Extreme Urban Makeover

Some days, don’t you just want to level everything and start over? All the hideous dead buildings. The cratered concrete. The rusted, sagging chainlink, the miles of cockeyed telephones poles, the trashy billboards. Every graffitti-ed and decrepit factory, warehouse, and weedy parking lot. The whole wretched, mad scribble of ill-planned, ugly roads and ruined waterways.

All of it — the whole Augean stable — gone. Nothing but trees, meadows, rivers and lakes left behind. It’d be tempting never to build anything at all again where the vile mess used to lie. 

But urban renewal isn’t like lawn replacement. Killing off cities in order to heal them has the unfortunate side effect of destroying people’s homes, neighborhoods and workplaces, which they need no matter how unspeakably awful those places are. (So, historical preservationists, you can put your beta blockers down now.)  

Alas, urban renewal also isn’t usually like landscaping or any other kind of well-planned design.  It happens in odd patches as bits of money become available for isolated efforts that are usually the pet projects of influential people hoping to gain even more power and money or to secure their civic legacy. Few urban communities would want or be able to afford the comprehensive plan — not to mention the political repercussions of totalitarian-level eminent domain - that French emperor Napoleon III commissioned from Baron Haussmann for the redesigning of Paris.   

Yet the fact remains that most cities have grown up with hardly any long-term, big-picture planning at all.  And in spite of that and their varying amounts of human and infrastructural misery, some of them are great places that you’d love to visit or live in.  

What makes the difference? What do the world’s greatest, most enticing and creative cities have in common? Here are a few things:

Physical beauty, including: an arrestingly gorgeous natural setting; flower gardens and parks; striking architecture, often with some intriguing native or period style influencing a lot of it (pagoda roofs, barrel tiles, half-timbering, Gothic arches, Victorian gingerbread…);  at least one unique, amazing structure that has become the city icon: the Eiffel Tower,  the Golden Gate Bridge, the Chrysler Building, the Forbidden City, the Christ the Redeemer statue; and vivid, colorful and/or highly imaginative art everywhere, whether fine or folk

Fascinating history: Great cities have great stories to tell about how they were founded, settled and fought over; how and why they grew; and what colorful people played notable roles; and these stories are told through the unique look, structures, cultures, and activities of these cities, as well as through their languages, beliefs and common knowledge    

Activity:  Economic, of course, as a well-employed city is usually a better-cared-for and happier city, but also interesting occupational activity (shoe design, rickshaw pulling, stone carving, ship-building…) and, especially, outdoor activity: bustling shops and cafes; street vendors and performers; crowds of people going to work, school, religious services and cultural events, playing in the parks; attending festivals and political events. In other words, nonstop evidence of thousands or millions living visibly busy, rich and varied lives

Atmosphere and strong local identity: All the above help create these two things, which are linked but not the same. A great city is like a well-adjusted person — unafraid to be itself, whatever that self is. And though some communities, like some humans, will naturally appeal more to the rest of world than others because of luck in looks or wealth or lifestyle, so no community will rise to the top if lacks confidence in its own instincts and value.

The wishy-washy, the imitative, the fearful are going nowhere. And if your city is one of those – if leveling it sounds easier than living in it anymore – then it’s probably not the kind of place in which normal, small-scale creativity will work much change.

No, your city needs radical creativity. Monumental creativity. Something huge, showy and preferably not at all useful that will shock and delight the world and make it want to come see for itself. Your city’s really creative people – the ones with both ideas and guts –  need to choose  a huge, amazing project and get it done through sheer force of will. 

Turn all the bridges into giant, glowing, winged dragon sculptures? Train climbing roses up every bare wall and fence in town? Connect all the tall buildings with Christmas-lighted working zip lines? Convert a central downtown space to a huge outdoor concert/movie stage with performances 24/7?  Take all the broken concrete and glass and build a fabulous mosaic light-tower at the edge of your lake or river?

With what radical act of creativity would you like to transform your city?

Grassroots: The agent of green change

How do you systematically redesign a place that’s already filled up and covered over with stuff you may not want, but can’t easily get rid of? The answer is: Maybe you don’t. And that’s no fun to hear when all you really want to do is level the mess, haul the rubble away and start all over.

I talk not of teen bedrooms, but of whole cities and regions. It’s hard to drive through any older population center and not feel as if a good mass implosion were the only answer for all the crummy parts, followed by an invitation to some latter-day Baron Haussmann to come in and reshape the whole metropolis from the sewer pipes on up (ignoring the distasteful fact that you’d also need an Emperor Napoleon III to decree and pay for the whole project on the backs of the working poor).

But Terry Schwarz thinks that’s the wrong approach. The interim director of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative , who’s been working on Cleveland’s land-use and environmental problems with Neighborhood Progress, Inc. and the City of Cleveland as part of the Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland  project, suggests that the grassroots are literally and figuratively the answer.

She sees good change coming to cities such as Cleveland in two ways. One is the actual grassroots: developing a flexible framework of strategies for returning key areas, such as watersheds, to the green states and purposes nature intended, so “we can more easily adapt, grow and shrink.” Two is the metaphorical grassroots: Within the framework, giving ordinary residents the freedom to experiment with ways of cleaning and greening their own lots and reconnecting their neighborhoods to the changed spaces around them.

Land reuse thus becomes – you saw this coming – organic. But it’s not the same thing as just letting the city “return to nature,” Schwarz says.

Thousands of people still live there and can’t be displaced like heads of lettuce just because you need to clean the refrigerator. Plus, grand plans are hugely expensive, logistically complicated and obstructed by people’s ownership of – and emotional ties to – their property. They also can’t anticipate every circumstance and end up being rigid impediments to good sense and individual initiative.

So engaging everyday people in the process of creative change becomes essential – and an opportunity for innovation on every level. (Schwarz reports that a visiting Environmental Protection Agency member took a look at Cleveland and exclaimed, “This is an ecological-restoration bonanza!”) 

More than 50 small pilot projects are already underway in Cleveland neighborhoods, Schwarz says, and they range from restoring a tiny bit of prairie to phytoremediation (planting therapeutic species that will, for instance, clean the soil of heavy metals such as lead) to landscaping on vacant lots to make city blocks look cared-for and so reduce crime.    

Schwarz sees Cleveland’s encircling “Emerald Necklace” of parks eventually turning into a larger green network, an “emerald web” of restored watersheds and tree canopy connected to strings of neighborhood green patches. Though removing structures and creating a lot of green space sounds like a danger to the density a city needs to support public transit and other essential services, Schwarz calls it “managing decline in a way that actually promotes growth” – and cites the city of St. Paul, Minn., where the restored wetland that replaced a failing mall proved so attractive and desirable a spot that new homes were built around the edges of it.

Among planners and environmentalists, there’s a fair amount of argument about what will work best. But as Schwarz notes, the damage to places like Cleveland has already been done; it’s never going to be 1910 and the Midwest’s industrial heyday again. So such cities will have to create the best outcomes that they can with the hands they’ve been dealt.  

“We will have to choose,” she says. “We have to take some risks. There is no model. We have to be the model.”