All-American City

The debate of the future of urbanism is strong in Charleston if not more than in other American cities. Charleston is viewed by many as a clear example that beautiful, pedestrian, and lively cities are possible in "modern" America. It's peculiar because the city was able to maintain these qualities because it went through a long period of social and economic degradation after WW2 when a lot of American cities were destroying their fabric with uncontrolled growth; the city was essentially a city-wide slum at one point. Charleston is also singular in that it's in the Southeast, a region completely populated by cities that were victim of urban sprawl and all of the symptoms we now know that come from it. So, the city managed to preserve its traditional urbanism that was built slowly and organically by "generations of incremental change" as the text points out. And now, the city is growing at a rate of 48 people a day and outside developers (mostly from the NE) are fighting to take a piece of the pie.

The city planning is trying to control this growth. Just recently there was a new Form Based zoning ordinance passed in a northern industrial district of the city. The ordinance allows developers to build bigger if they do certain "things" to the building to make them more human scaled, efficient, pedestrian friendly, etc. This zoning works on a point system where adding a bicycle rack or solar panels, and having an entry to a building every 60 feet on the ground floor gives developers a right to build taller and bigger. I worked on this zoning while working for the city’s urban design office. Although I think some of these guidelines will help control some of the bad things we see happen around American cities I think there's a disconnect with how people actually use a city. It goes to the point that the text was making where architecture needs to be the generator of good urbanism. The market forces are there and are stronger than city government and specially that the small architecture firms, but most architecture firms seem to have no interest in the urban context of their buildings. There’s been a loss of ownership in architecture to how their buildings affect a neighborhood. Maybe this ownership was never there or it was lost due to specialization. Firms in Charleston now build for outside developers buildings that could go in any American city. With this loss of ownership and urban context of the buildings there’s a loss in architectural regional “vernacular” which is intrinsically tied to site but also a loss of innovation in these vernacular strategies.

The form based zoning ordinance is a good step but I think it doesn’t address the issues that make good regional urbanism. These issues that only architects can address if they think of their buildings as a piece of the whole city. We will never have good american cities if our only strategy is top down urbanism.