Robert Guskind - Breakthroughs: Re-Creating the American City

Re-Creating the American City

Neal R. Peirce and Robert Guskind

A Center for Urban Policy Research Book

Originally published in 1993 by Bruner Foundation, Inc.

Published 2013 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2012015916

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Peirce, Neal R.
Breakthroughs : re-creating the American city / Neal R. Peirce and Robert Guskind.
p. cm.
Originally published: 1993.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-4843-5
1. City planning--United States--History--20th century--Case studies. 2. Urban renewal--United States--Case studies. 3. Central business districts--United States--Case studies. I. Guskind, Robert. II. Title.

NA9105.P45 2012
307.1'2160973--dc23

2012015916

ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-4843-5 (pbk)

Lewis Mumford, the American writer and social scientist, wrote that cities were created as "a means of bringing heaven down to earth." They are a "symbol of the possible," His idealism is hard to grasp these days when our cities have become symbols of despair. Solving urban problems sometimes seems impossible.

At the Bruner Foundation in Manhattan, we remain hopeful. Time and again, we have watched people do the impossible: transform their neighborhoods, cities, and even regions through innovative, collective action.

These successful models of urban excellence should be celebrated, and their success must be examined so that their lessons can be applied across the nation. The Rudy Bruner Award for Excellence in the Urban Environment was founded in 1986 to help make this happen. Primarily, the award is a tool of discovery. Searching for worthy programs, we attempt to find out what kinds of things improve cities. With the urban crisis growing and resources shrinking, false solutions must be avoided; the cost in human terms is too high.

It is the rigorous, innovative process by which the Bruner Foundation evaluates urban places that lends the award special value. Each round of competition takes two years. The Selection Committee members are chosen not only for their reputation in particular areas of expertise, such as landscape architecture or community development, but for displaying receptivity to issues outside their respective fields.

Over the years, Bruner selection committees have tried to avoid defining urban excellence too narrowly. A simplistic perspective is one reason so many urban projectseven projects that win architecture or design awardssometimes bring disappointing results in both human and economic terms.

We believe the development process to be a highly complex contest involving diverse perspectives and goals, none of which is sufficient in itself to create excellent urban places: developers and architects pursue economic and aesthetic objectives; governments promote their planning and growth policies; and neighborhood groups focus on the quality of life in their communities.

The Rudy Bruner Award competition seeks to identify, reward, and publicize urban places that reconcile these competing objectives. The economic, visual, and social perspectives must complement one another.

Although the limits that define eligible submissions for the award are quite broad, the project must be a real place, not just a plan. It must demonstrate its excellence in action. The people affected by the project must be involved. The values should be explicit and viewed as worthwhile by the local community. Conflicts must be discussed and resolved openly. Besides showing social responsibility, economic viability, and aesthetic sensitivity, the projects must also be ecologically benign.

With this broad mandate as a backdrop, each Bruner Award Selection Committee walks onto an empty stage without a script. The debate about what constitutes urban excellence begins afresh with each round of competition, inspired and framed by the eighty to ninety detailed responses to our call for submissions.

The senior author of Breakthroughs: Re-Creating the American City, Neal R. Peirce, is one of America's most knowledgeable urban journalists who served as a Rudy Bruner Award Selection Committee member and who participated vigorously in the debate that designated New York City's Tenant Interim Lease Program and Portland's Downtown Plan and Program as 1989 winners.

At the end of each chapter, critical conversations have been included in order to provide additional perspectives on the projects described. The contributors to these commentaries include Robert Shibley and Polly Welch, longtime consultants to the Bruner Foundation, as well as members of the Selection Committee who evaluated the award entries: Mary Decker, director of Capital Planning and Policy, Board of Commissioners of Cook County, Illinois; George E. Hartman, Jr., a partner in the Washington, D.C., architectural firm of Hartman-Cox; David Lawrence, senior vice president of Gerald Hines Interests, a Houston-based real estate firm; Steve Livingston, director of the Department of Parks, Charleston, South Carolina; the Honorable Joseph P. Riley, Jr., mayor of Charleston; Anne Whiston Spirn, professor of landscape architecture and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; and Aaron Zaretsky, the former executive director of the Market Foundation in Seattle and currently the executive director of the Grove Arcade Public Market Foundation in Ashville, North Carolina. Robert Shibley is the director of urban design and a professor of planning and architecture in the School of Architecture and Planning at the State University of New York at Albany. Polly Welch, an architect, is the former deputy assistant secretary of public housing in the Executive Office of Communities and Development of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Simeon Bruner
Treasurer, Board of Trustees
Bruner Foundation

It has never been easy for American cities. They have been obliged to survive in a nation born into Jeffersonian agrarianism and later to mature into suburban flight. Large or small, America's cities have had a perennially difficult time generating admiration, respect, or understanding. They have served the nation magnificently as fountainheads of commerce, finance, and the arts. They have taken millions of new Americans from their point of entry and helped those newcomers elevate themselves economically into the American mainstream. In recent years, the greatest of citiessuch as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeleshave become command centers of a new global economy.