Design for Social Diversity

Emily Talen, Sungduck Lee

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315442822
• Edizione: 2
• Argomento: Architecture
• Categoria: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The most successful urban communities are very often those that are the most diverse – in terms of income, age, family structure and ethnicity – and yet poor urban design and planning can stifle the very diversity that makes communities successful. Just as poor urban design can lead to sterile monoculture, successful planning can support the conditions needed for diverse communities.

This new edition addresses the physical requirements of socially diverse neighborhoods. Using the city of Chicago and its surrounding suburban areas as a case study, the authors investigate whether social diversity is related to particular patterns and structures found within the urban built environment. Design for Social Diversity provides urban designers and architects with design strategies and tools to ensure that their work sustains and nurtures social diversity.

1. INTRODUCTION

SOCIAL DIVERSITY AND DESIGN

Driving south of Chicago along the historic Lincoln Highway, one passes through the strangest juxtaposition of rich and poor places. Along one stretch of the highway is Ford Heights, considered to be the poorest suburb in Chicago, if not the nation. Residents there had a median household income of $16,800 in 2010. A short drive down the road lies Park Forest, a middle-class planned community with a median household income that is three times as much. There is no disguising the inequality. At one moment you are passing boarded up buildings and liquor stores. Ten minutes later, you are whizzing by Starbucks, Home Depot and packed parking lots in front of strip malls.

One can take almost any road through Chicago and traverse similar, strangely abrupt transitions between where the rich live and where the poor live. What is striking is how visible these differentials are, and how coarse the grain is: one neighborhood is poor, one neighborhood is rich, another is middle-class. This is the common, taken-for-granted, vernacular landscape of America. And although neighborhoods in the U.S. are getting more racially and ethnically diverse (Lee & Hughes, 2015), this is not the case for class and income.¹

How, and when, did all this spatial sorting occur? When did it become acceptable for communities along the same stretch of road to have such vastly different social and economic prospects? It was not always so. Historians tell us that socially mixed settlements and neighborhoods were the norm until the 19th century, a result of economic necessity: nobles needed to be near their serfs in the medieval city, while workers and owners needed to be close to factories in the early industrial city. People lived where they worked, not where their social class was geographically confined. In many European cities, rich and poor were separated through vertical zoning within apartment buildings, but out on the street, classes shared the public realm. In Chicago before 1850, “money bought dry ground, not segregation by income” (Massey & Denton, 1993; Bowden & Kreinberg, 1981, p. 116).

But as industrialization progressed in the 19th century, class consciousness became accentuated. In the American city, where ethnically distinct but economically mixed neighborhoods had been formed, class began to trump ethnic affiliation as the main driver of social geography. Olivier Zunz’s (1982) study of Detroit showed how a “silent social revolution” in the first decades of the 20th century created urban worlds defined more and more by class and industrial production and consumption than by strong ethnic bonding or proximity to workplace. New transportation technologies made the spatial sorting that much easier. There were still ethnic divisions, but 19th century neighborhoods and railroad suburbs formerly composed of multiple classes were being replaced by neighborhoods sorted by class and race.

Thus the story of 20th century urban America is a story of manifested social division. Industrialization brought rising affluence, the growth of the middle class, cheap cars, cheap oil, highways and government subsidies, which, combined with racial and class intolerance, created a toxic mixture that sparked the most extraordinary sprawling out and spatial sorting of cities the world had ever seen. Separation by use mirrored separation by class, and already by 1900, U.S. cities were exhibiting a segregated land use pattern where commercial and office space occupied the center and residential uses were pushed to the periphery (Jackson, 1985). By the 1920s, the connection between social segregation and cities was set. Harvey Warren Zorbaugh, in his classic 1929 study The Gold Coast and the Slum, wrote “there is no phenomenon more characteristic of city life, as contrasted with the life of the rural community or the village, than that of segregation” (Zorbaugh, 1929, p. 232). Louis Wirth reached a similar conclusion in “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, noting that urban populations were both highly differentiated and increasingly subordinated to mass culture (Wirth, 1938).

Figure 1.1
The ultimate segregation: Cabrini-Green public housing on Chicago’s North Side, most of which is being demolished.

We developed whole systems that maximized profits through homogeneity. Global distribution, financial markets and lending institutions structured themselves around homogenous clustering and centralized notions of cultural authority. Clustered social spaces began to dictate business decisions (Metzger, 2000; Weiss, 1988, 2000). And where social institutions made progress in breaking down barriers to integration, the corresponding physical design of cities thwarted the translation of this progress in broader terms. For example, although school desegregation made some headway after 1970, the positive effects were short-lived because the larger society remained segregated outside of the schools (Milner & Howard 2015; Shedd 2015), bolstered by school finance policies that had the effect of spatially segregating households by income (Nechyba, 2001).

It was not that we became worse people. Prior to the 20th century, social distance was maintained in other, often more perverse ways. Jim Crow laws are a notorious example. But unfortunately – or perhaps inevitably – as one kind of social barrier eroded, another arose in its place. This time, the separations were physical and etched into the built landscape like never before. As one author put it, “It is precisely because today’s middle classes are less able to exploit the working classes that our cities have become more segregated than they were” (Olsen, 1986, p. 133). As people were socially freer to move about, the means of separation from each other were encouraged by technological advance, especially the automobile. Spatial mobility and social mobility became one and the same.

Where pre-20th century urban form accommodated social mixing, urban form after the 1920s thwarted the ability of classes to mix, even if they had wanted to. Racial prejudice complicated and accentuated the situation. Middle-class Blacks had few housing opportunities outside of Black neighborhoods since White middle-class neighborhoods were resistant to Blacks moving in, even if they were of the same economic class. In post World War II America, many Whites believed that the only physical context associated with Blacks was urban blight. That degraded conditions were often a result of crowding due to a lack of alternative housing choices was unlikely to be considered (see Kefalas, 2003; Pattillo-McCoy, 2013; Sugrue, 2014). And since the built environment failed to accommodate increased density gracefully, residents of neighborhoods consisting exclusively of single-family homes became alarmed whenever houses were subdivided to accommodate poor families.

The consequences of failing to deliver an urban framework more supportive of social diversity have been monumental. Most damaging has been the concentration of poor people in the inner city. Now, we can only wonder what might have occurred if we had not retreated from diverse environments that permitted a wider social range, what a commitment to diversity might have meant for those seeking to escape the high real estate costs of the inner city and later, the federal bulldozer.

Suburbs have now become more socially diverse (Pfeiffer, 2014), but they have done so in spite of their physical form, not because of it. What has emerged are suburbs that are “collectively heterogenous but individually homogenous”, where people sort themselves out into “lifestyle enclaves” (Putnam, 2000). Most suburban neighborhoods are still being built for one social class or another, whereby market segmentation strictly divides neighborhoods into pods of distinct income categories.

Would these segregated social patterns have been different if American settlements had been physically structured to accommodate people of all social and economic means?

Different professions and disciplines will have different ways of addressing the problem of social sorting. Our interest – and the subject of this book – is the planning and design response.² We will focus on what we call place diversity – the phenomenon of socio-economically diverse peoples sharing the same neighborhood, where diversity is defined by a mix of income levels, races, ethnicities, ages, and family types. We will argue that good urban form can help sustain diversity. Just what “good urban form” means in the context of diversity, and how it is possible to justify such assertions, is our main concern.

Place diversity is diversity that exists within the realm of “everyday life” activities – attending school and shopping for groceries, for example. It concerns neighborhoods, whose pattern, design, and level of resources constitute the “things that really count” – schools, security, jobs, property values, amenities (Pattillo-McCoy, 2013, p. 30). While we do not use precise spatial definitions for the terms “neighborhood” and “community”, the idea of place diversity is probably most meaningful at a scale that falls somewhere in between Suttles’ (1972) “defended neighborhood” (a small area possessing a definite identity) and the “community of limited liability” (a larger, often government-defined district). Neighborhoods are to be distinguished from crowded urban places in downtowns and shopping malls – Millenium Park or The Galleria – that are full of social complexity, but where there is little sense of collective ownership or sharing of space for daily life needs.

This book explores how planning and design could be used to support socially diverse places. To understand the possibilities of a design response, we study places that already are socially diverse and suggest ways that the built environment could be leveraged to support their diverse social makeup. What is the physical context of socially diverse neighborhoods, and what does it mean for the residents who live there? Do diverse places look like Jane Jacobs’ Greenwich Village, or do they take on a variety of forms? Have these places been responsive to the needs of a diverse neighborhood, in terms of their physical design? What could be the basis of a shared aesthetic in diverse places? Given that place-based identity and affection seem so easily associated with “landscapes of privilege” and exclusion, how do diverse places find a shared definition of place? (Duncan & Duncan, 2004).

Some planners may be skeptical about the wisdom of using design to support diversity. Partly this is a matter of the divorce between social goals and urban design that has been brewing since the demise of modernist urbanism. Cuthbert may be right: “major theorists in the discipline present us with concepts of urban form that are unrelated, largely devoid of any social content and alienated from any serious socio-economic and political base” (2006, p. 21). Thus Jon Lang, in his book Urban Design: A Typology of Procedures and Products, states that it is the market that should provide people with choices, and that if the market fails to provide them, well, “these questions are not urban design ones”. He advocates designing sub-areas “with one population in mind” as a way to “avoid conflict”, while delegating larger, macro areas as the locus of integration (Lang, 2005, p. 369). Besides the anti-progressiveness involved, the problem with Lang’s view is that it leaves diverse places behind, providing them with no specific design support, nor any legitimate claim that an approach tailored to their unique social makeup might be needed.

Our basic thesis is that there are design principles that can help sustain diverse neighborhoods. Modernist urbanism, with its emphasis on functionalism, automobile accommodation and land use separation, exacerbated the key design requirements of diverse places: mix, connection, and security. As cities expanded and grew in the 20th century, design ideology and technological “progress”, along with other social and economic factors, fueled a built environment conducive to social separation. The result is that we are now left with a physical framework that seems hostile to, rather than supportive of, social diversity.

Figure 1.2
Places like Millenium Park in Chicago have a lot of social diversity, but the encounters are random; there is less sense of collective ownership.

Fortunately, every city has at least some places that have managed to attract and retain diversity. By focusing on those places in the City of Chicago as a case study, we hope to shed light on the ways that the planning and design of built environments can help those neighborhoods achieve stability. Can we leverage the built environment to promote social diversity? Can we help equalize access to social and economic resources by encouraging an urban form more conducive to an integrated population?

Complications of the Diversity Ideal

American ideals speak directly to the need for place diversity. Not only is social inequality viewed as a significant threat to democratic society (Bishop, 2009; Ehrenreich, 2011), but the idea that it is possible to be “separate but equal” has been rejected unequivocally. The segregation and separation that has come to characterize the American urban pattern goes against the basic underlying ethos of American idealism – a pluralist society rooted in the notion of human equality. Not only does separation challenge the basic foundation of a democratic society, but it engenders profound differences in access – access to financial resources, community services, public facilities, social networks, and political power. In addition, it limits our ability to encourage tolerant attitudes and capitalize on the creative aspects of human diversity.

At the same time, there is a certain acceptance of the inevitability of differentiation and segregation of the kind Park et al. identified more than 80 years ago – proclaiming that “competition forces associational groupings” (1925, p. 79). They made clear that the result of “continuous processes of invasions and accommodations” was a subdivided residential pattern of varying classes and associated land values, mores, and degrees of “civic interest”. Where one neighborhood might be “conservative, law-abiding, civic-minded”, another would be “vagrant and radical” (1925, p. 78–79). Such differentiation and segregation developed along racial, linguistic, age, sex and income lines, forming units of communal life that they termed “natural areas”. Zorbaugh’s 1929 study of Chicago’s Near Northside showed just how stark the contrast between “The Gold Coast and the Slum” had become.

Figure 1.3
In a neighborhood, social diversity is about collective life and the sharing of space for daily needs, as opposed to random encounters with strangers.

City planners are left trying to balance the inevitability of place homogeneity with the intolerability of segregation. They are buttressed by American proclamations about the importance of equality and pluralism, but they are constrained by the assumption that, in American society, it is somehow “natural” to associate social mobility with spatial mobility. One moves up in the world by moving out to a “better” neighborhood in a completely different location, a process of assimilation with distinct spatial consequences (Peach, 2001).

Even amongst social critics who are most concerned with the deleterious effects of social segregation and concentrated poverty, it is assumed that what is needed is better spatial mobility, not better planning and design to accommodate diversity. Massey and Denton in their well-known book American Apartheid (1993) rightfully lament the persistence of residential segregation among Blacks, but see the inequity as a matter of Blacks being prevented from participating in the “process of normal spatial mobility”. Neighborhood status conceptualized as moving from “declining” to “upgrading” legitimizes the idea that neighborhoods can rightly be of one homogenous, socioeconomic type or another.

Planners are in the unfortunate position of having encouraged social and economic sorting in the first place. Lewis Mumford argued half a century ago that the mechanisms largely put into pl...