Monthly Archives: April 2013

Editorial, Mark David Major, News

We the People… are not ready | COMMENT | A World Without Trash Cans | Atlantic Cities

We the People… are not ready

by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

I have been waiting for the appropriate time and place to ask a question. I wrote a tweet asking this question on the afternoon of the Boston Marathon bombing. However, I deleted the tweet without posting because 140 characters seemed woefully inadequate for any context to this question. I was also worried about prematurely discussing the implications before people had time to process Monday’s events. I wrote a slightly longer status update (about 40 words) for my personal Facebook page later that evening. I thought I could ask my friends this question. They know me and would willingly forgive any awkwardness arising from brevity. However, again, it seemed both premature and insufficient. I deleted the status update without posting. Thanks to the Amanda Erickson’s April 16th article, “A World Without Trash Cans?”, for Atlantic Cities (a link to her article is available below), I feel as if I have found the right venue to express something that has been bothering me… literally, for years. I ask this question and write this article with the disclaimer I am not a security expert. I am only a concerned citizen.

Here is the question: why didn’t anyone notice?

I lived in London from 1992-2000. During this time, like many Londoners, I had my fair share of close calls with Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombings. My friends and I partied in a Soho pub called the Sussex Arms on a Saturday night. The next Saturday night, the IRA set off a nail bomb, killing one person, in the men’s room of the same pub. My aunt and uncle visited me in London. I eagerly showed them around the city on a beautiful spring day. The personal tour included visiting historical sites in the City of London. During this tour, we passed the Baltic Exchange on a couple of occasions. The next day, the IRA set off the bomb that destroyed the Baltic Exchange. The IRA set off three bombs on a Thursday along the same stretch of road my ex-wife and I walked every Saturday on the way to and from the grocery store. Of course, I was aware of new learned behaviors on my part while living in a city under siege by the IRA. This included being naturally suspicious of unattended bags and packages on the London Underground and elsewhere. After I returned home, I became aware of other learned behaviors. To this day, if I am walking along a street and see an unmarked parked van, I have to restrain myself from crossing the street to distance myself from a possible threat. The first time I realized I was doing this was in Palm Coast, Florida. I laughed at myself for subconsciously thinking the IRA might want to bomb Palm Coast. More importantly, it represented learned behavior from living in London for nearly a decade.

There were others. I once had the unfortunate experience of watching a young woman throw herself under a London Underground train in a suicide attempt. It happened right in front of me. The young woman was standing a couple of feet to my right before she ran pass me and threw herself from the platform under the train. Fortunately, she survived with minor injuries. Afterwards, I realized she had been alone on the platform, coatless, and not carrying a bag. In the 1990s, almost everybody on the London Underground seemed to be carrying some sort of bag (briefcase, computer bag, backpack, shopping bag, and so on). They probably still do. From that point forward, when I was on the London Underground and I saw someone alone without a bag, I would casually stand near and in front of them, putting myself between them and the tracks, in an attempt to avoid repeating the experience. The probability this act made a difference was infinitely small. However, there was always the off-chance it might make a difference. It did not cost me anything to do and I seriously doubt anyone noticed a reason for my strategic positioning on the platform. I had developed a new learned behavior.

In the weeks after September 11, 2001, I visited English friends living in Atlanta, Georgia. Naturally, we discussed the events of September 11th within the context of our shared experience living in London with the constant threat of IRA terrorism. Make no mistake: the IRA were terrorists. They engaged in indiscriminate bombings designed to murder innocent civilians. This is the very definition of terrorism. In any case, my friends and I looked out the window of their downtown apartment in Atlanta, marveled about the neat row of trash cans spaced every 20 feet along the street, and wondered why they had not been removed. We talked about our travel experiences in the aftermath of September 11th. I admitted the presence of the National Guard armed with machine guns in American airports was comforting; not so much because of fear in the aftermath of September 11th but because it was more consistent with my European experience over the previous decade. My friends and I agreed that the United States was not ready if Al Qaeda decided to adopt IRA tactics. In the subsequent 12 years, this has been a source of occasional worry for me. I wondered, when is Al Qaeda (or any other terrorist group, foreign or domestic, organized or the proverbial ‘lone wolf’ fruitcake) going to realize how much damage they could really do by following the lead of the IRA? In 12 years, I have seen precious little to indicate we the people are ready for a sustained assault on thousands of the ‘soft targets’ across this country, designed to truly terrorize the general population on an everyday basis. Luckily, Al Qaeda and everyone else remained fixated of ‘spectacle terrorism’, designed to drive international news coverage into a feeding frenzy (terrorism by media proxy)… until Monday.

We have constructed a mammoth security bureaucracy to learn about and intercept terrorism threats before they cross our border and/or implement their plans. For the most part, it has been successful. However, I wonder how much of that success is due to terrorists’ unchanging focus on the uniquely spectacular instead of the ordinarily possible. It is true. We are an open society; in ideal, if not always in practice. And it is a good thing to aspire to this ideal, however imperfectly. But it does not mean we have to forgo common sense. Foolishness is not an inherent attribute of openness. At the same time, we do not want our home to become an armed military camp. Our approach to terrorism requires balance between freedom and caution, openness and common sense. After 12 years, we still do not seem to be striking the right balance. It is too top-heavy. Our government bureaucracies are well prepared, perhaps overly so, and (seemingly) paranoid. Our citizens are under-prepared and (seemingly) nonchalant. It is puzzling how two unattended bags can escape the notice of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people in Boston. All it took to avert this event was one or two people, ordinary citizens, flagging down a police officer or event organizer after noticing a suspicious package along the marathon route. Why did this not happen? It is time ordinary citizens became more vigilant, to develop learned behaviors that, in themselves, might prove equally effective in guarding against acts of terrorism. After all, as big as the government is, there are still more of us citizens than government bureaucrats. The most effective act against terrorism on September 11, 2001 was not a presidential decision, government policy, or military action. It was an act of vigilance and bravery by ordinary citizens on United Flight 93. Ordinary citizens appear to have learned this lesson in the air. Isn’t about time we learned the same lesson on the ground?

In asking who did this and why, I think we are missing an equally important question, which is: why didn’t anyone notice? I am worried that we are still not ready for this kind of terrorism… and, by now, we really should be.

A World Without Trash Cans? | Amanda Erickson | The Atlantic Cities.

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Art, Essay, The City in Art

Terre Potentiel | The City in Art

Paul Klee’s Highways and Byways (1929), 67 x 83 cm or 26.4” x 32.7”, oil on canvas, Christoph and Andr Collection displayed in Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany.

Terre Potentiel | The City in Art
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

According to the one interpretation of Paul Klee’s Highways and Byways, plots of lands are used as ‘building blocks’ to offer an aerial view of the landscape in order to create the illusion of perspective and relief. “Complexity emerges geometrically by successive doublings from a central ‘highway’ to create ‘byways’ (i.e. small, more dense or compact plots of land), only to be lost again by inversely halving their number.” The largest plots forming the central ‘highway’ approach a water body (probably the River Nile since this period of Klee’s paintings came after a trip to Egypt). However, the title of Klee’s painting indicates a different interpretation than agricultural plots for the colored strata (Source: The Peacock’s Tail: Essays on Mathematics and Culture). It does seem to hint at more than an abstract painting of an agricultural landscape. Perhaps skewed by an American perspective towards the land, it might suggest terre potentiel (the potential of the land). Humans have already intervened in the landscape for agricultural uses and the river already serves as a transportation hub, both associated with the support mechanisms for urban living. “In this pattern of fields, all is order, timeless structure, with a poetic element added… in twentieth-century creative language” (Source: PaulKlee.net). It is in this ‘timeless structure of order’ that can be found the design traces of a future urban pattern, a future city that has yet to emerge from the land but the potential for its emergence is already etched in the landscape. I love this painting, not so much for what it represents in the ‘here and now’ (though it is beautiful only on these terms) but what it represents about the possible, the “undiscovered country,” …the future, where all travelers must venture but none may journey before it is time.

About Paul Klee
Paul Klee (1879–1940) was born near Bern, Switzerland. He studied drawing and painting in Munich for three years beginning in 1898. By 1911, he was involved with the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), founded by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. In 1914, Klee visited Tunisia. The experience was the turning point. The limpid light of North Africa awakened his sense of color. Klee gradually detached color from physical description and used it independently, giving him the final push toward abstraction. In 1920, Walter Gropius invited Klee to join the faculty of the Bauhaus. Nearly half of Klee’s work was produced during the ten years he taught at the Bauhaus. From 1931-1933, Klee taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. When the National Socialists declared his art “degenerate”, he returned to his native Bern. Klee suffered from a wasting disease, scleroderma, towards the end of his life, enduring the pain until his death in Muralto, Locarno, Switzerland, on June 29, 1940 (Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wikipedia).

Visit the Artsy.net Paul Klee page here.

Read a later article about another Paul Klee painting featured in The City in Art series here.

The City in Art is a series by The Outlaw Urbanist. The purpose is to present and discuss artistic depictions of the city that can help us, as professionals, learn to better see the city in ways that are invisible to others. Before the 20th century, most artistic representations of the city broadly fell into, more or less, three categories: literalism, pastoral romanticism, and impressionism, or some variation thereof. Generally, these artistic representations of the city lack a certain amount of substantive interest for the modern world. The City in Art series places particular emphasis on art and photography from the dawn of the 20th century to the present day.

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Mark David Major, Professional, Review, Space Syntax

REVIEW | Paradigm lost, Industrial and Post-industrial Detroit | UDi

Featured Image: Choice network analysis at radius 10,000 meters of Detroit in 1952 with industry superimposed from Paradigm lost, Industrial and post-industrial Detroit (Psarra et al, 2013).

REVIEW: Paradigm lost, Industrial and post-industrial Detroit by Sophia Psarra, Conrad Kickert, and Amanda Pluviano, Urban Design International, Advanced Online Publication, March 27, 2013
by Mark David Major, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

There is a simple question at the heart of the Psarra et al paper, “Paradigm lost: Industrial and post-industrial Detroit – An analysis of the street network and its social and economic dimensions from 1796 to the present,” available as an advanced online publication from Urban Design International. This question is: can spatial pattern be implicated in the remarkable urban decline of Detroit over the last half-century? It is an important question precisely because so many architecture, urban design and planning professionals – as well as politicians and policy makers  – never bother to ask it, especially in the United States. The answer provided by Psarra et al is an academically careful and qualified ‘yes’.

Their basic argument is the locating of large-scale industrial uses at the northern periphery of the urban grid (along and near to Davison St./Grand Ave.) beginning around 1900-1910 – in combination with interstate highway system construction and decline of the streetcar system a few decades later – served to disrupt the integrated functioning of the urban street network, commercial, industrial and residential land uses, and the transportation infrastructure serving them (railroads, streetcars) in the city. This facilitated radical decentralization of Detroit to the suburbs, where developers and industry could find ever larger and cheaper land parcels. Their argument is a little more nuanced than this but that is the gist. In doing so, they conclude (though don’t say so bluntly) the automobile both made and destroyed Detroit.

They acknowledge more complex factors were, no doubt, at work in the decline of Detroit but argue understanding the pattern of urban space and how it relates to land uses and transportation infrastructure is crucial for diagnosing the problem. In its diagnosis, the paper excels though it is very light on offering solutions (beyond a vague call for “radical solutions”). For example, they generally discuss what they describe as “Landscape Urbanism” without much detail. They are far too kind to reveal what, I suspect, is probably an outright disdain for this approach to serious urban problems. Landscape Urbanism only exists because it is politically expedient and offers policy makers/politicians the appearance of doing something (and feeds the financial coffers of consultants) when, in fact, it is usually a useless solution that avoids the real problem all together. What is really interesting about their historical analysis is where industrial land uses were not located; namely, along the riverfront at the edge of the Woodward plan. This suggests the seeds of Detroit’s urban decline might be traced back to the early 19th century. Large-scale industrial land uses may not have been allowed to develop along the riverfront of the Woodward plan. If the industrial land uses along Davison/Grand had come to be located along the riverfront instead of the northern periphery, Detroit may have been better positioned to manage its transition from an industrial to a post-industrial city, as other cities have accomplished to varying degrees of success.

By necessity, academic articles cannot cover all of the bases. For example, I would have liked to have seen spatial analysis of contemporary Detroit with its interstate highway system ‘peeled off’ to better reveal its disruptive effect on the underlying street grid pattern. I’m not even sure if current space syntax software allows for this kind of ‘alternative’ analysis. I would have also liked to have seen a spatial model of Detroit embedded within its larger urban context to the south in Canada (Windsor/LaSalle), where the railroad lines do terminate along the riverfront of the Detroit River. There is also the political factor. Detroit has been subject to one-party rule (Democratic) for the last half-century and it’s hard to believe this is only coincidental with its decline as an urban center. To excuse the Democratic Party from Detroit’s decline, one almost has to concede that all government policies are essentially useless (a very Libertarian position). However, there is only so much anyone can cover in an article. “Paradigm lost, Industrial and post-industrial Detroit” is well worth the read. At the very least, it will get you questioning the “conventional wisdom” in the field about Detroit and other cities experiencing similar problems.

You read the full article online or download a PDF via the link below:

URBAN DESIGN International | Paradigm lost: Industrial and post-industrial Detroit – An analysis of the street network and its social and economic dimensions from 1796 to the present.

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Urban Patterns

Urban Patterns | Olmsted’s Riverside Suburb in Chicago

“Take me to the river, drop me in the water,
Take me to the river, dip me in the water,
Washing me down, washing me down.”
— Take Me to the River, Talking Heads

Urban Patterns | Olmsted’s Riverside Suburb in Chicago
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

We are not anti-suburbia. In fact, quite the opposite. By definition, cities grow at their edges and suburbs have played a vitally important role in the growth of cities over thousands of years even if the modern use of the term ‘suburb’ only first emerged during the 19th century. We are against badly designed suburbs. We are against the proliferation of cheap, badly designed suburbs that have spread across the American landscape like an infection since 1926 but, especially, during the post-war period, i.e. suburban sprawl. By cheap, we really mean flimsy vertical (usually baloon-frame) constructions instead of merely low-cost in gross terms, though this is also often an aspect of the suburban sprawl model. So, what does a well-designed suburb look like?

Frederick Law Olmsted’s general plan for the Riverside neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.

You would be hard-pressed to find a better model than Frederick Law Olmsted’s Riverside suburb in Chicago, Illinois. Riverside is one of the earliest (and still best) of the 19th century suburbs, which emerged from the City Beautiful movement. Olmsted designed Riverside in 1869, a full 60 years(!) before the landmark case, Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co., in which the US Supreme Court upheld zoning as a constitutional exercise of police power. The curvilinear street network of Olmsted’s plan discretely and explicitly separates in spatial terms the suburb from the large-scale regular grid logic in Chicago by making the most direct paths for movement around – rather than through – the residential area. Streets were “laid out as to afford moderately direct routes of communications between different parts of the neighborhood (but) they would be inconvenient to be followed for any purpose of business beyond the mere supplying of the wants of the neighborhood itself. That is to say, it would be easier for any man wishing to convey merchandise from any point a short distance on one side of the neighborhood to a point a short distance on the other side to go around it rather than through it” (Olmsted quoted in Reps, 1979 about an earlier but similar plan in Berkeley, California).

Satellite view from 5 km of Riverside in Chicago, Illinois (Source: Google Earth).

This is a similar design method deployed in Middle Eastern cities to isolated residential areas by complicating routes through those areas. However, like the Middle Eastern model, Olmsted’s Riverside suburb still maintains a multitude of street connections (17 in total) to the surrounding urban context at its periphery streets. This provides a stark contrast to even many New Urbanist developments; for example, Celebration in Orlando, FL and Amelia Park in Fernandina Beach, FL, which both only have three street connections to the surrounding urban context. The real genius of Olmsted’s Riverside plan achieves discrete separation from the surrounding urban context in spatial terms without relying upon interruptus in extremis (using the absolute minimum of external street connections, which is mathematically one), which lies at the core of the suburban sprawl model associated with Euclidean zoning and roadway classifications of modern transportation planning (and later, admittedly, the cost-savings aims of developers and home builders). So, we are not against suburbs. All we are saying is. if we are going to build suburbs – and we have to, it’s a fact – make sure they are damn good ones.

(Updated: April 13, 2017)

Urban Patterns is a series of posts from The Outlaw Urbanist presenting interesting examples of terrestrial patterns shaped by human intervention in the urban landscape over time.

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Art, Essay, The City in Art

Abstracting New York | The City in Art

Piet Mondrian’s New York City I (1942), oil on canvas, 119.3 cm x 114.2 cm, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

Abstracting New York | The City in Art
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

In the main, Piet Mondrian’s New York City I (1942) can be simply read as an elegantly beautiful abstraction of the Manhattan gridiron whereby streets are represented in primary colors (red, blue, yellow) and blocks in white. However, this first-impression interpretation of the painting is actually dictated by the edge of the canvas itself, which the viewer uses to define a series of unseen parallel or perpendicular streets subconsciously incorporated within the abstracted pattern as a given. Another (equally rich) interpretation of Mondrian’s painting is an abstracted ‘snapshot’ of built form in Manhattan, whereby primary colors represent vertical construction elements (post, beams and/or floors) and white represents the space ‘framed’ within these load-bearing elements. These white shapes could also be interpreted as ‘windows’ into those spaces. In this sense, Mondrian is playing with the two-dimensional plane of the canvas (a recurring motif of 20th-century representations of the city) to not only abstract but also ‘compress’ the abstraction of built space in the city. Given the De Stijl artists’ preference for universality in their abstractions, this latter interpretation might actually be closer to Mondrian’s original vision for the painting since the ‘vertical’ interpretation would be universal to all cities whereas the ‘horizontal’ one tends to be particular to New York and American cities in general. Mondrian’s New York City I builds upon and works within the artistic principles and framework outlined by Mondrian himself for the De Stijl movement, first reaching fruition in 1920 with Composition A: Composition with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow, and Blue. We will see some additional examples of Mondrian’s work in later issues of The City in Art.

About Piet Mondrian
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg in The Netherlands. Mondrian evolved a non-representational form, which he termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of white ground, upon which was painted a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the three primary colors. Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and color; they simplified visual compositions in the vertical and horizontal directions and used only primary colors along with black and white. Mondrian himself set forth these principles in “Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art,” writing, “… this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and color. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and color, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary color.” Mondrian attended the Academy for Fine Art in Amsterdam and began his career in the Netherlands. He later worked in Paris, London, and New York. He died of pneumonia on February 1, 1944, in New York (Source: Wikipedia/Tate Gallery).

The City in Art is a series by The Outlaw Urbanist. The purpose is to present and discuss artistic depictions of the city that can help us, as professionals, learn to better see the city in ways that are invisible to others. Before the 20th century, most artistic representations of the city broadly fell into, more or less, three categories: literalism, pastoral romanticism, and impressionism, or some variation thereof. Generally, these artistic representations of the city lack a certain amount of substantive interest for the modern world. The City in Art series places particular emphasis on art and photography from the dawn of the 20th century to the present day.

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