, the lawnmowing schedule—all has been designed with your

convenience in mind. This enormous attention and energy has failed to

produce much of a community, however. Planners need to temper their

instincts to organize everything and allow serendipity to intrude.

Finally, believe that design is a vehicle to change. Without design,

all kinds of things will change around you, but you probably won’t much

like the results.

Alex Krieger, FAIA, is professor in practice of urban design and chairman of the

Department of Urban Planning and Design in Harvard University’s Graduate

School of Design. He is a founding principal of Chan Krieger & Associates.
112
113

Design Competitions

Rosalie Genevro

Competitions, in all their various forms, are a very useful way to investigate alternative approaches and new possibilities in architecture and

design. They are often used as an open-ended, explorative process—to

elicit new ideas and perspectives when a building type is in flux or has

become obsolete, or when an evolving form of social life has not yet

become connected to a specific architectural or urban type.

Two very ambitious and fairly recent European projects suggest

how complicated urban design issues can benefit from the competition

process. In Ireland, a historic but dilapidated section of Dublin was 

slated to be demolished to make way for construction of a bus terminal.

The city took years to assemble the land, and, in the interim, rented out

properties at low prices to artists and other residents. This new community was committed to bettering the neighborhood and fought efforts 

to build the depot. Ultimately, the city agreed to hold a design competition to come up with alternatives. The competition was won by a

consortium of young architects, who proposed a precise, fine-grained

strategy for the entire area, in which new buildings and outdoor gathering places would be inserted at strategic points. The historic fabric 

would be re-used as well under new design guidelines. The community 

of artists and a local development corporation convinced the city to 

adopt this scheme, and managed the development of the project. Today

Temple Bar, as the area is called, is Dublin’s cultural quarter, and is 

Weiss/Manfredi won a

competition for Seattle’s

Olympic Sculpture Park by

uniting a site fragmented

by streets and railroad

tracks with a powerful

topographic form. A multiuse pavilion and plantings

that reflect the diverse

ecologies of the Pacific

Northwest will enhance

the Seattle Art Museum’s

rotating exhibitions. The

National Endowment for

the Arts helped organize

the competition as part of

its New Public Works

program, along with local

museum, private, and

public sponsors.
114

one of the most visited tourist destinations in Europe.

Another competition of note took place in the Ruhr Valley, once

the great steel-producing area of Germany but long since in decline. The

area was environmentally devastated by years of heavy manufacturing and

mining, followed by economic decline and high unemployment. The state

government decided in the 1980s to create an “international building

exposition” as a revitalization strategy. In Germany, earlier building expositions usually entailed the construction of model housing, so the focus on

an abandoned manufacturing region was unusual. The Ruhr region held a

number of design competitions for research-oriented business parks and

to reclaim vast polluted tracts for public use. Among the competitions

was one for a park called Landscape Park Duisberg North, which was

won by the Munich-based landscape architect Peter Latz. Latz proposed

to leave the industrial installations in place as ruins and to interweave

them with newly designed public landscapes. Designed to be installed

over several years, the park has groves of trees that help purify the toxic

soil, and a public plaza called Piazza Metallica, which is paved with large

steel plates scavenged from buildings. Local diving teams practice in former storage tanks, now filled with water, while other salvaged fragments

were used to make a “rock” climbing wall. The park has become extremely popular with surrounding communities. 

The lesson of competitions is that they are not simply a way to

solve a particular problem but can also be excellent public-education

tools. They serve as collective investigative enterprises. Architects benefit

because they get a chance to explore ideas, sites, and conditions. The

process also benefits the public by informing and engaging interested 

citizens and affected people alike. At their best, competitions make the

ground more fertile for design’s highest aspirations. The best competitions raise awareness of the relationship between design and the life of

communities.

Rosalie Genevro is the executive director of the Architectural League of New York.

Top:

Prequalified firms from

across the country were

invited to compete for the

renovation and expansion

of the Booker T.

Washington High School

for the Performing and

Visual Arts, in Dallas’ Arts

District. Allied Works, a

Portland, Oregon, architect, won with a proposal

that fit the large addition

on a limited site by wrapping new wings around a

courtyard. 

Bottom:

Blocklike forms catch the

sharp western light and

evoke the nearby Wasatch

Range in the Utah

Museum of Fine Arts, in

Salt Lake City, Utah. The

competition-winning

design is by Machado and

Silvetti Associates, of

Boston, with the local firm

of Prescott Muir

Architects. 
115
116
117

Community Workshops

James S. Russell

Design workshops, also known as charettes, have risen to prominence in

recent years because they take a positive view of the role citizens can play

in design. There are a variety of ways to structure workshops, but they

share common qualities. They are a way to involve interested citizens in

defining the criteria for a project, in understanding and evaluating the

tradeoffs that public projects entail, and may even result in sketches that

can form the basis for a design. Workshops involve citizens more directly,

asking them to identify key issues, make choices about scenarios, and consider alternatives in much the same way designers and public officials do.

Public agencies can run workshops during the early stages of a project to

test program criteria or to gauge the issues that most concern the public.

By being proactive, the integrity of the project planning can be better

maintained and is less likely to be derailed at a late stage by a failure to

identify important concerns.

A charette is a type of workshop used to define important issues

and envision the future. Participants meet intensively for two or three

days to define criteria that apply to a project, then go through a testing,

design, and sketching process that may result in alternative approaches to

a design. The sponsor need not create the expectation that the result of a

charette is binding as a design document. Technical or cost criteria, for

example, cannot be fully explored in such a fast-paced process involving

so many nonexperts. But participants in the process come out with a deep

It may look like a board

game, but the hands-on

workshops run by SMWM

help people come to terms

with conflicting desires for

a miles-long swath of new

land in the middle of the

city. It will be made available by the Central Artery

Project (known locally in

Boston as the “big dig”),

which routes parts of two

interstate highways underground. The process turns

talk into engagement:

acquainting people with

the issues at stake and

helping them see the full

range of possibilities.
118
119

commitment to solving problems through design—as well as a deep

appreciation for the complexity of the design process.

Though citizens can be given a voice in public hearings,

workshops offer a means of communication that is often more satisfying

and more effective at identifying issues and assigning them a priority.

While workshop participants express their concerns, they also gain an

understanding of the factors that drive a project. When citizens are

involved in exercises whose purpose is to reconcile a variety of interests,

they come to appreciate the importance of consensus and the need for

compromise. In this way, workshops often defuse controversy and help

build a constituency for important projects.

These sketches were

drawn as part of a

charette to envision a

possible Canal Basin 

Park, in Cleveland, Ohio.

Sketches by Ignacio

Bunster-Ossa and Sylvia

Palms, of WRT, suggest

how to integrate public

recreation with the 

powerful forms of the

city’s industrial heritage. 

It was undertaken by 

the Cleveland Urban

Design Collaborative, a

community-oriented

design center operated by

Kent State University. 
120
121

Biographies

Image Credits
122

Biographies

James S. Russell is editor-at-large

at Architectural Record magazine, the

premier American journal for practicing architects and the magazine

of the American Institute of

Architects. He writes on a variety 

of design, construction-technology,

and professional practice topics for

the magazine. He also contributes

articles on architecture and design

to numerous other books, exhibitions, and publications, including

the New York Times, the Philadelphia

Inquirer, I.D., the Harvard Design

Magazine, Business Week, Details,

and Grid. He teaches at Columbia

University’s Graduate School of

Architecture, Planning &

Preservation.

Mr. Russell was a staff editor

at Architectural Record for 10 years,

where he rose from associate editor

to managing senior editor. During

that time he pioneered coverage of

infrastructure, the design of the

workplace, and urban-design stories

rarely touched-on by design publications. His work has helped the

magazine earn two Jesse Neal

Awards and two McGraw-Hill

Corporate Achievement awards. 

Before joining Architectural

Record, Mr. Russell practiced architecture with firms in New York

City, Philadelphia, and Seattle. He

is a registered architect in New

York and a member of the

American Institute of Architects.

He is active with the Architectural

League and the Municipal Arts

Society, in New York.

Mr. Russell earned a Master

of Architecture degree from

Columbia University and a

Bachelor of Arts in Environmental

Design degree from the University

of Washington. He also attended

the Evergreen State College. He

was born in Seattle and resides in

New York City. 

Christine Saum, AIA, has been the

Executive Director of the Mayors’

Institute on City Design since 1993.

Through her work with the MICD,

Ms. Saum has visited cities across

the country to help their mayors

prepare for Institute sessions, and

she has continued to work with

them following their participation

as they implement the lessons they

learned.

Ms. Saum has also administered Leadership Initiatives in

design at the National Endowment

for the Arts. One was the Federal

Design Improvement Program

(with the Public Building Service 

of the General Services Administration), which promotes design

excellence in public buildings.

Another was the Federal Properties

Conversion Initiative, which sponsored a series of public design

workshops in Monterey County,

California, concerned with the

redevelopment of Fort Ord.

Ms. Saum received a Bachelor

of Fine Arts in Interior Design

from Virginia Commonwealth

University in Richmond and a

Master of Architecture from The

Catholic University of America in

Washington, D.C. A registered

architect and interior designer, she

practiced interior architecture in

Nashville and in Washington, D.C.,

for more than 10 years. She is a

charter member of the Congress 

for the New Urbanism and served

as an advisor to the American

Architectural Foundation on the

development of Back from the Brink:

Saving America’s Cities by Design—a

public television program broadcast

nationally. She writes and lectures

on how the design process can unite

with political leadership to promote

community livability. She lives in

Washington, D.C. 

Mark Robbins is the Director of

Design at the National Endowment

for the Arts where he has undertaken an aggressive program to

strengthen the presence of design 

in the public realm. In addition to

efforts to expand grant opportunities he has instituted new

Leadership Initiatives including

New Public Works, which supports

national design competitions.

Collectively, these activities have

doubled the available funding for

the Endowment’s design-related

activities. 

His work encompasses architecture, installations, exhibitions,

and teaching. He has received

awards including the Prix de Rome

from the American Academy in

Rome and fellowships from the

New York Foundation for the Arts,

the National Endowment for the

Arts, and the Graham Foundation

for Advanced Studies in the Fine

Arts. Before coming to Washington

in 1999, Mr. Robbins was an

Associate Professor in the

Knowlton School of Architecture 

at The Ohio State University. 

In addition, he was Curator of

Architecture at the Wexner Center

for the Arts from 1993 to 1999. 
123

Image Credits

12 (#1): Courtesy of Machado and

Silvetti Associates, photo © Michael

Moran

12 (#2): Courtesy of Sasaki

Associates, Inc.

12 (#3): Courtesy of New York City

Department of Cultural Affairs,

Percent for Art program (1999)

12 (#4): Courtesy of Saint Paul

Riverfront Corporation

12 (#5): Courtesy of Skidmore,

Owings & Merrill LLP

20: © Sony Development, Inc.,

1999, photo by Timothy Hursley

22–23 (#1–2): Photos © Timothy

Hursley

22–23 (#3): Photo © Timothy

Hursley

22–23 (#4): Courtesy of New Jersey

Performing Arts Center

24: Courtesy of Rob Wellington

Quigley Architecture/Planning,

photo by Brighton Noing

26–27 (#1): Courtesy of Hargreaves

Associates, photo by John Gollings

26–27 (#2): Courtesy of D.I.R.T.

Studio, photo by Thomas Woltz,

Nelson-Byrd Landscape Architects 

26–27 (#3): Courtesy of White

River State Park, photo © Banayote

Photography, Inc.

26–27 (#4): Courtesy of the

American Museum of Natural

History, photo by Denis Finnin

26–27 (#5): Photo courtesy of

Balthazar Korab

31: Courtesy of Alexander Cooper

Associates (1979)

32–33 (#1): Courtesy of Myers

Schmalenberger/MSI

32–33 (#2–3): Courtesy of

Hargreaves Associates, illustrations

by Christopher Grubbs

36–37 (#1, #3): Graphics prepared

by Michael Gallis & Associates 

© 2002

36–37 (#2): Courtesy of Moule &

Polyzoides, Architects and

Urbanists

36–37 (#4): Courtesy of Wallace

Roberts & Todd, LLC

40 (top): Courtesy of Stanley

Saitowitz Office, photo by Stanley

Saitowitz

40 (bottom): Courtesy of Phoenix

Arts Commission, Percent for Art

program, photo by Craig Smith

(2000)

42 (#1–4): Courtesy of New York

City Department of Cultural

Affairs, Percent for Art program

(1992)

42 (#5–6): Courtesy of New York

City Department of Cultural

Affairs, Percent for Art program

(1998)

54–55 (#1): Courtesy of Peter

Walker and Partners, photo by Alan

Ward

54–55 (#2): Courtesy of Ken Kay

Associates

54–55 (#3): Photo © Felice Frankel

for Olin Partnership

54–55 (#4): Courtesy of Wallace

Roberts & Todd, LLC, photo by

Tim Street-Porter

56–57 (#2): Courtesy of Miller/Hull

Partnership LLP, photo by Art

Grice

58–59 (#2): Courtesy of Machado

and Silvetti Associates, photo ©

Michael Moran

58–59 (#3): Photo © Timothy

Hursley

60–61 (#1): Courtesy of Stanley

Saitowitz Office, photo by Steven

Rosenthal

60–61 (#2): Courtesy of Loom,

photo by Christian Faust

60–61 (#3): Courtesy of James

Cutler Architects, photo by James

Cutler

62, 68–69 (2): © SOM /

Steinkamp/Ballogg Photography 

68–69 (#1): Courtesy of Selbert

Perkins Design

68–69 (3): Courtesy of Center City

Development, photo by Skip Jurus

68–69 (#4–5): Courtesy of ROMA

Design Group, photos by Bob

Swanson (garden) and Ira Kahn

(aerial)

70: Photo © Rod Berry

78–79 (#1–2): Courtesy of MGA

Partners Architects, photos by

Perretti & Park Pictures

78–79 (#3): Photo © Richard

Benjamin

78–79 (#4): Courtesy of and photo

by James Russell

80: Photo © Timothy Hursley

86–87 (#1): Courtesy of Hargreaves

Associates

86–87 (#2): Courtesy of Phoenix

Arts Commission, Percent for Art

program, photo by David Stansbury

86–87 (#3): Photo © JoAnn

Sieburg-Baker

86–87 (#4): Courtesy of Miller/Hull

Partnership, photo by James Housel

88, 92–93 (#2): Courtesy of David

Baker + Partners, photo by Brian

Rose 

92–93 (#1): Courtesy of Studio A,

Inc., photo by Dickson Dunlap

92–93 (#3): Courtesy of Koning

Eizenberg, photo by Grant

Mudford (1998)

92–93 (#4) Courtesy of Goody,

Clancy & Associates, Inc., photo by

Steve Rosenthal (1991)
124

Image Credits (continued)

92–93 (#5) Courtesy of Studio E

Architects

94, 100–1 (#3): Courtesy of Ken

Kay Associates

100–1 (#1): Courtesy of Wallace

Roberts & Todd, LLC

100–1 (#2): Courtesy of Michael

Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc.,

photo by Ed Massery (2000)

100–1 (#4–5): Courtesy of

Hargreaves Associates, photos by

John Gollings

104: © SOM / Steinkamp/Ballogg

Photography 

112: Courtesy of Weiss/Manfredi

Architects

115 (top): Courtesy of Allied Works

Architecture

115 (bottom): Courtesy of Machado

and Silvetti Associates, photo 

© Michael Moran

117: Courtesy of SMWM Planning

118: Illustrations © Ignacio

Bunster, Wallace Roberts & Todd,

LLC

James S. Russell editor National Endowment for the Arts THE MAYORS’ INSTITUTE: EXCELLENCE IN CITY DESIGN

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