http://www.planetizen.com/node/68396?utm_source=newletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=042122014
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| New York City Skyline c.1970s vintag.es |
Authenticity. There's a word loaded with a lot of connotations. What does authenticity mean in relation to a city? This is the question Mark Hough in his blog post for Planetizen, titled "Finding Authenticity," asks and attempts to answer. The words authentic and real are often interchanged, synonymous with each other but I would argue that authentic does not mean real. I'm not going to spend the space in this post evaluating the merits of authentic versus real, rather, I prefer to address Mr. Hough's blog post and look at what he means by authenticity in the city.
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| New York City police officer walking his beat c.1970s businessinsider.com |
Mark Hough begins his post by introducing the reader to the Facebook page Dirty Old 1970s New York which bills itself as "The official page of the old, dirty, affordable, real, honest, gritty, rough, and tough New York City of the 1970s." This page is an homage to the unglamorous and forgotten urban landscape that existed before all the "Gordon Gekkos"of Wall Street, the fashion darlings of Madison Avenue, and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani took over and made the former home of "Kojak" all pretty, clean and shiny. Contributors and fans argue that the images posted on this page present the "real New York City" more so then the skyscrapers, The Highline, and fairly clean safe sidewalks on view today. It's a fond remembrance of times and places past in New York City neighborhoods such as the East Village and Fort Greene, now having giving way to gentrification. However, New York City is not the only place on this planet that is dealing with gentrification and its attending issues. The news isn't all bad. In fact, oft cited data continues to show people moving back into the urban core, regardless of size and region, trying to figure how make them attractive. Anecdotal evidence suggests that people, young people in particular, want to live in places with a distinct character. Gritty is cool, the anywhere and everywhere developments of nineties are not cool.
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| Durham, North Carolina trianglehousehunter.com |
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| Durham marketplace durham-nc.com |
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| Durham Bull Athletic Park durham-nc.com |
This small section of Durham, dubbed "NoCo" (North of Corporation), is part of a transitional zone between downtown and the surrounding residential neighborhoods. It has a very energetic mix of buildings and warehouses all tied together by geography. Other than a venerable garden supply, there were very few successful businesses in the area. This situation changed in 2010 with the opening of two new commercial spaces" Fullsteam Brewery, which opened in the Art Deco former 7UP bottling plant and the hip music venue Motorco, located across the street in a former modernist auto dealership. Their immediate success gave the area enough of a push that it led to the opening of other artist studios, commercial and retail spaces, and other eclectic offerings. Now the neighborhood is regularly crowded with, wait for it, food trucks Duke University students mixing with hipsters, young families, and locals that appreciate the lack of sophistication and don't care that the chairs in the outdoor cafes don't match.
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| Exterior of Fullsteam Brewery Durham, North Carolina crossdrinker.com |
NoCo's success has even confounded Durham's planners because it seems to have been serendipitously developed-a "DIY District" if you will. Their, presumably NoCo's developers, foresight to graft the core of the neighborhood onto an existing design district before Fullsteam and Motorco opened has it the area evolve carefully. New zoning (regulations?) has encouraged a broad mix of uses and tilts towards pedestrians by doing away with cumbersome parking requirements. Flexible rules for development are sufficient enough to avoid things from becoming boring bland boxes but also have enough force to keep developers with plans that would radically change the character of the neighborhood.
Mr. Hough wryly observes that the neighborhoods transformation perfectly embodies the city's feisty personality. For Mr. Hough, it reflects a movement-people want to be in a place they care about and are anxious to push back against the irritating habit of over-designing and over-planning places in a well-intentioned effort to impose some conception of what these places ought to look like. Maybe this idea is catching in other cities, primed for things to happen? How about that, Jane Jacobs was right all along. Planned and designed places can be a good thing when they are rooted in the community and allowed to develop organically. A little bit of decay and dirt isn't necessarily a sign of pending doom. Mr. Hough points to James Q. Wilson's "Broken Window Theory" for instilling a need to over do it all the time. Grit is good. The New York City of Kojak demonstrates that there isn't anything wrong with a little bit of dirt.
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