In 1956, a large 57 acre urban renewal project was completed in St. Louis. It consisted of 33 apartment buildings, each 11 storeys tall. The entire complex was known as Pruitt-Igoe.
Early residents seemed to really like the buildings. The first tenant, Frankie Mae Raglin, called it the “nicest place she’d ever had.”
But 16 years later in 1972, the first 3 buildings within Pruitt-Igoe were demolished. And in 1977, architectural historian Charles Jencks proclaimed that the day Pruitt-Igoe was demolished was the day that modern architecture had officially died.
The modernist dream had failed. Architecture had failed us. Segregated “towers in a park” was not the way to socially engineer away poverty and slums from our cities.
This is the narrative that we have told ourselves, not only in St. Louis, but in cities all around the world.
But was it really all architecture’s fault?
Stuyvesant Town in New York (80 acres) shares many of the same architectural ideals that Pruitt-Igoe embodied and it seems to be holding up just fine. The same could be said for Lafayette Park in Detroit (46 acres), which is probably more telling given what the city witnessed in the years following 1956 – the year Lafayette Park was completed.
So the reality is far more complex.
Between 1950 and 1970, St. Louis lost about 30% of its population. Coming on the end, Pruitt-Igoe had a vacancy rate of 88%. Racial tensions were also surging. Here’s how the American Institute of Architects put it back in 2012:
Pruitt-Igoe was built during a tumultuous time in U.S. race relations in a city with an intense history of racial segregation. Pruitt and Igoe were designed as separate, racially segregated projects: Pruitt for African-American residents, Igoe for whites. As the towers were going up, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision banned segregation. Faced with the possibility of living next to African-American neighbors in an integrated Pruitt-Igoe, white residents moved out en masse, exacerbating Pruitt-Igoe’s vacancy problems.
So while most cities rightfully would’t dare build in the spirit of Pruitt-Igoe today, this was not a strictly architectural problem. There is always an underlying social, political, and economic environment. And unfortunately architecture, alone, cannot solve everything.
If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend you check out a paper by Katharine G. Bristol called, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.
Image by Bettmann/Corbis via The Guardian
Ed Glaeser, Giacomo Ponzetto, and Yimei Zou recently published a new academic paper called, Urban Networks: Spreading the Flow of Goods, People and Ideas.
The paper looks at whether it’s more advantageous to build huge and consolidated mega-cities or build connected networks of smaller urban centers (perhaps connected by high speed rail). As countries like China rapidly urbanize, this is something that many people are thinking about.
In China, there is a lively urban planning debate about whether to facilitate the increased expansion of the vast agglomerations of Beijing and Shanghai or whether to focus on creating networks of cities that are smaller, albeit still much larger than almost all of the cities of Western Europe. The current government policy favors networks, in the hope that connected smaller cities may be free of the extreme downsides of mass agglomeration, such as extreme congestion, pollution and high housing costs.
Like most things, there are real trade-offs.
In the paper, they assume that larger cities lead to more urban amenities, which in turn serves as an important magnet for skilled workers. However, for unskilled workers who may not care/benefit from the same urban amenities, it is possible for them to dislike the bigger cities. In this case, the benefits do not outweigh the negatives of urban expansion and an urban divide is created (rich/poor).
One of the potential negatives is housing.
The attraction of denser, not larger, mega-cities is determined also by the elasticity of housing supply. When it is easy to add extra homes on a narrow plot of land, as in Texas, then density becomes more attractive. European urban networks may well be the right answer because history and regulation makes it so hard to build in Europe’s older cities. Even though China has usually been quite friendly towards skyscrapers, the sheer scale of the Chinese population may still make the case for urban networks.
If you’re interested in this topic, there’s a section (#2) in the paper on the history of urban networks that you might like.
There’s something powerful about seeing/hearing cities being depicted in film, TV, and other kinds of pop culture. It creates familiarity and does a lot to drive the brand of that place.
But how often are you just seeing one city disguised to look like another? Actually quite often.
Here’s an interesting video that talks about how the 3rd largest film production city in North America never actually plays itself.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
I know that there are real economic benefits to being a cheap place to film movies, but I would love to see Canadian cities play themselves. There are also big benefits to that.
Thanks to Scott Bonjukian at The Urbanist for sharing the above video this morning.