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Bare walls plus eye candy just gives you Postmodernism, which isn't much of an improvement over Modernism. The goal is to build genuinely smaller buildings, or

Bare walls plus eye candy just gives you Postmodernism, which isn't much of an improvement over Modernism. The goal is to build genuinely smaller buildings, or buildings with a wider range of uses. (Think of how the Empire State Building has shops on the first few floors and offices above, and its stepped-back construction lets it blend in with more standard six-storey facades.)

tpeo 9y ago
Diverse urban landscapes is something that I can get behind, but the issue (as I see it) is that there's something else at play here. Mixed-use, for instance, is already well justified as an urban policy by contemporary urban economics. Designing streets in such a way that they're easier to navigate is something that is already well motivated by contemporary behavioral agent-based modelling of urban landscapes (besides being an idea which is probably as old as urban planning itself). It's the idea of some immediate psychological response to the environment like that of the stress level of a passerby to a facade that bothers me, because it reminds me too much of stuff which IMO hasn't been particularly useful in urban planning, such as the broken windows theory. There's no immediate inference that can be made from the immediate psychological response of a passerby to the behavioral response of a urban population to the same environment over long periods of time. There plenty of neighborhoods in this world that might look like shit but which aren't actually shit, and most often neither do the plainer houses in a given neighborhood house people any worse than their neighbors. But in so far as lots of money might be wasted trying to "solve" these issues, the whole idea to me sounds to me like a massive red herring.
- clock_tower 9y ago
  Massive blank facades, of the sort that this study condemns, can't occur in a diverse, mixed-use urban landscape; so I think this study has gotten to the right answer. Still, I see your point: are they getting to the right answer in the right way? I like the idea of breaking up blank facades, but I agree with your point that an area can look ugly or frightening to an outsider but fairly pleasant to a local -- and that if this way of doing things grows beyond the blank-facades question, it could become a serious problem.

tpeo 9y ago

Diverse urban landscapes is something that I can get behind, but the issue (as I see it) is that there's something else at play here. Mixed-use, for instance, is already well justified as an urban policy by contemporary urban economics. Designing streets in such a way that they're easier to navigate is something that is already well motivated by contemporary behavioral agent-based modelling of urban landscapes (besides being an idea which is probably as old as urban planning itself). It's the idea of some immediate psychological response to the environment like that of the stress level of a passerby to a facade that bothers me, because it reminds me too much of stuff which IMO hasn't been particularly useful in urban planning, such as the broken windows theory. There's no immediate inference that can be made from the immediate psychological response of a passerby to the behavioral response of a urban population to the same environment over long periods of time. There plenty of neighborhoods in this world that might look like shit but which aren't actually shit, and most often neither do the plainer houses in a given neighborhood house people any worse than their neighbors. But in so far as lots of money might be wasted trying to "solve" these issues, the whole idea to me sounds to me like a massive red herring.

clock_tower 9y ago
Massive blank facades, of the sort that this study condemns, can't occur in a diverse, mixed-use urban landscape; so I think this study has gotten to the right answer. Still, I see your point: are they getting to the right answer in the right way? I like the idea of breaking up blank facades, but I agree with your point that an area can look ugly or frightening to an outsider but fairly pleasant to a local -- and that if this way of doing things grows beyond the blank-facades question, it could become a serious problem.