Street Warts (and the TUA final)
Part 1 of a 2 part series on "blandness" and planning's responsibility to your eyes.
I’m cheating and reposing something I wrote before I had Substack, although it’ll be new reading to most of you (and I have updated it). I’m doing this because I’m actually working on another piece about “blandness” in cities and think this one is useful grounding. I originally wrote this for the Hunter Urban Review, the amazing publication associated with the CUNY Masters in Planning program. Check out the current issue, and stay tuned for the next one dropping this month.
ALSO: At the end of this post is the FINAL FOR THE TOURNAMENT OF URBAN ANIMALS. Don’t miss it.
The Street Wart
A few months back I was taking a walk through New York’s financial district, swarmed with holiday tourists, when I noticed a group taking pictures of a Con-Ed street stack. These steamy, bright orange tubes are unique to New York (we have the largest municipal steam system in the world). I get why people take photos of these. The billows of vented steam lend a kind of Taxi Driver/Gotham City vibe to the streets which would satisfy any tourists’ mental image of the city.
After all, what’s the point of being somewhere if it’s the same as everywhere else? “Blandness” has been an anxiety of placemaking and architecture for some time. Researcher Edward Relph observed in 1981 that mass production and mass culture were eroding the distinctiveness and significance of urban neighborhoods. A recent New York Times article titled “America, The Bland” profiled the endless spread of boxy, glassed-in developments with superfluous slabs of colored paneling. You can even learn about the “gentrification building” on Tik Tok. The criticism of these spaces isn’t that they fail to provide for our material comfort, rather that they are alienating at best and erase a place’s identity at worst.
It’s not just buildings. I’ve seen the same “string-light” toolkit of colorful plywood and plastic street furniture, Christmas lights, and other stock decorations from Smorgasbord in Brooklyn, to Pop Brixton, in London to the Quay D’Orsay in Paris.
Listen, I know we need to build housing, public plazas, markets, etc, quickly and affordably. These examples are vastly better than the parking lots or roads they replaced. There is a long, excellent tradition of DIY urbanism where people cheaply improve their cities, but at some point the aesthetics of this movement became the de-facto look for all “hip” public spaces. Coupled with the aforementioned “gentrification building,” and you get a rising tide of blandness in our cities. In a past post, I said this quote from Iris Marion Young was my mantra:
“Dwelling in a city means always having a sense of the beyond, that there is much human life beyond my experience going on in or near these spaces and I can never grasp the whole.”
What hope is there for what Young calls the “inexhaustible city” – the concept that cities are places of discovery and variety – when you can’t tell Denver apart from Nashville? At a more substantive level, the visual dimension of planning and design is the one the most people engage with. We don’t all have the knowledge to form opinions on how something is zoned or regulated but we can dam sure tell you how we think it looks. Anyone who has sat in on a public hearing, a rezoning or community board meeting, that half of the concerns are usually about the erosion of a neighborhood’s unique character. I worked with a group of social housing residents in London to help them mediate with the developer of a luxury residential complex going up in their neighborhood. Nothing elicited their passions like looking at renderings of the project’s glassy towers — the buildings were “intimidating,” and“inhuman,” the public spaces “aren’t for us,” they would attract “boring rich people.” Design can bore, or worse it can alienate.
The affordability of these designs, combined with our globalized tastes, means generic styles can easily and repeatedly be implemented in places across the world. You can’t, however, simply swap out millions of steam pipes for the latest heating fad, and so street stacks remain, an inadvertent “only-in-New-York” fixture of the streetscape. Features like the street stack belong to a wider category of unglamorous (or even outright nasty) parts of cities that nevertheless help form a vital part of their identity. I call these features (which are objectively bad, but tend, counterintuitively, to be kind of beloved) “street warts,” because as a wise man once said, “a city is like a wart, it grows on you.”
Fire escapes are another wart. Not every city has them and, in principle, hiding a facade with a metal staircase isn’t a nice idea, but people love their fire escapes and use them generously. In Tokyo, the “train pusher” – a white-gloved metro employee hired to forcibly shove passengers into a crowded train – is another example of a place-defining “street wart” from outside the built environment. YouTube has no shortage of travel vloggers being gleefully manhandled into overpacked train cars (although this practice seems to be a thing of the past as the system has sorted out its capacity issues). The easement plaques marking the property lines of Philadelphia’s older neighborhoods have become a source of fascination for blogs like 99% Invisible and Untapped Cities, which publish regular content on urban idiosyncrasies. When I was living in London I became a fan of the “coal hole.”— The little man-hole type hatch that sits in the sidewalk outside many British buildings. Each one feeds a coal bunker in the basement, and delivery services used to deliver coal from the street this way. The architect I used to work for had converted their bunker into bike storage. They’re obsolete now, but its nice to have a little decoration on the side-walk.
These warts last because they’re tied to some quirk of the built environment, policy, or practice that’s hard to change. It’s hard to justify replacing the largest municipal steam system in the world when (the occasional manhole explosion aside) the system actually works pretty well. As cities become increasingly similar, these features are stubborn vestiges of a specific sense of place. The way in which people respond to these, both in-person and online, reveals a longing for the urban idiosyncrasies that are fast disappearing.
Cultural consumption of the city has changed to the benefit of idiosyncrasies. Americans don’t sit in front of a TV en masse anymore to learn about New York from Friends or Sex and the City. Instagram accounts highlighting daily life such as @whatisnewyork and @subwaycreatures-, have increasingly stepped into their place. A video of a rat scurrying through a subway car as riders laugh and raise their legs may not be something the tourism board would want to promote on its website, but it’s how our online society is coming to digest how the quotidian aspects of cities look and feel. Scrolling through the comments shows a predictable amount of disgust, but also a sort of pride and even admiration. Unsurprisingly, the street stack gets a similar treatment. A British Tik Toker named @yourboymoyo details his trip to New York: “It’s mad here! I love it!” He exclaims. “Smoke just comes out of holes in the ground!” A YouTube explainer on the stacks has over two million views. These quick hits of weird urban life are made for our era of short-form media and shorter attention spans.
Of course there are limitations to romanticizing warts. Although the blog Curbed wrote lovingly about New York’s soon-to-be-retired green metal trash can, the new design improves upon the old in pretty much every way. Implicit in the odes to specific trash can models or the rat video comments is a kind of nostalgia so potent it verges on being hostile to progress: New York is a mess —and we tell ourselves we love it.
We would like to be as confident and brash in the terminally New York way that Dustin Hoffman is in Midnight Cowboy, screaming at a cabbie, “I’M WALKING HERE” even as he is nearly run over, even though the whole interaction would likely have been avoided through contemporary streetscape improvements such as a raised crosswalk and better intersection design. Many people have no choice but to live in dysfunctional cities, but others accept or even romanticize the bad parts of city life because a small part of them thinks it gives them credibility (The Fran Lebowitz Effect). The street wart is a source of unique identity—but it’s also a wart. Embracing it shouldn’t be a barrier to embracing improvement.
Progress aside, these outlets show that people still enjoy the things, however mundane, that carry a strong sense of place. Planning and urban design is often concerned with reducing the friction and chaos inherent in city life, but in doing so we sand some distinctness off the city’s surface. A street stack in the middle of the road is hardly ideal, but it is unique.
Planners and placemakers like Roberto Bedoya, who has written extensively about Latino placemaking, point out how good placemaking can solve rational problems while also shaping and reinforcing unique identity. In Bedoya’s case, he spotlights immigrant and minority groups claiming space through the everyday act of decorating their streets. In his research on place-uniqueness, NYU urban planning professor Juan Rivo showed that local businesses and design flourishes that feel unique not only enhance the sense of belonging for residents but also attract visitors and outside investment. Whether the design represents a group of people or the identity of an entire neighborhood, the joy of the street wart inspires us to pursue placemaking that doesn’t smooth over the distinct edges of a city. Urban idiosyncrasies can connect people to a place and give us the hope that, as long as steam billows over our streets, it will remain an interesting place unlike any other.
The Final of the Tournament of Urban Animals
After 5 (!) rounds the tournament is ending. Its the Rat vs the Hawk for the greatest urban animal. At this point I’ve said all I have to say. The Rat was always a favorite, the hawk is our Cinderella story. I’m committing to writing a little piece in the future on whoever wins.
Hello, I have been working on compiling a list of principles of good urban design. Principle §PC below relates to avoiding blandness.
Links to my complete paper.
Rodes.pub/Urbanism
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cY1R26FlscZCZ9OYMbbI8jV-6oEf1wANDqYY_xUxSok/
Peter Robinson
PRINCIPLE CODES
(Related to New Urbanism)
§BN BASIC NEEDS
§CC CONNECTIONS & COMMUNITY
§DN INCREASED DENSITY
§LG LEGS NOT CARS
§MD MIXED-USE & DIVERSITY
$MH MIXED HOUSING
§NL NEIGHBORHOOD LIFE
§PP PARKS & PUBLIC SPACE
§QD QUALITY URBAN DESIGN
§SE SUSTAINABILITY & ECOLOGY
§TT TRANSPORTATION & TRANSIT
(Other Principles & Goals)
§AC ACCESSIBILITY
§AF ADAPTABILITY & FLEXIBILITY
§AT APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY
§CE CONTINUITY & ENCLOSURE
§CI COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
§EC ECONOMIC STRENGTH
§ED ETHICAL DESIGN
§EF EFFICIENCY & EFFECTIVENESS
§FL FAILURES & LESSONS
§HH HARMONY & HERITAGE
§HS HUMAN SCALE
§IC INVENTING CITIES
§LR LEGIBILITY (RECOGNIZING)
§MG MARKETS & GROWTH
§PC PLACE, IDENTITY & CHARACTER
§PN PRESERVATION OF NATURE
§RI REGIONAL INTEGRATION
§UP URBAN DESIGN PRINCIPLES
§ZL ZONING & LAND POLICY
The Fran effect lmao