Public and Private Space

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Public and Private Space Author(s): Kate Winter, Denise Scott Brown, Ron Shiffman, Alan Plattus, ElizabethPlater-Zyberk, Fred Koetter and Stephen Kieran Source: Perspecta, Vol. 30, Settlement Patterns (1999), pp. 92-97Published by: on behalf of Perspecta. The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1567234Accessed: 16-03-2015 10:27 UTC

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92 perspecta 30

Winter I'd like to consider for a moment private spaces that serve public functions. Is a private space that serves a public function equal to a public space that is truly public? Also, how can housing communities achieve a balance between public and private? Plater-Zyberk Like a shopping mall.

Winter Like a mall. Can that satisfy our need for civic space? Kieran I'd like to point out that much of the infrastructure of this country is, and always has been, put in place privately and then been taken over by the public sector. In fact, if you quantify it, there is probably more privately-built infrastructure. It goes back to the nineteenth century. Look at the electric streetcar-the

first one in Atlanta was put in by a developer who owned a downtown office building and some property that he didn't know what to do with. So he built the streetcar line to improve the value of his property at either end of it. Now, the question really ought to be, at what point does this kind of development come back into the public realm, and what is it that the public is assuming the responsibility for? The immediate question is the privately-owned shopping mall; a couple of cases have gone to the Supreme Court about free speech in malls. The question about the real nature of that space is now before us. Scott Brown I'd call it "virtual" public space. Plattus We need to ask if what we make is for the immediate client, that is, whoever pays the bills, or if it is designed so that it

could become public sometime in the future, even if not at the outset. I'll use the example of Elizabeth's work at Kentlands. They started out trying to build a shopping center that could, first of all, function in a more public way, and eventually get re- absorbed into the public life of the place. It became extremely difficult, because the formulas that were applied by the developers were not predicated on that level of generality. The prime developers get their money out of those developments so quickly that they couldn't care less about what they become ten, twenty or thirty years from now. Koetter It seems to me that planning has become extremely programmatic, immediately representing a particular interest. But if these projects are going to last longer than the moment, they have to be trans-programmatic. If a plan is imposed on a com- munity, it's bad. But if there's no consensus as to what that plan ought to be, no settlement pattern is going to emerge. I think there's a distinction between process and pattern. They're related, but some of the patterns which remain the most useful in Boston, for example, have been there a long time. In and of themselves, they are adjustable and allow for accommodation of various kinds across time. But here again, if we're involved in the question of identifying things which may be useful over time, we may be getting too specific from a design point of view.

Shiffman But what we're really doing is privatizing what was originally public space. We all agree that suburbanization and

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roundtable 93

Times Square, themed entertainment, 1999

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t. This undermines the city, in many cases not by would do today. Could the commons provide a the choice of the people, but by market choices, model for augmenting our private malls with the way we condition things for Main Street to public activities? be destroyed. Plater-Zyberk One pattern-or settlement Plater-Zyberk There's something important we pattern, if we go back to the initial topic-that is haven't really talked about today. The fact is, truly American, is that of residual space, of the public space is a problem in this day and age object building in space. In cities in other parts of because people think it's impossible to maintain ade- the world, they're very clear about territoriality, quately. When you work in any urban area, the first thing about what's public and how it's maintained, and about that people will tell you, before any other issues, is defining the proper behavior in those places. It's clear "Make it clean and safe, or don't make it at all," espe- what's private, including great apartment courtyard cially parks. And that's something that the private buildings or even individual houses, in which sector has been able to deliver with a vengeance. there are courtyards. There's a clear definition of People who can make the choices are running to who takes care of what, and of who gets to par- the places that are as close to guaranteed safe ticipate in what. and clean as possible. So there's a governance 25 # Shiffman That's changing

dramatically, issue here, a management issue that is really because those cities were originally homoge- difficult for us as architects to deal with. nous societies with class differences-so they Scott Brown Perhaps there's another model. I6'*0 were able to impose those class differences. Now once heard Ivan Illich describe the uses, histori-67 they're becoming much more heterogeneous. cally, of the commons in the small English and New We're using the architectural discipline to address England town. The commons was public but not in our the problem of crime, when we really need to go to a sense of public-different people in the society had different transdisciplinary approach. We're not going to solve the problem rights over it. Some could cross it, others could graze cattle on it, of crime by just manipulating space. We really need to start look- and some could gather its twigs for firewood. Public ownership ing at some of the fundamental reasons for crime. Otherwise,

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94 perspecta 30

we're going to be constantly finding ourselves in a defensive pos- ture. Shopping malls are becoming more and more threatening. They are where carjackings occur. People are realizing that this is the territory in which to commit crimes. Koetter I think there's a relation between building pattern and crime. Many traditional cities took the form they did because they were dangerous. I've been reading accounts of central European medieval towns, where it was impossible to go outside. The territoriality that you associate with the city was at least in part not a civic gesture but a condition of a differentiated public. The ground plane was structured in such a way that distinctions were real. Kieran I think we can make one observation about the two exam- ples being talked about here. Whether we are discussing the shopping mall or Oscar Newman helping existing low-income or urban neighborhoods gate themselves, we are really talking about the same issue-that you can only control public space today in small quantities with rather specifically defined boundaries and with some kind of internal management system. At best, fragmen- tation results in a quasi-public enterprise in which you can control some of the issues that keep us all from using these spaces. Scott Brown Fairmount Park is a particularly interesting example of a bounded public space. It winds through upper- middle-class, residential areas of northwest Philadelphia. On summer weekends the rich go to the Poconos and the poor go to the park; they picnic and hold block parties throughout the northwest neighborhoods, yet you hear no outcry. Thirty years

ago African-Americans were not welcome in the Park; since then it has desegregated, yet I've never heard complaints. Perhaps this is because the Park runs through a river valley and doesn't seem to be part of the residential areas bordering the valley. Kieran There's a physical separation? Scott Brown Yes. Plater-Zyberk I'd like to go back to something Ron has brought up twice: this transdisciplinary work, which I think is critical. I don't think schools are preparing architects to think or work in those terms. Scott Brown It's not easy. In the 1960s, interdisciplinary edu- cation gained a bad reputation in architecture because it was underfunded and run by amateurs. To have a good interdisciplinary program, you need a faculty who can make connections between disciplines, and they must work hard. A worthwhile interdisciplinary studio requires the studio critic to spend as much time with individual lecturers in preparing their lectures as the lecturers spend themselves. It takes hours of preparation, but most schools don't know this is necessary and, in any case, couldn't fund it. Plater-Zyberk It's a contradiction in terms for the university as it is currently defined in the U.S., because the territoriality of disciplines is highly structured. Plattus And the system of tenure is based on them. As funds become more restricted, one of the things that goes away first is the margin on which you can operate genuinely interdiscipli-

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roundtable 95

much of the infrastructure in this country is. and always has been, put in place privately

nary work, and the same thing is true of the funding structure of projects. When one looks at Requests for Proposals and Qualifications now, so much is already determined by the definition of who the prime contractor is going to be. It's just like public space. If we truly value it, then we have to admit that it doesn't pay for itself. It is a choice that we make. You know if we continue to fool people into thinking that we can do genuinely interdisciplinary work or make a public space that polices and cleans itself without any investment at all, then we have only ourselves to blame. Kieran The question of what we should be doing in the schools is a very difficult one. The first priority I suppose is to develop people within a discipline, and it's questionable whether or not that can be done in three years, let alone asking them to go out into another discipline. Shiffman It's an attitude that you communicate to your student body. How many of us ask our students when they walk into a class what they've read in the newspaper that day? What books they're reading that do not have anything to do with the profes- sion? How can we interpret civic life? We tend to isolate our students so much from their environments and from other ones that we are not creating the kind of practitioner that we need. Scott Brown For years I taught interdisciplinary-in your terms, transdisciplinary-studios. I don't believe architecture students should take more than one such studio, because they have many other skills to learn as well. But few of the students

who took my studios, particularly the early studios, ended up as architects. They became good administrators.

Shiffman Is that more of a phenomenon of the time? Scott Brown Not necessarily. They may have self-selected to become administrative types because they had administrative ability. Administrative ability is even rarer than design talent. Also, though I tried hard, I feel I didn't help my students learn to design-to become skilled in translating verbally stated require- ments into three-dimensional form. This, with all it entails, is very difficult to do. And it's very difficult to teach. winter In what ways has the market's preference for standardi- zation and gentrification influenced the way in which individual communities are designed and developed? How have developers and architects contributed to a commodification of architecture? Koetter I think two things are happening: one, in many Ame- rican cities, portions of the historic core have been transformed into gussied-up shopping centers. I don't think this phenomenon is isolated to the U.S. The center of Arezzo is like a big up-market shopping center. It's not only the question of consumer pres- sure, but also people's perception of what cities are. It's the uni- versalization of Disney World's Main Street -you transform huge portions of a real city into that sort of environment and what does that say about public space? Shiffman There's a fundamental difference when commercial- ization is anchored to the existing fabric, as opposed to going in unanchored. When it is unanchored it creates certain dynamics

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96 perspecta 30

that can erode the existing fabric; it may adapt or change the nature of that fabric-with various degrees of success, depending upon the sensitivity of the designer and managers of the process. Koetter You're saying that in the case of Arezzo the buildings will still be there after Giorgio Armani goes away. Shiffman It won't be the case if they build outside the city. Kieran We're always asking what we can take from the center city to learn about the edges. I think that the economic reality is that the center is learning more from what's going on at the edges, and starting to implement strategies that heretofore were considered anti-urban. I'm not sure they necessarily are. One example is the accumulation of large groups of buildings into a district that comes to have an identity independent of the city. I would argue that these are fundamentally not too different from a mall; you're making a grouping of buildings for a thematic pur- pose with some sense of identity and control within a context. Whether or not it is entirely healthy is another matter. Shiffman In New York City we're having a large debate about whether to accommodate these new large footprint category- killer retail boxes. My argument is that it is a new form of mar- keting, and that they should be in the city of New York. Don't put them out in industrial areas away from the existing commercial strip. Now they're taking over the old department stores, and they're reinventing the department store along Sixth Avenue. If you put them out in Red Hook or the isolated areas of our cities,

they become auto-dependent, and they become competitive with the existing districts. The conglomeration effect is lost. Plater-Zyberk I agree. This goes back to something I was trying to talk about earlier-the idea of working with existing places and accommodating changing patterns of settlement. For many reasons we haven't done that very well. We tend to leave things behind. It is more difficult than going someplace where no one will care. Somehow we need to say that it is worth doing that. But long-term planning is not in our national ethic -we cut and run whenever we can. Plattus But in order to do that kind of planning, we have to be willing to exercise an unprecedented faculty of judgment that we hope we possess. The enemy is sometimes the developer's bag- gage: the Wal-Mart that says "I can only do it one way, and I won't let you have a chance to show me a different way." Shiffman Actually the phenomenon in New York was that with the real estate collapse, market pressures were released on those retail facilities and they moved in on their own. Plater-Zyberk To get back to the question, you're implying that this kind of gentrification is desirable because it keeps places intact, but there is also another exclusionary gentrification which I know a lot of people are concerned about today. Shiffman I think that when gentrification leads to the displacement of people because they have no options or economic wherewithal, it is a terrible phenomenon. But what has occurred

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roundtable 97

because of the fear of gentrification in some cases is that in low- income areas we are building inferior neighborhoods. We are building the permanent ghetto of the future because we think low-income neighborhoods mean low-cost housing. I think that we should be creating the best possible places we can. We need to develop the programs, the subsidies, and the public policies that protect people from displacement. Scott Brown Those are not the only two options. I think there's one other: mixed-use is often something that will keep a mixed population. If you have work opportunities, commerce and housing mixed together, which could be like a traditional neigh- borhood, you will probably have less risk of gentrification. Shiffman How do you feel about Soho and Tribeca in New York City? These are mixed-use areas but are places where probably the largest gentrification took place, resulting in the displacement of low-wage jobs. Koetter This question of what kind of places undergo gentrification is interesting. There's not very much 1950s public housing or Council Housing in London that people are clamor- ing to get into to gentrify. So there's a question concerning what types of buildings and urban situations are attractive to gen- trifiers. I think these buildings and areas have some higher degree of inherent value. Plattus We talk about this constantly in Connecticut. The Northeast has this unfortunate self-image that if you don't have a

little white clapboard church and a green, you're nowhere. And yet you discover these small mill towns where the physical fabric is often wonderful and absolutely dirt cheap. It will go through cycles, which are in many ways natural, as well as unpredictable. But there are certain buildings and urban strategies that lend themselves to reuse, predictable or unpredictable, and those are what we should be making and remaking. Scott Brown I think you can make the cycle of reuse slower and that may be all that you can do. If we have produced a 25- year cycle rather than a five-year cycle, that may already be quite an achievement. Shiffman But maybe we've framed the question wrong. When we talk about gentrification as the problem, that may be the result of not addressing what is really the problem, namely that people don't really have access to the resources by which they can get stability in their housing. We should talk about interven- tions in the market. Our tax code favors the wealthy to acquire housing: more money is transferred to subsidize housing for higher-income grou than for low-income people. In one year the wealthy accrue equ alent of fifteen years of subsidies for public housing. Si t enon, we need to look at those public act on the nature of gentrification. It's Plater-Zyberk B rch cts may sometimes be the people who recognize tho

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Public and Private Space