All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
in another, its own position was nebulous, concerned both with questions of the rights of city dwellers (if in a crudely theorized way) and with traditional urban forms that constituted the vessel putatively necessary for the exercise of such rights.
These issues continue to run through the heart of the discipline. In many ways, this is salubrious: one thing we do not need right now is a single theory of urban form and a single style of urban practice. The best-organized candidate for such dominance—the practices clustered under the rubric of “new urbanism”—is far less influential in the schools than in the profession in general. And, happily, the internal contradictions within the group seem likely to produce more and more open schisms as the green faction seeks to free itself from the lugubrious Disneyfication-by-prescription of the historicist wing.
More influential as an academic model is the school of neo-quantification, an abstract version of functionalism that seeks to translate statistics directly to form. This group has far deeper affinities with intellectual postmodernity (as opposed to the architectural revivalism sometimes encompassed by the term), and its analysis has a good deal more bite. Unfortunately, any diagram is always at risk from the next diagram and from the pushy relativism of postmodernism, with its focus on constant shifts in perspective and the incessant interrogation of the origins of value.
Another strand in the braided taxonomy of urban design has its origins in the reformism of Jane Addams, Jacob Riis, tenement legislation, the activism of the New Deal, the oppositional practice of advocacy planning, early preservationism, and the larger movement for citizen involvement in the process of urban decision-making and design. Although I personally feel a deep affinity with this history, the problem with its current translation lies in a certain reticence about design. The emergent school of “everyday” urbanism, while distinct from the grim generic of the neo-quants and crucial for empowering citizenship, nevertheless is too suspicious of formal experiment and overly sanguine about the dispensability of architecture as an artistic practice.
Ironically, the area of urban investigation that seems to have the least influence in the architecture schools is environmentalism, the panoply of practices and investigations subsumed by questions of “green.” Part of the reason is political. Unlike the European greens, our domestic variety has tended to be more delimited in its analysis, more focused on the aesthetic, spiritual, and medical consequences of deleterious environmental policies than on issues of maldistributed resources and the political effects of globalization. And part of the reason is that green architecture is only beginning to make a sufficiently compelling and comprehensible formal case for itself in this country. The upshot is that sound environmental design practice is the most under-taught subject in American architectural schools.
Every second, three people are born on the planet, two of them in cities. Urbanism is in crisis: the condition for billions of people in our cities is wretched, and we need to rapidly refit our dysfunctional metropolises for justice and sustainability and to build new cities around the globe. Urban design is a discipline—however it sorts out its relations with its professional siblings—that must be the site of a merger between social, environmental, and formal practices. If we designers are to have relevance beyond that of stylists or critics, we must produce convincing forms—as many as possible—for this coming together. While many schools of this urban joinery might and should emerge, there is no way a satisfactory urbanism can be taught that slights any of these aspects. Let a thousand urbanisms bloom!
2002
18
Urbanism Is Politics
During their recent “incursion” into the West Bank, Israeli forces were sent on a search-and-destroy mission to the Jenin refugee camp. Confronted with a labyrinth of streets far too narrow to permit tanks and armored vehicles, the Israelis elected to adopt a house-to-house approach. When a number of Israeli troops were ambushed and killed, bulldozers were introduced to topple houses and clear the site for safer access. The destruction of the refugee settlement was, among other things, an act of urbanism, Haussmannization raised to a flash-point. Although the consequences of the great boulevardization of Paris in the nineteenth century were not immediately lethal to those whose houses were destroyed to make way for Napoleon III’s grand axialities, the impetus to demolish was motivated in part by military needs. The broad boulevards were meant to expedite troop movements around town and provide clear fields of fire in case of insurrection.
Nowhere today is the political use of urbanism more glaring than in Jerusalem and the West Bank. This is true of the Palestinian suicide attacks on the benign settings of urban conviviality—the murder of Israelis as they sit in cafés or shop in markets—and of the more bureaucratic styles of apartheid and occupation engineered by the Israelis. Both sides clearly understand the relationship of the patterns of the city and urban life to the politics of struggle for rights and privilege. And both clearly understand how to make cities into places of fear.
In this supercharged atmosphere, no urbanism can be spoken of outside its political dimension. Here in the US, our most pressing urban issue is sprawl, which we largely understand as an environmental question. In Jerusalem, sprawl has a different flavor. Israeli policy to “Judaize” the city has resulted in the construction of a ring of settlements—housing close to 200,000 people—that a more growth-sensitive approach would never countenance. By building beyond the boundaries of the existing conurbation, however, a ring of population has been imposed—like a wall—both to control the city and to thwart any potential division. Sitting in their arrogance on the tops of hills, the settlements represent an almost medieval style of planning, prompted by aggression and machismo.
The suburban sprawl of the West Bank settlements has been produced by the same means that generated our own suburbs. Like the cheap loans for returning veterans, the construction of the interstates, the accelerated depreciation of suburban commercial development, and the disproportionate subsidies for infrastructure, the Israeli settlements are the direct outgrowth of government policies meant to create a particular environment for particular people. In the settlements, the tools of planning produce their usual product: benign-looking clusters of Mediterranean-style, whitewashed houses with red-tile roofs, backyards, and pools. Here, too, is the idyllic atmosphere of suburbia, a rankling obliviousness that surely drives Palestinian villagers below to distraction.
But the picturesque view can only be sustained until the frame is slightly enlarged. This picture shows the barbed wire, soldiers on patrol, and a striking contrast with more indigenous styles of building and of life. In this view, nearby Palestinian villages and towns come to constitute—in their morphological and economic difference—a kind of dispersed “inner city.” The familiar contrast between the city and its suburbs is played out in a tiny territory as the Israelis pursue simultaneous policies of urban renewal and ghettoization—urban renewal in the sense of the demolition and devaluation of the original inhabitants, and ghettoization not only for the Palestinians, but also for the Israelis, electively ensconced in their pleasant but beleaguered settlements.
The political sprawl of the settlements—and the murderous rage of the Palestinians—reflect the impossible physics of a situation in which two hostile populations attempt to occupy the same space at the same time. Even nominally shared space—streets and highways—becomes a battleground. The horrendous bus bombings are both murder clear and simple and an assault on the most fundamental freedom of the city, just as the construction by the Israelis of their private road networks on the West Bank are designed both to allow settlers to commute to Israel proper without passing through Palestinian towns and to divide the West Bank into a series of cantonments. Thus the traffic planner’s language of convenience and speed takes on an oppressive dimension that cannot be escaped.
On a visit a few years ago to the school of architecture at Bir Zeit University outside Ramallah, I was wandering the corridor of the civil engineering department when I came across a plan for a “bypass road” around a village. My immediate thought was that this was a part of the Israeli road network on the West Bank. Closer inspection revealed, however, that it was simply a traffic-management scheme designed to avoid slow going in town for Palestinian motorists. The alternative road, in itself, is a somewhat questionable enterprise: witness the number of American towns that, bypassed by through traffic, have seen their economies wither. While the bypass may be