The belief of the concentric city as a model for urban planning is held amongst some city planners. However, this idealistic model of a ‘dense center surrounded by rings of decreasing density, farms, and then wilderness’ has many holes these days. Our urban areas, no longer able to perform the traditional role of a concentric entity, are separated from the rural land by an inconsistent and non-continuous blob of suburban development.
Charles Dickens saw the threat of sprawl as ‘hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the earth, moldering in the water, and unintelligible as in any dream.’ He describes a city of chaos, consisting of parts unrelated to one another.
In-Between
This Zwischenstadt, a term introduced by a German planner Thomas Sievert, represents a zone ‘in-between city’, existing ‘between old historical city centers and open country sides, between place as a living space and the non-places of movement, between small local economic cycles and the dependency on the world market;’ simply expressed as the areas of suburbia or sprawl.
The traditional ways of planning have to be modified to fit these new ways of shaping the landscape; however, the method of changing the known ways posts a big question mark. Suburban areas create a new demand on planners, with the necessity of developing new patterns, which would provide and ensure good life and bring a meaning of coherence. In this new scheme, infrastructure plays a key role.
As Tim DuRoche states in The Burnside Blog, ‘This kind of salvational thinking about suburbs and their relationship to the city is not an entirely new idea, but is in fact a planning reflex that has a long lineage and a continuum of thinkers. Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Martin Pawley, Joel “Edge City” Garreau, and Peter Calthorpe, to name a few have all grappled with the schizographic taffy-pull of the town and country polarity.’ This city vs. suburb relationship is logically in the spotlight of planners today.
Place vs. Placelessness
While culturally rich and development dense cities are being pushed into background by empty suburban developments, our notion of a place is being lost in placelessness.
For a comparison, an anthropologist Clifford Geertz suggests that human beings and their interrelationships create a web of places. Each place is significant, containing certain environmental qualities.
These places, geographically a community, a neighborhood or a small town, are rich for their density and distinct character. In between of these places is an absence of place – placelessness, described as ‘a sort of a non-place quality manifest of uniformity, standardization and disconnection from context.’
Edward Relph adds, ‘It is tempting to see place and placelessness as opposite types of landscape – to contrast, for instance, the distinctiveness of a small town on the Costa Brava with a placeless industrial suburb of Toronto—and to assume that place is good and placelessness is somehow deficient.’ While reading Relph’s statement, one must question if there might be a new place created in the described placelessness, or if is it just an unsuccessful effort to try to create a place where there is none.
New Compact Suburbia
The urban reality of suburbs, as oppose to the compact city, presents a political and design task which allows city to become a laboratory that needs reconfiguration of the physical environment as well as its perception and use. The priority is given to the renewal of social cohesion and social links, as impacted by the built environment and the relationship amongst its parts.
Even though there may not be an immediate interest in many recently abandoned or cleared areas and it might be unsure if there ever will be, planners and designers have to deduct about their functionality and prospective use. This uncertainty has to be embraced, as there is still a necessity for a connection to a place. The possible scenarios for new patterns of development are envisioned by shuffling the existing variables. As Jason King points out, ‘While knowing the variables and planning for scenarios is the status quo, embracing uncertainty as a challenge that can be formative allows for a range of 'solutions' that are not static by iteractive.’
Connectivity
The key to patching of the existing holes within the urban fabric is in assuring a necessary density connected by transit. Without density of places, bare bodies are exposed to the arms of placelessness. The blanket for the Memphis area is full of holes and by moving away from the core, urban density is weakened for the gratitude of sprawl. Do our officials really think that there is enough population to allow for that many places within the new I-269 loop or is it obvious that extending the city boundaries will lead to a further decentralization and placelessness? The interconnectivity of places is not provided by loops around but by a high speed public transportation and infill development.
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