The CEOs for Cities blog points to a wonderful piece by Andrew Blum on the growing tension in urban planning — between local and global, between preservation and change, between scale and density. The idealized, localized, human-scale urban neighborhood of Jane Jacobs is transforming right in front of us:
When I ”look, listen, linger and think” about my corner of the world, I am persistently confronted with the broader world beyond. The barbershop chatter is in Creole, the cigar store might be closed for the end of Ramadan, and the cyclical chanting of capoeira, the Brazilian martial art, echoes from an upstairs dance studio. Planes pass overhead on their way to La Guardia. And at all hours people pause at the top of the subway stairs to finish their cell-phone conversations.
Blum nudges the received wisdom of Jacobs’ urban ideals, and wonders out loud if they resonate with or resist the forces at play. Is our current understanding of preservation and community helping either, or hurting both?
The challenge Blum struggles with is well worth the struggle: How can cities (or any social structures) be both preserved and renewed? How can we balance the old-world personal and local interaction with the new world’s global reach? How can virtual and face-to-face conversations thrive alongside each other, and even intertwine? If those aren’t questions for cultural managers and arts organizations, I’m not sure what is.
I’ve noticed a trend in your coverage in the past year or so, Andrew, that suggests some of the arts’ most sacred institutions – those big, centralized repositories of excellence that anchor every city’s cultural community – will eventually give way to a less centralized, more democratic, more diverse and widely dispersed cultural landscape. It strikes me that this thinking parallels the subject of this article in fascinating though perhaps opposite ways.
Urban planners are struggling to find ways to pack more people into smaller, more efficient urban spaces (often those urban cores that the arts rescued in the 70s and 80s). Meanwhile, cultural institutions are witnessing a parochialization of arts participation marked by waning interest in once dominant ‘centers’ of cultural activity. The day could come when our grand, cavernous performing arts centers sit largely empty on real estate that could be more efficiently employed in other, less wasteful uses.
Should we tear down the lovingly restored but soon-to-be-obsolete movie palaces that saved the downtowns and replace them with condo complexes? Probably not. But should we be thinking critically about the value of gigantic rooms that were designed at a time when people gathered in gigantic rooms to do things people don’t really gather in gigantic rooms to do anymore? Our built environment is littered with empty movie palaces, theatres, concert halls, churches and other assembly spaces that have long outlived their purpose.
As urban land becomes more dear, these places stand to become the subjects of heated discourse over cultural relics, some worth saving, some not, that have outlasted their cultures. If it were up to me we’d find a way to save and use them all. But I’m realistic enough to expect that our romantic attachments to these gilt-encrusted barns will eventually have to succumb to more pragmatic considerations.