This is the first lecture in Doug Allen's History of Urban Form series. It begins with a simple question—"What is a city?"—which leads to surprisingly complex answers.
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Watch a video of the lecture, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QigggmU1ME
Doug Allen
History of Urban Form Lecture Series
Lecture 01: Constitution & Representation
0:05
[Its now about six minutes after so we will go ahead and get started…]
Today’s lecture is what I call Constitution and Representation. And I think it precedes from a question that we might ask at the beginning, as most books do on this topic, on this subject – “What is a city?” It is a surprisingly difficult thing to define. Considering that we all know what a city is. We all know when we are in one. But it is a surprisingly difficult to actually define.
0:44
SLIDE TWO: What is a City?
So we will begin with that. Recognizing that no definition, including my own, is totally satisfactory.
0:52
SLIDE THREE: What is a City? – Kostof, The City Shaped
To begin I think its important to see what others have said. In your readings today by Spiro Kostof, a great architectural historian, architecture and urban historian, no longer with us unfortunately. He taught for many years at the University of California at Berkeley and unfortunately passed away at an early age, actually from lung cancer.
His definition, in today’s reading, he offers nine points. Nine points of what a city is. He goes into greater detail that we will go into here today and you can read these when you download this. But there are a couple that I think are worth mentioning.
1:40
One is “cities are places were a certain energized crowding of people takes place.” There is always some discussion of density and crowding and so forth, but I find that to be terribly unsatisfactory. When I go to a Braves game, there seems to be a lot of energy. There is a lot of crowding. And its certainly a lot of people. But Turner Field is not a city.
2:05
Cities do “come in clusters.” There is always a kind of hierarchy and these things distribute themselves in space. If you look at a Medieval map for example of cities in China, or even today, Georgia for example, the southeastern United States, you will see larger cities such as Atlanta and Charlotte and Birmingham and so forth. Then associated with it, kind of in a ring, are smaller cities like Macon and Augusta and Columbus and so forth. And then between, let’s say Macon and Columbus, there are still smaller cities and so forth. Each of those cities, whether its Macon or Columbus or Atlanta, is sort of an economic center for a lot of activity of people that are somehow associated with that place.
And these come in a kind of hierarchy and that is true, interestingly enough, when we go all the way back into the ancient world. In some cases, as in ancient Rome, these are actually set into a kind of law that has to do with the physical agricultural territory that was attached to a particular city.
3:15
“Cities are places that have some physical circumscription.” Well, in the Middle Ages in Europe, you would have a wall. Right? A wall around the city. It was pretty clear. You were either inside the wall or you were outside the wall. You were either “intramural” or “extramural,” from the Latin murus meaning wall. Mural, paint on a wall. Intra-mural athletics means that different clubs and groups at Georgia Tech play one another; extra-mural means we play Clemson or we play Wake Forest or something on a Saturday. Outside the wall.
But in the complexity of the contemporary city, a city like Atlanta, it is very difficult to say where Atlanta begins and ends. When you come down Interstate 85 in a car there is a little sign on the side of the road, lost among many other signs on the road, that says “City of Atlanta.” Otherwise there is no clue whether you are in or not in the city of Atlanta. So its a little more ambiguous today than it was historically.
4:23
“Cities are places favored by a source of income.” They are really engines of… They are economic engines, in other words. Income… trade, intensive agriculture, the possibility of surplus food, physical resources. You know surplus food, you don't think about it you go to Whole Foods or you go to Publix and you buy your groceries. You don't go out and chase the chicken around the yard like my grandmother used to do.
4:50
Number six I think is absolutely critical. That is that “cities are places that must rely on written records.” Writing is a fairly recent human invention, in its current forms going back to about 4000 BCE at the earliest. And it actually has to do really, probably, as we will see with the need to record trade, to record surplus food. Lists of things. A census for example. How many people. How do we provide people in case of an attack. Who is eligible to serve in the army. That sort of thing. Written records become really critical and I think we don't see written records outside of cities. This is in the ancient world that I’m talking about.
5:45
“Cities are places that are intimately engaged with their country side.” I’ve already mentioned that. There is agricultural territory normally associated with a city. In the days before airplanes and trains and boats, like we have today, most produce was like milk. You’re not going to ship milk in. You might ship strawberries and tomatoes in, lets say, from Peru, but your not going to ship milk in. Right? Because it goes bad too soon. And so the agricultural products that are associated with the territory close to the city suggest that, prior to the modern world, there was always an agricultural territory that was attached to the city. And really in a sense they were inextricably linked economically.
6:34
“Cities are places that are distinguished by some kind of monumental definition.” Now by monument, and we will come to this in a moment, by monument what we are really talking about is memorial, memories. We are unique among the animals, as far as I can tell… its true that Salmon go back to the place that they were born to spawn. Its true that my dog new how to get home when he was lost. But as far as I know he did not know the name of his grandparents and he did not desire to have a headstone when he passed away. This human trait to enshrine for future generations the memory of something that we think is important in the present is very important. And we see all cities, going all the way back to the earliest forms of human settlements, being associated with this monumental function.
Now in some cases these monuments might be the embodiment of institutions. They might be public buildings, a religious building, a shrine, something else. Right? The monument alone however does not make a city. If we go to Stonehenge in England its very old. Its about the same, roughly the same point in time, as the pyramids in Egypt. We have no idea who the people were who built it. We do know that it took quite a bit of effort because the stones actually came from about forty miles away in some cases. But there is no evidence… There’s evidence of burial. There’s evidence of some sort of ritual associated with it. There are a lot of theories about it, that it was a celestial clock, that it could predict eclipses, that it was sort of an astronomical calendar. But there was no city. No permanent settlement yet found that was somehow associated with it. So the monument alone does not make a city. But cities do always embody a monumental function.
8:30
And finally, it goes without saying, that “cities are places made up of buildings and people.” And I think we only have one city planner in here this year, but I have always been struck by when architects talk about cities, they talk about the physical thing. Right? And when planners talk about… city planners talk about cities, they are generally talking about people. And so there is a rhetorical question, its like a chicken and egg, which is more important – the people or the city? Well, you could say obviously that people are more important that's true. But then without the physical part of the city where would the people… how would they distribute themselves in space without falling all over one another. Right? With out the boundaries that would separate me from my neighbor yet join us together in the overall collective structure.
So a city is like, lets say, a high rise building. Right? The floors and the skin and the structure and the elevator shaft and the mechanical systems and the plumbing, like in this building, are shared by everybody in it. Right? And you can’t design or build a building by accurately forecasting what floor the attorneys are going to move into five years from now. Or trying to regulate that somehow. Right? So the physical part is often, in a sense, prior to the people. Now I’m going to say that now and we will come back to that later in the course because its a little confusing. But its sort of significant, particularly when we get to Rome.
10:03
So these are Kostof’s nine points. And I find them useful and I find them important. He elaborates on them more in the assigned reading. But I find them unsatisfactory. Its too complicated, too complicated. It reminds me of people, I’ve never done this I’ve been married forty years, but I can imagine people going on dating sites that say, you know, “I want my mate to be this kind of person, I want her to be educated. I want her to have a PhD in cultural anthropology from Northwestern University. I want her to be able to cook. I want her…” you know, whatever. You end up with this list of fourteen things and guess what, you’re not going to find anybody. And I think there is some aspect to that here. That it’s a little too much to actually be very useful.
10:55
SLIDE FOUR: What is a City? – Mumford & Wirth
He quotes Mumford, Lewis Mumford, and he quotes Louis Wirth. And so I thought it would be useful if we look at Mumford and Wirth to see what they said. And Mumford says, “The city is a related collection of primary groups and purposive associations: the first like family and neighborhood…” and so on and so on and so forth. You can read this yourself. Again, quite complex in all of its qualifying statements.
11:24
I like Wirth a little bit better. Wirth was actually a sociologist and interestingly enough I think he comes down to these sort of four characteristics that a city must have. One is it must be permanent. Or at least have the pretense toward permanence. When its built the idea is that its going to be there for a very long time. Unlike a lot of things that you say, “well you know it has a thirty-year economic life,” or when you buy an automobile you don't assume its going to last forever. But when cities are built the assumption is that they are going to last for a very long time.
Generally they have very large populations. Yes. They have higher density than rural areas. Yes. And there is a lot of social stratification and social heterogeneity. Yes. That’s fine. But again, it doesn't help us very much in sort of then applying that toward a variety of cities across time and space to really understand how we might differentiate these formally one from the other.
12:24
But I like, actually, the final sort of concluding statement that he makes. He says “all cities, at least those in our culture,” and I think you can expand that actually globally. What they “have in common,” that strikes a chord with me. I think its very easy to sort of talk about difference, what separates us. We have different religions. We have different skin colors. We have male and female. We have different ages. There’s all kinds of demographic things that are all about difference. But in the end those kinds of demographics are really about finding out what people have in common. And it is looking for what is in common that actually I think leads me to my definition.
13:10
SLIDE FIVE: What is a City? – Doug Allen
I thought after over four decades of actually teaching this course, that I should probably obligate myself to come up with my own definition. And so here it is…
“The city is the largest man made artifact in human history. It is a political association manifest as a collective work of architecture, built over time. A city contains two orders: a political order and an economic order. The political order is a framework of common elements owned collectively.”
… we will go into these in a moment.
“The economic order consists of individually owned parcels and their occupants within that collective framework.”
Ok? That is my definition of a city and that is the one that I will apply in this course.
14:00
SLIDE SIX: What is a City? – Constitutional vs. Representational Orders
Now having said that, let’s tease this out a little bit more. So I’ve said that the city consists… for it to be a city it must have two orders present. One is a political order, which you see on the left side of the scree. And the other is an economic order, which you see on the right side of the screen.
The political order, or the collective framework, I call the constitutional order because it constitutes the city. All four of these elements must be present and, as hard as I have tried, I cannot come up with a fifth one. There are only four. In and of themselves they are meaningless. It is only how they arrange themselves and then are occupied later, by the economic order, which for the sake of this course I am calling representational. I don't like that term but it’s the only one that I could come up with. So we are stuck with it until I can come up with something better or if you have a better suggestion. But let me go into this in some detail because I think its very important and you might want to pay particular attention to this slide because it is likely to be on a test. Ok?
15:14
“The constitutional order,” – the political order – “brings a collective structure into being. It is political in nature. It organizes society. It separates us from one another and joins us in a collective structure. It is prior to individual building. Every city has a constitutional order.”
The constitutional order consists of four things. It consists of boundaries. “The boundary is the fundamental tectonic unit of the city. It separates and joins discreet identities into a collective whole.”
Now let me talk about boundaries for a minute. When I say boundaries what comes to mind? Anybody?
[Student: interstate highways?]
Why is that a boundary? Why is I-75/85 and 285 a boundary?
[Student: a physical limit?]
A physical limit! Well that’s how most people think of boundaries and that would be the extramural boundary. And I think the interstate highways actually are in another category altogether which we will tease out toward the end of the course. Its a limit except where you are allowed to cross it, yes. But that’s like the wall of a city, of an ancient city. But there is another kind of boundary. What about boundaries intramural?
[Student: county lines?]
County lines, that’s some. How about the property line between me and my neighbor? How about the wall between my living room and dining room. Which room does it belong to? Anybody? What does it belong to? It depends on which side of the wall I’m on. So it constitutes one side and the other. And without that boundary then I wouldn't have a living room and a dining room. Thus it constitutes the rooms. But what does it belong to? What’s the word we use?
[Student: shared?]
Shared! And its shared by a larger concept that we call what? The house. Right? And the parcel adjacent to my neighbor, who owns that property line? Who actually owns the property line? You do. The city. Right? And if we are going to have setbacks and zoning requirements and other kinds of things, where do those regulations proceed from? The property lines. Right? Seven feet off of the property line, etc, etc. So the parcel itself, at the parcel level, even down to a building like this where this room is constituted by that wall, the wall is a boundary.
Now you say, “that is only if we talk about it as a limit, then that is limited.” But what if we look at it etymologically. What is embedded in the word boundary?
[Student: an inside and outside?]
An inside and outside, that’s a peculiar thing. Right? But what else? How about bind? How about your binder… can I see that notebook? Thank you. What do you call this? Its a binding. Right? So the pages in the book are bound together. Right? These are the ties that bind. My wedding ring, for example, the symbol that I am married.
So the word boundary has actually a double meaning. It separates and joins together at the same time. It separates and constitutes the living room and the dining room, but it joins them together in a larger structure that we call the house. And that is what I mean here that the boundary is the fundamental tectonic unit of the city. Ok? Its constitutional, owned by the city. Owned by the political entity, the political association, the collective association.
Let’s take a high rise condominium community up in Buckhead. Right? Let’s say you’ve got the 12th floor and the 11th floor. Right? And there is an apartment on each. Who owns the floor? The condominium association. You follow me? That is critical in understanding how cities actually operate, particularly from the stand point of designing a city. From an urban design standpoint.
20:03
“The street is the primary structural unit of the city. They allow us to communicate and to move about. They constitute the order within the collective whole. Streets are complex institutions with great social, political, and economic depth. Giving them over to single functions,” – as we have done in the last 100 years, often – “depletes them of their historical depth and their historical role.”
What I mean by that is that since the advent of the automobile we have actually come to a point where we tend to think of streets as something you just drive on. The street is actually the public right-of-way. It has many names: via, meaning way; strada, meaning pavement; etc. They have many names. 16th Street is conceptually a very different thing from Old Flintlock Trace or something in a suburb somewhere. Right? They have different associations that come to mind. But the public right-of-way is the street. And streets are complicated. Revolutions begin in streets, often. Right?
So streets are the primary structural unit, like the column grid of a building. We might in some point in time change this room, forty years from now, to a cafeteria. But the one thing we are not going to move is what? Those two columns. Right? Because if we move those columns the building collapses. Streets are like that. Once they are built they tend to stay with us for a really, really long time. As we will see, an example in Damascus, there is a street called Straight which is about four-thousand years old. When you are in the old city of Jerusalem today walking through the Suq Khan El-Zeit you are actually walking down the Roman cardo that was constructed in about 130 CE. Streets, once they are built, stay with us for a really long time and they shape and form the nature of the city itself. They give a form to it.
22:03
Streets lead often – and they are usually in a hierarchy. Avenues, boulevards, other kinds of things, we will tease these out as we go along. We will talk about how they developed at various points in time and their significance – but usually they lead to a public place of some sort. And here I am being deliberately sort of vague. Maybe even a little too weak. Places where the public gathers, outside of the domestic environment, where one is aware of your identity as a citizen. That’s the important part. That’s the qualifier.
The public may gather in a shopping mall, which has all of the appearance of a street, but is it a street? Is it owned collectively? No. It has doors on either end and you shut it down at ten o'clock at night. Its a fake street, an ersatz street, that is built inside of a warehouse, basically. Right? In fact at Lenox Square here in Atlanta, there is a little obelisk in the middle of the mall, there is a fountain or something, and it says “town square.” And I have always wondered what “town” it was the “square” of. That’s not the center of the city. Ha! It is not owned by the city, but it is developed in imitation of a regular street.
Public places, actually, again with the advent of the automobile and in the complexities of the modern world in the 20th Century, often times these things actually have become quite ambiguous. And its sort of difficult to sort out. But for now lets just say the typically the public place is the place that is associated with the functions that remind us that we are citizens. Public parks. Fourth of July, Peachtree Road Race ends where? Piedmont Park, etc. That kind of thing. As opposed to simply a club house in a condominium building. Or a vacant plaza somewhere in front of a building.
24:19
Normally public places then serve a variety of roles. But one of the things that they serve is that memorial function that I am talking about. And that is that they become then the places, they become the repositories of memory. The repository of the monument. And again there is kind of confusion. When you say a monument most people think, “well its a really big thing.” Because we tend to associate exaggerated size with being monumental. That mean that it has taken on the characteristics of a monument, but if it does not stand for something else then it does not play the role of a monument. The Coca Cola building over here may be really big and it has “Coca Cola” written on top of it. Is it a monument? No. Because it doesn't represent anything but itself.
Monuments can become quite complex and they might include public buildings. If we take a well known example in the United States, the Lincoln Memorial, it was built in the 1930’s after Lincoln’s reputation had been rehabilitated in a number of ways. He was really ridiculed while he was president even from people in the north. In fact the Chicago newspaper called him a monkey after he gave the Gettysburg address. Actually the reporter referred to him as a monkey. Well we built a Lincoln Memorial, and Lincoln’s not buried in there, but what does it represent, symbolically? Some concept of justice. Of unification. Count the number of columns. It’s the number of states in the old Confederacy and the Union. Right? The unification of the nation. And what does it face? The public building which is the embodiment of the legislative branch of the government, with its dome, at either end of a long street we call The Mall. And Martin Luther King appropriated that in 1963 to give his very famous speech. Right?
So these kinds of public spaces have the potential within which there is a symbolic function of remembrance. That stands, in this case, symbolically for justice that we intact can transform ourselves in light of that concept of justice. The court house square, the capital, these all are forms of that. And in the ancient world they might contain a temple; they might contain another kind of public building; they might contain the house of the king; they might contain something which is intended to ensure the welfare of the community as a whole. That’s the intent. And the purpose of the monument is to obligate future generations to remember something that the builder of the monument believes to be important. So how long is a monument supposed to last? Forever. That’s the intent.
27:37
Well, on the other side of the coin, we have then the economic order. This order “animates the constitutional frame and gives it meaning. The representational order is economic in nature. The representational order changes more rapidly over time than the constitutional order.”
Lets go back to my ersatz street in a warehouse at Lenox Square. And lets think about over time, trust me when you are my age you will have seen this change enough, where the cookie store changes place with tie store, changes place with the furniture store, things come and go out of business. Right? Along the street. But what doesn't change at Lenox Square? The column grid, the leasing depth, etc. You can buy shops side to side but you cannot encroach on the collective space in the center. Right? And that is an analogy, perhaps, to how the city operates.
28:37
Now, the economic order then actually fleshes out this political framework. This constitutional framework. And it consists of houses of all types including farms and industrial production. All part of what I would call, in the larger sense, the domestic realm. And markets, commercial, office, and institutional buildings that are not associated necessarily with the constitutional frame. The vast majority of architectural production falls with the category on the right. Individual acts of building over time animate, and give meaning to a large or small degree, the nature of this political framework. This [the constitutional order] is more or less permanent, over here. And this [the representational order] is more or less changeable, over here, over time.
West Peachtree Street, 5th Street, we’ll come back to that in a minute, on this corner right here, I remember when, in my lifetime, when that block right there was John Smith Chevrolet, there was a Chevrolet dealership, and this block was actually a series of houses. And there was one on this corner about where I am standing that I got my stereo, my first stereo, repaired. It then became a parking lot. Right? There was a night club over here called Cafe Erawan and that changed. Georgia Tech bought it. But what didn't change? The public right-of-way. Right? So these various uses were plugged in to this political frame. And as the come and as they go, they animate the boundaries in significant ways and they give the city meaning. The occupants, the people, the uses, give it meaning.
But the framework is prior to individual habitation. “In the United States today the first three of these [in the constitutional order] are controlled by subdivision regulations.” That is, this. The monument, by its nature, is representational. It stands for something else. But once it it constructed it then flips into this category and becomes a permanent part of this constitutional, political, order. These are controlled by subdivision regulations, the economic order is controlled by zoning ordinances, at least since 1926. We will discuss that later on in the course.
31:00
Now let me pause for a moment before I move on and we will look at how these distribute in space. I mentioned West Peachtree and 5th Street. We might also ask the question while we are sort of pondering these big issues, where does that come from? 5th Street? Where does that come from? West Peachtree, Peachtree Street, where does the concept of naming streets after trees come from? I’m going to tell you in a minute, but I want to use that to make a point. The point is that the point of view of this course is from this intersection looking backwards to ask ourselves the question, “How did I arrive here?”
So there are lots of great cities in the world. Stockholm. Moscow. Santiago, Chile. Keep going. Lyon. Right? We are not going to talk about those cities because I have to edit this some way. And the filter that I have applied is really asking the question how did we come to a point where we have an intersection called West Peachtree and 5th [Street]. Right? And then why does 5th Street jog, in this uncomfortable way, right here? That’s an interesting question.
And I’ll tell you where it comes from. It comes from Philadelphia. William Penn who actually thought that if he could create an indexical order he could create the city of brotherly love. Phil-Adelphia, that’s what it means. Therefore it would erase all the sort of Medieval social hierarchies. “Where do you live?” Well I live at Holyrood Palace [Edinburgh, Scotland] which would indicate to me that I’m important because I am associated with a bishop. Right? Follow me? If I live at 99 8th Street, what does that signify? That I am just next door to 98 8th Street. Ok? It’s an indexical system. So the streets that run between the rivers were named after trees, Locust and so forth, and after functions, Market, Broad, a physical descriptor. Streets then running parallel to the rivers as they move away 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th all the way up to 30th Street. Right? So you run out when you hit water again. So in the United States Philadelphia really exerted a profound influence over cities in the 19th Century all across the county.
And so you have a lot of these streets that are indexed like that. So starting with North Avenue, which was the street just outside the city limits when Atlanta got started, the furthest street north, North Avenue, what’s the next street? Ponce, well it was a highway, it was already named. So whats the first… 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and you keep on going up to about 28th Street and then we stopped. When’s the last time we built a street that was numbered? Like the streets of Manhattan or the streets of Philadelphia or the streets of Omaha or the streets of Gainesville, Florida, for example.
34:20
So it was William Penn. But where did William Penn get his ideas? He was a Quaker, a pacifist, a lawyer, very well educated. He traveled in very important circles in London in the late 17th Century. What was he reading? He was reading Filarete. He was reading these texts that were circulating among the sort of intelligentsia of the West End clubs and the legal societies in London at the time. Who wrote those? Italian Renaissance architects. Ha! Well, where were they taking their inspiration from? Well, a misunderstanding of the world that was all under their feet, the old Roman world. And where did they take theirs from? Well it was part of their religion, etc. So as important as, I don't know, Moscow might be on the global scene, by traveling through Moscow we don't get to 5th [Street] and West Peachtree. Do you follow what I am saying, so the filter that I have applied here is that sort of looking at that back and pulling it back forward through time. And I will use examples that will show things around the world in cities in Africa and Arabia and so forth. But I want to say that the perspective of this course is related to this question, this rhetorical device, which is “where does 5th and West Peachtree come from?”
35:42
SLIDE SEVEN: Depiction of Human Activity in Space
Now if we take this constitutional frame and distribute it in space, and it doesn't have to be a rectangle, we see that we can map this out. So that before there is a mine and a yours and a his and a hers and theirs, there has to be then something that differentiates undifferentiated territory, subdivides it into parcels, and that forms that collective structure. And there are those four elements mapped. And I will even argue on very shaky terms, I cant support this for sure, but I believe, that’s all I can say, is that this is really the beginning of human consciousness in the modern sense. That once we actually are able to say, “this is mine, this is yours,” what this line does is that it inscribes a kind of ethical behavior of how I treat my neighbor in his or her absence. Follow me? J.B. Jackson, my teacher, said that “boundaries were what made farmers out of wanderers, neighbors out of farmers, and citizens out of neighbors.” I actually think that’s true.
Now I suppose the second one, streets, that if Adam was in paradise, he didn't need a street. But once he was expelled from paradise and had a neighbor, he needed a street because all of a sudden you have a shared world between you. Right? And among you. The street is the collective space. It is ours. And then the public space, where the public gathers, normally containing some really important thing that ensures the welfare of the community as a whole [ed: a monument].
So we can map these four elements [Slide 6] and they come out looking something like that [Slide 7].
37:37
SLIDE EIGHT: The City is a Building
And then the sort of secondary point that I want to come to, because this is something architects in particular, there are a lot of architects in here, have great difficulty with, is understanding that the street itself, this collective frame, this political frame, is in fact a building every bit as much as that or this is a building. Right? And that there are plenty of places in the world where this is actually a party wall. Right? And the private part of the house, the outside of the house, is of course a doughnut in the middle. We will see a lot of that later on.
38:10
SLIDE NINE: Conceptual diagram of a City
It doesn't have to be rectangular. In fact we can take a portion of Atlanta at Peachtree Street and 15th [Street] and we can map that.
38:20
SLIDE TEN: Map of Peachtree Street and Pershing Point
If its “A,” its part of the constitutional order. If it is “B” it is part of the economic, or representational, order. And we can see the numbers, boundaries, streets, public gather places, and so forth. This is actually my neighborhood. This is Ansley Park. And there we see Winn Park. And there we actually see the sort of publicly-owned things. There are two memorials although the one at the top, at Pershing Point, which is a World War I memorial, is so covered up with vegetation that you can’t even see it. Which is unfortunate. So they do not have to be… they can be irregularly shaped. They do not, in fact, have to be rectangles.
Although rectangles are particularly useful. Unless you sleep on a round bed, sit on a round sofa, drive a round car. Right? Rectangles tend to be fairly useful forms for us.
39:18
SLIDE ELEVEN: Growth & Form
SLIDE TWELVE: Aerial photo of Atlanta
Now if we go through very quickly looking at how then these constitutional elements arrange themselves in space, we don't have to go very far, we can look at Atlanta, a sort of accidental city that we will come to at the very end to talk about how it in fact developed.
39:36
SLIDE THIRTEEN: Atlanta – Edward Vincent Map, 1853
We will look at the first map of Atlanta, 1853. Very new city, very recent city.
39:44
SLIDE FOURTEEN: Atlanta – 1853 map & modern aerial photo
And we can see then how these streets and how these parcels, this constitutional frame… no real public space. The important thing is the rail depot, that we see here, and then the sort of industrial part which had a spring associated with it, which is why this is called Spring Street, by the way, because it led to the spring. Because you had rail cars here coming from Chicago going to Mobile and from here going to Savannah and Augusta. And you had to tie all of this together somehow in a land lottery, then, that each individual owner in the lottery could subdivide theirs any way they saw fit. Despite the fact that this never had any kind of artistic intent, in fact the person who laid it out, Stephen Long, was offered land lot as payment and he said, “No, I think its good of a tavern and a blacksmith shop and not much else.” Ok, that was it. Its now its a city of six million people.
So, look at how that laid down in the crudest possible way influence the shape of the city over time. Right? Astonishing.
40:52
SLIDE FIFTEEN: GA 400 at Haynes Bridge Road
When I retired from Georgia Tech full time three years ago, I was cleaning out my office and I had a lot of material and I found this at the back of a file drawer. This was a set of areal photographs taken the year I started teaching a Georgia Tech, 1977, 1976-1977. This is actually Alpharetta. That’s Georgia 400 which has just been constructed. The photograph stops right here. This is contemporary off Google Earth.
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SLIDE SIXTEEN: GA 400 & Haynes Bridge Rd – growth over time
Again, if we look at this what we see is the remarkable growth that this has experienced. And we can sort of deconstruct this landscape to look then at the streets or roads as the case may be.
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SLIDE SEVENTEEN: GA 400 & Haynes Bridge Rd – public streets forming blocks
SLIDE EIGHTEEN: GA 400 & Haynes Bridge Rd – preserved public open space
We can then look at the public spaces which in this case are regulated wetlands.
SLIDE NINETEEN: GA 400 & Haynes Bridge Rd – blocks & open spaces
We can then super impose the roads, primary and secondary, back on to that, the arterials and the collectors, and we get this pattern.
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SLIDE TWENTY: GA 400 & Haynes Bridge Rd – diagram & aerial photo
So again, these elements are independent of form. But form ultimately has to do with our intent. And of the host of things, in this case a ton of regulations, that actually lead to this form. So what I want you to realize is that when downtown was built there were no regulations whatsoever. None. Right? You just subdivided it the way you saw fit. This is probably the most heavily planned environment that I can think of. Everything built here has been subject to some form of regulation.
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SLIDE TWENTY-ONE: GA 400 & Haynes Bridge Road – characterized by a street hierarchy based on capacity of traffic
SLIDE TWENTY-TWO: Juba, South Sudan
If we look at these elements here, for example, in South Sudan, the city of Juba, we see the similar structure. In this case rectangles. We see the important buildings, a school. We might even see a church. South Sudan is Christian, northern Sudan is Muslim.
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SLIDE TWENTY-THREE: Buenos Aires, Argentina
If we go to Buenos Aires, in Argentina, we see the public gathering place. We see blocks, individual parcels that are visible here in terms of the individual buildings. Train station coming into the center of all that.
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SLIDE TWENTY-FOUR: Kabul, Afghanistan
Kabul in Afghanistan. Again the mosque is a kind of public building, a monument of sorts. The market place that we see up here. Another mosque that we see there. And then individual parcels and streets, our constitutional frame.
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SLIDE TWENTY-FIVE: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Even if we go the favelas of São Paulo or in this case Rio de Janeiro. The most grinding poverty on the planet, just about. What we see is in fact this same structure. Even though this is subject to just make do. Yes, question?
[Inaudible]
That is an excellent question and one that that you should try to keep in the forefront of your mind. Did everybody hear that? Can you say that loudly? I will repeat it. “If there were no regulations in downtown when it was being developed then why does it seem more systematic than Alpharetta does?” That is an excellent question. That’s the question we have to ask. And I hope that by the end of this semester, if I have done my job properly, you will have some understanding of that. I can’t possibly explain it in the next five minutes. So keep that question in the forefront of your mind because that is the kernel of the question of this course and why – as architects, as planners, as engineers, as citizens – it is necessary that we ask ourselves these questions. Right?
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SLIDE TWENTY-SIX: São Paulo – Favela do Moinho
The favelas, here. This is what they look like, in fact. This is in São Paulo.
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SLIDE TWENTY-SEVEN: Scale
SLIDE TWENTY-EIGHT: Scale Comparison
Just briefly, I want to mention in the last… in the closing three minutes here. When I talk to my colleagues in city planning they all want “mixed use.” When I go to the Congress of the New Urbanism, they talk about “mixed use” communities. We all want “mixed use” communities. When I teach in the real estate development course here, that's taught in this college that we are in now, they talk about “mixed use” doesn't work, we need this that and the other. Well when I get up in a hot air balloon, if I’m high enough, everything is mixed use. Right? So we’re really not talking about mixed use. Ha!
What we are really talking about is scale. And scale is always related to the human body. Right? To the human body. How long does it take me to walk? How tall is this room? Always in relation to the human body. That is scale. Right? So if we look then at the Spanish colonial settlement of St. Augustine, Florida, and a very early shopping mall in San Francisco, the Stonetown [Shopping Center], and we look at Georgia Tech – they are all at the same scale, here. This gives you a sense of the size of things.
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SLIDE TWENTY-NINE: Scale Comparison – GT vs. Alpharetta
If we look here then at Georgia Tech, in the small little photograph that we see here. Right? That's one square mile. And this is that area we just saw. This is Alpharetta. This is Georgia 400. Ok? Huge blocks! Enormous blocks!
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SLIDE THIRTY: Scale Comparison – Rome vs. Suburban Atlanta
So if we look at Rome, for example, and we look at suburban Atlanta from the same elevation, at the same scale, we have much greater density Rome.
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SLIDE THIRTY-ONE: Scale Comparison – San Francisco, Panhandle
The white line that you see is one kilometer. This is the panhandle of San Francisco.
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SLIDE THIRTY-TWO: Scale Comparison – San Francisco, suburb
But keep in mind this is also San Francisco. Right?
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Its not cultural, in the sense that American cities look like this and European cities look like that and Chinese cities look like that. Right? They change over time. That’s the point I’m coming to. That is San Francisco [Slide 31]. That is San Francisco [Slide 32].
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SLIDE THIRTY-THREE: Scale Comparison – Rome, Campo Marzio
That is Rome.
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SLIDE THIRTY-FOUR: Scale Comparison – Rome, suburb
That is Rome. Same scale.
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SLIDE THIRTY-FIVE: Scale Comparison – Seoul, downtown
That is Seoul, Korea.
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SLIDE THIRTY-SIX: Scale Comparison – Seoul, suburb
That is Seoul, Korea.
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SLIDE THIRTY-SEVEN: Scale Comparison – Atlanta, Midtown
That is where you are right now. That is 5th Street at West Peachtree. We are actually in this building… somewhere. I don’t know, you can find it. I am too close to the screen.
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SLIDE THIRTY-EIGHT: Scale Comparison – Atlanta, suburbs
That is also Atlanta.
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SLIDE THIRTY-NINE: Density
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SLIDE FORTY: Atlanta Metropolitan Area
And we probably ought to end this here and we will come back and talk about some of these measures on Wednesday.
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If you have any questions at any point, please raise your hand. I will do my best to answer. I appreciate that question. If you have any other questions, please see me after class.
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