The article “Revolting High Rises“, which ran last weekend in the New York Times Magazine, is worth a look.
It presents the thesis that the physical environment in the low-income suburbs of Paris and other French cities may have contributed to the riots that occurred there last month. Unlike American cities, wherein the poorer citizens have largely been pushed into the center, the French have put immigrants and other low-income citizens in high-rise developments around the periphery. These developments adhere to the principles articulated by Le Corbusier, who believed that housing should take the form of hyperefficient “machines for living” — that function should take precedence over form in all ways. (For those who remember them, the Robert Taylor Homes and Stateway Gardens developments in Chicago were the best examples I can think of within the US.)
Le Corbusier‘s urban vision was developed in response to a housing crisis in Paris and other French cities in the post-World War One era. It has the virtue of density; relying on high-rise apartment buildings, many thousands of people can be put into a very small amount of land. (The General Motors exhibit “Futurama“, displayed at the 1940 World’s Fair, is the logical conclusion of Corbusierian planning. It was the inspiration for much of the post-war development in the US.)
The problem is that Corbusier’s machines are inhuman places to live. Their scale is all wrong, and people start to feel claustrophobic. We don’t do well living in something designed merely to be functional — we want to live in a place that we can make our own. Developments based on Corbusier’s principles generate a level of detachment from the environment, and they restrict “psychic ownership” of the things around us. If the NYT Magazine piece is right, this lack of ownership contributed to the riots.
I have to run off to jury duty in a couple of minutes, so for the moment I’ll just say that I think that the article is right — that lack of ownership, and lack of “humanness” in the built environment, probably did have some impact (along with poverty, and societal displacement, and other factors).
I have a vague memory of a visitor to a class that I took with Terry Nichols Clark about 5 years ago saying that people feel most comfortable with a 3-to-5 ratio in our cities and towns; that is, that people a most comfortable when the buildings bordering a street are 5 feet high for every 3 feet of horizontal space on the street. Most American (and European) cities maintain ratios close to this. Corbusierian planning just doesn’t respect this comfort.
(An additional quick comment: There’s a good reason that the Chicago Housing Authority has torn down some (all?) of the Robert Taylor and Stateway Gardens developments…)
November 30th, 2005 at 9:03 am
Yes, yes, yes. And yet one more reason to revere Jane Jacobs, who wrote “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” in 1961. She was then an unknown–a person who had worked at an architectural magazine in New York and thought about these matters but without fancy degrees or titles. The first sentence reads: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” She “sets forth different principles” and in so doing began the process of upsetting the totalitarian mindset of Le Courbousier and others. It was a scandal. Not long after people in Boston, having suffered the loss of the West End and the arrival of Longfellow Place, began laying down in front of bulldozers, emboldened to believe that they were right and the experts were wrong. A bright, creative, independent-minded woman not afraid to speak her mind, Jane Jacobs in my hero!