By KEITH C. HALL, CEO, New Zealand Planning Institute
What makes a great place? Just what is it that makes a place great or not so great? Perhaps a more important question is, “Why have we forgotten how to make great places?”
Some of the most memorable events in my own life have been those where a sense of place was integral to the overall experience.
Few places achieve the liveliness of a New Year’s Eve in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, a political protest in Mexico City’s Zócalo, or window shopping at Christmas on 5th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.
Some of the biggest disappointments have been places designed and built to be spectacular while failing to live up even to a basic level of mediocrity. Cancún and Las Vegas come to mind. That I burn too easily in the sun and have no affinity for gambling does not help make a case for these places, but both do have certain interesting qualities.
Do the streets themselves make a place great?
Streets that are too wide are generally unpleasant places for human activity.
How many pedestrians are there on Ti Rakau Drive at Botany Town Centre? Streets that are poorly connected limit pedestrian access and, as such, put an end to activities at a human scale on footpaths.
How many bus riders can walk from any station on the Northern Busway to, well, anything at all? Finally, if traffic moves too fast, the pedestrian environment is severely degraded. The streets with the most ‘street life’, defined as a relatively dense concentration of commerce and a range of human activities, are streets like Auckland’s Queen Street, Broadway in Newmarket, and Wellington’s Lambton Quay.
These are all streets where traffic can move at a painfully slow pace, but they all give humans a particularly positive experience as pedestrians, an experience deprived from those people in automobiles. In part, yes, streets do contribute to making a place great.
Is design itself an important factor in making a place great?
Too many planners, architects, and landscape architects treat design, in terms of the aesthetics of the streetscape, as the ultimate goal in the process of place-making.
To be sure, the feel and appearance of the street are important. What would the spectacular little town of Santa Fe, New Mexico be without its own unique style of architecture (and art, food, and music, the human activities that accompany its streetscape)? Great architecture cannot stand on its own to create a great place.
Manhattan is full of notable buildings and public spaces, but, for the most part, a typical Manhattan streetscape is ordinary from an architectural point of view.
In stark contrast is downtown Houston, home to a number of Fortune 500 corporations that have spent no small sum emphasising their prominence through landmark buildings facing semi-public plazas filled with corporate art.
Houston’s neat, tidy, and very well-connected downtown streets mostly fail to create any sense of a lively streetscape, the ‘scale’ and ‘feel’ do not work well with human interaction even with nice pavers, landscaping, and artwork. In Manhattan, the human element makes the streetscape interesting; in Houston, the lack of the human element makes the streetscape uninteresting. Aesthetic design is important in the streetscape but only to the extent that it engages people into the life of the street; aesthetic design cannot overwhelm the street.
What role do people play in making a place great?
In Manhattan, the important factor is the intensity and diversity of people and commerce taking place in human scale activities. To be sure, there are many cars, but there are many more people. People (a large number of them), live or stay, dine, work, shop, and play in the relatively confined space that is Manhattan.
In contrast, there is at least for now simply a lack of housing and retail in Houston’s large, office-dominated central business district, even though it is relatively attractive.
Although Houston’s CBD has added residences, entertainment, and restaurants, it simply has not achieved the critical mix of uses to generate a lively streetscape beyond a few blocks of Main Street. People engaging in the daily activities of life at a human scale are ultimately the generators of successful urban environments; that is, people make great places great. But certainly, people might be more likely to participate in the urban streetscape where streets are well-connected, making travel on foot more convenient, and in attractively-designed urban environments that offer comfort through amenity and a perception of safety.
Good examples of great urban places are hard to find in our cities. Perhaps we followed the North Americans when they decided that everyone should drive everywhere, thus abandoning the trams that are still found in Lisbon, Boston, San Francisco, and Melbourne. We did not replace the trams with subways, as did Manhattan, Munich, and Mexico City.
Instead, we built freeways and parking lots so that everyone could drive to the front door of every destination; we force people to drive to their every destination by making sure that they cannot walk safely or take public transport conveniently. So, from an urban design perspective, our cities look quite similar to some of the less spectacular cities of North America. And as we drive at 100km/h past everything, we contribute to the further deterioration of our urban and natural environments such that we end up driving 100km/h past, mostly, nothing of any interest at all.
How do we make 'great places' ?
Great places do not happen overnight. The examples above were built, then evolved, and finally matured into the places they are today. And they will continue to evolve and mature into the future. Cities are, after all, organic; development in any vibrant city will change over time in response to economy, technology, and human activity.
A course in Planning 101 would necessarily include a lecture on how cities have evolved in response to changing technology, transport, and communications. For the purpose of this article, however, I will merely suggest that planners and architects try too hard to find quick solutions to what does not work in our cities, and we might sometimes be just a bit too lazy to understand why it does not work.
Perhaps worst of all, we are likely too impatient; we want to design a solution and implement it with immediate success when we know that all the great places around the world took years, often centuries to evolve into the cities they are today.
That is not to say that we should not try to create great places; after all, today’s actions lay the groundwork for tomorrow’s places, both good and bad. If we put most of our infrastructure money into expanding the motorway network and private capital into suburban fringe development, then certainly a large part of our future will be suburban.
If planners continue to focus on rules that discourage urban intensification and quality mixed-use developments, we might well stifle the very development we keep saying we want. Architects must rise to the challenge with building designs that contemplate the urban sphere beyond the individual site, while landscape architects must think beyond the aesthetic of the street and begin designing for the diverse range of activities that take place in an urban streetscape.
Finally, surveyors must lay the groundwork for an urban fabric that supports an organic, evolving city rather than one full of individual residential ‘fortress’ lots designed to isolate families from their neighbours.
Ultimately, no one profession is solely responsible for creating great places. The best efforts put forward by one profession may be stifled by another. More likely, all of the professions involved in shaping the built environment may simply work in such isolation that no one benefits from the expertise of another. I believe that it is time for a change in the way our professions work together, and it is time that our professions began speaking with a common voice. We must engage both the public and our government authorities with a unified vision if we are to meet our future urban challenges.
The New Zealand Institute of Architects, New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects, New Zealand Institute of Surveyors, and the New Zealand Planning Institute have created an avenue for collaboration in the New Zealand Urban Design Forum (UDF).
The UDF does not promise to solve all of our urban woes, but we do promise to initiate a dialogue between the professions to serve as a meeting point where we can share ideas and resolve issues. We will seek to develop a common voice as outspoken advocates for the development of sustainable urban places, great cities in which we all can live.