2THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMRICAN CITIES.docx

1、2THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMRICAN CITIES(THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMRICAN CITIES) 1 Introduction (1) This book is and attack on city planning and rebuilding. It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those n

2、ow taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to the Sunday supplements and womens magazines. My attack is not based on quibbles about rebuilding methods or hairsplitting about fashions in design. It is an attack, rather, on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthod

3、ox city planning and rebuilding.(2002.2.8) (2) In setting forth different principles, I shall mainly be writing about common, ordinary things: for instance, what kinds of city streets are safe and what kinds are not; why some city parks are marvelous and others are vice traps and death traps; why so

4、me slums stay slums and other slums regenerate themselves even against financial and official opposition; what makes downtowns shift their centers; what, if anything, is a city neighborhood, and what jobs, if any, neighborhoods in great cities do. In short, I shall be writing about how cities work i

5、n real life, because this is the only way to learn what principles of planning and what practices in rebuilding can promote social and economic vitality in cities, and what practices and principle will deaden these attributes.(2002.2.8)(3) There is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to

6、spendthe figure is usually put at a hundred billion dollarswe could wipe out all our slums in ten years, reverse decay in the great, dull, gray belts that were yesterdays and day-before-yesterdays suburbs, anchor the wandering middle class and its wandering tax money, and perhaps even solve the traf

7、fice problem.(2002.2.9) (4) But look what we have built with the first several billions: Low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle-income housing projects which are truly marvels of dul

8、lness and regimentation sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity, or try to, with a vapid vulgarity. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums, who have fewer choi

9、ces of loitering place than others. Commercial centers that are lackluster imitations of standardized suburban chain-store shopping. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. . Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sack

10、ing of cities.(2000.2.9)(5) Under the surface, these accomplishments prove even poorer than their poor pretenses. They seldom aid the city areas around them, as in theory they are supposed to. These amputated areas typically develop galloping gangrene. To house people in this planned fashion, price

11、tags are fastened on the population, and each sorted-out chunk of price-tagged populace lives in growing suspicion and tension against the surrounding city. When two or more such hostile islands are juxtaposed the result is called “a balanced neighborhood.” Monopolistic shopping centers and monument

12、al cultural centers cloak, under the public relations hoohaw, the subtraction of commerce, and of culture too, from the intimate and casual life of cities.(2002.2.10) (6) That such wonders may be accomplished, people who get marked with the planners hex signs are pushed about, expropriated, and upro

13、oted much as if they were the subjects of a conquering power. Thousands of small businesses are destroyed, and their proprietors ruined, with hardly a gesture at compensation. Whole communities are torn apart and sown to the winds, with a reaping of cynicism, resentment and despair that must be hear

14、d and seen to be believed. A group of clergymen in Chicago, appalled at the fruits of planned city rebuilding there, ask, (7) Could job have been thinking of Chicago when he wrote: (8) Here are men that alter their neighbors landmarkshoulder the poor aside, conspire to oppress the friendless. (9) Re

15、ap they the field that is none of theirs, strip they the vineyard wrongfully seized from its owner (10) A cry goes up from the city streets, where wounded men lie groaning (11) If so, he was also thinking of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, St. Louis, San Francisco and a number of other p

16、laces. The economic rationale of current city rebuilding is a hoax. The economics of city rebuilding do not rest soundly on reasoned investment of public tax subsides, as urban renewal theory proclaims, but also on vast, involuntary subsides wrung out of helpless site victims. And the increased tax

17、returns from such sites, accruing to the cities as a result of this “investment,” are a mirage, a pitiful gesture against the ever increasing sums of public money needed to combat disintegration and instability that flow from the cruelly shaken-up city. The means to planned city rebuilding are as de

18、plorable as the end.(2002.2.12) (12)Meantime, all the art and science of city planning are helpless to stem decayand the spiritlessness that precedes decayin ever more massive swatches of cities. Nor can this decay be laid, reassuringly, to lack of opportunity to apply the arts of planning. It seems

19、 to matter little whether they are applied or not. Consider the Morningside Heights area in New York City. According to planning theory it should not be in trouble at all, for it enjoys a great aboudance of parkland, campus, playground and pleasant ground with magnificent river views. It is a famous

20、 educational center with splendid institutionsColumbia University, Union Theological Seminary, the Juilliard School of Music, and half a dozen others of eminent respectability. It is the beneficiary of good hospitals and churches. It has no industries. Its streets are zoned in the main against “inco

21、mpatible uses “intruding into the preserves for solidly constructed, roomy, middle-and upper-class apartments. Yet by the early 1950s Morningside Heights was becoming a slum so swiftly, the surly kind of slum in which people fear to walk the streets, that the situation posed a crisis for the institu

22、tions. They and the planning arms of the city government got together, applied more planning theory, wiped out the most run-down part of the area and built in its stead a middle-income housing project complete with shopping center, and a public housing project, all interspersed with air, light, suns

23、hine and landscaping. This was hailed as a great demonstration in city saving. (13)After that, Morningside Heights went downhill even faster. (14)Nor is this an unfair or irrelevant example. In city after city, precisely the wrong areas, in the light of planning theory, are decaying. Less noticed, b

24、ut equally significant, in city after city the wrong areas, in the light of planning theory, are refusing to decay. (15)Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning

25、and forming and discipline (if such it can be called) have ignored the study of success and failure in real life, have been incurious about the reasons for unexpected success, and are guided instead by principles derived from the behavior and appearance of towns, suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fai

26、rs, and imaginary dream citiesfrom anything but cities themselves.(2002.2.13) (16) If it appears that the rebuilt portions of cities and the endless new developments spreading beyond the cities are the reducing city and countryside alike to a monotonous, unnourishing gruel, this is not strange, It a

27、ll comes, first-, second- third- or fourth-hand, out of the same intellectual dish or mush, a mush in which the qualities, necessities, advantages and behavior of great cities have been behavior of other and more inert types of settlements.(17) There is nothing economically or socially inevitable ab

28、out either the decay of old cities or the fresh-minted decadence of the new unurban urbanization. On the contrary no other aspect of our economy and society has been more purposefully manipulated for a full quarter of a century to achieve precisely what we are getting. Extraordinary governmental fin

29、ancial incentives have been require to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility and vulgarity. Decades of preaching, writing and exhorting by experts have gone into convincing us and our legislators that mush like this must be good for us, as long as it comes bedded with grass. (18)Automobiles are

30、 often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect s of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building. Of cause planners, including the highwaymen wi

31、th fabulous sums of money and enormous power at their disposal, are at a loss to make automobiles and cities compatible with one another. They do not know what to do with automobiles in cities because they do not know how to plan for workable and vital cities anyhowwith or without automobiles. (19)T

32、he simple needs of automobiles are more easily understood and satisfied than the complex needs of cities, and a growing number of planners and designers have come to believe that if they can only solve the problems of traffic, they will thereby have solved the major problem of cities. Cities have mu

33、ch more intricate economic and social concerns than automobile traffic. How can you know what to try with traffic until you know how the city itself works, and what else it needs to do with its streets? You cant.(2002.2.15) (20)It may be that we have became so feckless as people that we no longer care how things do work, but only