Author: Lindsey Luria

The recent arrival of winter weather in Charlottesville has brought interruptions to school, work and business, particularly on the outskirts of town. The snow storm was a reminder that it generally takes longer for snowplows to clear rural backroads and neighborhood streets than it does in the town center, where everything is more concentrated. This raises several questions about the benefits and detriments of density—do people belong in cities? What does it mean to create space for people? What do they need in their immediate environs, and what can be provided from urban peripheries?

When it comes to receiving public services like snowplowing, people in urban areas have a clear advantage over those who live in rural areas. In fact, the concentration of businesses, consumer markets and tax bases in cities gives urban dwellers an advantage in access to all kinds of goods and services, including health care, well-stocked and well-staffed public institutions and responsible waste management. These advantages, as well as the social advantages of greater professional opportunities and cultural amenities, have caused a global trend of urbanization—people moving to denser areas.

Whereas environmentalists have historically regarded cities as unsustainable and unhealthy (think the Great Smog of London), there is now an overwhelming consensus that dense development is probably more resource-efficient than sprawl and may even have the potential to function with more ecological integrity. The problem is that the more people choose to live in cities, the more need there is for either urban production of goods and waste management or dependency on the cities’ neighboring areas to provide these necessities.

Many urban designers have been tackling air quality, storm water management, nutrient recycling and urban farming, trying to meet these needs within cities, but very often there is too much red tape or too great an expense involved in retrofitting high-density areas, and the majority of the burden still falls on rural outskirts. Driving into New York City, one of the nation’s leaders in urban sustainability, there is a persistent stench of waste being dumped into New Jersey. This environmental injustice also works in the opposite direction, where many Americans who live amongst farmland ironically require government aid to buy fresh vegetables because so much of those grown must be sold into urban areas through a system that rewards mass production.

So, returning to the question of whether urban density is good or bad, the more important point is that the attractive ease of access to goods and services within cities often comes at the expense of those in rural areas and maybe, in addition to the brilliant work in urban design and sustainability that has already begun, we can also work on strategies to improve rural life through design. The question of “What does it mean to create space for people?” should refer to all people and not only those in cities, and if urban centers are more resource-efficient than sprawl, then perhaps this idea can be translated to the development of thriving rural towns.

Lindsey Luria is pursuing a master of landscape architecture degree and certificate of historic preservation at UVA’s School of Architecture.

In urban design, decisions about road lanes, sidewalk widths and shade trees affect the rhythm of use in outdoor spaces—transportation and commerce, social activity, traffic, safety, recreation and even public health are determined by these choices. Urban planners have long been using the catchphrase “live, work, play” to describe an idyllic mixture of programming, but perhaps we need to take a more careful look at what living, working and playing mean to different people.

In some cities, like Venice, Italy, vehicular traffic is nonexistent, while pedestrian traffic traverses all manner of spaces: from public squares to private alleys, bustling streets to tiny walkways. The pedestrian experience is diverse but continuous, making the whole city feel accessible and fluid. And what’s more, beyond the integration of public spaces within the pedestrian street network, public areas in Venice also feel accessible to a diverse population of users because of the myriad ways in which they can be used: Restaurants set up tables, vendors set up street carts, children play soccer and friends share drinks, all within the same streetscape.

Here in Charlottesville, the downtown pedestrian mall is theoretically similar to this type of urban fabric—a mix of public and private space with vehicular traffic almost entirely removed. However, it functions more like other American town centers, serving a clientele that mostly arrives by car. While the side alleys of the Downtown Mall have begun to densify with more businesses, the mall itself is still somewhat disconnected from the neighborhoods on its perimeter, with the backs of its boutique shops remaining unadorned, unused and, in many cases, unwelcoming. Even on the mall, fences cordon private-use areas, which beckon to a particular social group and impart an exclusive atmosphere on public areas.

Commercial hubs like Reston Town Center in Northern Virginia are designated as mixed-use areas and often include outdoor play spaces or concert venues, in addition to offices and shops, but the apartments are expensive and the location within business parks and housing developments makes it a destination for shoppers and diners—more of an outdoor shopping mall than a public space. On a typical New York City block, too, the sidewalk is technically public but the streetscape is more of a commodified stage for those who patronize the shops lining it. Public parks are nestled into blocks, like islands within their surrounding landscape, with bars and playgrounds being kept decidedly separate.

In retrofitting our cities to incorporate truly public space that is both diverse and accessible, what lessons can be learned from places like Venice, small-town main streets and cozy villages? How can the public realm be made into a network, rather than patchwork? How can the streetscape play a larger role in welcoming people of all ages, genders, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds? Perhaps town centers and pedestrian malls are good models for the activation of public space within commercial centers, but they must be better integrated into the larger pedestrian realm in order to unite diverse communities, rather than divide them.

Lindsey Luria is pursuing a master of landscape architecture degree and certificate of historic preservation at UVA’s School of Architecture.

Every new restaurant looks like a factory. Or, so says a recent NPR article. Reclaimed wood, brick walls and exposed beams, the piece asserted, have become so popular in interior design that new furniture is being treated to look weathered, and new apartments are being built loft-style with “factory” windows. Where does this preference for things that look old—even if they are, in fact, new—come from?

The manufactured appearance of age and wear is not unique to modern fashion. Nineteenth century English gardens featured artificial Roman ruins and today, denim is sold pre-torn. In both examples, the components suggesting age and history lend the designs character, an air of authenticity that is perennially perceived as missing from everyday life.   

In the UVA School of Architecture, a seminar entitled Landscapes of (In)authenticity is compelling students to contemplate the centuries-old impulse to flee urban life and the abstract spaces of corporate capitalism for a return to simplicity and truth. We have considered the notions of pastoralism in 17th century European landscape arts, ideologies of country life during the Enlightenment and 18th century discourses of sincerity and the natural world as presented in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; we will continue to trace the impulse through the appearance of faux farms and dairies in landscape gardens, utopian communities in 19th century America and the counterculture landscapes of the 1960s and 1970s.

The widespread intrigue in sites that are neglected or recycled—or look as though they are—is part of a long and ongoing effort to find meaning in our environment and the ways we interact with it. In designing to accommodate this demand, we try to distill what is meaningful to a place and find ways to evoke it. But where is the line between evocation and imitation? What is the extent to which the charm of oldness can be replicated in new materials and designs, and when is the appeal diminished by falseness?

In Charlottesville, or at least on Grounds, there is an overarching partiality for Jeffersonian architecture: red brick with white columns. While contemporary buildings of this style recall the university’s legacy, it could also be argued that they undermine the singularity of the original campus. Rather than complementing the historic structures, many of these buildings have been designed to appear as if they were constructed contemporaneously with the Rotunda, conflating the old with the new. For some, they carry an identity throughout the architecture of the city, but are they authentic? In this case, as with Roman ruins in gardens and torn denim on models, it seems that genuine, historic origin is less important than the evocation of a romanticized past.