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We've
been on a trip to New York, which is our representative of the 19th Century
Hypertrophic City. Here are some of the characteristics of 19th Century
Hypertrophism compared to the Traditional City, the common form of
urbanization in all place and all times up until 1780 or so.
January 24, 2010: Let's Take a Trip to New York City
1)
Very wide streets, which I am interpreting as an aesthetic decision in
line with the Heroic Materialist aesthetic of the Industrial Revolution. BIG
BIG BIG is one aspect of this aesthetic, and it is very easy to make a big
street. You just space the buildings farther apart. It is not so easy to pave
a big street, unfortunately, which is why they were often unpaved, and thus,
unfriendly to people (pedestrians) for about a hundred years. More
consequences spun out of this first decision, such as a fascination with
personal transportation. Here was this huge, enormous, mammoth street,
sitting unused because there weren't any cars in those days, and not that
many wagons either. And, it was dirt, or often mud, which means that you
didn't want to walk in it, and would rather be suspended off the ground on
wagon wheels. Next, we had a tendency towards BIG BIG BIG in all other things
as well, to match the scale of the extremely wide street.
July 26, 2009: Let's Take a Trip to an American Village 3: How the
Suburbs Came to Be
July 19, 2009: Let's Take a Trip to an American
Village 2: Downtown
July 12, 2009: Let's Take a Trip to an American
Village
2)
Traditional-style buildings. Except for the
very large roadway, the 19th Century Hypertrophic City for the most part does
not suffer from Non-Place. There's no parking, or acres and acres of Green
Space to try to compensate for the stinking horror of automobiles. However,
the trend toward Non-Place and sprawl was set in motion from the beginning.
This took the form of using freestanding farmhouses as residences, with the
typical suburban "yard" all around. Thus, we have the first Green
Space in the form of the suburban yard. This is a format that dates from the
beginning of Heroic Materialism, around 1780, not from the post-WWII
"suburban" period. Bigger cities often had townhouses, a
Traditional City format, but even this often took on a Hypertrophic aspect,
to relate aesthetically to the Very Wide Street they were often located on.
In general, architecture had a tendency toward the monolithic, in part
because it was facing the Very Wide Street, instead of a pedestrian area. By
"monolithic" I mean "like a big block of stone." For
example, long blank walls with no entrances, or details, or anything a person
on foot could relate with.
October 10, 2009: Place and Non-Place
3) The
Grid. Most Traditional Cities have a sort of organic,
curvy layout, a bit like the way plants grow. The Heroic Materialist
aesthetic appears again in the form of The Grid, omnipresent in all U.S.
cities of the 19th century. Oddly, this passes away after WWII a little bit,
as we get some swoops, curves, cul-de-sacs and so forth in Suburbia.
The
Traditional City often has many sizes of streets, a lot like the system of
arteries, veins and capillaries. There are a few large avenues -- perhaps 3%.
Then, there is a set of smaller, but still quite wide, access streets, of the
sort that allows two to four lanes of wagon or truck traffic. This might be
10% of the roads. Finally, there are lots and lots (80%+) of Really Narrow
Streets, about 8-15 feet wide, which is a very comfortable pedestrian size
but rather difficult for a wheeled vehicle. Although most of the streets in
the city are Really Narrow Streets, in fact the larger avenues are never more
than a few hundred meters away. So, if you were going to deliver a sofa or
some construction materials to a site, you could drive on the big streets
most of the way and then pass (slowly) through the Really Narrow Street only
the last 200-300 meters or so. This is hardly any problem at all. Also, the
Traditional City needed some larger streets to serve as firebreaks.
With
The Grid, however, we find that streets tend to be all the same size. So,
instead of a progression of large avenues to Really Narrow Streets -- where
most of the action is -- we have a sort of sterile, middling size that is not
much good for anything.
 
Chicago.
The tyranny of The Grid.
Central
Bangkok. The typical hugger-mugger of the Traditional City. We don't need no
stinking Grid!
Courtesy
of Jim Kunstler, this is Union Station in St. Louis. A beautiful 19th century
train station. But, with a tendency toward the Monolithic. For example, you
could have put a row of shops or something along the street there, something
for humans to interact with. And hypertrophic, although that is maybe a
little unfair for a major train station. Note the size of the roadway it
faces. This is apparently no longer used as a train station.
A side
view of the new St. Louis Amtrak station, three blocks away. A piece of shit,
obviously.
Although
there are some very fine buildings from the 19th Century Hypertrophic era,
they are a little unfriendly to people. Big, impressive, majestic, a little
cold and uncomfortable. Definitely not cozy.
Like
this. A Really Narrow Street in Bangkok. Cozy, right? A Traditional City has
a lot of this sort of thing. You never see it in the 19th Century
Hypertrophic City. In terms of people, compare all the detail and potential
for interaction of this row of shops to the monolithic facade of the Union
Station.
Some
brownstone townhouses in New York. This is about as cozy as it gets the 19th
Century Hypertrophic City. Good things: this is basically a Traditional City
format, the townhouse. It might have a small yard in the back, but no
proto-Green Space surrounding it like the typical house of the American
Village and, later, Suburbia. However, this is not quite Traditional, it has
been tweaked to fit into its Hypertrophic environment.
Look
how the stairs jut out into the street. There is what: six feet taken by the
stairs alone here? If you add another six feet for stairs for houses on the
opposite side of the street, you get 12 feet -- the typical width of the
Really Narrow Street -- consumed by stairs alone! Hypertrophic.
The
typical street where brownstones are found. Wide enough for two lanes of
traffic, plus two lanes of parking on either side, plus two sidewalks, plus
twelve feet of stairs. About fifty feet all together -- three times the width of a Really
Narrow residential street! I told you this stuff is
Hypertrophic. Not real cozy either, despite the addition of trees. Here we
begin the process of trying to compensate for the excessively wide,
unpleasant roadway with early forms of Green Space. I think the addition of
the big stairs was also an attempt to create a sort of "buffer"
between the living spaces (houses) and the increasingly human-incompatible
roadways.
Here
is a typical residential street in the downtown Meguro district of Tokyo. It
is about 13 feet wide. No cars. See how it is comfortable and cozy? We don't need a
"buffer" here.
Another
typical Meguro residential street.
Biking
around Meguro. No cars. Note that she is right in the middle of the street. It's a
human-friendly place.
This
is what I mean by a larger street. Two dedicates lanes for automobiles --
hardly used. Sidewalks. Even this larger "arterial" street is
narrower than the narrowest streets in the 19th Century Hypertrophic City.
Daikanyama district, central Tokyo.
Along
with industrialization, in the major U.S. cities, came a huge wave of
immigrants, both from foreign countries and also U.S. citizens migrating from
farms or elsewhere in the country. This exploding need for housing (mostly
cheap housing) with the Heroic Materialist aesthetic of stripped-down
functionality translated into rather crude, plain brick buildings. The
combination of the excessively wide streets and this sort of crudely
functional brick architecture has not aged well. We can look at very simple
but beautiful boxy buildings in Florence for example, which could be five
hundred years old, and they are fine.
Florence
back street. Note that it is Really Narrow. This architecture is pretty
simple.
Italy
has been an economic backwater for most of the past two hundred years, while
the United States was the most successful, wealthiest country in the world.
And this stuff is old -- very old. But, it's still presentable, dignified,
and usable, while almost all of the United States -- 19th and 20th century
hypertrophism -- is a dump.
If you
leave the part of Manhattan where the beautiful people live, it gets ugly
real quick. This 19th Century Hypertrophic stuff just didn't last. This is
what the vast majority of New York City looks like, everything north of 110th
street in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn (most of it), Queens, Staten Island,
and also most of every other 19th Century Hypertrophic City in the U.S.
Queens, New York.
This
is such a collection of bad ideas I just had to throw it in. Queens. But, if
you lived in Queens, you would want a buffer between the horror of Queens and
your living space, right? There it is, in the form of the Big Stair and of
course the Green Space.
Ain't New York
grand?
 \
Makes
me want to move to the suburbs just looking at it.
Just
so we aren't picking on New York too much, here's a typically crappy corner
of Chicago.
More
Chicago. See what I mean about being unfriendly to humans? Gimme some Green
Space, please!
Let's
try to imagine what life was like in the 19th Century Hypertrophic City, in
the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries, before the burst of
suburbanization after WWII. We're cataloging the failures here so we can
understand why Americans generally dislike cities. They should dislike them!
They stink!
In
addition to these basic design flaws, the 19th century period was very
difficult. The cities were deluged by a flood of immigrants, from other
countries and also other places in the United States. There was a flood of
blacks from the South in the decades after the Civil War, for example. Unlike
perhaps France or Japan, where there was an established culture, expectations
of behvior, a community spirit, and a long history of successful urban
living, this was a mishmash of humanity tossed into a city environment that
was basically flawed to begin with. They had all the problems we associate
today with poor immigrants and cities, particularly crime and a sort of
bleakness and lack of any shared cultural endeavor. Like a bunch of rats in a
box. We can add to this some of the problems of early industrialization, such
as the everpresent black coal soot, exploding populations, overtaxed
sanitation services, and all the depradations of early industrial capitalism.
Sixty-plus hour workweeks in some steaming industrial hell. Child labor.
Debtors prisons. Dickensian? Yes, it was exactly what Charles Dickens was
writing about.
We in
the U.S. have no experiences except for these. We have a failed 19th Century
Hypertrophic model, exacerbated by all the other problems of that time, and
then a failed 20th Century Hypertrophic model, either Suburban Hell or its
high-rise equivalent.
If you
don't understand the problems with 19th Century Hypertrophism, you are bound
to recreate them. 19th Century Hypertrophism is closer to the Traditional
City than Suburban Hell, although not very close, so it is common to find
that people who are fed up with 20th century Hypertrophism, such as the
so-called "New Urbanists" (really New Suburbanists) tend to migrate
toward a 19th Century Hypertrophic ideal. This is ultimately a failure,
although not so much of a failure as Suburban Hell.
Try
this article for example:
Ideal Living Magazine: New Urbanism Communities Herald A Return to
the Small Town Atmosphere of Old
This
is a photo from the article. Yes, it looks just like the Small Town America
of Old. We looked at that a few months ago. This is exactly identical to the
19th Century Hypertrophic Format, Small Town edition. It is also identical to
the Suburban Hell format -- because, for the residential areas, they are the same. Yes,
this neighborhood was purposefully designed to be an example of "New
Urbanism." You know we are going to have a good time kicking around the
New Urbanists at some point in the future. They've been working at this for
thirty years, and this is all they can do? Pathetic.
Another
example of New Urbanism, from Colorado. Really Narrow Street? I think NOT.
This is again a 19th Century Hypertrophic format: an acceptably Traditional
building (three stories, right on the street, enticing street-level
storefront) combined with a huge Hypertrophic roadway complete with plenty of
Free Parking.
Here
we have another New Urbanist project. Once again, it is 19th Century
Hypertrophism, straight out of the Small Town America playbook. White picket
fences! Note that these are NOT townhouses, a Traditional City format (which
can even include a garage on the ground level), but suburban standalone
ersatz-farmhouses. In the back, where there should be a yard, there is no
yard, but rather a garage! The commercial street is a little better, but once
again it is not a Really Narrow Street, like a European commercial street,
but a Small Town America commercial street complete with two strips of Green
Space on either side. Failure
failure failure.
Commercial
street, Madrid, Spain. See the two strips of Green Space on either side?
No?
Good.
Old Shanghai.
Shanghai
backstreet.
Toledo,
Spain. This could be a decent residential area.
Toledo back
street.
Walking
around Toledo.
I hope
I've burned into your brain by now the differences between the Traditional
City and 19th Century Hypertrophism, both in its Small Town America format
and also its big-city format. 19th Century Hypertrophism basically doesn't
work, and besides, it's close enough to the Traditional City anyway that
there's hardly any reason to use it at all. I also wanted to illustrate the
problems with 19th Century Hypertrophism so that we could see how they led to
20th Century Hypertrophism, both the high-rise variety and the Suburban Hell
variety.
I will
leave you with this one photo of 20th Century Hypertrophism, which differs
from the Manhattan example by the introduction of mega-roadways and lots of
Green Space. While Manhattan is mostly walkable, even if quite a bit more
unpleasant than Toledo, we see that 20th Century Hypertrophism is completely
hostile to humans aka "pedestrians."
Dubai.
How's that for a mega-roadway? Impressive big buildings, but they are spaced
so far apart that the actual land area/floor space ratio is rather poor. Can
you imagine walking in a place like this? Me neither.
Nathan
Lewis
Nathan
Lewis was formerly the chief international economist of a leading economic
forecasting firm. He now works in asset management. Lewis has written for the
Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal Asia, the Japan Times, Pravda, and
other publications. He has appeared on financial television in the United
States, Japan, and the Middle East. About the Book: Gold: The Once and Future
Money (Wiley, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-470-04766-8, $27.95) is available at
bookstores nationwide, from all major online booksellers, and direct from the
publisher at www.wileyfinance.com or 800-225-5945. In Canada, call 800-567-4797.
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