Washington
and Berlin. Minneapolis and St Paul. Chicago and New York. Paris and Buenos
Aires. There are some cities that seem to come in pairs, whether as twins, rivals,
siblings, or off-spring. They reflect,
mimic, and answer, each other in form, culture, and power. We’re always comparing cities; we almost do
it for sport (and it’s often about sports).
We note the ways in which one city is superior to another because of
what it does or doesn’t have.
We
Washingtonians regularly get smacked down for the failings and quirks of our
city. Washington isn’t a real city because_____. Fill in the blank with your own gripe. It doesn’t have real neighborhoods, so say the Baltimoreans, despite empirical evidence
of humans happily place-attaching themselves to Benning Heights, Bloomingdale, and
Brookland. In fact, Washington has some
of the most memorable and imageable neighborhoods, thanks to L’Enfant’s plan
which bestows on various chunks of the city unique combinations of geometries--circles,
squares, orthogonals and hypotenuses—and geographies—ridges, hills, and shores—not
to mention finely tuned views to our incomparable monuments.
Which,
of course, leads others to the common complaint: Washington isn’t a real city because it doesn’t have a
skyline. At least that’s what the pre-Copernican Manhattanites say, who still
think the world revolves around their little island the skyline of which
telegraphs the message that concentrated private capital defines the city. Washington does
have a skyline, but its buildings belong to all of us. The wish for a skyline
comes only from capitalists, formalists, and purveyors of postcards. While a skyline
is as necessary to a city as bicycle ownership is to a fish, that’s not to say
that density isn’t crucial to a city. In
fact, urbanity depends on the friction of constant human encounters, and its
economic health depends on enough people with enough discretionary income to
support enough street life. It’s the bottom twenty feet of buildings, not the
top, that make or break a city.
As
much as we’d like to say that every city, like every child, has its own special
challenges and merits, and we shouldn’t compare them, comparisons are powerful
tools for sparking change. Portland’s
success with light rail and streetcars is only reproducible if planners,
designers, and elected officials can parse the ways in which their own
situation is or is not similar to Portland’s.
Washington builds a sports arena in the middle of its formerly moribund
downtown and chooses not to provide any parking for its 20,000+ fans. What does another city need to know about
Washington to predict whether that will work for them? What is it about Charlottesville that made
its pedestrianized downtown thrive, while others have languished?
These
are some of the questions that we’ll be raising, and maybe even answering, this
spring in the brand new, fresh from the curriculum committee, Comparative Urbanism Seminar. It’s always a little scary to teach a brand
new course, and it’s been awhile for me, but I do believe that this is going to
be fun! And I’ll be sharing with urbiphiles everywhere.
