Affordable Housing Institute : US

Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downwards… Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing.

– Sun Tzu, The Art of War

 

As Paris burns and other European cities tremble, Americans may wonder, why the suburbs? Why are they the ghettos, not the inner city?

Evreux, France

The answer takes us back several centuries.

As France’s government awakens to a complex problem that will take months, years, possibly even decades to address, we have to begin our exploration of the solution by gaining knowledge of the ground. Appreciating the physical configuration of European cities, and the isolated suburbs that ring them, is fundamental to any proposed solution.

 

What defines a city: essential functions

Not only are buildings exoskeletal, cities can be either exoskeletal or endskeletal. A city’s skeleton is its network of roads and major structures; its nervous system is its transportation lines. Thus the modern city is physically defined by its streetscapes and its people flows among the five essential urban uses: home, school, work, shopping, and recreation. In a healthy city, all these are readily available, preferably on foot, with security and the perception of security.

 

That perception is as critical as the reality — both citizens and would-be perpetrators must believe the law is just around the corner, invisible but ever-vigilant. When it breaks down, we have looting in New Orleans, torched cars in Paris.

Toulouse, France

 

Housing is a city’s anchor, for it is where jobs go at night. If the jobs leave at night, so does money (for jobs are wealth creation made manifest), and money demands safety. Poverty cares less about safety because there is nothing to steal and thus the crimes are smaller, more personal, and more chronic: extortion and protection replace robbery.

 

Genetic code of the European city

In Europe, what we recognize as a city — as opposed to a village, encampment, or military garrison (for definitions, see box) — is an outgrowth of the early Renaissance, a time when Western civilization moved beyond autonomous agriculture and into structured distant trade. (Both the Greeks and the Romans established cities as we define them, but as all those cities fell into dissolution, the city re-emerged as a new creation.)

 

Types of communities

· Village. A cluster of homes at the nucleus of an agrarian self-sufficient community, undefended and bounded by farms.

· Encampment. A temporary resting place for a nomadic populace, characterized by minimal permanence (e.g. a well or oasis) and predominantly portable accommodations.

· Garrison. An imposed outpost with the purpose of protecting a larger surround and housing a military force. A fort writ large.

· City. A permanent market with a distinct identity and an independent polity. (Cities include towns, which differ in scale but not in interpersonal congress.) By definition, a port is a city. By definition, a city never sleeps.

A slum is thus redefined as an economically rational, socially and physically dysfunctional neighborhood within a city.

 

Such cities were independent polities because there was no superior political organization, and as independent polities, they now and then had to be defended from roving armies. These cities thus grew hard shells, circular walls broken only by heavily fortified guard towers.

 

Lucca, Italy, whose city walls are fully intact

 

Avila, Spain

 

The early-Renaissance European city of first Italy (Ubrino, Orvieto, Todi, Lucca, Siena), then the continent, is thus like a coral: in times of tranquility open and expanded around the countryside, contracting into an impenetrable hard shell in times of violence. The walls define its footprint.

Chester, United Kingdom

Chester, 1571

 

Inside that small protected space are all the essential elements: town green, market square, cathedral, city hall, and every form of specialist craft that serves a large population, plus accompanying residential housing, starting from the apex — palaces, mansions, rectories — and right down to worker’s quarters.

 

[The physical hard shell also is symbolic of a political shell. European nations with the strongest city-states, particularly Italy, were among the Western world’s last places to become nations, achieving this status only late in the nineteenth century.]

 

Space is at a premium, so houses are small, as are roads. Old-world city centers are vehicle hostile: they were never designed to accommodate wheeled transport, and they do not.

 

[Imagine the gauche automotive terror my mother-in-law once faced when she found herself, by confusion of map-reading, driving atop Lucca’s city walls!]

 

They were also manufacturing-hostile. European city centers might accommodate artisans and craftsmen, but not foundries — those were sited out of town. Josiah Wedgwood built his own manufactory on his own river (the Trent and Mersey Canal) in the Midlands.

Wedgwood’s Etruria factory, directly in the path of the Trent and Mersey canal

 

Genetic code of the American (more generally, New World) city

Typical American cities were settled by pioneers who rolled their wagons into what they saw as virgin territory and set to work laying out neat grid configurations. Those cities, laid afresh on the plains by homesteaders hauling Conestoga wagons and toting hunting rifles, were founded without walls, paid afresh on the plains with broad, vehicle-friendly streets. Where the European city ended in a wall, an American city ends with a right angled turn onto a sign-posted dirt road.

 

It is no surprise, in an American motel, for the front window to face a parking lot, the rear window to overlook a cornfield.

[The same orthogonal grid dominated throughout the English colonies, so Americans are instantly at home navigating downtown Melbourne, Winnipeg, Darwin, and even Pretoria.]

 

Melbourne, Australia

Pretoria, South Africa

Darwin, Australia

Winnipeg, Canada

Sacramento, California

 

In the American city, manufacturing and commerce and homes all coexisted, block by block, as the city grew and grew outward from its initial seed. Even as urban an environment as Manhattan always had — and today still has — the Garment District.

 

I grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts, which today a visitor would see as a picture-postcard tourist ‘old town’ stapled to a classical American suburb. But in the Civil War the town manufactured bullets, and I can still dimly remember working shoe factories in downtown Marblehead, housed in large warehouse-style buildings with red asphalt shingling.

 

Genetic imprint and the first demographic wave:

The persistence of city structure in post-WW2 Europe

Where an American city is thus a tabula rasa, a European city is a palimpsest that is permanently imprinted with an anachronistic pattern. (There’s one exception: for a few cities such as Rotterdam, World War II bombing destroyed the downtown core so thoroughly the rebuilding could lay down a new grid, but by military expedience very few cities suffered such a fate.) That fourteenth-century configuration remained even as the second half of the twentieth century saw unprecedented urbanization and the remaking of European society to accommodate, if not tolerate, the automobile.

 

With the city center both cherished and inflexible, where could the new people, and the industry, and the manufacturing, and the cars, go?

In Europe, as in America, they had to go out — out beyond the ring road, out into the formerly agricultural spaces. But where in America this was a continuous growth — just grid a few more streets, lay out some new signs, string some new poles and wire, and annex the result — in Europe was forced to leap into the unknown. European post-war jobs were thus zoned into Industrial Estates, as they became known, disconnected from the city center. Out there – out among the Industrial Estates — there arose a need for new workers’ housing.

 

[One might have thought that Europe after WW2 would embrace the new town, but here we encounter cultural conservatism and historic snobbery. The UK has built new towns in Milton Keynes, Swindon, and Corby — all of them perfectly pleasant places, accommodating and well designed — but to this day the names are used as talismans of crass commercialism.]

 

Enter the housing estates, the subject for Part 2, coming tomorrow.

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