Comparing Cities

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.