| buy book | URBAN DESIGN DOWNTOWN: POETICS AND POLITICS OF FORM By Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Tridib Banerjee. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1998. If you have walked through the redesigned downtowns of many American cities and wondered why they look so fragmented, so corporate in their aesthetic and so socially homogeneous, then this book is for you. Loukaitou-Sideris and Banerjee give an insightful interesting overview of downtown redevelopment in the 1990s. They provide a short history of downtown design; a discussion of the models that have been used to guide the design of American cities over the past two centuries; and a concise discussion of the larger political economic framework for what the authors call the ‘postmodern downtown’. Like so many others, the authors are nostalgic for a more public downtown. What they see happening today in the American downtown is an increasingly privatized control of open space designed by corporations through negotiations with city authorities who have to a great extent abdicated control of urban design to corporate interests. In such a condition, the authors argue, open space is aestheticized with the aim of marketing downtown to a select clientele, allaying the fears of those who work in the high-rise corporate headquarters and secure from the poorer and more ethnic residents of surrounding neighbourhoods – the other downtown. Poetic metaphors rather than the open spaces themselves serve to mediate between the private realm of corporate ownership and the public domain. In the most striking part of the analysis, the authors reveal that whether cities develop strong policy guidelines for the design of downtown open space or whether they work on a case by case negotiation, the result is the same. The contemporary American downtown is designed, the authors argue, not by reference to an overall vision, but on a project-by-project basis. This is why, they contend, it looks and feels so formally and socially fragmented. The strength of this book is its moral commitment to rethinking the design of downtown open space to make it more public and democratic. The analysis of the various cases the authors use to demonstrate their arguments provides a strong sense of why this is not happening and insights into why the American downtown is fundamentally in conflict with the ideals of a democratic and public space. Problematically, the authors have confined their analyses to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The authors would have been able to be more nuanced if they had looked at cities like New York or Boston where a heterogeneous and cluttered street life has had a stronger presence. Finally, the suggestions the authors give for making a more public, class mixed, open downtown in which cities provide resources for the poorer areas surrounding the corporate centre are admirable. Missing is a sense of how this might be achieved, and what role architects, urban designers and planners would have in creating and with whom they might ally in developing what the authors see as a more humane, public and democratic downtown. Without this, you are left pondering whether what the authors have described is a particular historical moment in the history of downtown or an unchangeable condition of our contemporary and future world. ED ROBBINS |