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Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for
Downtown by Roberta Brandes Gratz with Norman Mintz. Preservation Press, 1998. |
| US$13.96 at Amazon |
I have always thought that cities are
organic beings. After all, they grow, morph, become sickly and thrive like animals, so
it’s a wonder we don’t treat them as such. Instead the "planners" who
are appointed to manage these creatures attempt to fix their ills by imposing heavy-handed
regulations. They undertake massive surgery when simple support and tender care is all
that is needed. Roberta Brandes Gratz and Norman Mintz call these people Project Planners.
The helping hands and gentle caregivers are Urban Husbands.
Gratz is no stranger to the city, living in the heart of
New York and having written for an array of publications on the topic of cities. Her love
of them is obvious when reading her and Mintz’s book Cities Back from the Edge:
New Life for Downtown. She gives us a how-to guide on revitalising struggling
neighbourhoods by explaining her concepts like a good schoolteacher would to a child:
calmly and clearly but forcefully with plenty of interesting examples. Her concepts are
sound and easy to understand, and the most prominent of these is that of Urban Husbandry.
This is a train of thought that considers cities as continually changing organisms rather
than static, geometric objects. She calls those who consider them the latter Project
Planners, people who believe cities can be built and revived by moulding them as if they
were clay.
Urban Husbandry and its antithesis are explained through
numerous anecdotes. Gratz cites many examples ranging from small-town Ohio to big-city
Manhattan, writing about suburban-style downtown malls meant to help the core but instead
killed it; large chain stores that have successfully integrated into urban environments,
rather than imposing their suburban model on the city; and formerly decrepit warehouse
districts turned into chic neighbourhoods. The warehouse districts are central to another
important theory, that of the "SoHo Syndrome". Gratz presents this as a natural
rebirth of a neighbourhood without the involvement of grand redevelopment schemes, such as
what happened to the New York neighbourhood of SoHo. "The onetime New York industrial
district [of SoHo]," she writes, "was transformed [into a thriving
neighbourhood] with little loss of its 19th-century buildings, without any suburban
adjustments . . . and without large public funding".
Ideas such as these are clearly influenced by Jane Jacobs
and her masterpiece, Life and Death in Great American Cities. Like Jacobs, Gratz
insists that people, rather than government, are what make cities great. She argues that
urban rebirth is not the product of large-scale projects and excessive redevelopment but
rather simple care for buildings, communities and people as well as an understanding of
how the city ebbs and flows. Cities Back from the Edge voices its argument with a
clear and steady voice, and if it falls upon the right ears, we could be seeing some
important changes in the way we revive our decaying neighbourhoods.