What Makes a Great City

Alexander Garvin

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781610917599
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architektur Allgemein

One of Planetizen's Top Planning Books for 2017 • San Francisco Chronicle's 2016 Holiday Books Gift Guide PickWhat makes a great city? Not a good city or a functional city but a great city. A city that people admire, learn from, and replicate. City planner and architect Alexander Garvin set out to answer this question by observing cities, largely in North America and Europe, with special attention to Paris, London, New York, and Vienna.For Garvin, greatness is not just about the most beautiful, convenient, or well-managed city; it isn't even about any "city." It is about what people who shape cities can do to make a city great. A great city is not an exquisite, completed artifact. It is a dynamic, constantly changing place that residents and their leaders can reshape to satisfy their demands. While this book does discuss the history, demographic composition, politics, economy, topography, history, layout, architecture, and planning of great cities, it is not about these aspects alone. Most importantly, it is about the interplay between people and public realm, and how they have interacted throughout history to create great cities.To open the book, Garvin explains that a great public realm attracts and retains the people who make a city great. He describes exactly what the term public realm means, its most important characteristics, as well as providing examples of when and how these characteristics work, or don't. An entire chapter is devoted to a discussion of how particular components of the public realm (squares in London, parks in Minneapolis, and streets in Madrid) shape people's daily lives. He concludes with a look at how twenty-first century initiatives in Paris, Houston, Atlanta, Brooklyn, and Toronto are making an already fine public realm even better—initiatives that demonstrate what other cities can do to improve. What Makes a Great City will help readers understand that any city can be changed for the better and inspire entrepreneurs, public officials, and city residents to do it themselves.

National Mall in Washington, D.C. (2010). (Alexander Garvin)

1

The Importance of the Public Realm

Bilbao had become a great city by investing in its streets, squares, parks, and infrastructure. These are the parts of the city that people share in common, occupy together, and use on an everyday basis. They matter to everybody. That’s why its occupants had devoted their time, money, and efforts to reconfigure them to meet their latest needs.

Any city’s infrastructure (its water, sewer, utility, and transportation systems) is what allows people to live there. The more widespread and comprehensive the infrastructure, the greater the number of people who can use it. But is it part of the public realm? Similarly, the more extensive a city’s network of streets, squares, and parks, the easier it is to live there. But does the public realm include anything else?

Defining the Public Realm

With the exception of the transportation network, especially subways, infrastructure is not accessible to everybody, so it may seem to be apart from the public realm. This infrastructure has come to be managed everywhere as a public utility paid for on a fee-for-service basis, rather than from general government revenues. Unlike the rest of a city’s infrastructure, however, the public is able to come, go, and circulate within the transportation network in the same fashion as it does in streets, squares, and parks. But it does have to pay for using subways, buses, trains, and other components of the transportation network. Thus, although transportation is not usually available for free, it really is part of a city’s public realm.

I already understood that the public realm included everything that was accessible but not in private ownership. I also understood that this included sidewalks, public benches, lighting, signage, vehicular roadways, and everything else within city streets, squares, and parks. But I was overly focused on these three main components of the public realm. I understood that only during a visit to Hvar, a small Croatian city on an island in the Adriatic Sea, late in my quest to determine the importance and characteristics of a great public realm.

Promenade, Hvar, Croatia (2015). This combination of street, park, and square is central to life in this small city. (Alexander Garvin)

I was walking along the city’s harbor promenade, which is lined on one side by boats of every size and description and on the other side by hotels, bars, cafés, restaurants, and souvenir vendors. In the distance, the hills sloping down to the harbor were covered with charming, red-roofed, limestone buildings that provide residents with places for business, family life, and community activities. Lots of people were out walking along the promenade, having coffee in the cafés, meeting friends, making new acquaintances, sitting on benches, walking along the beach, tying up boats . . . The promenade provided a welcoming part of Hvar’s public realm that was easily accessible to all the city’s residents. It was not a street with cars and trucks, yet people were using it to get from one place to another; it was not a park, although children were using it to play games and adults were sitting on benches sunning themselves; it was not a square, either, but groups of people were using it as a gathering place.

For me this experience only emphasized that I had to explain the importance of the public realm not just by discussing streets, squares, and parks as the three major components of the public realm, but also by examining the sometimes ordinary, but usually very special places, such as Hvar’s waterfront promenade, that are not exactly streets, squares, or parks, but are also very much a part of the public realm.

Streets, Squares, and Parks

Streets, squares, and parks have specific and very different functions. Each component, in turn, complements its core functions with a variety of other activities that make its contributions to the public realm even richer.

As this book will explain, of the three major components, it is a city’s streets that contribute most to shaping its character. Their chief function is to provide corridors that allow people, goods, and vehicles to move from points of origin to specific destinations. This may be the core function of streets. But along the way, streets play host to a wide variety of activities, both commercial and recreational, that keep a city energized, interconnected, and socially functional. When streets take the form of limited-access highways, however, they are not entirely “public,” as they only are available to motor vehicles and their occupants.

When walking these streets, many people will simply pass through. Others will avail themselves of the streets’ special attractions or casually stroll, check out the window displays, and enjoy the buzz. Still others will make their way to destinations located along the street or elsewhere in the city. In fact, the number of people passing through a street usually far exceeds those who are there for a specific reason. Nonetheless, great streets offer passersby the opportunity to stop and shop, rendezvous with friends, sit, or park their bicycle along their way.

City squares, like streets, contribute to the public realm by offering a wide choice of social, political, and business activities designed to attract both individuals and groups. People from all over the city gather in these squares at different times of day, and at different seasons of the year. A myriad of activities take the stage here: celebrations, protests, musical events, political rallies (such as Occupy Wall Street), candlelight vigils, free children’s shows, farmers markets, speeches, street performances, art exhibits, and anything else people can think of. But the main function of a city square is to serve as a social and political center that invites participation from all levels of society and that provides a sense of community and unity to those who participate.

Parks offer city dwellers a variety of recreational opportunities, though a great deal more than recreation takes place there. People pass through (and enjoy) public parks on their way to somewhere else, just as they do on city streets. They gather there for public events, just as they do in squares. But because a far greater proportion of the territory occupied by parkland consists of greenery, parks are likely to provide a healthy haven from the surrounding city and contribute to its livability.

Beyond Streets, Squares, and Parks

There are some examples of the public realm that cannot be neatly fit into the category of street, square, or park—places such as the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, the greenways in the Society Hill section of Philadelphia, and subways everywhere. People everywhere use open air malls, skylit arcades, and pedestrian walkways.

They function in the exact same way as streets, squares, and parks do. Yet they are not, strictly speaking, any one of the three. Everybody understands that they are part of the public realm, but we often forget that they require funding for the same maintenance and management personnel that are routinely devoted to the streets, squares, and parks that are conventionally thought of as making up the public realm.

The National Mall in Washington, D.C., for example, connects the Capitol with the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and a dazzling array of great museums; yet it is not a street. It is a national gathering place that has hosted everything from civil rights protests and antiwar demonstrations to concerts for tens of thousands of Washingtonians and millions of television viewers; yet it is not a public square. It includes 309 acres of grass, trees, plants, and walkways; yet it is not a park. But it serves as the most significant part of the public realm of the United States, which the entire nation shares once a year on Independence Day, every four years when a new president is inaugurated, and whenever events of national importance take place.

National Mall, Washington, D.C. (1993). (Alexander Garvin)

Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan (2012). (Alexander Garvin)

In Milan, the six-story, glass-roofed cruciform public space known as the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, which includes stores and restaurants on the lower floors and offices and residential apartments above, is similarly difficult to categorize. Many Milanese gather here to socialize, but the Galleria is not a square. Others pass through on their way to and from the square in front of the Duomo, Milan’s cathedral, or from the square in front of the Scala Opera and other destinations; yet, like the National Mall, it not a street. Still others go to the Galleria to have fun and relax; but it is not a park.¹ Everybody who comes to Milan, however, goes to the Galleria, and its contribution to that city’s public realm is as great as any park, square, or street.

Similarly, Society Hill’s greenways were cut through the large blocks of the Philadelphia neighborhood during the 1960s and have become a valuable part of that city’s public realm.² Previously, residents traveling to a destination at the other end of the neighborhood had to walk the long distances between streets before being able to turn a corner to go in another direction. The greenways provide a more convenient route but have become more than a shortcut in the years since their construction. In some places the greenways have become community gathering places; in others they are where children play; but everywhere the greenways have made neighborhood circulation easier.

Indeed, though few would place a city’s transit terminals or metro stations in the same category as its parks, the most frequently ignored component of the public realm is the transportation system. Many are hidden from view as underground subways. Smart public officials have long understood that they can be a potential source of revenue from retail rents paid by the stores that cater to the hundreds of thousands of daily riders who pass through places such as Grand Central Terminal, but few recognize their importance as public realm. A great public realm can assist in convincing those riders to do something they had not anticipated when they got there. Indeed, transit stations do not need to be as impressive as Grand Central to be important components of a city’s public realm. The London Underground station at Bond Street, ...