A Place to be Human
"We often get busy making a living and forget about the things that we see every day."
"During the space that is designed for machines."
"We have to find our way now if our cities, our smaller towns..."
"Problem-ridden major metropolis"
"Some of our old central districts never planned"
"Tree gives a person a sense of scale."
"Relate the area to the man himself"
"We're losing our open space"
"We need lots of open space, a lot of parkland and it should be inviting"
"We had no quality of urban design"
"We really should ask ourselves what does this mean for the city?"
"We need a place to stop and sit down and contact with people enough to know that a pleasant environment relieves them of tension, emotion, and frustration"
"This is where we lost our way and this is where we have to find our way now"
"It's a jungle out here, this is what we call the beginning of urban blight"
"We have to keep reinvesting in our community or it will deteriorate just like an abandoned home"
A place to be human.
A growing number of people believe that many of our cities and towns just don't fit that description.
They're overcrowded and polluted.
They're not very pretty to look at.
And they're inconvenient to travel in.
In general, people are finding that neither our cities nor towns fill our needs for comfortable areas in which to live, work, and play.
But it didn't be that way.
Cities can be designed in a way that lets people move about conveniently.
That allows them to have attractive surroundings.
And gives them areas for play, to relax, and to enjoy themselves
And people are coming to realize this.
We looked around and saw many areas in towns which we didn't think looked as they should,
they were not conducive to a good environment.
We got a group of civic leaders together, pointed these things out to them.
And from this we started action.
We have lost our way somewhat.
We have forgotten that our communities are for us as people.
And we give priority to cars and trucks and motorcycles,
and we lose the civilizing aspect that made our towns exciting and interesting places to live.
I think at this time we need to stop and re-examine the quality of our lives.
What we're looking at now is roughly what you see being developed all across the country.
And we consider this a shame because no thought had been given to the humanocracy of this land.
You'll notice the asphalt and the building and that's it.
They step back and throw an open door and say, come and shop here
But unfortunately, today's shopper is looking for more aesthetic quality.
Some of the most important things about a community to me as an individual and as a designer
are the characteristics of that community that tend to make the individual feel as though he's a part of it.
And this is a feeling that I think can be very consciously generated by good design.
And I think one of the most important things when one begins to consider improving the visual character of an urban area
is to carefully take a look at what exists
And again, one of the most common problems in my view of an individual shop is that if they're in an old building,
immediately they think that any improvement visually starts with buying an aluminum storefront
and covering up everything that was built more than 20 years ago.
And quite frequently it has very tragic results.
There are many, many buildings in many of our communities that have a great deal of architectural character.
And all we have to do is recognize this character.
It's important that the community be a rich and viable area for the individual to live in.
Because if it is not, if it's nothing more than a prototype of the one down the road five miles,
then we're really missing the boat and there's no real reason to identify with that community.
A viable area for the individual to live in.
But what's that?
To understand, we need a concept of space and what space means to our lives.
Perhaps we first need to understand that although man lives on the earth,
he exists in space.
Basically because we're two-legged creatures, our feet are supported by the earth or this horizontal plane,
but our bodies are perpendicular to it.
So that everything that we experience in life, in our homes, as we shop, as we play, where we work,
is the result of three-dimensional volume of space that is developed over this horizontal plane.
Now this space that I refer to is created by the placement of objects on the land,
they may be buildings, roads, signs, benches, plant materials.
And the spaces defined by all of these objects are essentially specific forms to which a human being reacts in a very definite way,
in fact, we classify these in three different categories.
Maybe I could best demonstrate by using this little cutout of a man and place this in the palm of my hand.
And there you can see that we have a man out in open space.
And let's just say this is a nomad.
He's in a situation where every other man is his enemy and every animal is his enemy.
And in an open, unprotected space, he would tend to crouch down because he couldn't protect himself on all flanks.
Well, we're not so far removed from this ancestor of ours that we don't react to a great extent in the same way.
We no longer crouch down, but we feel overwhelmed and unprotected by broad open spaces.
But give me the opportunity to detail this space with paving patterns, benches, plant materials, and other vertical structures
I then make this space more approachable, I make it more human, and hopefully we will achieve a sense of place.
By changing my hand, we still have man oriented to the horizontal,
but I have introduced a vertical element to which man can definitely relate.
He can focus on this and it gives a reference of scale to man and to his own body.
This is space that results in very comfortable space for human beings because we feel sheltered and protected,
and we should strive for more of these types of spaces in our community.
Finally, we have spaces that are small, perhaps narrow,
typical of many that we find in our community.
They may be comfortable if we exist in them by ourselves,
but if we are forced to share these with great numbers of people,
then they tend to generate tension, stress, and displeasure.
So that essentially, when we think about community development, community design, and community beautification,
we're talking not about specific areas, but rather volumes of spaces that must be developed for human use.
How then can a community best use the space it has?
Well, many things are involved, things you find in almost any town or city,
but things you rarely find used as well as they could be.
One of them is the entryway to the city.
One of the important aspects of an entry to a community is that you change very rapidly and very harshly
from rural, placid countryside to a very complex change of land usage,
where suddenly you're confronted by industrial usage or residential usage or strict shopping centers.
I think one of the most important things that a well-thought-out entryway can do is offer a transition
from this purely rural, natural type of landscape to the densely man-made situation.
There are many ways to get from the country to the city,
and it doesn't have to be an unattractive route.
As you enter the community, you've left the pastoral scene, if you will,
and the scene begins to become one where plant materials, giving you a tie in the rural area, begin to be used in a design context.
And this gives you an introduction to the fact that, yes, man is approaching here,
that you are coming into an urbanized area, and man has an effect upon it.
But even a well-designed entryway will lose its effect unless planners look outside the city limits.
One of the most important things that the visitor identifies with that the local person may not really be aware of because he sees it so frequently,
are the focal points or the landmarks that the community might have.
One of the most tragic things, though,
is placing incongruous or distracting elements between the visitor entering the community and the focal point.
Industry can be an eyesore, or it can be a landmark.
In our town, most industrialists realize the responsibility that they have to the community, their employees,
and that they will attract better employees in a better environment.
They realize that they have this moral obligation to the community.
They also realize that they have a terrific investment in this community.
Commercial strips, where there are distracting roadside signs and there are clashing building styles, are often the ugliest parts of the city.
There is also the litter of utility wires and poles, the litter of unnecessary signs that don't communicate information but merely clutter up our scene.
There is the litter of unplanned growth, of proliferations, of gas stations, and marginal businesses along highways,
which, if they had been planned, could have been grouped together in a pleasing way.
Because individual businesses are looking out for themselves
they put up a big sign to call attention to themselves.
And it's rather popular now to take pot shots at all signs.
And I think probably that's not generally the best approach to take toward signing.
We have to return to what is pleasing in simplicity of design
and a sense of order that the mind can follow.
Business buildings along commercial strips can be designed so that they harmonize with the rest of the community.
Gas stations, for example.
Obviously are a needed commodity.
The basic function of a service station is to provide services to an automobile.
But at the same time, I don't think it's fair to say that that is their only context to the community
because they, like anything else, are simply a part of a larger whole.
And it is not necessary for them to be a bare, scalped corner with tenants hanging from every corner of the site.
The gas station should be given design consideration just like anything else.
Motels, theaters should be similarly concerned.
In many of these commercial areas, there are some especially discordant areas or structures.
For example, the large, expansive, and barren parking areas associated with shopping centers.
Frequently, they are not only an eyesore to the community,
but a drain on the central business district.
Our shopping areas are, in most cases, miserably deficient from this aspect.
We have not considered the driver.
We've considered only the car.
Once you're there, you are not dependent upon the automobile at all.
So we have this terrible contrast that once you get out of your car and begin shopping,
you're in really an alien territory.
You're in a space that is designed for machines, and yet you're a human being, and you have nothing to relate to.
Some shopping centers have provided an alternative.
This is one reason that many downtown areas have probably suffered in sales and many stores are closing.
Downtown merchants are in a battle with area shopping centers,
and this is one way they can compete effectively by attracting the customer to attractive areas.
There are a lot of ways that a community can achieve a sense of human scale in a downtown shopping area.
And obviously the one that probably would achieve it the quickest and the most completely
is to block off a street and return that whole street space to a pedestrian zone.
Another example would be if the primary shopping street could not be closed.
Forfeit four or five parking spaces per city block of shopping precinct,
and in these parking spaces, you could provide a generous area in which a major shade tree can be planted.
Now, normally the reaction would be, good heavens, we can't give up any parking.
But what you have to weigh is the fact that if it is not a pleasant area to walk in, to shop in,
once you get out of that car, it's not going to make any difference how much parking you have.
I don't think you can overemphasize the value of a street tree program in any municipality.
After all, our streets are our show places, and I think trees can do more to enhance a town than we really realize.
It's amazing when we go in and plant street trees in a neighborhood how the property owners will start to take notice,
how they will protect those trees, how they'll take better care of their lawn, their own landscaping, and even their boats.
As we widened the streets in our communities,
and it became necessary to modify the walk, we did so under the same contract,
and as a net result, the sidewalk is identical paving to the street itself.
People walking relate favorably to a variety of texture and a variety of color
and this can be achieved in paving materials.
Sometimes communities decide that the central business district needs a whole new look,
and a mall is frequently the device that provides that look.
A mall can provide the central focus for the business district,
and it can provide an area for shoppers, passersby, and businessmen to enjoy themselves.
But whether you're building a mall or redesigning a street,
you need to consider a number of items that usually aren't given much serious thought in central business districts.
Street furniture,
and by that we could include such things as lighting, benches, mundane things as waste containers, display cases.
These elements, though they are simply details,
can be utilized to give a great deal of continuity to a shopping area.
The sign kiosk, for example,
they can be a very exciting element in the downtown area because it's a constantly changing element.
Benches obviously provide a place to rest,
but they can also be used to define small subspaces.
They can be used to separate and help control traffic flow.
You might want to use the benches to define a quiet area where people might sit and read a newspaper.
Display cases can be freestanding sculptural elements within our pedestrian zones.
Lighting fixtures do not have to be on 30-foot poles.
They can be glass globes,
they can be clusters of lights that become sculptural focals in themselves.
Many times, communities don't need drastic changes.
Sometimes all that's needed is emphasizing the hidden beauty of the community itself.
One of the big assets of many Midwestern towns is the courthouse square.
The square, in many of our communities, is an open resource that really is just lying fallow,
simply waiting for some attention to be given to it in order to turn this into significant pedestrian space and a focal point in our town.
Normally, the square is dominated by a courthouse.
With some maintenance that can become very strong visual focal points within the community.
Not only do we have courthouse squares, but there are other open space nodes that might be as large as a square, maybe a city block, a half block.
There might, in fact, even be smaller open spaces that were created to provide a setting for perhaps a piece of sculpture, a war memorial, or any number of things.
An existing resource that occurs in many communities that has not received proper attention is the existing waterways.
It could be the most dominant pedestrian-related resource in any given community,
and it would be a shame if it was not recognized as such and steps weren't taken to return this as a true natural feature.
So far, we've been talking about big things
building nice entryways, controlling signs, coordinating building styles, and redesigning the downtown area.
All jobs that usually have to be tackled on a community-wide basis.
But there are also things that the individual citizen or groups of citizens can do to make their community more pleasant.
An important part of any community is its residential areas,
the places where people live.
And the design of residential districts affects the people who live there, and it also affects the community as a whole in terms of the way it looks.
Individuals can do a lot to help their community just by keeping their houses in good condition.
And if they're considering building or remodeling,
then they should consider the areas around them.
They can work so that their homes will blend with that which is around them,
but not necessarily be so uniform that it's like going down one of our new subdivisions where every house is just an exact duplicate of the preceding one.
Residential areas should be designed so that the houses not only harmonize with the environment,
but at the same time they provide individuality.
Areas such as apartment houses have the same problem.
A great number of buildings all built along the same design end up looking alike and having a very sterile, cold appearance.
Every community has churches and schools,
and good design in these areas will be beneficial to the passerby as well as to those who use them.
Schools are an important use within a community to give particular attention to good design.
One of the tragedies is to drive past any number of schools and see the school structure surrounded by an asphalt concrete.
The asphalt concrete is assigned as play space and the inside of the school is assigned as the education space.
It's a marvelous experience to be able to go outside and to actually hold classes on the site.
But to do so you have to give some design consideration to it.
And of course, people must play, so parks and playgrounds are important parts of any community.
Parks, I can't say too much about parks.
We're losing our open space.
I think we need lots of open space,
a lot of parkland,
and it should be inviting
because we're getting to shorter and shorter work weeks,
and man needs some place where he can sit and think and play.
Today, there is a greater emphasis upon what we call a creative playground.
A creative playground really is a playground designed to provide a variety of experiences, play experiences and learning experiences for the kids.
The motor skills development, I think, is a very important aspect.
The various pieces of play equipment are linked together.
They're not isolated pieces of equipment sitting side by side in a field.
Now we know what it takes to make a place to be human.
But how do we get it?
Well, the people we talked with used a variety of approaches in their communities,
but a central feature in all approaches is that you get a broad spectrum of people from the community to take the leadership and start moving others.
Several years ago, a group of people here in Alton just didn't like the way our town looked.
Our town is old.
We thought that it needed improving in appearance.
Too often we get busy making a living and forget about the things that we see every day.
And we got about eight couples together, men and women, one Sunday night and had supper together and we showed some slides of what our town looked like.
In about six months we gave birth to pride,
and these people just kept spreading the word, and from that we involved representatives from every segment of our community.
The League of Women Voters of Champaign County initiated a one-day conference.
Out of this came the feeling that we needed a new organization.
We have some successful projects,
and we hope that they can point the way for general trends that both public and private agencies will pick up and follow through with.
Other groups have taken other approaches, but regardless of the approach used,
there is general agreement that some sort of effort has to be made.
And someone has to start it so all can benefit from a place to be human.