All cityscapes manifest cultural values. The ritual centers of the pre-Columbian Inca and Maya, Periclean Athens, Renaissance Rome, Second Empire Paris, and Edwardian London can be read as social-historical texts because urban form, architecture, and ornament constitute a language. Representing tenets of religion, state, and empire, these elements of the built environment have created great urban landscapes denoting beliefs, historical memory, and world power. But what happens when societies are in flux and their respective cultural centers no longer hold?
Today global capitalism, machine technology, and transportation mobility foster a geography of flows and conditions of impermanence. This constitutes the cultural matrix that is reshaping contemporary urbanism, the result of which is a series of vast and formless regional complexes and message-laden landscapes of desire in which things that are not meant to last for long nevertheless impact the senses with great force. Leaving aside here issues of zoning and land conservation that relate to the metropolis as a whole, I would like to concentrate upon what is happening to the appearance of cities when you view them from inside and close-up.
Democracy is the prevailing system of governance in Western nations. While no member of a Western nation nowadays would wish to limit the individual rights democracies confer upon their citizens nor complain of the near universal literacy rates of democratic industrial societies, we can nevertheless dispassionately examine some of the results of free enterprise and protected freedom of speech (and writing) upon the scenery of our skylines and our sidewalks. Propelled by democratic consumer capitalism, we are building dress-down, highly branded environments. Buildings that once proclaimed identity through architectural form and ornament now sport neon logos on boxy illuminated towers. Government, along with business, plays the branding game, reaping revenues from bus-shelter and pay-phone franchises whose income is derived from advertising.
The provision of these amenities in prime neighborhoods is often in excess of demand (sometimes there are two or more ad-encrusted pay phones per block). But this form of visual blight is exceeded by the news boxes chained to light posts or standing sentry at nearly every corner, a blatant usurpation of public space that is protected by the First Amendment in the United States.
Even once-staid London has shed its dowager image, permitting lucrative giant billboards to line its motorways and defile many of its formerly decorous streets. Moreover, high-brow cultural institutions now feel compelled to advertise their attractions. Banners announcing museum exhibitions may be artful in design and festive in appearance, but they hide the architectural lines of handsome landmark buildings. Yet sometimes the electrified and electronic graphic urban scenery becomes so concentrated, as in Times Square, that the result is a brassy urban glamour, a kind of noir sublimity. On the other hand, dribbling the energetic potpourri of Times Square out in doses throughout the city is far from glamorous, no matter how winsome, erotic, or graphically clever the advertising images may be. Because so much internet commerce now depends on marketing company names and dot.com addresses, we are likely to see a great deal more of the public realm used for this purpose.
Advertising and commercial signs are as aggressively big as they are because they must catch the eye of the swiftly passing motorist. Traffic graphics—directional and regulatory signs-are also boldly scaled for the same reason. Light poles and other street furniture, once the province of the architect and industrial designer, are now purchased as off-the-shelf items by budget-conscious highway engineers who actively discourage design innovation. Except in a handful of cities including Chicago and Charleston where there exists strong mayoral commitment to good urban design, it has become an unexamined truism among the American municipal officials that, save in independently financed business improvement districts, streetscapes developed in collaboration with talented professionals are unaffordable. To the contrary, nothing signals urban health and public security more economically.
Culture, like nature, has inherent imperatives. Our fast-paced, highly technological, democratic capitalist culture is self-directed to a large degree. What in this situation is the role of citizens, government officials, architects, and city planners with regard to the public realm? Leadership within government counts for a lot, especially when it recognizes that best and bottom-line are not necessarily opposed and that citizens, including private-sector architects and urban designers, working in partnership with city officials, can contribute a great deal toward putting a physical face on the civil city. Just think of what has been accomplished already. Here in New York, we have removed the advertising signs and made
Grand Central an urban cynosure once more. We have passed and upheld laws that protect this and other landmarks and monuments. We have rebuilt Central Park. We are reclaiming the waterfront for recreation and parkland. We have commissioned wonderful works of public art to enliven subway stations. We have pretty much won the war on graffiti.
The cityscape at large is our next frontier for public action. Even as we focus upon the unintended opportunity of Ground Zero and exchange the temporary Jersey barriers that litter the front of Lincoln Center Plaza and other apparently vulnerable properties for less ugly means of protection against terrorist attack, shouldn’t we also address the urban scene as a whole and use the expressive power of good design to signal civility and improve public space for public life?