Design Advocates: 5 People Making American Cities Better for All
At the turn of the 20th century, American urban planning and architecture was defined by the City Beautiful approach—what Daniel Burnham referred to as “municipal art”—which emphasized grandeur and linked public spaces with civic morality and virtue. Those values are now being reimagined in a 21st-century version of the City Beautiful movement. Instead of desiring to upstage Paris or London, American cities are engaging in friendly competition with one another. Whether it be in New York City, Atlanta, or Little Rock, Arkansas, policy makers and private enterprises are seeing the benefits of investing in urban amenities that will create desirable places to work and play. “We’re seeing that good urban design and good planning is not a partisan issue,” says Trinity Simons, executive director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design. “Cities may couch the reason why they’re investing in these projects differently, but at the end of the day they’re talking about the same thing.”
And unlike City Beautiful, this urban renaissance is pursuing a holistic model of development, weaving together great design with environmental sustainability and social equity. “The era of single-objective funding is over—every urban design project now has to have multiple outcomes,” Simons says. Across America, in Newark; Washington, D.C.; Minneapolis; Houston; and Santa Fe, New Mexico, a diverse group of design advocates is pursuing projects that position their cities as globally competitive while improving local residents’ quality of life. And these projects, from large-scale park systems to design-conscious midmarket housing to innovative arts venues, are becoming part of a new narrative and identity for these places, and raising the bar for urban centers everywhere. “City residents are now demanding a certain array of amenities—fabulous public spaces and cultural offerings,” says NBBJ principal Alex Krieger. “It’s this accumulation of amenities that will make cities more attractive.”
Bridge Building in Washington, D.C.
Scott Kratz is a resident of Barracks Row, one of two very different communities on either side of the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C., that will soon be relinked literally and metaphorically by an old freeway bridge that is being transformed into the multiuse 11th Street Bridge Park. Kratz is the director of the park, which is a project of the nonprofit Building Bridges Across the River. He served as a volunteer on the project for two years before leaving his role as the vice president of education for the National Building Museum.
“This bridge is an opportunity to put all of the lessons I learned from eight years at the National Building Museum, working with some of the leading thinkers in city design—folks like Jan Gehl and the High Linefounders Joshua David and Robert Hammond—to bear on a single project in my hometown,” he says.
The final design of the project, by OMA and OLIN, builds on input from hundreds of meetings with members of the community on both sides of the river. When completed in late 2019, the park—with a distinctive X shape—will support multidisciplinary uses, including a performance space, an education center, a plaza for farmers’ markets and festivals, lawns, urban agriculture, and public art that speaks to the area’s rich history.
Also on top of Kratz’s list of priorities in leading this project is anticipating and candidly addressing the unintended consequences of rising real estate prices and gentrification that are plaguing similar projects like the Atlanta BeltLine and the High Line. “The big question is, how do you invest in neighborhoods of need without displacing the residents you’re trying to serve?” he says. In addition to leading the design, construction, and fund-raising for the project, Kratz and his team have set up a home buyers club for local residents to have a stake in the rising equity of the area, as well as a community land trust. They are also investing in building the skills and capacity of residents so that the $45 million budgeted for the project’s construction can be used to hire locally as much as possible.