What makes a great city? The answer is easy, says renowed urban planner Alex Garvin. The public realm.
“Streets, squares, parks,” Garvin said, explaining what he meant at a lecture in Houston last week. “It’s what belongs to us.”
Garvin’s new book, What Makes a Great City is a guide (not a question), featuring iconic public plazas, green spaces, boulevards and other areas that have inspired Garvin over the years.
Garvin’s ideas are worth paying attention to, given his illustrious career creating beautiful spaces. He helped plan Atlanta’s iconic BeltLine of urban parks around the city. In New York, he oversaw planning for the city’s 2012 Olympic bid, which paved the way for new parks along the city’s waterfront.
Today, he argues, three cities in particular – Minneapolis, Madrid and London – are the leading examples of creating amazing spaces in the public realm. But Garvin, who spoke at a Kinder Institute lecture last week, argued that those amazing spaces don’t come out of nowhere. Each of them, he said, has six specific characteristics. And any other effort by lawmakers or advocates to create amazing spaces in their own communities would be wise to ensure their projects uphold those six tenets too.
1. It must be open to anyone.
The easy example of this is a public park, but plazas, some offices and even subways fit the bill. One of Garvin’s favorite examples is the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca, Spain. “People come to the Plaza Mayor from all over Salamanca because it is overwhelmingly identifiable, accessible, safe and easy to use,” Garvin writes in his book. “It accommodates people of different goals, backgrounds, and reasons to be there.”
2. It has something for everybody.
One of Garvin’s favorite public spaces is New York City’s Bryant Park. In addition to shops selling crafts and art, it has a restaurant, a cafe, an ice skating rink in the winter and a summer movie program. No matter what you’re looking for, Garvin says, you can probably find it at Bryant Park.
3. It can attract and maintain demand.
An attractive place will draw people from near and far away, Garvin writes. “Urbanization starts when property owners initiate development,” Garvin said.
In the 1950s, retail shops along Vienna’s Kärntner Straße were losing business, as customers lost interest in the noisy, polluted area dominated by cars. Retail opportunities expanded and even more customers arrived once the city cut off the street from vehicular traffic and turned it into an open-air pedestrian mall. The technique has turned the street into one of Vienna’s leading destinations.
4. It needs a framework for urbanization, to allow for surrounding development.
In St. Petersburg, streets were aligned so that they’d lead to to the city’s Admiralty building, which is one of the city’s most conspicuous landmarks. It provides a useful framework for pedestrians. “In a great city, once people arrive at their destination, they must be able to orient themselves and then get to the other places they wish to visit…. stop along the way … and move around easily throughout the public realm,” Garvin writes.
In St. Petersburg’s case, the Admiralty building supports both a symbolic and actual link to the West via its access along the Neva River; the city quickly grew outwards from that point.
5. It needs to be a sustainable, livable environment.
By this, Garvin means, great places are designed for people, taking into account all their human needs. That means they have fresh air, a lack of noise and trash, and plenty of shade, if necessary.
In his book, he touts the San Antonio River Walk as a prime example of those principles in action. Originally, it was the result of a flood mitigation effort by the city in the early 20th century that today has evolved into the state’s most popular tourist attraction. “This … demonstrates that though many conceptualize environmental remediation as opposed to economic development, improving the public realm can unite the two,” Garvin writes.
6. It needs to nurture a civil society.
Cities can be chaotic places, but somehow, great public spaces seem to bring out the best in people. Or maybe it’s the other way around: when people act gallantly, they can create amazing spaces. Either way, amazing public spaces are taken care of by the people and businesses who use them, and the governments responsible for overseeing them. And those who use the space are respectful.
For this example, Garvin is partial to New York’s Grand Central Terminal. “Miraculously, hundreds of people rush around the great hall of Grand Central, only rarely bumping into one another or getting into an argument or fight,” he writes.
And — though he doesn’t include it in his list of six rules — there’s another thing any city should keep in mind: great projects require lots of resources. “If you want to have a great city, you have to work at it,” Garvin said. “It isn’t done cheaply.”
This article was originally published in the Urban Edge by The Kinder Institute for Urban Research, a multi-disciplinary “think-and-do tank” housed on the Rice University campus in central Houston, focusing on urban issues in Houston, the American Sun Belt, and around the world.
Top image: Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuel, one of the many examples of great public spaces Garvin cites. Photo by Dennis Matheson via Flickr.
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Great article. I highly recommend anyone read up on Jeff Speck with his recent book The Walkable City.
Good article. I just returned from my first trip to New York City and can relate to the beauty and diversity of its parks, the movement of large amounts of people and traffic with relative ease, and the vast amount of cultural diversity of the people in the city (many I am sure are visitors). After seeing the vast amount of infrastructure associated with public transportation, it dawned on me the foresight and financial commitment it took by the city’s leadership to create such a transportation network. The transportation systems were not developed after the city became the nation’s largest city but were a contributing factor in its growth in becoming such a city. It makes me wonder whether or not San Antonio can ever catch up in infrastructure (parks, walking spaces, public transportation…) to create a city environment described by Ryan. The development of a city that is described by Ryan is probably not done after the city reaches its status as one of the largest in the country but while the city is growing to that milestone. It is my opinon that too much time and money has been wasted by the leadership of San Antonio to ever create a great city like the ones described by Mr. Holeywell. On another point, I was struck by the number of businesses located in the heart of the city of New York. San Antonio’s city leadership should have done a better job encouraging and incentivizing companies, such as, USAA, Valero, Rackspace… to locate in the downtown area instead of the outskirts of the city. Great cities seem to be associated with large amounts of citizens who live and work within the central parts of a city. More and more people are residing in the downtown area and if that trend continues, the challenge for the city will be investing in the infrastructure to support those people.
Great cities seem to be associated with large amounts of citizens who live and work within the central parts of a city.
You clearly don’t see the parking lots on SA-bound I-10 or US 281 in the mornings: obviously *someone* has their headquarters downtown!
That said, I do wish the big employers you mention were back in downtown or near-downtown instead of ringing 1604. But in choosing a location those companies have a duty to their current and prospective employees first and to the City somewhere down the line.
I’ve been fortunate in having spent quite a bit of time working and living in Buenos Aires, and similar to Vienna’s Kärntner Straße, Calle Florida, a pedestrian mall at the heart of the city’s central business district, makes you feel like you’ve reached the center of the universe. It’s a pretty fantastic experience. One of the keys to Florida Street’s success is that it sticks to the old axiom “every path leads to a place”, and roughly connects two of downtown’s anchors- Plaza San Martín and Plaza de Mayo. This pretty much guarantees that anyone on foot in downtown BsAs will at some point make that irresistible detour to either Florida Street, or its perpendicular pair, Lavalle Street. Anytime is a good time on Florida Street to stop for a gaseosa or a cortado, maybe an alfajor or a choripan if you’ve got the munchies. Can you imagine if we did this here in SA to Commerce Street and connected Market Square to St. Paul Square? Talk about transformative!
Agreed on your downtown point. We have the RiverWalk for that enclosed corridor space, and we more or less have plazas, but we don’t have a *long* plaza where it’s just pedestrians. Alamo Plaza may approximate this in the future when traffic’s rerouted, but not quite since there isn’t really that commercial component. But maybe that’s not needed—look at some of the Roman plazas/piazzas, which just feature churches, accommodations, a central stele or fountain, and maybe some vendor carts here and there.
So SA has some great features, but not really that BIG place to wander around that roughly connects points of interest. Without closing a major street, I don’t really know where that would be.