The New Urbanism:
To Whom Should We Listen, Studs Terkel or Martha Stewart?
by Mike Pyatok

The Social Policies of Urban Renewal, New Village Journal
Issue 2, 2000

1. Social Policies of Urban Renewal
Not to review the obvious, since we all recognize that urban infill and suburban sprawl are two sides of the same coin. But our urban in-fill tasks today within many inner city neighborhoods are of Herculean proportions because of many decades of systematic disinvestment in inner cities coupled with public-private collusion in the expansion of suburbs. This lack of investment in sectors of the inner city has meant a flight of jobs, chronic unemployment, loss of ability by the abandoned populations to find or hold onto work, along with new generations inheriting those problems and taking them to the local schools, which in turn spiral down from places of learning to places of fear and fortification. That investment in middle and upper income flight has meant very apparent physical disrepair and abandonment of the real estate within older inner city neighborhoods.

When we discuss strategies for redevelopment of these older neighborhoods, fixing the real estate and its appearances is too often deemed the number one priority for resuscitation. Real estate renewal, or focusing on the ’sticks and bricks’, as difficult as that may be sometimes, is often quicker and easier than importing businesses with decent jobs for local residents and revitalizing neighborhood schools to offer challenging and effective education. It could be argued that this is a ‘chicken and egg’ problem, that sources of employment will not move into or near areas displaying such severe physical signs of disinvestment. But this argument assumes that the only way to improvement is the importation of outside sources of employment, not the incubation of local home-grown businesses.

The latest efforts to refocus attention on the inner city, whether by the CNU, HUD or local RDA’s, is showing signs once again of this tendency to quick, cosmetic physical fixes. We have learned that just fixing the real estate is not enough, and that wholesale removal of people and their neighborhoods is inappropriate. But the latest cure mythology promoted by HOPE VI and many RDA’s, is to import people with higher incomes, particularly in the form of homeowners, asserting that ‘mixing’ incomes is healthier for a neighborhood than maintaining it homogeneously low-income. This also has its drawbacks for the existing residents who have toughed it out during the leaner years. The social engineering of relocating the poor with rent vouchers as the HOPE VI program is doing, or the less sensitive strategy of one-time reimbursements for relocation in order to make room for people with stable and higher incomes, forces the same painful social and economic costs on those who must move as it had under earlier forms of wholesale urban renewal/removal.

2. Architectural Policies of Urban Renewal
In the same way that the implementation of this newer ‘mixed income’ social policy has its flaws, so too does the architectural and urban design clothing in which it comes dressed today. We can all agree that importing neighbors who already have jobs does little in the way of providing real jobs for those underemployed or unemployed who are permitted to remain as part of the new mix, or who must move on and be excluded from the mix as real estate values rise. In the same way that the social planners have made the importation of jobs, job training and micro-loans for small, home-based businesses a lesser priority for the existing low income residents than fixing the real estate to lure in those from the outside who already have jobs, the architects facing the design task for these policies also fixate on those picturesque architectural qualities that will attract people with somewhat more discretionary income. They do not design neighborhoods that can promote home-based, incubator businesses.

The architects sincerely believe that those who are unemployed or underemployed need the same types of frozen domestic stage-sets from yesteryear to feel like they belong with the higher income class of their employed new neighbors. Somehow having their own home and front porch is expected to catapult them into the middle class, which this kind of domestic imagery purports to reflect. In this sense, the Martha Stewarts of urban design are intruding on the lives of people like those Studs Terkel has so often documented in their own voices, and in the process insulting their cultures and ignoring their more significant economic needs.

3. Suggested Policy Corrections
Some adjustments to these social and physical planning policies for revitalization need to be made to accommodate the realities of those who must survive on modest incomes. If we make local entrepreneurial activity on the part of the existing residents a prime social and economic objective, and not their relocation or architectural ‘repackaging’, then certain urban design and architectural responses may naturally follow to facilitate this type of live-work community. In fact, to the Martha Stewarts of urban design, the results may seem downright ‘grungy’.

Design Issues:

  • Depending on parking requirements, at densities even up to 35-40 du/acre, it is still possible for dwellings to be ground-related with both front sides and back sides. Being ground related, with a back side not visible to the more public street side, sets the stage for the many untidy, but critical-to-survival, home-based businesses that require manual labor-whether repairing autos or appliances, making clothing or furniture, manufacturing home decorations, providing hair and nail cosmetic services, etc., all somewhat ‘grungy’ activities with their unique consequences for the physical appearances of real estate.

  • The presence of alleys, often promoted by the CNU, offer an excellent opportunity to those households who need to engage in these types of messier live-work ventures without destroying the ‘proper’ street appearances so valued by today’s homeowners and policy makers.

  • All dwellings can be designed, without any appreciable increase in size, to permit a portion of the home to be cordoned off for either a messy income-producing activity or to rent out or sublet to a tenant (without necessarily adding a kitchen) for additional income to the owner or primary tenant.

  • We should not borrow from the early 20th Century’s middle class and gentry notions of domesticity, which sought picturesque retreats from the messy places of industrial work using fantasies of craftsman bungalows, mini-mansions, or other miniaturized references to the lives of landed gentry. Rather, if we need at all to look to our past for models, architects today perhaps should look for inspiration to our pioneering and urban immigrant days-- or perhaps to today’s Third World-- to find models of ‘entrepreneurial’ neighborhoods, not to mimic or romanticize the physical conditions and images of struggling under poverty, but to borrow from them with appropriate revisions to meet, within reason, today’s standards for health, safety, and comfort.

Codes, Covenants and Regulations:

  • Zoning regulations need revising to permit these uses with housing, which may often be considered ‘light manufacturing’. We have to carefully scrutinize the biases of those among us who produce home imagery in this age that worships ‘exchange value’ over ‘use value’, sporting and promoting frozen, designed imagery, whether they be from HUD, private developers, the local public officials, redevelopment agencies, property management companies or ourselves as architects and planners of the CNU. As professionals and solid members of the middle class, many of us personally matured in an age long past pioneering and immigration days, when such diverse uses were integrated within neighborhoods, blocks and dwellings out of necessity with little complaint or sense of impropriety. Those among us who matured under these conditions need to remind our colleagues of the rich opportunities that once resided in such neighborhoods.

  • We have to understand that as much as 25% or more of the population of our inner cities today live under those same difficult economic circumstances as pioneers and immigrants but are now disallowed by modern zoning, building codes, lending and insurance policies and property management policies from having the opportunities that had been present during pioneer and earlier industrial times: the home used as a homestead, the block used as an incubator of small manufacturing and repair workshops, the neighborhood used as a thriving, messy exporter of goods and services, rather than a bucolic setting for retreat and home-based escapist consumption, relying upon local, cutesy retail centers to distribute goods produced elsewhere.

  • Rental property managers and lenders need to reconsider their policies to recognize that those struggling up from the bottom as renters have little concern about the long-term exchange value of their dwellings acquired by someone else when they move as they are in their dwellings’ use value for the here and now, that is, how their dwellings can be used to earn income for them now, not when they are sold. The less predictable and less tidy aspects of living in a neighborhood characterized primarily by its ‘working’ features (use value) and less by its designed ‘domestic’ re-sale features (exchange value) is what is being suggested here.

4. Conclusion
There were good reasons, at the turn from the Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century, for muckrakers and social reformers to see their factory districts as unhealthy, polluting and disease-ridden neighborhoods. But over the remainder of this century, the gradual and systematic purging from our neighborhoods of the livelihoods needed by lower income households eventually became a means to separate classes and races. In the process of ‘sanitizing’ the city, not only were the poor relegated to their own zones, their zones were also denied the opportunities to engage in their life blood activities. The CNU, in collusion with HUD and its HOPE VI program, in their quest to ‘domesticate’ low income neighborhoods, are not only perpetuating in part the tradition of displacing the poor, they are also imposing restrictive architectural and planning straight jackets onto those who are privileged to remain, preventing them from engaging in forms of economic self-improvement. As we turn from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century, we need more sensitive policies that reflect the ‘cleaner’ means available to us today by which we can manually produce goods and services, particularly at the micro-scales of the home, block and neighborhood. In this way we may be able to reinstate a slightly more stable foundation for working class communities to raise their families with dignity, confidence and more self-reliance in spite of the stranglehold of global capitalism.