Introduction: American study of urbanism has become more urgent: cities as we know them seem unlikely to survive. Both the government and the private sector are worried about the future cities, but their concerns with urban problems have been quite different. These two planning groups, government and the private sector, are seldom aimed at the same targets.
In the government example, we see our bureaucracy voicing the criticism of the urban process of self-determination in community formation. We see bureaucratic action to save our cities by artificially removing class barriers.
In the private sector, we see rebellion against excessive government. We see a revival of 19th century capital development: our best development comes with least government. Such rhetoric, and sometimes politics, has been characteristic of planning during the past 40 years to save a city. While we have been planning, in the real world urban deflation has produced insupportable budget inflation. Our cities have lost their affluent population and its support of urban tax base. Our cities are compelled to offer more human services to a poorer population at higher unit costs. Urban deterioration will bottom-out only when our cities become a fundamental, functional core, which we are compelled to support at whatever cost. This core city will no longer be what we call our center of civilization.
Our cities, where we now seek our support for a new form of living, were the planning of the early 19th century and the housing of the American industrial revolution. This physical plan, more than 150 years old, was conceived for a different society from the social change we are promising for the year 2000. The early cities and their housing never were intended for attractive living, but rather for storing people in their upward trip to riches. Within our inheritance of this deteriorated outworn housing, we continue to hope to deliver our social promises for the 21st century. Deliverance, if possible, is more likely to come from a new environment structured for a new society, and it is the shape of a new environment that we must now examine.
The Reinvention of Cities:
Can our almost deliberate march to urban deterioration be turned? Is there a realistic way toward urban rejuvenation which can shape us, our governments, and our human condition? Does the architect know how to make a plan for the possible city, go give us community which we can pay for? A plan which can house both our density and humanism at the same time?
I believe yes.
In 1979, the Joint Commission on Urban Affairs from the Congress of the United States, issued a study called “To Save A City.” The study was meant to show us need and methods to save our cities in trouble. Above all, the study meant to reaffirm that our cities are the symbols of our humanism and our civilization. The report stated: “This rejuvenation of our cities… could be the growth industry of the eighties. A huge consuming public is uniting for the joys and strengths that the city of the future can provide.”
“Rejuvenation of cities” — do we mean the old, failed city, or some new form of city to match our social change?
A New Form For Urban Rejuvenation:
What form of a city can shelter a society that needs a cohesion of neighborhood, but often has given up the children, the church, and lacks the jobs that support the neighborhood? What should the city look like that can no longer afford to service the needs either of the automobile or its people? Whatever answers we find, these new problems cannot be solved with the answers found in the old forms.
Are there new forms which can better shelter a new society and produce a measurable improvement of the conditions of debt, of work, or our political life? There are working examples of these new forms, and there is a rapid growth of new research on city formation from them.
The City Within a City: The Critical Mass of a City:
Living, working, recreation, culture, each had its separate physical location 25 years ago; each had separate zones in our American cities. This led to urban sprawl, to transportation problems, to high cost of distribution for energy and city services.
In order to reduce sprawl and reduce the cost of urban shelter, we combined these living activities within a single structure called a mixed-use “urban complex.” Marina City built in Chicago was, in 1960, the first complex since the 14th century cities to provide 24-hour use, 7 days per week, on an urban site. It was the first to reduce the cost of living by providing more intensive usage of broader services spread throughout commercial and domestic living patterns; and by providing a system of internal taxation for the first time, it absorbed the cost burden of social amenities normally provided by the municipal government. Its density was 635 families per acre.
Density Reduces Taxes:
An urban complex with housing an .d commercial rents has the financial resources to replace municipal spending by privately supporting its social services. An urban complex collects more of the family income than just apartment rent. An urban complex, if properly planned, can be the locus of spending about 60-cents of the take-home dollar.
The private apartment development now includes the free swimming pool. But if the complex is large enough and commercial rent returns fat enough, the free swimming pool service can be extended to include schools and health and education.
Greater concentrations of people can achieve a more democratic society with more social amenities. New numbers as well as new forms are needed to achieve a critical mass in neighborhood formation.
1. 750 families at today’s reduced birth-rate become the critical mass required for support of a conventional school. We also need a new form other than the single-family house to use less land and bring parents and children closer together into a smaller neighborhood.
2. 3000 families are the critical mass which buy enough groceries each week to support one supermarket. A sales volume of $250,000 per week is needed to support a supermarket. New neighborhood forms are needed to bring more than 3000 families closer to their daily shopping.
3. 7500 people are required to support a simple health plan at low cost. Other new, larger, and denser communities are required to support public transportation, culture, hi-tech business, energy conservation, and, in fact, all our city actions.
A new society needs new density; new forms of our architecture can shape a city suited to new social changes and concerns. Architecture changes behavior. New modernized urbanism can attract a balanced society which in turn can better pay for our urban services.
It is clear that our concept of necessary population density must change to match our needs. But what do we need? What must our city provide?
Briefly, three urgently needed changes must be provided in American cities:
1. Restore city middle-income population with job creation;
2. Reduce the cost of housing in urban centers;
3. Provide housing and living environment for new family types.
The combination of all these must be enhanced with that magic element of concern for life that we call humanism–together, these three will form cities within cities.
A Design for Urban Objectives: River City:
For the past 15 years, we have been planning and designing for this goal a model called River City. In the south section of Chicago’s Loop on the Chicago River, it will be located on 45 acres of land now used by the CSX Systems (formerly Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad).
More than 4,000 families can be housed in a mixture of high, medium and low-rise buildings located in a park. Beneath the park will be commercial service shopping, parking and light industry to provide jobs within an elevator ride from the apartments. Lagoons, a zoo, greenhouses will be installed in the open arms along the riverbank.
At the outset of our planning, we organized ad hoc citizens’ committees to become a major component of the planning process. These committees for education, health, physical planning, transportation, community relations, security and finance became important activity groups. Northwestern University, through its education and medical care departments, was a major contributor to our planning. The committees told us what and for whom to plan.
The City Hall of Chicago dictated that the first phase of River City be designed as low-rise, from 8-15 floors containing duplex townhouses, apartments, and penthouses. This combination in the low-rise form will provide 1500 dwelling units along the River. There are two apartment structures, one facing the pier and one facing east toward the lake overlooking a private tenants’ park built on the roof of the base building. These two apartment structures are connected by a continuous landscaped atrium which connects all the apartments like an internal street.
When completed from Harrison Street to Roosevelt Road, this mixed-use center will have at least one high-rise tower, a festival market, about 1 million square feet of shopping, theatres, parks, marinas, and jobs. It will also have a continuous riverfront walk for public access to a river, almost double its present width.
Our design for the high-rise living combines three buildings which we call a triad. They are connected with three bridges, each providing for a neighborhood center. The triad will contain about 3,000 families. This bridge to neighborhood contains school, library, health care, and the upper gymnasium level. The structure of the high-rise apartments is comprised of ten petal-like modules of living areas, containing kitchen, dining, living, and large outdoor porch.
Each floor then contains two bedrooms and two bathrooms–dressing rooms between each living module. This is primarily designed for the standard American family of two adults and two children; each floor like a city block contains 10 two-bedroom/two-bathroom houses.
But these high-rise buildings for the first time in the history of apartment buildings will be able to respond without alternation to the shifting household types that live in our cities. The two-bedroom apartments can be reorganized without remodeling, as any type from studio to four-bedroom.
Mixed-Use–The City Within the City:
Mixed-use is the essence of the future city within a city–it is vastly different from development of commercial real estate.
Mixed-use is not the confusion of people doing a lot of different things at random. It is living and working in an environment that clearly supports the actions of living and working separately and together. The environment is planned to promote living and working separately, and yet to bring them together clearly and to their advantage.
1. The residential tenants can provide a concerned, educated labor pool 2. The business tenants can provide new jobs for this labor pool 3. River City will include the first model of this relationship: the creation of a Business and Technology Center to create new jobs.
The architecture must support these concepts:
A. River City is a “smart building” for business: a building smart enough to anticipate a new role for business not yet completely understood. B. River City provides a “smart building” for residential tenancy.
Mixed-use is possible only in dense centers of living and working. The center of Chicago can provide a river for recreation, a business center for work, and a neighborhood for living that will bring people back to rejuvenate city life.
Our architecture can shape a denser city suited to our social changes and concerns. Our denser cities can support our jobs. A new urbanism can attract a balanced society which in turn can provide those human services we promise ourselves through cities.
Churchill said it best: “We shape our buildings and our buildings shape us.”