Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it’s a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two percent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use….
The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s population density is more than eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inherently energy efficient residential structures in the world: apartment buildings.31
There’s not really any way to think about our urban future, either in global or Vancouver-specific terms, without recognizing the need for density. If all of twentieth century, Western urban planning can be thought of as attempt to disperse and decongest Dickensian, Victorian cities, then twenty-first century city building has to be about the reverse: getting people to live more compactly, inducing them to stop sprawling and to stop gobbling up land with highways, 4,500 square foot houses, cul-de-sacs, and their freaking lawns.
The ecological imperative is the stick, but the carrot is cities that are potentially alive, vibrant, complex, and cosmopolitan. That carrot is not a given, however: Blind densification can also mean brutal squadrons of apartment blocks, faceless crowding, or sterile rows of glassy towers. Make no mistake; densification is going to mean lots of people giving a certain amount up—space, lawns that look like putting greens, cars, purchasing power, and lots else—but boo-fucking-hoo. Frankly, density is necessarily the future of this city, and every other one too.
I know that’s a little rough, and probably should be tempered a little. I’m not talking about turning the whole city into Manhattan (as if that were even imaginable within the next century or two). It’s tempting to brand everyone who resists density as NIMBY
BANANAs,32 quasi-pastoralist relics, or just plain selfish,33 but that’s no good. It is important to understand that density has to be nuanced, that there has to be a wide range of different kinds of spaces in the city, some more dense than others, and that not everyone wants urban vitality and bustle and liveliness. As Frances cautioned me:
Certain people, from both sides of town and all kinds of political persuasions, really oppose density: they want a quieter, less-busy place. This has always been a growing city and will continue to be, so you’d think that people would recognize that and ask, “how should we deal with it, how do we want to shape that?” rather than opposing growth and density itself. Lots of people really love that liveliness, but others really don’t. They find the crowded urban life depressing and scary. We need to find a way to accommodate those people too.
And you need the variation of densities. You need places where you can go to get respite from the noise. You need quiet streets, places that feel restful. Even in New York the traffic is all on the arterials and some of the side streets are very quiet—and that’s important. We want liveliness, but we can’t be assaulted by the city. Even in Shanghai, which is incredibly dense, there are streets and areas that are very quiet. When I lived there, I would ride my bike downtown through some really peaceful neighborhoods with beautiful old houses and it was a restful commute.
And she’s right, of course. The city has to contain all kinds of different spaces if all kinds of people are going to thrive here. All of us want (need) quiet places without traffic, without people rushing around, and protecting those spaces is contingent on our willingness to densify, especially high streets. But, sort of counter-intuitively, it is sprawl, both within and beyond city limits that destroys the capacity to retain those peaceful areas. Endless single-family housing sprawl through the city brings traffic into every nook and cranny, just as suburban sprawl erodes our agricultural base and the character of rural areas.
When Larry talks about ending people’s romance with the burbs, I’m right there and I applaud (for real) the significant progress this city has made in densifying. But there is a sterile, manufactured quality to the density that I am calling into question, and I think it reflects the quality of civic engagement and participation that Vancouver has nurtured.
Part of what I am poking at is the actual form. Glassy towers are just not a big part of my vision of convivial city life, for all the obvious reasons, some of them aesthetic, some practical. And they are not at all necessary for a dense city. As James Howard Kunstler said to me once: “Skyscrapers don’t equal rich cosmopolitan life—Paris has lowish rise, but is very dense.” Towers give you a peculiar kind of density, and not necessarily a convivial one. Often densely vibrant neighborhoods are entirely three or four stories high—think of Brooklyn or London, for example. There are almost no skyscrapers in Istanbul and it is as dense as I can imagine a city ever wanting to be.
As Berelowitz wrote: “Architecturally speaking, it [the podium tower] is a one-liner…. I am more interested in how we use the city than necessarily how it looks. It’s packaged: look but don’t touch. It’s very much about a sanitized vision of the city.”34 Beasley doesn’t dispute this per se, but argues that the vitality will come in time.
This is something I have struggled with all my career. I travel all the time, I am always visiting new cities, and I love their public spaces, filled with people—and I often asked myself why aren’t the public spaces here like that? And you’ve got to realize that part of this is a difference in culture.
In northern cities all over the world, the public realm is not where you hang out because of the weather, and in this culture people are often socializing in other circumstances, not the street or plazas. What I’ve tried to do, contrary to what is happening in many North American cities, is to design the public realm so it can be repopulated, it can be rediscovered. My hope is, and I don’t think this will happen overnight but over generations, that Vancouverites will rediscover how to use the space.
I always tell the story of False Creek North—we designed the whole thing with the Seawall, parks; everything linked and five thousand people move in and there’s no one on the street. And I go, “My God. What have I done wrong? There’s no one on the street. I want street life!” Then a little food store opens and all of a sudden there’s people all over the street because up until then people had been taking the elevator down from their tower, getting in their car, driving to the suburbs where they used to shop, driving back to their tower. They were never outside. But that all changed as soon as local establishments opened.
Right now, one of the criticisms of this city, and it’s a good criticism that I buy and one I don’t feel anxious about, is that it does feel packaged. But you know what? If you were in eighteenth century London, it would feel packaged too. When something is new, it’s just been created—it feels new. And that’s true of all cities, and then they get repopulated. The spaces that you and I love, say in Delhi, they were initially designed as great, government image-making things, and they weren’t populated. But human beings have this way of learning how to use cities and how to take advantage of what’s there. But our job is to make