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 THE URBAN MORPHOLOGY RESEARCH GROUP (UMRG) BULLETIN No.7 1997
         
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This is the seventh of the Urban Morphology Research Group's
Bulletin series about the Group's activities and matters of
general interest to all those engaged in the study of urban form.

ISSUE 7 CONTENTS

1. Personal Viewpoint: Architecture and the City - The Future (Pt 3)

2. Launch of the ISUF Web Site and Journal

3. UMRG Research Review (1996)

4. UMRG Personalia

5. Invitation for Submissions to Future Bulletins

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1. PERSONAL VIEWPOINT: ARCHITECTURE AND THE CITY - THE FUTURE (pt 3)

Preface (by Simon Marshall)

What follows, is the last of three personal essays by Richard Reep,
an architect registered in Florida State, USA. This trillogy of
essays deals with Richard's perceptions of "Architecture and the
City". The first part (Bulletin no.5) dealt with "the present",
presenting evidence of the impermanence of today's cities' physical
form. The second part (Bulletin no.6) deals with "the past", and the
final part (below) deals with prospects for "the future".

The essays were originally posted to the Urban Morphology Interest
Group ([log in to unmask]) in July 1996. With Richard's permission,
they have been reproduced as it was felt that they would be of
interest to a wider audience. If you would like to discuss any of the
issues raised, please e-mail your comments to [log in to unmask] If
you would like to submit a similar personal viewpoint, please mail
the editor (see below for details).

If you missed the first two parts of the essay, Bulletins 5 and 6 can
be found archived on the UMRG's web site at:

http://www.bham.ac.uk/geography/umrg/news.html

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Architecture and the City: The Future

Five Trends seem to be influencing the future of US cities. Clearly,
however, similar trends are echoed in other countries where
traditional 'Western' planning and economic models have been
followed. Unfortunately, these trends control the morphology of our
nation's cities and we do not control them. These trends stem from
the perceived need for personal security in our lives, the loss of
faith in our government to accomplish even the simplest things, and
the uncertainty of our economic future. These trends are:

1. Public vs. Private
2. Adaptive Mixed Use
3. Informalization
4. Recreating old lifestyles
5. Sanitization of industry


I. PUBLIC VS PRIVATE

America's schism between public space and private space exists, and is
not going away. Some examples:

Main Street vs. Wal Mart: Wal Mart won.
Downtown vs. The Mall: the mall won.
Communal Housing vs. single family housing: single family housing
won.

The "American dream" single family house is a microcosm of many
trends.

Since about the 1970's, houses have evolved to turn away from the
front yard and towards the back yard. The notion of the "front
door" as the entry that presents the house, the family to the street
has become less and less functional and more and more iconic. Front
doors are being designed more ostentatiously than ever: big
porticos, glass transoms, expensive columns. What is missing is the
front porch, with its living room window, facing the front yard that
acknowledges the visitor and the public.

Now living rooms focus on the back yard, the inevitable pool, and the
rooms all cluster around the rear view. Rooms that are unlucky enough
to face the front are usually not the most used: the dining room, the
study, and sometimes even the laundry room.

Homes are now designed with the front doors opening onto a kind of
sallyport: the front porch long gone, the front door resembles a
defensible entry to a medieval castle. This allows the money once
spent on the front porch to now be spent on large stucco columns and
a 2-story tower over the alcove.

Most families come and go through their garage and kitchen. This is
a function of practical house design. This pattern has excluded the
homeowners from using their front door, leaving it for guests. Our
neighborhoods, being very spread out and often without sidewalks,
now have few guests. No one calls that isn't expected; the era of
the door-to-door salesman, the neighborly visit, the pollster is
gone. Now, the front yard and the front door are the true back of
the house: unused, uninviting.

Within the bedrooms, the space once devoted to a rudimentary bathroom
has balloned into 3 or 4 bathrooms, and the master bathroom is
sometimes as big as the master bedroom. The 40 or so square feet that
the entire family needed for lavatory, tub, and toilet is now 400 or
more. This, the most private room in the house, has grown the most.
We have sacrificed almost all the public area and reprogrammed it for
private space.

This, I believe, has happened to our nation's cities. We took most
of the space previously called "public" space--the agora, the steps
of city hall, the public waterfront, the plazas, parks, and
gardens--and utterly trashed them. What is encouraging is that
people today are beginning to take these spaces back. Music in the
Park programs are flourishing. Shakespeare in the Park is becoming
one of the most popular venues in American cities today. (One Newsweek
article recently commented that Shakespeare may be the only playwright
heard more often outdoors than indoors). Parks are being replanted,
trash is being picked up, and nuisance crimes that drive people away
from public spaces are getting some attention from city leaders.

So there seems to be hope that the pendulum may finally be swinging
back the other way in some places. In many places we may continue
to see it swing towards the private side. Our era is often compared
to Medieval Europe: Strong feudal power, weak government power. This
shows no sign of changing yet.


II. ADAPTIVE MIXED USE

Finding new uses for old building shells will be the most important
trend in the coming decades. U.S. cities will densify and the
spread-out landscape of shopping malls, suburban office buildings, and
residential districts will be subjected to renovation, reconstruction,
and changes.

The mud hut era seems to be over. We have many growth constraints on
our cities and towns today, not just regulartory but practical: we
are butting up against rivers, mountains, farmland, swamps, and other
natural barriers that used to be 'way out there. If we keep our heads
about this, we can turn this to our advantage and make the second
growth wave occur on top of the first one, and improve it. You,
readers in the field of urban morphology, have got to make a
difference in how we plan this next generation of growth and make it
better than the last. The planners of Troy 6 hopefully learned from
the mistakes of Troy 7, and didn't build a gate big enough for a
wooden horse.

As a neighborhood evolves, its use patterns will change. I do not for
a minute believe that all the Big Box Retail stores being built today
will all thrive and do well: at some point the marketplace will say
"enough is enough" and we will see only the strong survive. The rest
will be ripe for conversion, for cutting them up into multiple smaller
uses: A warehouse and grocery store. An office building with a
center courtyard. A school.

In the early 1980's, the government only allowed banks to loan money
and hold people's savings and checking accounts. Banks grew by
building many little branch banks all over the place to capture more
consumers.

Banks were opening branches faster than MacDonalds: 3 or 4 on every
streetcorner. I worked on one bank's plan to open 30 or 40 in the
State of Florida within 2 years.

But then deregulation hit, at the same time the 1987 stock market
upset. This caused banks to stop developing so frantically. They
didn't need to because they could sell other services, such as mutual
funds, securities, etc. The Wall Street crash also hurt many of
them, so the strong began gobbling up the weak.

So on the intersection of two streets were Banks A, B, and C. Bank A
buys Bank B and bank C buys bank A, then all three branch buildings
are now owned by Bank C. They don't need 3 branches on a
streetcorner. What do you do with the other two buildings?

This sort of puzzle is being worked out over many different suburbs
today. How to design a building so that it can be adapted to a new
use in the future is a very important question for students. Perhaps
the way to look at it is how do you predesign a building to become an
urban artifact.

Perversely, most buildings today are designed to be throwaway: use
it, then demolish it and rebuild to suit a different need. This is
extraordinarily wasteful and I believe that it will not continue. We
will find new uses for abandoned superstores, shopping malls, and even
industrial buildings, possibly by mixing uses in a building. Turn a
shopping mall into a school and office park. Turn a branch bank into
a drive-thru pharmacy. Turn a franchise restaurant into a senior
citizen's center.

We will certainly be in the position to make over parts of our cities
that were planned, probably in the near future. Infrastructure
replacement will dictate it, if nothing else. Roads crumble and need
widening, power lines need replacement, and our communication lines
will be updated. Right now, we have running parallel along many
roads:
  Telephone lines (originally installed in the 1930's)
  Cable TV lines (originally installed in the 1970's)
  Fiberoptic telephone trunk lines (installed in the early 1990's)
  Private data lines (variously installed in the 1980's and 90's)

All those are likely to be consolidated and buried underground in
either our lifetime or our childrens' lifetime.


IV. INFORMALIZATION

As in our personal lives, I believe that our cities are undergoing a
process of informalization. American business's "Casual Day" is
becoming more and more common in businesses. Downtown once meant
wearing a suit and tie, buildings that were classical, formal,
stern, commanding. Companies relocating to downtown markets have
been less and less common, and the need for face-to-face business is
less important, with so many different ways to communicate.

Before WWII, most U.S. businesses were small and employed a few
people. 1,000 square feet (93 sq m) was considered big for a
business, and the downtown 200' x 200' (61 m x 61 m) block size worked
fine for this size.

Office space has ballooned, however, beyond the capacity of upstairs
spaces to be flexible. Suburban offices built today average 40,000 to
50,000 square feet per floor (3,700 sq m to 4,600 sq m). Businesses
have hundreds of employees, and added computers, fax machines,
copiers, miles of files, and so on and so forth.

The computer may be one tool that allows businesses to shrink in
area once again. If a company evolves as decentralized workgroup
clusters, then it could conceivably re-inhabit the once-thriving
spaces in our downtowns. Businesses may not need that face-to-face
interaction of its coworkers. This would take that informalization
process even further.


V. SANITIZATION OF INDUSTRY

Most North American cities that sprang up in the late 19th century did
so because the location held an advantage as a manufacturing center or
a distribution center. A particular location might be convenient to a
raw material, such as timber, ore, or fish. Another might be at the
crossroads of a river and a railroad: two transportation types that
could interface.

The types of structures that served these needs were warehouses,
processing buildings, manufacturing buildings, or other industrial
structures. Moving forward in time, these buildings may have been
replaced and updated several times but the essential use of the land
under them remains the same. The land has now become prime real
estate.

In the meantime, the city has grown around these industrial uses. I
am here referring to a common pattern where a 19th century city used
the waterfront almost exclusively as a shipping center. River edges
were hardscaped, bricked over, given to railroad beds, warehouse
space, and dumping grounds for industrial waste.

Frequently today cities find themselves with the growth patterns
that pushed people away from these waterfronts because they started
as such nasty places, but today the industry has changed or moved
away from the waterfront. Certainly the loss of America's railroad
system has caused a lot of waterfront property to lie fallow, because
it no longer is served by the freight trains.

U.S. cities are now struggling with the sanitization of these
industrial districts and reopening them to people, turning them into
amenities. This started in Baltimore in the late 1970's with Harbor
Place and has been repeated often with mixed success.

I believe that enough of these "waterfront entertainment districts"
or "downtown districts" have been built now that we can start
analyzing what works and what does not, and build a model for success
for future ones. People are getting used to the idea that going
downtown can be fun, can be entertaining, and can be useful without
sacrificing personal security, and we can capitalize on this trend.

Once upon a time a decade ago, a few cities were legendary for their
livability: Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania were about it. Their lessons are starting to sink in to
less progressive urban leaders. People travel a lot more now, ideas
are shared across a broader spectrum now, and I suspect that a lot of
influential people are going back to their communities and saying
"let's do this thing here."

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending upon your viewpoint, most of
these revitalized districts seem to be the result of one individual or
one company's effort. This means that what was once public space has
been turned over to private hands, scrubbed and rebuilt, and
re-presented to people to enjoy---for a fee. It resembles public
streets, it resembles public plazas, and it resembles the feeling you
get about being in a public place, but notice there are no bums, that
the street life is choreographed, that there are no kiosks plastered
with posters and notices, no mix of classes?

CONCLUSION

The blurring of the public/private line is the most insidious trend
that affects most of the other things that I have written about in all
three essays. To paraphrase a famous quote, we shape our cities, and
thereafter, our cities shape us.

If you diagram a typical Western city over time, and assign one color,
say, yellow to public space and a different color, say green to
private space, you would see a trend of green increasing slightly at
the expense of yellow.

What would be more interesting, however, would be to study the amount
of time people spend in each color and what type of activities they
do, and you might find that people spend more time in the green
(private) areas and if interviewed might actually prefer these
spaces--not because they are private, but because they are simply more
important parts of their lives.

What is right for the future is a balance between the two, which will
allow a choice. That is what democracy is all about, isn't it? It is
hard to keep away from sociology in this kind of essay, and stick to
urban morphology.

Richard Reep
Architect
Florida State
USA
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2. LAUNCH OF ISUF WEB SITE AND JOURNAL

The International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF) was inaugurated in
1994. It seeks to advance research and practice in fields concerned
with the built environment. It does this through an annual conference
and through its own journal 'Urban Morphology'. Its members are drawn
from several disciplines, including architecture, geography, history,
sociology and town planning. In February, ISUF launched its own web
site, hosted by the UMRG to coincide with the Group's hosting of the
1997 ISUF conference. The web site may be found at:
http://www.bham.ac.uk/geography/umrg/isuf.

In May, ISUF launched the first volume of its inhouse journal 'Urban
Morpholgy'. Volume 1, edited by the UMRG, collects together articles
from a broad number of countries and disciplines, reflecting ISUF's
multi-national and multi-disciplinary membership:

           A.V. Moudon
           Urban Morphology as an emerging interdisciplinary field

           S.Satoh
           The morphological transformation of Japanese castle-town
           cities

           A. Siksna
           The evolution of block size and form in North American and
           Australian city centres

           M.G. Corsini
           Residential building types in Italy before 1930: the
           significance of local typological processes Viewpoints

           G. Cataldi, G.L. Maffei, P. Vaccaro;
           S, Malfroy; A.Levy; G. Cataldi; K.S. Kropf
           The Caniggian school

           J. Tatom; P.J. Larkham
           New urban design journals

           J. Nasr
           A multilingual glossary of urban form

>From 1998, Urban Morphology will be published biannually, in April and
October. The annual subscription, which includes membership of the
International Seminar on Urban Form, is stlg15 for both individuals and
institutions. Subscriptions are due on 1 August and should be sent to
the Editor, cheques (in sterling) being made payable to 'International
Seminar on Urban Form'.

For further details, including submission, please see the Journal web
site (http://www.bham.ac.uk/geography/umrg/isuf/urbmorph.html) or
contact the current editor Professor Jeremy Whitehand
([log in to unmask]).
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3. UMRG RESEARCH REVIEW (1996)

The Group's research has continued to be of two broad types; one
concerned principally with historical urban development and the
other investigating various aspects of cities in the twentieth
century. In the case of the first, a major project on the Norman
town in England, Wales and Ireland is providing the basis for three
monographs (one already published and two nearly ready for the
press) in the Group's Research Monograph Series. Related research
on the medieval towns of south-west England is approaching
completion for the Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Two
monographs based on a project exploring the relationship between
economic functional change and the building fabric in early modern
Shrewsbury are in the press. Coming closer to the present, research
is continuing on the comparative development of housing in Worcester
and Gloucester between the early nineteenth century and the middle
of the twentieth century.

Work on twentieth-century cities has been increasingly concerned
with projects having relevance to planning practice. Three studies
have been completed on the place of the concept of the townscape unit
in local planning: two of them in relation to conservation in city
centres (Bristol, Birmingham, Chester and Shrewsbury), and the other
in relation to the delimitation of design areas. These have given
rise to further work on the foundations that urban morphology can
provide for creating and implementing design areas. All these
studies relate to a larger, longer-term investigation of the
relationship between on the one hand the description and explanation
of urban form and on the other the prescriptions contained in local
planning documents.

This work is also providing a conceptual framework within which four
projects are being undertaken on various aspects of physical change
to residential areas: two of these studies are concerned with
low-density residential areas (one in London and one in Birmingham),
a third is exploring detailed physical changes, including internal
changes, to individual houses within small areas of Birmingham and
London, and a fourth is examining the attitudes of Birmingham's
residents to the planning process in their local areas. A further
study is exploring ideas on townscape management, with particular
reference to the differing townscape perceptions of members of the
public and those with a professional interest in townscapes. This
and several previously mentioned studies also contain conceptual
links with continuing work for the Home Office on the built forms of
Category C prisons, which is concerned with inter alia the
relationship between the physical characteristics of prisons and the
security and behaviour of inmates.Lessons for planning practice also
constitute a significant part of a project that has begun on the
conflicts inherent in the planning system for the conservation of
historic church buildings in the English Midlands.

It is envisaged that the geographical compass of the topics
currently being investigated in several projects will be extended in
the next few years, following a meeting in July 1997 of researchers
from some twenty countries which is being hosted in Birmingham by
the Group.

Prof. Jeremy Whitehand
(University of Birmingham)
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4. UMRG PERSONALIA

The UMRG is increasingly becoming a base for overseas academics
wishing to study in the United Kingdom. We are pleased to welcome Dr
Satoshi Asano from the Department of Architecture, MIE University,
Japan. Dr Asano is joining the Group for eight months - funded by
the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture and Science - to examine
the changing form of historic town centres in East Asia and the
United Kingdom.

For further details about group membership, please contact the
Head of Group, Professor Jeremy Whitehand
([log in to unmask]). Updated details of Group
members may be found on the Group's web site
(http://www.bham.ac.uk/geography/umrg/members.html).

Details about the Group's international discussion listserv, the
UMIG, may also be found at :
http://www.bham.ac.uk/geography/umrg/umig/umig_mem.html
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5. REQUEST FOR SUBMISSIONS TO FUTURE BULLETINS

The UMRG would like to invite any submissions for inclusion in future
bulletins, details of conferences, web sites, reviews and any other
such matter. If you would like to submit something for a future
bulletin or would like to comment about any of the news contained in
this bulletin, then please feel free to e-mail the Group at
[log in to unmask]

______________________________________________________________

Posted 3 July 1997

The Bulletin is edited by Simon Marshall on behalf of the Urban
Morphology Research Group, School of Geography, University of
Birmingham.

UMRG WWW Site: http://www.bham.ac.uk/geography/umrg



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