Horizontal growth and the diffuse city
Joseph Brookover
If horizontal growth is to continue, how do we deal with “sprawl”? I intend to re-frame the American consideration of the urban condition. Suburbia is often criticized yet seldom theorized; this criticism fails to approach the concept of sprawl on its own terms, viewing suburbia as something to be repealed, constrained, or perfected. Deploying an approach which conceives suburban territory as an established extension of the urban condition, “Citta Diffusa” as according to Paola Vigano, will allow analysis of general issues across a territory that emerge from particular historic and geographic trajectories. This analysis will allow the project as “knowledge producer” to emerge, addressing issues of complex systems through contextual intervention at local levels. These new types of projects hold the potential to address ecological (human and environmental) resiliency across territories of varying occupation.
Sprawl is not a negative phenomenon unique to our time. The history of urban development across the world is characterized by expansion brought on by a natural tendency of people to avoid dense environments. It is argued, by Robert Bruegmann in Sprawl: A Compact History, that the intense densification of urban centers brought on by the industrial revolution are an aberration of history and that normal modes of development, “sprawl”, will continue to intensify.
... a more dispersed landscape has afforded many people greater levels of mobility, privacy, and choice than they were able to obtain in the densely settled large cities that were the norm through the end of the nineteenth century. A great many people have concluded from exactly this kind of analysis that sprawl is inevitable and that efforts to stop it are doomed.
According to Bruegmann, decentralization and suburbanization are considered the quintessential American Dream; through much of American history “sprawl” was regarded as a social good manifest by the achievement of economic stability. However, anti-sprawl campaigns have been pursued by elites for centuries. Opposition by Europeans to the sprawl of 19th century industrial cities and American academic opposition to the housing boom in the post WWII era have been succeeded today by slogans of “new urbanism” and “smart growth.” Yet despite the best efforts of elites to dictate the pace of urban development and how people should live, efforts to control horizontal growth have often proven ineffective and do not directly address societal issues facing human occupation across expansive territories.
Traditional criticism to sprawl is often a subjective aesthetic and political reaction that fails to approach sprawl on its own terms. This criticism sees suburbia as something to be repealed, constrained, or perfected, subsequently missing opportunities to create new bodies of knowledge that can address regional problems of land transformation and balance that affect the inhabitants of a territory. The failure to recognize the potential of the diffuse city is fundamentally one of modern architectural theory and modern politics since the growth on the industrial city. This failure stemming from elite classes focused primarily on the economic and social capital of urban centers. Meanwhile, new materials as a result of industrial production coincided with a period of land use and policy experimentation leading to the growth of the suburb. Many manifestos, theories, and projects have been created for the city center, but this growth lacked, and continues to lack, a productive theory of architecture. The profession of architecture disproportionately focused itself on the concerns of the city centers, often ignoring whole areas of territory where people actually choose to live including first and second ring suburbs.
Today conditions of sprawl and non-resilient inhabited territories are most pressing in and around the fallow centers of post-industrial American cities. Initially generated by urban centers, these cities grew to encompass entire regions. Consequently, the decline of the industrial center precipitates a re-allocation of resources and distributes local centers of power between multiple entities. Design and political approaches that disregard sprawl as a legitimate territory of knowledge alongside this redistribution of resources and power, fail to consider the productive potential the diffuse city holds for the health of entire territorial regions. A new architectural theory and approach is necessary to address the diffuse city and issues of territorial occupation.
What questions are raised that begin to formulate a new theory? If horizontal growth is going to continue how do we address “sprawl”? Do we continue to criticize sprawl and its inhabitants or do we treat sprawl as a “diffuse city” and define a new urban territory from which projects as knowledge producers emerge? How do we then utilize this knowledge, what new projects begin to emerge that lead to new futures? What are the pressing issues of today in places where people choose to live? Are there issues of ecology, resiliency, economics, production, and infrastructure that can only be addressed by a territorial approach? Can architectural projects emerge from the city and suburbs being treated as a single territory?
Today the project for the [Diffuse City] is a fundamental place for redefining the the domain of architecture and urbanism... On the territorial scale, different types of projects emerge which, as a group, have formed the contemporary space: individual and informal projects, along with collective and institutional ones tied to the idea of decentralization and rebalancing… In the [Diffuse City], different settlement modalities alternate and follow one another, each using specific materials and supports and capable of being designed correctly and coherently with regard to specific natural and climatic conditions.
Italian architect and urban planner Paola Vigano proposes that a territorial understanding addressing the diffuse city allows the architect to take on new urban and environmental issues. She proposes that we must rethink what constitutes the city and seek to understand its geographical history and potential (geography being multiscalar traces on a territory (physical, economic, or social) that form complex ecosystems). New structural frameworks, forms of inquiry, and design tools are needed, with particular emphasis on context and connection, which produce bodies of knowledge used to address territorial issues and discover potential futures.
Vigano proposes utilizing two epistemologies to achieve this end. The first epistemology is present-based and utilizes observatory fieldwork to determine the conditions of the present territory and its many constituents and administrative bodies. The second epistemology is future seeking, detached from constituencies and looks for what has changed and transformed over time. Both of these knowledge bases inform approaches to potential future upheavals and the consequences of changing geographies.
Similarly, Vicente Guallart’s Geologics finds that an architecture that pursues a geographical understanding of territory fundamentally alters the role of the architect to one of “information producer.” The practice of architecture should “set processes in motion” by utilizing research to actively investigate new conditions that open up “new spaces for action” which go beyond “formal responses for an economic discourse.” Today, in a global society, architecture should respond to new territories and integrate “values of environmental processes and natural ecosystems” which have a proven evolutionary capacity for survival. Architecture today should look beyond functional typologies and formal material manipulations in order to integrate itself into the essence of a place and act as a transformational element across territory. Architecture should “emerge in specific places, at particular moments of history, in a continuous process of re-foundation of the territory.”
If we treat sprawl as a diffuse city giving rise to a new urban territory which produces new bodies of knowledge and gives rise to the architectural project, what concerns are raised? How are interventions deployed to address specific problems that emerge from particular historic and geographic trajectories? How can we create ecological (human and environmental) resiliency across territories?
The project for territorial supports transcends the sectoral logic of the metropolitan constructions of the city. From this point of view, a project for a territorial architecture must recover its ability to interact with the disparate set of projects that crowd and fragment it. Some transversal sequences emerge from the study of strategies of coexistence, multifunctionality, re-use, reinterpretation. The city’s new dimension and the increasingly intense process of fragmentation, place the territorial scale with its different expressions and opportunities at the center of discussion...
Learning from Paola Vigano, listed are a series of potential concerns used to define the territory of the Diffuse City. These concerns can be used to build knowledge bases from which new architectural projects emerge. They include concerns of the:
Spatial
Single use development presents a lack of social and functional mixes which do not take into account long term effects, deterioration, decline, social costs, or hierarchies of control across underutilized portions of territory (old industrial areas).
The diffuse city may exist alongside large swaths of open space with different economic modes.
Infrastructural
How do infrastructures (road/economies/power/ecological/water) work across the territory? Infrastructure is not always a collective investment solely under control of public governing bodies, to what extent do constituents support action for the common social welfare and risk distribution?
How are weakly connected networks strengthened in ways that are decentralized and non-hierarchical?
Political
How does the territorial project mediate between public/private, short term/long term conflicts?
How to we transcend administrative and political boundaries, transcend ineffective and intrenched systems of governance?
How do we rethink collective and individual well being between the local/global and individual/society?
Practical
How does one rethink “construction” processes in which more effective outcomes are reached through a series of small interventions over time rather than the single immediate project?
How do interventions co-exist with existing conditions through reuse and reinterpretation in ways that are multi-functional?
Historic
What are the inherent resources of a given territory found through its particular history?
Who are the people who occupy this territory, what do they offer as a body of knowledge/productive strength? What are the human “genes” of the place?
How can these concerns be leveraged to address the specific issues of the American urban settlement particular to post-industrial territories? We can leverage methods of mapping, learning from local and regional constituencies, and looking to history to define the territory. We should recognize that these concerns most importantly produce a body of knowledge, a greater understanding of the workings and potential of a given territory. What results is not a grand utopian “master plan” applied to solve preconceived problems but an understanding that solutions of resiliency often require a series of approaches particular to local historic, political, and economic contexts over time. Below are six issues which only a territorial approach of a diffuse city can address, generating architectural projects of immense spatial consequence.
Resource and Land Management: Environmental and watershed resiliency - new modes of public use/economy
Land Settlement: schools drive land use development and property values, source of immediate and sustained disparity in opportunity. Desire for open space, agriculture
Lack of Access to Social Resources: healthcare/workforce training/legal/childcare/education brought on by discontinuities in settlement patterns
Economies: Disappearance of manufacturing economic base and new local means of employment in an emerging service economy
Transportation: New lifestyles brought on by emerging transportation systems - autonomous vehicle and adaptable bus networks
Tourism and recreation: novel economies and personal wellbeing
Multiple research avenues arrise given this prompt of the diffuse city that lead to the utilizing a territorial approach to investigate the present conditions of American urban settlement.