Streets for People

I read this book over 20 years ago and yet its impact stays with me. It's on my list to acquire (used as it's out of print) and re-read. When I read Streets for People, I was not yet an engineer, but was already very interested in the interaction, overlap and tension between aesthetics and function. This book gave me a new environment within which to think of these themes, and has made me permanently more aware of the life on streets and sidewalks, of the trade-offs between downtowns and malls, etc. As another reviewer has mentioned, our thinking as a culture about streets and homes and the integration of residential and commercial functions has changed over time, and I look forward to re-reading and seeing how many of the ideas in this book have been more implemented in the last 20 years.

Rudofsky wrote the book at the height of the first huge wave of emirgration to the suburbs, when cities were of nearly the least interest to people and the suburbs and their malls were where it was at. Now, years later, we have suburbs that are scrambling to rebuild themselves like cities and malls that have fallen prey to even bigger malls with more drawing power/gravity to pull in more shoppers. There is even a website called deadmalls.com to document the dead malls in America, the most famous of which is the long, long dead Dixie Mall in Harvey, Illinois, featured in the movie "The Blues Brothers". I wonder what Rudofsky would think of Transit Oriented Development or The New Urbanism, just to name a few. He might well applaud them and say that he told us so. I wonder if he might even let someone drag out of him any grudging acceptance whatsoever that good urban design might exist in America, or if he might even expand his approval to speak up for affordable housing at all income levels, thereby expanding that label's appeal. Now, it just means Low Income Housing and Those People. Given the times in which he wrote this book, the early to middle 1960s, I can somewhat forgive him for saying, "Those God-awful, Philistine Americans, they don't know the beauty of Europe". However, I think that the market has determined what people can and cannot take from their suburbs, and they are starting to demand better urban design based on the cost of doing the same old things in areas that are necessarily 40 miles away from the central city, if not further. I may criticize this book somewhat, but let me tell you this: This book made me want to be a city planner, a dream I have made come true, when I read this book at the tender age of 14 or 15. I picked this book up and could not put it down. My library in my small town of Jackson, Michigan, had a copy and I either checked it out or read it numerous times. I think I even called Mrs. Rudofsky to offer my condolences after calling information for his number or looking it up on microfiche (oh, those pre-Internet/Mosaic/Netscape days!). I was so isolated in the dream that this book started that I didn't even know urban planning existed as a profession, much less that I could aspire to it. In the end, take this book with a grain of salt, understand the author's biases and the times in which it was written. It may well have started an urban design revolution that many recent books in that field have continued.

Another beautifully illustrated book by Bernard Rudofsky (author of "Architecture without Architects", still in print), this time with ample commentary detailing the significance of pedestrian culture across the globe. One wonders whether Victor Gruen and Rudofsky personally knew each other and, if so, who was a greater advocate of street culture. I myself rarely walk anywhere, but, when I do, their appreciation of its pleasures informs every moment.