Isegoria

There are two kinds of square-footage in a city, Nathan Lewis says — Places and Non-Places:

Places are areas where things happen. This includes:

• Houses
• Offices
• Factories
• Warehouses
• Beaches
• Marinas
• Parks
• Museums
• Restaurants
• Shops
• Theaters
• Schools
• Hotels
• Sports fields
• Train stations
• Plazas/central squares
• Gardens/yards/courtyards

In short, if you “do something,” like work or sleep or go shopping or have a picnic or a party, it’s the place where you do it. A destination. The location where people interact. Places are universally pedestrian places. Nothing happens while people are in their cars. Cars are just the means to get from one Place to another Place.

Non-Places are areas of the city where nothing happens. This includes:

• Parking lots
• Useless greenery (not a park, but landscaping where nobody goes)
• Roadways and other transportation infrastructure
• Areas around buildings which are not “destinations,” and often have no real purpose

I think you understand exactly what I’m talking about. Notice that almost every area is easily categorized as one or the other. There aren’t many exceptions.

When more and more of a city consists of Places, then there’s “more there there,” as Gertrude Stein might say. When most of a city consists of Non-Places, then there’s “less there there,” until finally there is “no there there.”

One of the biggest and most destructive Non-Places in cities today is Green Space:

Note that it is always termed “green space.” It is not a park, or a backyard, or a sports field, or even a wholly natural area like a forest. If people were talking about parks, they would say: “we have plenty of parks.” But they don’t say that, they say: “we have plenty of Green Space.” Green Space is not a place where things happen. Do you ever say: “Let’s get the kids together and have a picnic in that grassy area between the northbound and southbound I-95.” No, that never happens. How about: “Let’s go play soccer in that grassy area by the Wal-Mart parking lot.” These are things that happen in parks and sports fields, which are traditional components of the Traditional City, not Green Space.

Green space is a new invention. What’s it for? Green Space was invented to make our other Non-Places less horrible. It basically doesn’t exist in the Traditional City.

One of the basic problems with Non-Place is that it’s contagious. When you start introducing Non-Places into a city design, you tend to add more and more Non-Places to try to fix the problems caused by the original Non-Places. If you have two Places next to each other, like an apartment building and a store, then you can easily walk from the apartment building to the store. If you put a big roadway in between, now you can no longer walk. You need a car. Now the apartment building needs a parking lot. Now the store needs a parking lot. Now the roadway needs to get bigger because of all the people driving from the apartment to the store. Now you need to surround the apartment building with grass (or better yet, a row of trees) to add a little buffer between the apartment building and the noisy roadway, because who wants to live next to a roaring highway? Then, you need to surround all the parking spaces with more grass and shrubbery, so that you aren’t left with acres of burning asphalt. Then, the apartment building and the store are now so far from each other that you decide you need a freeway system. Then, because you have to drive the on/off ramps at 50 miles per hour, they need to have an enormous radius, and then they need to be surrounded by more green space and probably a cinder block wall so that people can tolerate the endless noise of a major freeway. Then, your city fills up with gasoline stations, car dealers, mechanics, auto parts stores, and all the paraphernalia needed to maintain all this transportation infrastructure. It is quite possible that your portion of Space to Non-Space in the city will fall below 10%. Essentially, the only Spaces left will be building interiors and a few parks (minus their parking lots).

One of the things you’ll notice about the Traditional City is that there is often not a lot of greenery in them. This might be considered a genuine problem. I would be all for greenery in the Traditional City, in the form of parks (concentrated greenery) and also just bits of flowers and trees here and there. However, the Traditional City can still be just fine — in fact quite wonderful — without this greenery. How much greenery is in Siena, Italy?

Not only are there hardly any parks to speak of, but on street level, you would have to get out a magnifying glass to find even the slightest trace of vegetation.

I don’t think Siena is the best possible Traditional City. But, along with Florence, it is a place that people have been traveling to for about 200 years because of its reputation as an urban concrescence of beauty and culture. Obviously, it appeals to people. Out of all the millions of tourists over the years, how many have collapsed in a heap, writhing in agony because of the shortage of Green Space? Exactly none. The Traditional City doesn’t need Green Space. Apparently, not even a single blade of grass — although a few parks here and there should probably be considered an improvement.

Posted in Urbanism | 3 Comments »