Also this issue:

Happy and Car-Free
Philadelphia is a great transit town. Let's find ways to build on that.
-Robert J. Ravelli

November 7-13, 2002

cityspace

A Prayer for the Regional City

by Daniel Brook

The students and residents who packed a UPenn lecture hall Monday night to hear University of Michigan urban planning professor Robert Fishman speak may not have been expecting good news, but that’s what Fishman delivered. Professorial slide show aside, Fishman expounded on his view that cities and suburbs can thrive together.

Fishman challenged the conventional wisdom that the rise of the automobile and the suburb would leave the city in the dustbin of history. He told an anecdote about the late urbanist Lewis Mumford's response upon hearing in 1975 that the City of New York was bankrupt: "Make the patient as comfortable as possible, the case is hopeless." Fishman, however, went on to list the well-known features of New York's comeback.

But Fishman's larger point is not just that downtowns are back -- even Philadelphians know that. His point is that urban centers can peacefully coexist with suburban "edge cities" or "technoburbs" (places with jobs and shopping as well as housing), creating what Fishman calls a "regional city."

Fishman showed a slide of midtown Manhattan juxtaposed with an office park in North Jersey. "Both of these are New York," Fishman told the audience, meaning both are part of the New York "regional city," and both can thrive. One doesn't have to suck the life out of the other, though this can happen, Fishman acknowledged, as it has in his own metropolitan area of Detroit.

Fishman said the main unsolved problems in his new and "hopeful vision" of the regional city are the urban neighborhoods that "are caught between two forms of urbanism" -- the vibrant downtown and the prosperous fringe. Displaying a map of Philadelphia, Fishman pointed out the high-poverty neighborhoods ringing Center City. Fishman said he hoped inner-city neighborhoods could be rebuilt at slightly lower densities (the model behind Mayor Street's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, though he did not mention the program by name).

As Fishman talked about the need to redevelop inner-city neighborhoods, heads in the audience were nodding, but Fishman's claim that suburbs are not places of "soulless conformity" seemed a tough sell with the Center City crowd. When he put up a slide of a Starbucks outdoor café table in a strip mall parking lot and said, "You can still have your coffee on the terrace" in suburbia, the crowd laughed. It was hard to judge how much they were laughing at him, and how much with. Apparently not everyone in downtown America is as ready to make peace with the suburbs as Robert Fishman is.