Town Greens

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A New Edict of Nantes, and a Trip to the High Line

Anthony Flint, writing in The Atlantic Cities, has a nice piece about sustainability — especially its environmental aspect — as a new way of branding mid-sized European cities for tourism and investment. Nantes, a mid-sized city in Brittany, has made radical changes to its transportation model and is actively pursuing an avant garde identity as the greenest city in France.

In tangentially related news (at least, on the topic of green cities), I finally had a chance to upload some photos that I took of the High Line this summer. For people who don’t know its story: the High Line began with an aging, elevated freight train trestle that runs down the West Side of Manhattan. The structure had been built by New York Central in the 1930s as a viaduct between the rail infrastructure surrounding Penn Station and the West Side Piers. It replaced Death Avenue, a surface right-of-way, dating from the 19th century, that had previously carried freight trains at street level through Chelsea and the West Village. The High Line was abandoned for most of the late 20th century, after the rise of containerized cargo caused the West Side Piers to be de-emphasized in the Port of New York and New Jersey. For years, the structure languished, overgrown with weeds and scraggly trees; there was a general consensus in the New York real estate community that it was an eyesore whose presence was a significant obstacle to redeveloping the Far West Side. Its images were used to add an element of city grit to movies and TV shows.

But a few people dissented from the crowd, noting the oasis that the High Line’s unplanned nature provided from the concrete jungle of the city. And in the late 1990s, activist planners began to study the High Line’s redevelopment potential. The dissenters turned out to be prescient, and the thoroughly landscaped and hardscaped park-in-the-sky is now a major attraction that has increased property values and created a major new green space while preserving an important part of the city’s industrial history. It is without question one of the great planning successes of the last decade. For a kid who grew up in this region during the 1980s and 90s — when the city was synonymous with too much concrete, too many steel doors, and an almost defiant hostility to nature — it’s been incredible to witness the greening of Manhattan over the last several years.

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Nice Bottle

What it says: “This map of Aranda del Duero is the oldest perspective map drawn in Spain in 1508. The original was made on skin and is preserved at the General Archive of Simancas. Was used as an inspiration for planning the cities of the New World, just discovered. It was presented to Queen Isabella of Castille to document the city limits where underground wineries were already producing and aging the wines from Ribera del Duero.” Note the plaza/forum, the cardo, the decumanus: it’s basically a perfect Roman frontier city. Great wine, too. Thanks, Jim!

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Rome’s Forum Traiani

The Urban Simulation Team at UCLA has done some great work, including an intense model of Rome’s Forum Traiani, which is based on the research of Northwestern archaeologist James Packer. Unfortunately, the full model does not seem to be available online. If anyone has a link to more extensive screenshots of this model, please e-mail me. Trajan’s Forum, including the adjacent Mercati (markets) was a major landmark in the evolution of public spaces in Western cities.

Traiano Mercati: Trajan's Markets, Imperial Fora, Rome.

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Spotlight: Little Falls and Canajoharie, New York

NY's Mohawk Valley. Source: Google.

More than a dozen small towns dot the countryside of New York’s Mohawk Valley between Albany and Utica.  In most, compact urban neighborhoods give way at their edges to farmland and forests:  That is to say, the towns of this region still furnish the contrast between efficient development and pastoral nature that was blurred by the sprawling postwar model.  Internally, a few are near perfect examples of artful, practical town plans.

I like the physical layouts of Little Falls and Canajoharie, in particular:  Both are river towns, built on steep banks, with winding streets worked into the rough topography of the land.  Both have very good surviving stocks of Victorian architecture–  including factories, simple houses, and showcases– arranged around the common spaces that traditionally organized settlements in the Northeast.  And both are, essentially, walkable time capsules.  On a recent drive home from from the Adirondacks, I took some photos of these towns.

A slide show, here:

The Mohawk Valley has been settled for as long as nearby parts of New England.  Visually, the region’s mountainous terrain casts a haunting daylight shade over certain twists in the river.  The valley is largely forgotten by its former industries, and remains mostly undiscovered by sprawl developers or New York City vacationers.  Notably, an Amtrak line that runs through the valley skips over the entire stretch between Amsterdam and Utica without a stop.

The development patterns of the smaller, most isolated Mohawk Valley towns reflect the old urban elements of the early-industrial, pre-automobile constellation.  In particular, the influence of traditions, building codes, physical restraints, and market forces can be observed through the architecture, street layouts, and walkable accommodations of both topography and transportation routes in both towns.  Historically, the the instrumentalities that linked these places with the wider world were the Mohawk River, Erie Canal, and N.Y. Central Railroad (in that order).  From the maps of Little Falls and Canajoharie, it is apparent that the nodes of development were sited in proximity to these routes, and to meet the challenges posed by the rough topography on either side of the river.  Similar evidence could still be found today in more developed regions, but the persistence of the Mohawk towns in the original matrix of a rural countryside allows much evidence of the early functionality of their patterns to be preserved.  (Note the similar street patterns of the river towns along the lower Hudson, here, as they existed in 1906.)

A Google satellite map of Little Falls is here:

And one of Canajoharie:

One tradition worth noting in both towns is the presence of an open public space near the town center.  In Little Falls, two separate greens characterize the upland neighborhood just north of the river, in the tradition of English town planning.  Interestingly, the geometric convergence of several streets around a wide swath of pavement in Canajoharie is (in its current form) more reminiscent of a Continental plaza.

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Shameless Plug

Drawing of Theater Square, Newark.

I have a couple of blurbs in the current issue of Transit-Friendly Development, a Rutgers-related newsletter where I’ve made some contributions.  One is a review of a 2010 AARP study that considers the dangers to affordable housing for seniors near transit; another, somewhat longer piece looks at the transit infrastructure and inherent T.O.D. potential in Newark.

Here’s a file of the full-length Newark article, unedited for TFD: TOD in Newark.

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The Romance of Public Space

Picture this iconic moment in a five-acre Bed, Bath, and Beyond parking lot, somewhere in Central New Jersey.

For Valentine’s Day, Leonard Lopate interviewed the author, Ariel Sabar, about his research on the role of public space in chance meetings between strangers.  The audio is here.  From WNYC.org:

Ariel Sabar, whose own parents met in Washington Square Park, tells the true stories of nine ordinary couples—from the 1940s to the present—who married after first meeting in one of New York City’s iconic public spaces. He tells those stories in Heart of the City: Nine Stories of Love and Serendipity on the Streets of New York.

It’s interesting to think about how much value we could add to our suburban communities with land use codes that emphasized the importance of real, shared public spaces.  The interview discussion hints at this a little bit toward the end.

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Spotlight: Ouro Preto, Brazil

Amazing town.  Architecture dates to the Brazilian Gold Rush, mid-19th c.  Nearby Belo Horizonte, a pre-planned city, replaced it as the capital of Minas before industry or growth set in.  Check it out in Google Street View.

One thing that’s really captivating about this town’s plan is the natural way in which it was built into the wild contours of the land.  For example, take a look at the 0-200 blocks of Ruo Claudio Manoel, and note how the dense buildings of the town center are worked into the steep hillside, without any sacrifice to the quality of architecture on a lot-by-lot basis.  A little further up the hill, near where the map is centered, the Praça Tiradentes represents an almost perfect adaptation to the land of a classic plaza or forum that one might find in a small European city.

Photos remain the copyright of Google, and are used in accordance with the principles of Fair Use.  Explore the streets of Ouro Preto, yourself, here.

Rua São Francisco.

Praça Tiradentes.

Rua Conde de Bobadela.

Ruo Claudio Manoel.

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Open Yale Course on Roman Architecture

Professor Kleiner includes a fair amount of discussion about town planning in her lectures.  Examining the Greco-Roman approach provides a tremendous amount of insight about the classical roots of the modern planning tradition.  If you’ve read Vitruvius, Kleiner’s lecture topics will be broadly familiar: town plans, the architecture of the forum, public baths, private houses, and so forth.