CONTOURS

OF THE CITY
An Interna8onal Conference in memory of Giovanna Franci Bologna, Italy, May 3-5, 2012

Urban Imaginaries and American Inll:

Intercultural Place-Making
Dean Sai(a Department of Anthropology University of Denver

Abstract
American thinking about urbanismlike thinking about urbanism in many other countriesis awash in an alphabet soup of compe8ng urbanisms: among them Agrarian, Combinatory, Ecological, Landscape, and Post Urbanism. The reigning American king, of course, is New Urbanism. These frameworks for imagining the urban future have dierent virtues and blind spots. They are dieren8ally sensi8ve to issues of culture and history, and the challenge of making place in a par8cular context. Denvera western American city balanced on a knifes edge of environmental and social sustainabilityhas long been considered a laboratory for implemen8ng and evalua8ng alterna8ve models of urbanism. This talk looks at some examples of new inll or regenera8on projects in Denvers urban core and suburban edge with any eye toward iden8fying whats missing from the American urban design discourse. The short answer is an intercultural sensibility. It iden8es what we can learn about cul8va8ng such a sensibility from discourses being pioneered elsewhere, especially in Europe.

This conference honors Giovanna Francis vision and energy in helping create the Laboratorio di Ricerca Sulle Ci(e. My par8cular talk honors Giovanna for sparking the Atlan8s Project, a joint collabora8on between the ins8tu8ons iden8ed below and sponsored by the European Union and US Department of Educa8on. This project was instrumental in s8mula8ng my interest intercultural place-making. Atlan8s website: h(p://por\olio.du.edu/atlant

GLOBAL CITIES/GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP: SOCIAL AND NATURAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF URBAN AREAS IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES

The urban imaginaryrefers to our mental or cogni7ve mappings of urban reality and the interpre7ve grids through which we think about, experience, evaluate, and decide to act in the places, spaces, and communi7es in which we live.

The ideas about intercultural place-making discussed here have also been heavily inuenced by the work of Phil Wood and the Council of Europes Intercultural Ci8es project.

The Intercultural City

Welcomes diversity (ethnic, linguis8c, religious). Views diversity as an opportunity, not a problem. Adapts its services, ins8tu8ons, and governance structures to the needs of diverse popula8ons. Proac8ve in taking ac8ons and crea8ng policies that encourage social mixing, interac8on, and investment.

The Intercultural City is akin to Leonie Sandercocks Cosmopolis: a city in which there is genuine acceptance of, connec7on with, and respect for the cultural Other, and the possibility of working together on ma@ers of common des7ny, the possibility of a togetherness in dierence.

I especially appreciate the Intercultural Ci8es projects emphasis on the rela8onship between culture and built environment, especially public space. The project ar8culates useful Ques8ons and Ac8ons regarding the rela8onship between culture and built space.

Ive brought these various inuences together in my own web project called Intercultural Urbanism. h(p://www.interculturalurbanism.com/

This graph explains why developing an intercultural urbanism will be increasingly important for American ci8es in the years ahead. The increasing ethnic diversity of American society will be especially evident in urban centers.

Imagine a Great City -Campaign slogan of Federico Pena, Denver Mayor 1983-1991

Denver is na8onally known for implemen8ng New Urban approaches to imagining, and regenera8ng, the city. New Urbanism advocates the restructuring of public policy and development prac8ces to support the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in use and populaNon; communi8es should be designed for the pedestrian and public transit as well as the car; i.e., dedicated to smart growth; ci8es and towns should be shaped by physically dened and universally accessible public spaces and community insNtuNons; urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building pracNce.

CriNcs of New Urbanism QuesNon its Newness.

Much of what it recommends overlaps with European Old Urbanism.

Old Europe (Elizabeth Elkin, Oakville Ontario)

what is claimed as new within new urbanism is in reality old. It re- creates and reies yet again a vision in which Chicana/o urbanism has no value. What is being advocated is, in reality, everyday barrio life. -David Diaz, 2005.

PracNcing New Urbanism: Three Denver RegeneraNon Schemes

All seek to reconnect rela8vely big spaces to the established street grid, and to regenerate those spaces in conformance with New Urbanist design principles.

#1. Stapleton Airport

These images exemplify Stapletons redevelopment as a mixed use, architecturally- variable, green community.

Crescent Lois (top right) and 29th Avenue, Denver

Stapleton also displays a touch of what Spiro Kostof calls The Grand Manner: a set of baroque planning principles that emphasize geometric order and formal vistas.
Park Crescent, London

#2. Elitch Gardens Amusement Park

Before

Aier: Highland Gardens Village

Highland Gardens Village

Pitched Roof and Front Porch Aesthe8c

Preserved Carousel Preserved Theatre

#3. Villa Italia Mall (1965-2001). At its opening it was the largest suburban mall west of Chicago.

The Villa Italia site today. Known as Belmar, its intended to provide a new downtown for suburban Lakewood. Its surrounding community is largely Hispanic in ethnic composi8on.

Lois

Belmars Neo-Modern or American Mercan8le Aesthe8c Plaza Alley Housing

Block 7 Ar8st Galleries

EvaluaNng Denvers New Urbanism

In fall 2011 my Culture and The City class which included Atlan8s exchange students from England and Italy as well as students from the Czech Republic and Liberiawas assigned the task of analyzing Denvers New Urban developments. The guiding ques8on was whether these regenera8on projects achieve their aims and contribute to intercultural place-making. The results are fully reported on the Intercultural Urbanism blog and very briey summarized in the slides that follow.

Denvers New Urbanism has mixed appeal for a diverse group of internaNonal Millennials (American, English, Italian, Czech, African) -European students overwhelmingly preferred Highlands Garden Village. American students narrowly preferred Belmar. -These preferences suggest that New Urbanism is on the right track in terms of appealing to at least Western Anglo and Con7nental intercultural tastes and values. However, acracNng and mixing ethnic groups is another macer altogether. The built form of Denvers New Urban developments, their retail establishments and adverNsing, their housing prices, and their lack of seamless integraNon with surrounding neighborhoods sNll signal to all studentswhite upper/middle class homogeneity and exclusivity. -my one Hispanic student reluctantly threw in with Belmar. My one African (Liberia) student hated all three New Urban developments equally.

These results raise the ques8on of whether New Urbanism can succeed in accomplishing, at the same 8me, its diversity and civic engagement (community-building) goals. One student quesNoned whether New Urbanism is capable of producing an intercultural city at all. As she put it, perhaps an intercultural city already exists in the urban fabric and just needs some poking and proddingusing other varieNes of urbanism as a guideto draw it out.

Minimally, there was a fairly good consensus that architects and planners interested in intercultural city-building must either structure space so that dierent cultures might see and use it in a variety of ways, or create more open-ended spaces to which a broad variety of intercultural Others can adapt.

One of my current interests is to chronicle another regenera8on project at 9th Avenue and Colorado Boulevard in Denver. This is the former site of the University of Colorados Health Sciences Center. Im studying the projects planning documents and also engaging in a li(le urban ethnography by a(ending community mee8ngs at which city planners, ci8zens, and site developers meet. Observa8ons are fully reported on the Intercultural Urbanism blog.

Images of the exis8ng hospital site. All of this will be demolished.

A small piece of this historic, 1920s Nurses Dorm along with its adjacent grassy quadrangle will be preserved as the social heart of the site.

Map of the proposed and s8ll un-named development. The preserved Nurses Dorm will house retail and oce space on the north side of the public square (center). The large retail store at upper lei will be a 100,000 square foot Big Box store that will be the anchor tenant for the site. Residen8al buildings for mul8-family housing are at lower right.

Urban Design Standards and Guidelines reect New Urbanist planning principles.

Conceptual renderings feature pedestrian-oriented design and ground oor transparency that allows a closer connec8on between the buildings and street.

Parking lots will be concealed. This will likely prevent development of informal economies (e.g., food trucks) important to some barrio cultures.

One worry for an intercultural urbanist is that the main square will end up looking like a place thats more invested in 8dy Grand Manner visual order rather than messy cosmopolitan interac8on (e.g., Place des Vosges, Paris, early 1600s)

Renderings of the Big Box Store also have a Neo-Modern cast. These examples of Big Box design (from ci8es around the United States) range from the banal (upper lei) to the more adventurous (lower right)..

Architecture and Place Making

Ive suggested to the developer that something dierent would be appropriate for the Big Box at 9th and Colorado. An exposed skeleton structure like Paris Centre Georges Pompidou would honor the sites historic use as a hospital and also likely make for an interes8ng conversa8on piece. As Sco( Doyon, a New Urbanist, percep8vely suggests: (Memorable visual events) make our communi7es more interes7ng, and interes7ng places engage people at a more in7mate, emo7onal level. When we talk of making places more pedestrian friendly, we o9en focus on sidewalks, road geometries and diversity of des=na=ons but its less o9en that we also focus on delight the visual candy that engages our senses as we travel from point A to point B.

Alterna8vely, something like the Idea Store in Whitechapel, London a building that in8mately connects to its context and that also a(racts an ethnically diverse user popula8onwould also work for the Big Box.

What will happen at 9th and Colorado remains to be seen. In June 2012 Ill travel to Venice to par8cipate in this Intercultural Ci8es seminar. I hope to learn more about how the arts of architecture and design and can serve the objec8ves of Intercultural Urbanism.

INTERCULTURAL CITIES Seminar on Intercultural urban planning and place-making Universit IUAV di Venezia, 21/22 June 2012
To what extent should buildings and urban spaces be designed to be generic, or specic to par8cular users and their cultural predilec8ons? How should new public, commercial and residen8al buildings and public spaces take account of dierent lifestyles and cultural prac8ces? To what extent can/should urban design a(empt to inuence intercultural engagement? How to prepare aspiring urban designers and other place-making professionals to func8on in an intercultural world?