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WHAT'S UP IN NEW DEVELOPMENT
Jane Jacobs' seminal work, The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, just turned 50 a few months back, and while
the occasion went unmarked in this column at the time, recent
events have gotten me thinking about how her ideas have
been carried forward over time, and ultimately corrupted. It's
been a slow progression over the last half-century, as her
observational urbanism was adapted into the more codified
New Urbanism and Smart Growth approaches, which ulti
mately have become mere marketing tools. It's the planning
equivalent of "greenwashing," where questionable sustain
ability claims art used to sell products that are inherently
unsustainable.
While Selig and the gang would have us believe that their
shopping center is an extension of downtown, an urban project
utilizing New Urbanist thinking to fit in and embrace the city,
pointing to a few mixed-use buildings as evidence, this is not
the case. Even the Mall of Georgia, quintessential^ opposite to
the Main Street model of commerce, has a little "downtown"
wedged between the parking lots and the big box. "Lifestyle
centers"—-a euphemism for this sort of artificial Main Street-
had been picking up as a New-Urbanist skin on the American
shopping mall. However, it's
the underlying dynamic, more
than the architecture, that
defines the way a place will
actually function. Make no
mistake, Selig is building
a lifestyle-center shop
ping mall on the outskirts of
downtown. • .
The kernel that Jacobs
and other early documented
of urban life really focused
on was the nearly ecologi
cal nature of cities, with an
orderly chaos of intricate
interactions among diverse
webs of interlocking factors.
While mixed-use buildings are
a manifestation and a poten-.
tial indicator of a dynamic
urban neighborhood, they
are not equivalent to one,
in the same way that simply
because one plants oak trees
in their yard, they have not
actually created a living forest
ecosystem.
Whether Selig spends 80
million or 800 million on that
site, they won't create a real
neighborhood, only a shopping
center. You can't build neighborhoods from the ground up; they
must be grown, organically over time, in the same way that
you can't construct a living tree, no matter how much money
you spend on it. Two-by-fours nailed back together do not
recombine into a pine tree. What we can do is prepare the soil,
so that when the right seeds fall, they grow rather than wither.
Until one understands why community is so precious and
rare, it's really hard to see the value of it It's the distinc
tion between building and growing that people like Selig
and Athens Banner-Herald editorial page editor Jim Thompson
so completely fail to grasp. Interestingly, both have mistaken
the raw matte' of historic landmarks in the area for the com
plex ideas that they embody. Thompson continually suggests
chopping up local landmarks and selling them off as paper
weights—including the St. Mary's Episcopal Steeple and, most
recently, the Georgia Railroad Trestle in Dudley Park—as if this
were somehow equivalent to preserving them or relevant to the
community's valuation of them, likewise, Selig has suggested
that reuse of bricks from the National Register historic build
ings they intend to demolish is somehow a useful idea. But old
bricks are simply clay, with no memory of what they used to
be; ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as it were. If these places are
not part of the living meta-organism that is a community, they
are simply raw matter.
Jacobs' and the New Urbanists' most compelling ideas were
based on creating a framework for future growth and evolu
tion, the "good soil" in which community can grow. Our local
framework has been undergoing the death of a thousand cuts,
as essential streets and connections which contribute to the
health of the system are slowly whittled away. Similarly to
ecology, though, "shifting baseline syndrome" is a big issue,
and memory of what was doesn't go back far enough. And so,
we continually accept more and more Impaired iterations of
what was originally vibrant
If we're going to move from meeting each crisis with mild
appeasement and mitigating each individual loss to actually
growing our community economically and culturally, we have
to look at what makes a successful and dynamic urban frame
work, actually prioritize it rather than paying it lip service, and
then enforce those priorities. Those priorities should include
a seamless, multi-modal connectivity, with good streets and
plenty of redundancy in connections. Overlaying that are the
linked issues of scale, density and age. Dynamic urban environ
ments are determined to a great degree by the plats and prop
erty lines which originally established them. Those narrow iots
and a complex ownership landscape ultimately do an excellent
job of regulating height, use and density, and allow for the
kind of diversity in age and cost that Jacobs documented
50 years ago. Selig has the opportunity to create a similar
vibrancy by incorporating some of the historic structures on
the site; unfortunately, as builders of shopping centers, this is
a foreign notion to them.
Even the once-mighty Sears, Roebuck and Co. has now lost
its hegemony, and so too will Walmart. Whether they occupy
this development for 10 or 30 or 50 years, one day they won't,
and what happens then? City Hall East, the massive Sears
warehouse in Atlanta, was underutilized for decades, awaiting
the right redevelopment scheme. Selig is building its own
version. The Banner-Herald's state-of-the-art building was
likewise out of date as soon as it was finished, and never fully
occupied. It took 20 years for debt-ridden Morris Publishing to
finally recognize and unload that albatross. It remains to be
seen whether their respective new owners will be able to adapt
these out-of-scale structures to new life; however, the solution
Will almost certainly involve decentralization, breaking them
up into smaller and more flexible pieces.
Everything is changing constantly, and whether this city
will evolve as successfully as its namesake has over the mil
lennia depends on whether or not we can plan a truly adapt
able framework. The city is a living place, and we must start
thinking and working within an ecological rather than a simply
architectural paradigm if we want it to grow. It's a deceptively
simple idea.
Kavtn Williams alhensrising@flagpole.com
The truly mixed-use urban environments of downtowns like ours are products of well connected streets and
small lots. While Selig claims its shopping center will look like downtown, its underlying DNA is totally different
6 FLAGPOLE.COM JANUARY 11,2012
KEVAN WILLIAMS
