Why are so many US cities still so empty?

Buildings are used as a people stage. Everybody uses them for a myriad of simultaneously animated play areas. Balcony, forecourt, window, gateway, stairs, roof are the stage and box seat at the same time. Even the most miserable existence is proud to be, in spite of all the depravity, a participant in one of the never repeating images of the Neapolitan street, and enjoys being able to leisurely follow the great panorama. Walter Benjamin: "Naples", 1924

Post WWII Holiday shopping at Howard and Lexington Streets in Baltimore
( Photo SUN, Robert Mottar)

Where are all the people in US cities? Except for a few success stories such as Boston, New York, Seattle, or San Diego, US cities still look largely deserted compared to even no-nonsense European cities such as Zurich or Frankfurt, not to mention global fun places like Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris or Florence. US urban spaces are still dominated by cars. In the many places assembly is treated as loitering by police.

Walter Benjamin had admired what he had called the "porosity" of Naples which he defined then as not having hard borders of confrontation and separation.

Its hard to see such porosity in most US cities, especially in the older former industrial hubs such as Baltimore. Instead of fluidity and porosity there are hard boundaries, which demarcate the proverbial "right and wrong side of the tracks". In more affluent neighborhoods special security details canvas empty streets. In poor neighborhoods the sidewalks are busy but most city residents from outside the community wouldn't  dare to go there. Parks, the classic urban commons,  remain devoid of people most of the time. It hasn't always been that way.Historic photos depict city streets bustling with life. What has happened?

The urban park as a commons: New York Bryant Park
(photo: Philipsen)

There is no lack of trying to create attractive spaces and urban plazas including reclaiming streets in the name of "complete streets" policies. Yet, the spaces remain mostly deserted, no matter the inviting public chairs and tables placed there by boosters of urban life. How different things could be, becomes manifest only during programmed festivals and events, afterwards the city goes dormant again.

The causes must reside less in the geometry of American city space and must be searched in the more hidden codes and meanings that permeate a city, including the official codes, policies and regulations.

Many places specifically created as people or tourist attractions, such as Baltimore's HarborPlace, are governed under a semi-private status that tries to balance commercial use with public enjoyment, assuming that there is sufficient overlap. When it comes to public speech, the balance usually tilts towards protecting commerce.

Urban Pop-up spaces:Sandlot, HarborPoint
(Photo: Philipsen)

Public places in cities are in theory the people's domaine, governed by "the mayor and city council". However, reality is often more obtuse. A thick set of rules, though, puts that assumption frequently in question with a large number of prohibitions which outlaw much what one would consider freedom of expression in a democracy. In Baltimore the ACLU had to fight overly restrictive ordinances putting too much of a burden on gatherings and protests of almost any kind. Ideally rules strike a balance between rights and obligations of different groups of users. Many arrangements, concerning loitering and slicitation infringe on public rights such as free speech and disadvantage especially the poor and minorities.

The city itself should arguably be treated as a common: a collective physical and cultural creation by and for its inhabitants. However the range of activities permitted in urban spaces is becoming increasingly narrow. Many streets and squares are now managed by private owners and those held by the state are too often sanitised by public space designs that serve to enhance local property values and business rates. This leaves little possibility for the urban public to be used productively by its communities to sustain themselves materially or culturally. (Theatrum Mundi, London)

That is not to say that public spaces are places of order in which the privileged class, which usually makes the rules,feels entirely comfortable. Especially in cities with large disadvantaged populations, there is also a pervasive sense of unruliness in spite of (or because of?) all the restrictions. In urban streets a certain amount of chaos is part of the attraction. But there is a point beyond which not following a common etiquette becomes a nuisance, a threat or turns a place too dysfunctional. The result is that even those who are supposed to benefit from restrictive rules stay away. Examples can be benign:  Delivery vans or pizza services blocking travel lanes or a bike lane for extended periods, cars speeding like on a race-course, too many who take red lights as simple nuisances or block intersections. Pedestrians who amble aimlessly into traffic any time they feel like it. Dirt bikers who pop wheelies in the middle of traffic. Trash that piles up on sidewalks and along the curb. Hawkers who offer legal or illegal items in plain view? Self appointed preachers with blaring loudspeakers, carcasses of spindly trees with broken off limbs which live out their last days. Squeegee boys or beggars harass motorists on all major arteries day and night. Beggars cursing at passersby who don't give or roam subway cars to ask for money. The list of complaints of those who live and orderly middle class life seems endless.

Community benefits district
Private security vehicle (Photo: Philipsen)

All this is petty compared to crime and police corruption roiling so many of US cities, including flagship cities such as Chicago.

The combination of restrictive ordinances and unruliness is a curious state of affairs in a period when cities compete over being places of experience and entertainment: Which city is most walkable, and attractive,  most fun to move around on foot, by bike, scooter or transit, which has the most food markets, the most outdoor seating, most coffee shops, brewpubs and museums with smashing exhibits? Publications of all kinds keep running lists with all those metrics.

Urban theory suggests that the vitality of the public space is a symbol for the viability of a city in general, its functionality as a community. Sociology sees public space as a litmus test of democratic expression. It matters, then, if a large number of inner city residents don't feel welcome in the new shiny spaces while people from the surrounding greater metro areas still don't show up on the streets and plazas of their core cities because outside of festivals they don't see them as places where they feel safe.

Maybe the pulse of public spaces is truly the canary in the mine-shaft that separates the successful cities from the losers: Deserted public spaces, whether abandoned for fear or by exclusion,  are indicative of a larger problem, they signal a rift in the social compact which makes a city and a country work. On that measure, the growing split that keeps growing across the country becomes manifest in many of the country's cities.

Aside from being an indicator, empty public spaces create tangible problems: They aren't good for a city, whether from the prevailing single-lens of economic development and healthy retail, or from the perspective of policing where the lack of eyes on the street begets more crime. Most of all, from the standpoint of the community itself, empty parks and places don't enhance their quality of life and add little value to their community, even if they are beautiful.

Pennsylvania Avenue, Baltimore's Harlem:
Where many don't dare to go (Photo: Philipsen)

History informs about how public spaces were produced, perceived and experienced. In the post-war suburbanization of America, privatization of public space contributed to emptying out the central cities not only by robbing them of residents who could afford to move but also by taking away importance and meaning of mingling in public. The urban park loses meaning when green space is privatized in the form of the front and backyards of single family homes. The urban plaza loses its attraction as a space of gaining information (knowledge) when each living room has a TV. The outdoor space loses importance of escaping the heat when everyone has air conditioning. The human function of mingling, observing and producing had been already declared dead but then rediscovered as an essential condition of human existence, just like Walter Benjamin had observed in Naples or Jane Jacobs in New York.

Historic Pennsylvania Avenue in the so called hey-days 

Planners, designers and developers have long begun to revert those car-centric destructive sprawl trends in favor of principles straight form Jacob's book and in favor of the adventure and leisure city. But the reversal is often half hearted. Lax land use policies let sprawl continue unabated in most metro areas. No wonder, cities and former industrial hubs such as St Louis, Cleveland or Louisville still look like ghost towns during most of the day and after 6pm in the evening.

When Detroit design director Steven Lewis and I  talked about the "reinvented American legacy city" with a special focus on equity  at the AIA Conference in New York last week, Lewis, a long time "Angelino" showed a slide showing a lively scene of downtown Detroit, photographed during a special event. But Lewis had to admit, this wasn't normal:

"Sometimes in the morning when I look up Woodward Avenue there is not a soul in sight in two blocks" (Steven Lewis, Planning Department Detroit)

Detroit like many other former industrial hubs are still shrinking while their surrounding regions continue to grow. Beyond the numbers, can the deeper causes of exclusions and rights in the public space be explained by Jane Jacobs and the French philosopher Henry Lefebvre who wrote the "Production of Space"?

 “The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity.” ― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Downtown Baltimore
Lexington Street at Liberty Street, now and then (Internet Commons)

Like the German philosopher Walter Benjamin in his 1924 writing about Naples, Italy, the American journalist Jane Jacobs, had lovingly observed and described a city's public spaces. In 1961 New York and many other American cities were in peril: lively public spaces were threatened by urban renewal, the automobile and autocratically engineered solutions a la Robert Moses. Jacobs suggested as her antidote mixed use, small scale development, physical diversity and less dependency on the automobile. All would result in more eyes on the street. She had concluded all this under the ominous title of "life and death".  Her city New York has since been near death and seen several rebirths. Even though Jacobs was not a planning professional, her views are now widely adopted by urban designers.

As discussed, the issue of "life and death" is still around for many US cities and "recovery" is far from uniform.

Via-San-Gregorio-Armeno, Naples, Italy

The French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefevbre expands beyond Jacob's largely physical analysis of urban space with a wider theory of space by subjecting it to the Marxist categories of production and interest, asking who makes spaces, whose interest does it serve and how is it experienced?

Integrating the different perspectives into a system he wrote "The Production of Space" in 1974. In the book space is described not as an "absolute" (a geometry) but as a social product with different meanings for those who conceived it (produced it) to those who perceive it (consume it) and those enduring it (living in it). His tri-part theory of space aims to integrate "physical, mental and social space". It allows urban designers and sociologists to go beyond design as a matter of geometric order to consider embedded non-physical aspects such as control and power (hegemony).

"It is not the work of a moment for a society to generate (produce) an appointed social space in which it can achieve a form by means of self-presentation and self-representation - a social space to which that society is not identical, and which indeed is its tomb as well as its cradle. This act of creation is, in fact a process." (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Intro)

Armed with this more comprehensive understanding of space it is easier to decode what is going on in our urban spaces. It is obvious that the transformation from an industrial city to one of service, science and entertainment would inform public space, a transformation that younger sunbelt cities  such as Austin, Miami or Phoenix, which were pretty much always post-industrial never had to make.

In fact, the old maker-city didn't have much time for ceremony and display and worried little about the public space, with a few exceptions such as Philadelphia and Washington, cities founded based on masterplans. The front stoop was all that was needed in Baltimore, a city which, for a short time, was actually bigger than Philadelphia and certainly bigger than Washington. Baltimore evolved in a more pragmatic and typical manner than its famous neighbors. Baltimore's spaces were strict ethnic enclaves layered around the original mills and settlements at the navigable Patapsco River where it flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The city grew by layer upon layer, fueled by a steady stream of immigrants from overseas and by former slaves resettling from Maryland's plantations on the Eastern Shore in hope of city jobs. While residents in those days would walk to their respective ethnic corner stores and churches, they would not mingle with strangers. The "city of neighborhoods" (Baltimore slogan) was also a city of strongly separated enclaves. The better neighborhoods located on higher ground with cooler air, the poorer ones downstream from the foul industrial air in the hot and humid sections of town. The city was certainly not seen as a playground nor was it really a mixing bowl, no matter how ethnically diverse it was overall.

“The only thing different between the South and Baltimore was trolley cars. They weren’t segregated. Everything else was segregated.” (Thurgood Marshall)

In the urban renewal phase planners wanted to modernize the old cities: make traffic flow, clear slums, introduce downtown plazas and create offices which could compete with suburban locations. All this resulted in the disastrous outcomes which motivated Jane Jacobs to write her book. The old order and the urban renewal order can both be explained with Lefevbre's methodology, especially the interest of the ruling classes in maintaining economic power overlaid with a desire to stabilize their base in an increasingly black city.

As an example of the failure of urban renewal, especially when it comes to public space itself, can be seen in the creation of Baltimore's  One Charles Center, large scale modern office towers rising from a section of downtown that had been turned into rubble. Far from ignoring the element of public space, planners carefully conceived of three new plazas, strung together by (by now demolished) pedestrian bridges. In the then prevailing design idea of separation of car and people spaces,  the plazas were tucked away from Baltimore's main street. The new buildings turned their backs to Baltimore's most prominent street but the effort of a friendly face to the plazas was half hearted, at best. These designs ignored Jane Jacob's observations and the lessons from historic cities in creating a separate pedestrian realm surrounded by office monoculture with only one theater as relief. Not surprisingly, these new urban commons never performed well under normal daily conditions.
The Charles Center plaza was re-designed with advice from New York's Project for Public Spaces (PPS) who became famous through New York's Bryant Park, a national posterchild of a reclaimed public space that once had fallen into the same state of neglect and unsafe emptiness which still plagues so many urban spaces.

IT TAKES A PLACE TO CREATE A COMMUNITY AND A COMMUNITY TO CREATE A PLACE. (PPS)

Center Plaza in Baltimore, although beautifully redesigned and rebuilt, still lacks, what PPS considered the key to success: Active uses around the plaza and a lot of programs taking place on it.

It was the converted waterfront at Baltiore's Harborplace which eventually created the kind of leisure space which characterizes the desired renaissance of the post-industrial city. Once it had been discovered by tourists, Baltimoreans grew soon tired of HarborPlace, chain stores, its lack of authenticity, its sameness to Faneuil Hall and Southstreet Seaport and numerous similar "festival marketplaces". But the water oriented vacation remains a theme in Baltimore and elsewhere. The latest Baltimore leisure space is the pop-up space "Sandlot"just a bit east of HarborPlace. Erected on top of a peninsula once entirely devoted to industrial production, this latest creation of space bears all the irony of the reinvented legacy city.

Rededicated street space in New York (Herald Square, photo: Philipsen))

Sensitized by the 2015 unrest and its own analysis, which confirmed that much more planning money had been spent on predominantly white neighborhoods than on black neighborhoods, the Baltimore Planning Department has recently presented a Green Network Plan with a focus on space creation in disinvested communities. While well intended, it is to fear that Jane Jacob's lessons will be once again forgotten.

The industrial legacy city is also burdened by the long history of racial segregation. City spaces were not there for everybody, a fact that had found its particularly unpleasant manifestation in the openly racial zoning, financing and covenants which, Lefevbre might have argued, reflected the history of US production and forced labor.

Baltimore streetcar lines ended in lush, cool and green amusement parks from which blacks were barred. After African Americans finally gained access to Gwynn Oak in 1963, the park remained segregated as journalist Retta Balney recalls this way:

Most white people didn't consider the idea that they could share Gwynn Oak. They just abandoned it to the black people. It had been a segregated park, and it remained one, just with different patrons, and now the segregation was by choice. Retta Blaney

Space as a tool in the Arsenal of Exclusion (Dan D'Oca) is another cause of today's struggles with urban "commons". Exclusion (or inclusion) can go many ways. It can be subtle through monuments which express power through meaning ("expression of space") or it can be explicit through prohibitions which ban begging "loitering" or assembly outright. Exclusion can also come in the form of bad design: it can exclude women, the elderly or the disabled by disregarding their special needs.
 In whatever form, such exclusions reduce the diversity which Jane Jacobs considered a key ingredient for a successful public space.

Even though Jacobs didn't focus much on civil rights, one her lessons remain relevant: Nothing makes people feel better than a lot of other non threatening people that are also out and about. It seems to be important for feeling comfortable and secure, though, that everybody can find others in the crowd that look like them. The frequently quoted "eyes on the street" make the public spaces work, the trick is to get them there. Watching the otherness of others in the public roam  is a basic form of human enjoyment strong enough to fuel a renaissance of cities around the world. With the right balance of rights and responsibilities and a civic compact otherness is not a threat.

Downtown Detroit (Steven Lewis)

Since 1961, both the civil rights movement and a more community oriented design thinking among planners, have turned many US cities into successes with lively streets and parks, sometimes  to such an extent, that the question of exclusion strikes again, this time as displacement through gentrification.

The most successful cities are those which couldn't or wouldn't allow endless sprawl in their surrounding areas. One of those is Jacob's New York, by most accounts, a quite unruly place throughout its history as a city. Yet, today the lively chaos of Manhattan is an island of peace compared to the stillness of Baltimore's public spaces. It is worth to look at it from today's perspective to see what solutions it may offer.

The contradiction of chaos and peace becomes reconciled if one considers walking through Manhattan for miles without having to fear much of anything. Yes, there are way too many cars and there is too much horn blowing and the sidewalks are often so thick with a walking and gawking public that getting somewhere swiftly is difficult, but there isn't "anarchy". The mass of people follows a common etiquette. On the subway escalator most stand to the right and walk to the left. Drivers usually stop for pedestrians who, in turn, mostly don't walk right in front of moving cars while they have the red hand. There are plenty bicyclists generally contently riding in the many bike-lanes, buses ply their dedicated lanes as "Select" service. To keep an eye on it all the police department deploys an army of traffic patrol officers in small non threatening "smart cars" but they have full police powers and can issue citations when needed. There is also surprisingly little trash blowing around in spite the big ugly trash in plastic bags, black for landfill waste, clear for recycling, still put out for collection, a practice that Baltimore has largely eliminated.

Pennsylvania Avenue, Baltimore (Photo: Philipsen)

In spite of the considerable gentrification, the public in the streets of Manhattan remains very diverse, a mixed crowd of different ages, races and appearances, a jumble of languages hangs in the air. The mix is a bit different in Hells Kitchen than on Wall Street, but whether on the sidewalk, the park or the subway, the bikelane or the bus, no population segment dominates entirely and one can walk feeling safe in any part and almost any time. Given the the national housing crisis, the high cost of city living and the rising inequality across America, New York has a large number of individuals who have fallen through whatever safety system. Since their plight remains unresolved, it may sound cynical to point out that the homeless, beggars and addicts don't dominate the space and thus don't make others feel unsafe. But it is an important ingredient of a successful public space that no one group should dominate.

To summarize: Shrinking legacy cities with a history of segregation, expansive urban renewal and surrounded by sprawling suburbs are the ones with the empty public spaces. Reinventing a formerly industrial city in a post industrial world, reducing segregation, managing regional growth and creating public space that is thoughtful of history and Jane Jacob's lessons are the pathways to filling public spaces so that everyone wants to be in them.

Density is part of the puzzle. The lack of diversity and the absence of people can almost always be explained from a lack of density and diverse uses in the buildings that surround public spaces.

Pints in the Park: Event at Center Plaza

Another answer is public rights.

Police protecting HarborPlace at the  free speech area
of the now demolished McKeldin Fountain in May 2015 (Photo: Kim Stark)

The solution to scarcely populated public spaces cannot be strategy of reduction in which the less fortunate get banned or discriminated. Instead, what is needed is adding more people. More people, more uses will make spaces inviting and safe for even more people to go out into streets, parks, and plazas.

To break out of a self defeating cycle it takes what neither Jacobs or Lefebvre talk about,  the theory of the tipping point. The obvious conundrum that empty spaces would benefit from more people, if there only were sufficiently many people to begin with, requires a dynamic view in which a system is fueled with energy until it tips into a self feeding positive feedback loop. To achieve such a tipping point, a lot of things have to be calibrated just right. One of them is the right balance between control and freedom. Full rights in public spaces is an often overlooked component of a social compact. Another is redirection of resources away from the big mono-use projects which ruling groups typically favor such as bigger and bigger convention centers which absorb huge amounts of resources but create even bigger dead zones.

Using resources on reviving depleted neighborhoods, creating affordable housing and strategically placed open spaces would most likely create the consensus that spaces need to function as "the commons". A critical and diverse mass to make public spaces welcome and safe for everyone will then follow.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA