The Architecture (+art) of Signature Streets by Josh Grigsby

T H E

AR CH I T E C T UR E( + a r t ) OFSI GN A T UR ES T R E E T S

JOSHUAGR I GSB Y

Department of Geography

Graduation thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in urban Studies

Title: â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Architecture (+art) of Signature Streetsâ&#x20AC;? Supervisor: Prof. Martin Zerlang

September 2012

Josh Grigsby

+ART

THE ArCHITECTurE Of SIGNATurE STrEETS

+ART

The Architecture of Signature Streets Chapter One: An Introduction Prologue: The City of the Wooded Circle Why Signature Streets, or I ♡ Allan Jacobs Three Categories of Streets The Essentialness of Streets Why the “Architecture” of Signature Streets? Three Definitions of Architecture Why “(+art)” of Signature Streets? A Note on Content & Structure

Chapter Two: Contextualization, Definition, Origin On Streets & Great Streets Signature Streets Defined A Brief History of Signature Streets

Chapter Three: Toward a Theory of Signature Streets Dual Drivers of Signature Streets Driver #1: Beauty Driver #2: Branding

07 08 12 13 14 14 15 21 23 25 26 30 34 47 48 48 66

+ART

The Architecture of Signature Streets 81 82 83 86 116 122 126 132 158 164 170

Chapter Four: Case Studies Introducing the Case Study Streets + Analytical Approach Toward a Semiotics of the Street Strøget (Copenhagen) Walking Strøget: Observing Life, Space, Form Making Strøget: A Signature Street Takes Shape Contextualization: Strøget as Signature Spine Conclusions & Cautions Ringstrasse (Vienna) Walking Ringstrasse: Observing Life, Space, Form Making Ringstrasse: A Signature Street is Decreed Contextualization: Ringstrasse as Signature Limes Conclusions & Cautions

173 174 174 176 178

Chapter Five: Conclusions & Final Thoughts

180

Appendix

A Concise Recapitulation Lessons from the Case Study Streets Closing Thoughts Epilogue: On the Passeggiata

Not by appointment do we meet delight Or joy; they heed not our expectancy; But round some corner of the streets of life they of a sudden greet us with a smile.

—Gerald Massey, The Bridegroom of Beauty

For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe...

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.

—T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

CHAPTER ONE AN INTRODUCTION

Prologue: The City of the Wooded Circle

am walking through history. It is red and green and shaded with gray. Morning fog and silence hang over the grassy tagliata below San Donato, dark sentinel trees arrayed neatly beyond. Wisps of mist scale the ten meter brick walls and drift across the passeggiata where they melt like ghosts. On this open stretch I am alone. To my right, entirely ringed by the earth and brick walls on which I walk, is Lucca. Old Lucca, Lucca as it was five hundred years ago, Lucca as it is has become, Lucca as it will always be so long as the mura’s embrace holds. Unseen, unheard, troops are mustering near San Pietro. Now, too, and centuries later, horse-drawn carts rumble toward Antico Caffé, where wealthy Lucchesi will break their fast. I see the Palazzo Pfanner with its fine gardens and statues. There is the tower of San Frediano, and there Guinigi. Puccini is here, yet asleep, and in his dreams such music. Romans are here, too, at the anfiteatro, the old one that has been dust for two millennia. They also dream, but of home. Church bells peal and the city wakes. I hear a soft metallic grinding and a man on a bicycle overtakes me. The growing roar of cars and motorcycles on the highway breaches the old city walls, whose spell remains unbroken. The passeggiata delle mura urbane provides an ideal street on which to walk, to cycle, to sit and read or walk one’s dog, to picnic on the baluardi, to run into old friends or chat with strangers, but more than these things it is a symbol of Lucca, a sort of proxy for the city, like a signature for its signee.

“Gabriele D’Annunzio celebrated Lucca as ‘the city of the wooded circle,” thus establishing one of its most felicitous and most frequently used self-images. But the walls have also served, and still serve, to form the identity and the mentality of those who live within them.”

- Roberta Martinelli

“As Arrigo Benedetti noted, the walls ‘reveal the Lucchese taste for holding aloof, their tendency to look on those born within the walls as citizens of a special sort, gifted with a particularly strong sense of civic duty.’”1 And what better place for the Lucchesi, and for the rest of us, to look on Lucca from than here? The passeggiata not only looks both out from Lucca and onto Lucca, it looks into Lucca. It is Lucca. When on the passeggiata you are in Lucca, unmistakably, and you are nowhere else.

Why Signature Streets: or, I ♡ Allan Jacobs Roland Barthes claimed that “whoever would outline a semiotics of the city needs to be at the same time semiologist, geographer, historian, planner, architect and probably psychoanalyst.”2 The very best readers & writers of the city are all of these and more—I would add flâneur, spy, teacher, and poet, at least (again referencing Barthes) at an amateur level in the etymological sense of the the word: “he who loves.” Spiro Kostof belongs to this select group, as does Jan Gehl, Peter Bosselmann, Jane Jacobs, Witold Rybczynski, and perhaps most influential for me, Allan Jacobs. The Good City and Great Streets are two of my favorite books. This thesis is an attempt, however stumbling, to begin to follow in the footsteps of urbanists like Jacobs, et al., who manage to be holistic in their observations of the city without losing sight of its individual components, and who succeed in systematically illuminating the relationship between buildings, space, signs, and people without dispelling its magic. The genesis of this thesis was my walks on the passeggiata delle mura urbane in Lucca. I realized this was not only a street, and not only a Jacobsian “great street,” but some third kind, which I could only call a signature street. I had heard the term before but was surprised to find that signature streets have yet to be properly defined, let alone theorized, analyzed, or understood. This thesis is intended to begin to fill that gap, to get the ball rolling.

Three Categories of Streets For the purposes of this thesis, streets are grouped into three categories: functional, great, and signature. Functional streets are all those that exist principally to provide access—to homes, to businesses, to other streets. Some may be more memorable than others but they are not, as a rule, cultural lodestones. Functional streets demand our attention only when they do not work properly. Great streets, after Jacobs, transcend functionality and become destinations. They are the streets we choose to be on without need. We develop emotional, even psychic, connections to them. They are the places we meet friends and bring visitors to. Nearly every town and city has at least one great street, and many have numerous great streets, depending on how rigorous one’s criteria for measurement is. When compared to functional streets, great streets are rare; signature streets are rarer still. They are the streets that have become inextricably linked with their city, the streets that by common agreement represent their city, that manifest a prevailing notion of their city. They are singular streets. There is only one Broadway, only one Champs-Élysées, and who could imagine either in a city other than, respectively, New York or Paris? Who could imagine New York or Paris without Broadway or the Champs-Élysées? Would Lucca be Lucca without the passeggiata?

The Essentialness of Streets Streets represent the lion’s share of urban public space. Cities built during the age of motor vehicles have a predictably high percentage of their land dedicated to streets, but so too do more ancient cities. More than 40% of Houston, Chicago, and even Boston is made up of streets, and the street-share of Paris and Vienna, while lower, is still around 25%. Streets may consume less than 10% of the total area of medieval Italian cities such as Verona, but in all cases they account for more than 90% of public space.3 This is all to say that streets are essential urban elements, germane to any discussion of urbanity. We experience a city mostly from and on its streets. They affect and are affected by local planning and architectural projects, local history, economic and social conditions, climate, transportation policies, the perceptions that a city has of itself, and the perceptions of people in other cities watching from a distance.

Why the “Architecture” of Signature Streets If you understand architecture to mean only the design of buildings the title might cause some confusion. This thesis is not a construction manual nor a catalogue of buildings, and while it touches on designable aspects of signature streets it is not prescriptive. So what is meant by architecture? ‘What’, exactly, ‘is one doing when one is doing architecture?’”4 Signature streets are formed by a curious mix of intention, interaction, and historical

happenstance. They are complex beasts, and their consideration deserves a nuanced approach. Architecture is no less complex, with multiple meanings that range from an abstract concept to a design profession. They share a unifying thread, however: the making and communication of place. The three definitions of architecture below represent three overlapping frames, three points of view from which to examine signature streets, and they underpin the analyses that follow.

Three Definitions of Architecture 1 > SHAPING OF MASSES / FRAMING OF CAVITIES Probably the most common definition of architecture, what is assumed to be the task of architects, is the design of buildings. That is, architects are responsible for the shape and style of individual structures that will house the functions of living, working, and playing. They decide how and where to divide the interior space into rooms and corridors, where to place windows and doors and what size and shape those windows and doors will be. They sculpt the exterior, the frame of the building, and design the facade according to the stylistic preferences of their clients. In this way, architects are often understood to be artists and purveyors of style, and, less so, visual designers or graphic artists. Architecture has long been spoken of alongside other classical arts such as painting and sculpture, and in such discussions it is easy to focus on aesthetic qualities, on style. However, despite Philip Johnson’s clarification that “a style is a climate in which to operate, a springboard to leap further into the air,” and Gabrielle Chanel’s claim that while “fashion passes, style remains,” Witold Rybczynski admits that “architects don’t like to talk about style.”5 Unlike painting or sculpture, pure arts both whose purpose is more inspirational than practical, architecture can be considered

first a functional art. It is a bigger act, more important, more impactful, more concerned with the good of the people (or at least of its clients), than style or design connotes. Architecture is an art, yes, but it is also a science in which physics and even psychology are paramount. Translating Vitrivius and his three fundamental laws of architecture—firmitas, utilitas, venustas—Sir Henry Wotton wrote, in 1642, that “in Architecture, as in all other Operative Arts, the end must direct the Operation. The end is to build well. Wellbuilding hath three conditions: Commoditie, Firmeness, and Delight.” Rybczynski defines the aims of these conditions as “to shelter human activity (commodity), to durably challenge gravity and the elements (firmness), and to be an object of beauty (delight). Architecture is always a synthesis of the three.”6 This definition is certainly a better one than the reductive “design of buildings,” but it still restricts the realm of the architect to buildings, to masses. If we invert the figure ground, does this definition change? “Instead of letting his imagination work with structural forms, with the solids of a building, the architect can work with the empty space—the cavity—between the solids, and consider the forming of that space as the real meaning of architecture...Let us suppose the site to be an enormous, solid rock and the problem to hollow out rooms inside it. Then the architect’s job would be to form space by eliminating material, in this case by removing some of the rock.”7 If we consider the street as “an enclosed, three-dimensional space between two lines of adjacent buildings,”8 is it not an architectural object? An architectural cavity shaped by surrounding masses? Architecture is a dance, with masses and cavities as partners. They are symbiotic elements, each helping to define the other. “The Germans speak of Raum-Gefühl, meaning the sense or conception of the defined space. In English there is no equivalent.”9 Noah Webster and his colleagues might fail us,

but an all-encompassing noun is not required for us to know that a space has been conceptualized, framed, defined. Well-designed streets and squares and even parks convey a sense of intention. Everything in its right place, as they say. Masses and cavities, enclosures and openings, the built environment and the spaces framed by it. The architecture of the street.

2 > IDENTIFICATION OF PLACE / CONCEPTUAL ORGANIZATION By alternately emphasizing masses and cavities, two mirrored concepts of the city take shape. The first is of an empty ground upon which buildings are erected, an urban fabric woven from a cloth of buildings. In the second, the city is a solid mass of buildings from which streets and squares and other cavities are carved. Generally speaking, modern cities have sprung from the former, tabula rasa, concept, while traditional or medieval cities evoke the latter. Either way, here architecture can be defined as a multi-scalar, conceptual organization of discrete parts.

Two Concepts of Urbanism:

Figure-ground & figure-ground reversal.

Simon Unwin makes the comparison to musicology, in which “the architecture of a symphony can be said to be the conceptual organisation of its parts into a whole, its intellectual structure...The architecture of a building, a group of buildings, a city, a garden…is considered to be its conceptual organisation, its intellectual structure. This is a definition of architecture which is applicable to all kinds of examples, from simple rustic buildings to formal urban settings.”10 Before there were buildings there was architecture. Before there were professions there were architects. Unwin’s description of the primordial origins of architecture gets at the heart of the concept: “Imagine a prehistoric family making its way through a landscape unaffected by human activity. They decide to stop, and as the evening draws on they light a fire. By doing so, whether they intend to stay there permanently or just for one night, they have established a place. The fireplace is for the time being the centre of their lives. As they go about the business of living they make more places, subsidiary to the fire: a place to store fuel; a place to sit; a place to sleep; perhaps they surround these places with a fence; perhaps they shelter their sleeping place with a canopy of leaves. From their choice of the site onwards they have begun the evolution of the house; they have begun to organise the world around them into places which they use for a variety of purposes. They have begun to do architecture.”11 The most fundamental definition of architecture is this, the purposeful alteration of one’s environment to suit one’s needs. It is, with apologies to Michel de Certeau, the creation of place (which has meaning) via the modification of space (which does not). It is also both a solitary act and a collective one. “Perhaps most important, thinking of architecture as identification of place accommodates the idea that architecture is participated in by more than the individual. In any one example (a building for instance) there will be places proposed by the designer, and places created by adoption by the users.”12 A space only becomes a place when embraced by its intended users.

Architecture as the organization of elements so as to provide a setting for particular activities and modes of living can be traced at least as far back as the beginning of the common era, when Vitruvius—architect, engineer, and writer—identified three street scenes as appropriate backdrops for theater productions.13 Serlio considered these three streets—the tragic, the comedic, the satyric—to be “the paradigmatic environments of the Renaissance, the public realms within which the dramas of city and country life were to be acted out; dramas of state and public ritual in the tragic street, of boisterous merchant and popular life in the residential street of comedy, and of bucolic manners and country sport in the forest path.”14 Emerging from this notion of architecture is a context for activity—a context for urbanity when expanded to at least the scale of the street. The ten thousand activities of the city are given enough order to avoid being choked by chaos and conflict. The potential paralysis of anarchy (or, put another way, unlimited choice) is mitigated. Places are provided for working, for residing, for consuming, for recreating, for congregating, for moving about. Architecture is a skeleton around which pieces assemble so that we might perceive a body whole.

3 > VEHICLE FOR VISIONS / CANVAS FOR CULTURE Of architecture, Roland Barthes wrote, “[it] is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.”15 Architecture does not end with the satisfaction of its intended function. Always it conveys meaning, always it suggests a vision of what could be, what should be, of what is beautiful, what is right, what is here. Or else it is not architecture and only construction. The outward function of the great tower on the plain of Shinar might have been simply to cloister the first community, but the symbolic power of its heavenly reach was too great for God to suffer.16 Even as one marvels at the twinkling spread of the

Serlio interpreting Vitruvius:

Three Pardigmatic Street Scenes.

From top: tragic, comedic, satyric.

Los Angeles basin below, Mulholland Drive offers a lonely and voyeuristic vision of success. On Piazza San Marco, especially when flooded during acqua alta, brick and solid stone become buoyant, Venice reveals itself to be one and all of Calvino’s invisible cities, and the question what other impossible places might we build? becomes irresistible. Le Corbusier’s concept of La Ville Radieuse suggested that a newly evolved humankind required a freshly conceived urban form, and that the future could be anything but in league with the past. Whether structure, street, square, or city, architecture can give material form to our dreams. It can suggest who we might become and even what is possible. Who has walked the aisles of St. Peter’s, or stood in the shadow of the duomo, and not been struck by a vision of divinity, of the limitlessness of art and the inexorability of will? Castles can make us believe in fairy tales; prisons can crush our spirits without our ever needing enter them; streets can convince us that magic is real and that if we only lingered awhile in this place we, too, would be touched by it. In Notre Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo wrote that “architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.”17 Form does not always follow function; sometimes design follows dreaming, with new dreams following design in turn. The architecture of signature streets provides local visions a vehicle and local culture a canvas.

Why “(+art)” of Signature Streets Because the science of streets doesn’t tell the whole story. Signature streets cannot simply be designated as such. Their status must be felt. Because beauty and aesthetics are central elements of signature streets.

Architecture as Vehicle for Visions and Canvas for Culture. The Tower of Babel; Le Corbusierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s La Ville Radieuse; Dubai.

Because “our favourite works of art seem to guide us to the truth of the human condition and, by presenting completed instances of human actions and passions, freed from the contingencies of everyday life, to show the worthwhileness of being human.”18 Because the ultimate job of signature streets is to remind us, in some small way, why and how being human here, in this place, is worthwhile. Because signature streets, like great streets, have magic, and magic is a squirrelly thing.

A Note On Content & Structure In this thesis I will attempt (1) to define the term signature street and sketch its historic development; (2) to propose a theory explaining its importance; (3) to explore the role of signature streets in current urbanistic practices, especially city branding; (4) to analyze two case study streets; and (5) to glean some lessons for cities attempting to create, improve, or leverage signature streets. This first chapter introduced the subject, explained the title, and stated the goals of the thesis. Chapter two will contextualize the concept of signature streets, define the term, and briefly trace the evolution of the street (and the rise of signature streets) in history. Chapter three aims to establish a theoretical foundation for the discussion of signature streets by expounding on the dual drivers of beauty and branding. The fourth chapter consists of multifaceted analyses of two case study streets: Copenhagen’s Strøget and Vienna’s Ringstrasse. The fifth and final chapter presents the lessons learned from the case study streets and about signature streets generally. Numerous books could be written on the concept of signature streets: how media

has shaped it, how economics, and perhaps especially its relationship to the extant literature of the street as a locus of collective memory and identity. Sociology and anthropology, among many other disciplines, could shed much light on the subject. However, this thesis will attempt to restrict itself to the architecture (+ art) of signature streets, touching on other themes and perspectives only where they overlap.

CHAPTER TWO CONTEXTUALIZATION / DEFINITION / ORIGINS

On Streets & Great Streets “Our streets no longer work. Streets are an obsolete notion.”1

—Le Corbusier

Streets lead us where we need to go. They are the paths by which we move ourselves and the things we make and consume and dispose of. Streets are no different than roads and and routes, avenues and freeways, these many monikers differing only in scale and pace. Streets are about movement, transport. They are functional spaces, voids, means to an end. And if we accepted this definition as complete we would fail to understand that streets is a biological order of sorts, distinct from roads and the rest, within the kingdom rights of way. As Cliff Moughtin notes, “one particular feature of the road or thoroughfare which is incompatible with the street is the movement of fast-moving or heavy traffic with all its engineering requirements.” He defines a street as “an enclosed, three-dimensional space between two lines of adjacent buildings...in a town or village, comparatively wide as opposed to a lane or alley.”2 Streets, then, are urban. Transportation is accommodated by them, as are the needs of commerce and leisure and casual interac-

A road; not a street. São Paulo.

tion. Streets are places as much as spaces. More specifically, public places and spaces. Streets are linear extensions of squares and plazas and parks as well as the corridors that join them. “Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs,” wrote Jane Jacobs. “Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets. If a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city looks dull.”3 Ms. Jacobs was a keen critic of modernist planning, but even within CIAM there were those, such as Peter and Alison Smithson, who understood that “the street is not only a means of access but also an arena for social expression.”4

A Jane Jacobs Street: Greenwich Village, New York City.

Streets are not accidental. The word comes to us from the Latin strata, or strata via, meaning paved way, and as Ernest Weekley wrote, in his exhaustive 1921 tome An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, “In the Middle Ages a road or way was merely a direction in which people rode or went, the name street (emphasis added) being reserved for the made road.”5 Streets were and are designed and constructed with specific intentions. Baron Haussmann made his boulevards broad to facilitate military maneuvers and the control of Parisian mobs. Mesopotamian cities kept streets narrow to maximize shade from the relentless sun and often set dead end

streets against gusts of desert wind.6 Streets are also representative spaces. Notions of cosmic order were reflected in the layout of streets in early Chinese cities, while the harmony of abstract geometry guided the platting of many baroque European towns. The ubiquitous bicycle lanes of Copenhagen and the small sidewalks and expansive boulevards of Los Angeles are testaments to local priorities and politics. Look closely at the streets of a city. Listen to them. See the buildings, size and style and the purposes they are put to. See what happens on the sidewalks and in the motorways and whether these are separate spaces. By its streets the city reveals itself— what it values, what it aspires to, how it perceives itself. Many streets serve bicycles, cars, trucks, buses, trams, and other modes of egress, but they are, first, for people, for pedestrians, and it is on foot that streets are best experienced. “Human movement is by nature limited to predominantly horizontal motion at a speed of approximately 5 kilometers per hour (3 mph), and the sensory apparatus is finely adapted to this condition.”7 The best streets must be walked, and walked repeatedly, to be known. Allan Jacobs begins his seminal Great Streets with the simple statement, “Some streets are better than others; to be on, to do what you came to do.”8 His book is ostensibly an exploration of the designable qualities of great streets, with great in this sense referring not to size or grandeur but superior quality, but his consideration of streets far exceeds dimensions and materiality, facades and functions. Jacobs brings humanity to his study of streets. How does it feel to be there? So, what qualities elevate a great street above other streets? “What is it that a great street should do?”9 According to Jacobs, a great street: is physically comfortable and

safe; encourages participation; can be remembered; and, finally, is representative, the epitome of a type. Among these he counts the Via dei Giubbonari in Rome, the Cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence, and Barcelonaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Las Ramblas. But are these criteria sufficient? Not entirely. There is yet one more quality, a quality that is virtually impossible to measure and difficult, at best, to design for: magic. Le Corbusier was wrong about the obsolescence of streets. Streets are still central to the making of community, the forging of collective identity, and the staging of

An Allan Jacobs Great Street: Boulevard St. Michel, Paris.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;There is magic to great streets. We are attracted to the best of them not because we have to go there but because we want to be there. The best are as joyful as they are utilitarian. They are entertaining and they are open to all. They permit anonymity at the same time as individual recognition. They are symbols of a community and of its history; they represent a public memory. They are places for escape and for romance, places to act and to dream. On a great street we are allowed to dream; to remember things that may never have happened and to look forward to things that, maybe, never will.â&#x20AC;?10

- Allan Jacobs

dissent. Streets are third places and the breeding grounds of urbanity.11 Nobody told the throngs walking and shopping and eating and talking on Strøget in Copenhagen that streets are outdated. On Vienna’s Ringstrasse, the museums have not been shuttered, nor do the parading crowds seem concerned by Corbu’s pronouncement. In Lucca, on the passeggiate delle mura urbane, people walk their dogs and couples hold hands, friends meet, joggers jog, picnics are had, books are read, all in ignorance that the death knell of the street sounded a lifetime ago. The divisive Swiss visionary was right, however, that many of our streets no longer work, as places or as spaces. Architecture designed to be seen from a speeding automobile fails to inspire the pedestrian, who avoids the street anyhow because the sidewalks have been reduced or removed to make way for more cars, which in turn are mired in traffic and crawl along, ironically, at the same speed as those who once walked there, though with far less joy. All the more reason that we must learn from the best streets, whether functional, great, or signature.

Signature Streets Defined This thesis proposes signature streets as a third category distinct from functional streets and great streets and deserving of both theoretical and practical analysis. But what, exactly, is a signature street? How, specifically, does it differ from a great street? Why is the term important? And what role do signature streets play in contemporary urbanistic practices? When looking for existing definitions of a signature street, one is left wanting. I have not been able to locate a single book or academic paper that defines, contextualizes, or explains it. The term appears quite often, particularly in local media reports in the United States and Canada describing new or proposed works on a town’s signature

street. Its definition is only implied, however, its meaning assumed to be universally understood. Headlines include “Redondo’s Signature Street Gets a Facelift”12 and “Construction of a Signature Street Underway Downtown,”13 but no further explanation is provided of what is meant by signature street. A signature street seems to be either a city’s main street or its most well-known street. In smaller cities these are often the same, but polycentric modern metropolises typically have multiple main streets. Does New York have a single main street? Does Paris or London or Tokyo? Most well-known street is not a bad beginning of a definition, as it alludes to city marketing and branding (discussed in the next chapter), but it hardly tells the whole story. Signature streets are those most associated with the image of their city. They represent their city in the minds of residents and visitors and in the minds of those who have visited only in dreams. They are manifestations of the idea of their city and proxies for the ideas that shaped their city in generations past. Signature Streets are fiction. They are films. Nevsky Prospekt, Sunset Boulevard. They are often, but not always, great streets according to Jacobs’ definition. It would be stretching the truth to describe Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, which traces the spine of the eastern Santa Monica Mountains, as either physically comfortable or particularly safe, and if it encourages participation it is only in a collective fantasy of the city, performed in solitude as cars and motorcycles process on narrow rights of way. It is not a place to meet people or to shop or to conduct business. But with its sinuous curves and its chasmic cliffs and its endless views of the Los Angeles basin to the south and the San Fernando Valley to the north and its multimillion dollar houses that look like toy houses stilted to the vertical hills, Mulholland Drive is Los Angeles. Or at least an idea of it.

Detail of M.C.A.T. 308 by David Hockney.

A signature street of Los Angeles, Mulholland Drive remains identifiable even when presented in abstracted, referential form.

Signature streets have three requirements that great streets do not. They are: urban linchpins Signature streets appear as if they have grown organically from their local context, as if they were the only possibly outcome, as if they have always been. Or else they seem to be the foundation upon which the local urban fabric was built. They are highly visible and easily reached; one doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t search for a signature street so much as inevitably finds oneself on it. Remove a signature street and the logic of the city in plan view suffers, its imageability in person reduced. The city is lesser for its absence. cultural canvases On signature streets is written the history of a place and its people. They are symbolic spaces, expressive places. Legible in the buildings and the layout and in the experiences signature streets offer are the collective values of the cultures that built them, that inhabit them. Signature streets are also aspirational places that evoke ideals and suggest paths toward their realization. They are not exhaustive in this capacity, how could they be, but time spent on a signature street can bring a careful observer to a greater understanding of what distinguishes this place from that. place icons And signature streets are iconic. Great streets are representative of a typeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a best practiceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but not necessarily of local history or culture, and they need not be heralded or even known beyond their neighborhood. Signature streets have celebrity. One recognizes Las Ramblas, and in so doing one recognizes Barcelona. Many streets identified as great streets by Allan Jacobs are also signature streets, and many signature streets likely meet the criteria for great streets, but the two types have different job requirements. Great streets are streets on which people choose to be, whether they need to or not. Signature streets are proxies for their city. They are

living, interactive exhibitions of a city’s past, present, and desired future. They are ambassadors; they greet visitors and announce their city to the world.

A Brief History of Signature Streets > In the Beginning... The notion of the street as the center of social life and a locus of collective memory was a long time in coming. Streets in the early cities of Mesopotamia were functional: narrow and winding to maximize density within protective walls and to ward against enemies, heat, and wind. “Since the streets of ancient cities were dark at night and did not ensure any entertainment for citizens, people spent their times in the evenings at home, often on the rooftops.”14 Little changed over the next few millennia. Hippodamus’ gridiron layout for the Greek colony of Miletus left an unplanned void in the central city where the agora was to eventually take shape,15 and while this added importance to the streets that led directly to the center the streets themselves did little more than provide access. In cruciform Roman colonies the cardo maximus and decumanus maximus were undoubtedly the main streets, relatively wide and lined as they were with shops and vendors, but local character was suppressed by mostly uniform Roman design and aesthetics. Colonnaded shopping streets appeared near the market in some eastern provinces of Rome, in Ephesus, Timgad, and Palmyra,16 but here, too, architecture identified the empire before the city. All roads led to Rome, after all, and so all roads should be proudly Roman. Symbolic streets were evident in ancient Chinese cities such as Chang’an, which was laid out in the shape of the big dipper to refer to cosmic order.17 These cities and their streets were focused skyward, however, and their representational qualities had more

to do with the infinite and celestial than the local and cultural. Medieval European cities also developed major streets that connected the church plaza and the market square with city gates. Traffic flowed along these corridors, but the squares, both sacred and secular, remained the foci. Defensive concerns limited ground floor access to buildings, and the upkeep of the street was often left to the owners of buildings. Streets had yet to evolve into places unto themselves. For most of the long history of cities there was simply no need for signature streets. Urban life was not leisurely and cities were small, so the market and church sufficed as twin centers of public life. Though Paris was paving its streets by 1185, Florence by 1235, most of the rest of Europe was slow to follow. As such, streets were generally dirty, noisy, dangerous, and dark. Tourism was minimal, international mass media nonexistent, and cities were often under foreign rule. Inter-urban dealings were more concerned with the exchange of goods than culture. The urban condition had not developed sufficiently to demand much more from streets than safe passage. Yet change was occurring. Streets gradually began to exhibit qualities beyond those required for defense, commerce, and transport. “Small variations in height and building material and roof-top profile and variations in window openings and doorways gave each street its own physiognomy.”18 The urban fact of streets as spaces of cultural representation and local expression was emerging.

> The Street Comes into Focus Leon Battista Alberti was hardly alone in championing the narrow and winding streets of medieval urbanism for reasons of protection, both from invading armies and extreme weather, but his observation that the “winding of streets will make the passenger at every stop discover a new structure”19 suggests a notion of the city as a site of exploration and the street as a living architectural gallery. For large cities,

Alberti called for broad, noble streets that might convey the city’s greatness. Here, in embryonic form, is the idea of signature streets. Urban design, having arisen in Europe in ancient seats of empire such as Athens and Rome and having fallen into obscurity with their collapse, returned to prominence during the era of the great city-states. The city was increasingly considered in plan view, with baroque values of symmetry and balance realized in the construction of axial boulevards. Koray points out that the location of monuments as vista-terminating elements, the sense of single, integrated architectural ensembles resulting from the repetition of a basic elevational design, and the application of perspective theory in the arts combined to make the street “a locus of three-dimensional design considerations.”20 “From medieval localism to baroque centralism, from medieval uniformity to baroque universality, and from the absolutism of the church to the absolutism of the centralized power of the national state.”21 These were the tectonic shifts at play in 16th century Europe, and city builders such as Pope Sixtus V recognized that such a new order could only be expressed with a new urbanism. “The straight street can direct the social and practical advantages it passes into a discourse of ideology and with a suitable coding of architecture and decoration it can import a powerful representational message,” wrote Kostof.22 Rome and Paris established the model of monumental buildings and royal plazas connected by majestic boulevards. These were the first signature streets. Their identity was rude for all their refined design and ornamentation, however, as such streets served the few rulers more than the many ruled. They sought not cultural expression nor necessarily to inspire, but to cow. This place is favored by God, they seemed to say, or at least protected by godlike military might. Defy he who rules here at your peril.

Time marches on. New instruments of war are developed, urban populations swell, old fortifications fall. The proliferation of wheeled vehicles adds to the demands of streets, which in turn become more complex and varied in their size and functions. The baroque city craves power, it preens and it awes and it oppresses. The tragic and comic street scenes of Vitruvius and Serlio no longer require a stage; the city has become its own theater, with everyone assigned his role;23 Baroque order demands oppression. Now, though, industrial capitalism is rising. And now it has risen. The Baroque is broken. Factories are the new cathedrals, the new palaces, vulgar monuments to opportunity and opportunism. The streets are crowded and dirty and children are at play in courtyards deep with filth and the heads of kings are falling and by what rule will order be restored? The street is now a four-letter word, home to the desperate and the depraved. “Capitalism has altered the whole balance of power. The city was [now] designed [on] commercial principles and human needs were neglected. The new rulers of this era were the businessmen instead of despotic rulers.”24 From an urbanistic perspective, early industrial capitalism wrought chaos and disorder. Railroads displaced streets as the pathways upon which goods were moved. Factories and the housing of factory workers created new centralities at the urban fringe. Slums were everywhere. And those who could afford to abandon the city for the hygienic superiority of the nascent suburbs—literally greener pastures—did exactly that. If the city was lost, so too was the street.

> The Street Comes of Age But what if a city is too great to abandon? How then to ameliorate the deleterious effects of the industrial era, the overcrowding and the squalor, the rampant crime

and disease and social unrest? In Paris, Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann crafted one of the world’s great urban forms by inelegantly and unsympathetically carving wide axes from the historic core. This was urban surgery at a grand scale, and while Haussmann’s methods are rightfully criticized, his works returned the street to prominence. Parisian boulevards became the site of troop movements, of celebrations, and of public demonstrations. The winding alleys of medieval Paris became capillaries to Haussmann’s new arteries, both more distinct for the contrast. Problems of hygiene were combated with storm drains and sewers constructed beneath the street, while “visible to the eye, paving, house numbering, mail boxes and most important of all, sidewalks”25 became symbols of modernity. Mystery was now countered with rationality, tradition with innovation, and the ascendant bourgeoisie were given a canvas on which to paint their own new—capitalist—order. “Napoleon III wished to make Paris the first great city of the industrial age.”26 This is is nothing if not city branding. The autocrat’s boulevards, including the Champs Élysées, became signature streets and Paris a template that other cities, notably Vienna with the Ringstrasse, would borrow and customize. Industrialism, capitalism, and consumerism make easy bedfellows, and the adaptation of the imperialist boulevard for retail purposes seems, in retrospect, inevitable. “These boulevards put on public display the new pastimes of the fancily dressed café crowd, turning the entire city into a bourgeoisie spectacle.”27 This was not only the birth of the modern shopping street, but of the street as a true extension of the public square. Haussmann saw that “standard systems of street furniture such as pissoirs, benches, shelters, kiosks, clocks, lamp posts, signs, etc. [were] designed.”28 The implication here is that the street is a place and must be designed, equipped, programmed, and maintained as such. By this time a schism had developed in urbanism between those such as Otto Wagner who argued for purely rational and technological motives, for a break from the past, and humanists such as the Viennese architect Camillo Sitte who viewed “the

street and square [as] three-dimensional rooms for public life and public space [as] the starting point for city design.”29 This second group might accommodate traffic, but they would have the needs and experiences of humans supersede those of vehicles. The pedestrian-oriented winding streets of medieval cities were favored, as was the carefully considered, fine-grain design aesthetic of, in particular, Italian towns and cities—what Jan Gehl would later refer to as 5 km/h architecture. Considerable debate was held between the two camps until the advent of the mass-produced automobile and the ascendency of Modernism delivered decisive blows.

> The Street is for Cars It is easy to poke fun at Le Corbusier nearly a century later. Many of his statements diagnosing the problems of modern life and proposing their solutions were presented so unequivocally, and so narrowly, as to now seem absurd. But we should recall the world as it was seen through his bespectacled eyes. The industrial age had not yet ended. There seemed no solution to overcrowding and its attendant misery. The rapid spread (and increasingly rapid speed) of motor vehicles had made even crossing city streets hazardous for pedestrians. “Le Corbusier, for one, was horrified by such conditions. ‘All cities have fallen into a state of anarchy,’ he remarked. ‘The world is sick.’ Given the scale of the crisis, drastic measures were in order...Historic Paris was, after all, just a byword for tubercular Paris.”30 With Le Corbusier leading the charge, the Modernists sought to cure the ills wrought on the present by severing the past. They struck at the very idea of the city and called for city centers to be razed and replaced by towers set amidst calm and healthy parklands. The street is no suitable place for human beings, it is a place of speed and efficiency. It is for vehicles. Euclidean zoning became the tool with which the Modernist—Taylorist—urban philosophy of separation of functions became first law, then reality. Once streets were taken away from people and given to cars, cities

followed suit. The story of the street in the 20th century is largely the story of the automobile.

> The Street is for People There was one tiny detail overlooked by Le Corbusier and his colleagues, however. Humans aren’t machines and we do not wish to behave mechanically. We do not value efficiency above all else. We like to walk. We like streets. We like to watch other people and possibly even interact with them. We like diversity and crave moments of chaos when life becomes excessively ordered. We like to be surprised. In Europe, the New Rationalists of the 1960s and ‘70s, most notably brothers Rob and Leon Krier, rebuked Modernism for its ignorance of humanity and called for a return to human-scale and human-centric urbanism, touting the lessons of the great preindustrial cities. Cities should be built, as they always were, upon squares, streets, and quarters, while still accommodating motor vehicles. “The asphalt carpet which serves as a channel for the movement of cars is still called a street. It retains no connection with the original significance of the term.”31 How to rectify this? Strøget, in Copenhagen, evicted cars in 1962 and quickly became the poster child for the reclaiming of urban streets. Germany pedestrianized at least 63 streets between 1960-1966 but had no other traffic-calming policies.32 Streets were now divided between urban autobahns and pedestrian sanctuaries, as traffic management had yet to break free of the monofunctional zoning mentality. A giant step forward was taken in the Netherlands in the 1980s with the woonerf concept, which essentially calms motor traffic by adding curves and various obstacles. The suggestion here, that people and cars can coexist in the same space, would prove revolutionary.

> The Street is for Everything The renaissance of the street as a social space, and as an identity-giving place, was assisted by the writings of urbanists and skilled observers such as Jane Jacobs and William Holly Whyte. Jacobs in particular was able to reach a wide audience with her classic The Death & Life of Great American Cities, in which she argued persuasively that the street was where social life in cities occurs. In a healthy city, the street supports a full range of urban activities encompassing living, working, playing, and moving, the latter in a variety of modes. The street is, and should be, for everyone. Urbanism fails where it isn’t, and increases the likelihood of crime, vacancies, and depressed neighborhoods. For different reasons and with a different vision, New Urbanists and other NeoTraditionalists also championed the street as a place for community- and identitybuilding, beginning in the 1980s. “In the new urbanism the meaning of the street as the essential fabric of the public realm is restored. The space created is understood to function as an outdoor room, and building facades are understood to be street walls.”33 Alongside New Urbanism developed the complete streets movement, spearheaded in the United States by the National Complete Streets Coalition. “Instituting a Complete Streets policy ensures that transportation planners and engineers consistently design and operate the entire roadway with all users in mind - including bicyclists, public transportation vehicles and riders, and pedestrians of all ages and abilities.”34 The past two decades have seen numerous other street concepts as well, perhaps most significantly Shared Space, which rids the street of all dividers, including sidewalks, and instructional signage, and forces users (of all modes) to communicate with one another to avoid collisions—to share space. Le Corbusier would not be pleased.

> The Street is a Commodity The return to the street coincided with the birth of the information age and the rise of inter-urban competition and city marketing & branding. Castells, Sassen, et al. have charted our transition to a global network society and the primary role of cities within economic constellations. As cities compete with one another for talented residents, tourism revenue, and multi-national corporations, points of differentiation become critical. City branding efforts, which will be covered in more detail in the next chapter, identify unique characteristics of cities in order to leverage them in marketing campaigns. If the street is indeed a stage for city life, then streets with particularly high place-identity value provide ideal brand imagery. They become both ideas and commodities that can be packaged and sold, and as they gain symbolic value over time such streets can become signature streets. As our current age is one defined by consumerism, it stands to reason that internationally-known shopping streets such as Oxford Street and Regent Street in London, Grafton Street in Dublin, Champs Élysées in Paris, Fifth Avenue in New York, and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills would acquire signature status. True signature streets, however, provide more than stores and reveal more about a city than its shopping preferences. Consider the Canal Grande in Venice, which is both a great street and a signature street despite a dearth of retail therapy. History unfolds here, its layering visible to those who would see. Preserved architecture, both grand and more modest, recalls the city’s once-great power and influence, and the style that became known as Venetian is on full display. This is Vitruvius’ street-as-stage, this is Alberti’s street-asarchitectural-gallery; when one is here one is in Venice and nowhere else.

> The Signature Street as Salve This last point should not be overlooked. Precisely because our postmodern world is

so hypermobile and borderless (for those whose lives are characterized by postmodernity), the allure of place, identity, and roots is increasing. Signature streets help us get our bearings. They announce the where to global citizens while also introducing the who. Balance, which will be explored in the next section, is something we inherently strive for. As globalism and the international style homogenizes cultures and cities, the need for a counterpointâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the distinctive power of signature streetsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; becomes more acute.

A Brief History of Streets.

Previous page, left to right, from top: Roman street ruins in Palmyra; Ancient Changâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;an street layout; Typical medieval street; Street as expression of Baroque power, Vatican City; Squalid early industrial street. This page, Haussmannâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s urban surgery, Paris; Modernist separation of functions, China; Shared space, Austria; Street-art-as-commodity behind protective glass, London.

Signature street as salve, Venice.

CHAPTER THREE TOWARD A THEORY OF SIGNATURE STREETS

Dual Drivers of Signature Streets Having defined signature streets and distinguished them from functional and great streets, and having sketched a brief history of signature streets, we now ask what drives their development. Why are signature streets important, to residents, visitors, and municipalities? How do we investigate their meaningfulness? I propose dual drivers of signature streets: beauty and branding. But what is beauty, really? What is the nature of its relationship with signature streets? What role do signature streets play in city branding, and vice versa?

Beauty > an insufficient definition In Beauty, his philosophical inquiry into the nature of the titular subject, Roger Scruton recalls Plato and Plotinus, who first esteemed beauty as “an ultimate value— something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given.”1 Most likely referencing John Keats—he of Beauty is truth, truth beauty—George Santayana writes, “We know on excellent authority that beauty is truth, that it is the expression of the ideal, the symbol of divine perfection, and the sensible manifestation of the good.”2 It is tempting to end the discussion here, to concur that “beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.”3 But we are still left with the question of what, exactly, beauty is. And if beauty is truly an ultimate value, why is there such disagreement surrounding what is and is not beautiful? “Such phrases stimulate thought and give

us a momentary pleasure, but they hardly bring any permanent enlightenment. A definition that should really define must be nothing less than the exposition of the origin, place, and elements of beauty as an object of human experience.”4 Judgment & Perception To say that something is beautiful is to perform two actions more or less simultaneously: to perceive and to judge. Santayana considers these two actions, named by him as the nouns aesthetics and criticism, “two essential qualities of the theory of beauty.”5 We view a painting or hear a piece of music; we have an emotional reaction; we identify the constituent parts of the work and evaluate the result of their blending. The pleasure one derives from beauty is therefore both sensory and intellectual. But if beauty entails judgment, by what criteria do we judge? If this criteria is mutable, subjective, then by exploring beauty are we not “investigating the sentiments of people, rather than the deep structure of the world?”6 The Ecstatic & The Minimal “To speak of beauty is to enter another and more exalted realm—a realm sufficiently apart from our everyday concerns as to be mentioned only with a certain hesitation.”7 Scruton cites Bernini’s St. Teresa in Ecstasy and Beethoven’s late quartets as examples, and I would add architectural works such as Brunelleschi’s Duomo, Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, and Larsen & Elisasson’s Harpa in Reykjavik. This is ecstatic beauty, “aesthetic heroism.”8 It overwhelms us, transports us, changes us. There is another, more frequently found form of beauty, however, called “minimal beauty” by Scruton. Examples include the arrangement of furniture in a living room, the selection of the day’s clothing, and the presentation of food at a restaurant. No claim to artistic immortality is staked; rather the goal is to put everything in its right place. Minimal beauty might not reach for the heavens, but “looking right matters in the way that beauty generally matters—not by pleasing the eye only, but by convey-

ing meanings and values which have weight for you and which you are consciously putting on display.”9

Ecstatic Beauty: Il Duomo, Florence.

Minimal Beauty: Swedish interior design.

Transference of Values & The Pursuit of Happiness Now we come closer to our destination. There seems to be a communicative, even representational quality in beauty. We call something beautiful when we perceive it to possess qualities we would possess, or to express values we, too, hold dear. Santayana goes so far as to claim that “Beauty is a value, that is, it is not a perception of a matter of fact or of a relation: it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and appreciative nature...Beauty is an emotional element, a pleasure of ours, which nevertheless we regard as a quality of things.”10 By this definition the object possesses nothing, including beauty; it is the viewer who bestows a judgment of beauty upon an object when he perceives it to be a particularly effective, elegant, pure, or skillful affirmation of his own predilections. Now we can explain why one might swoon over the beauty of a certain building or

painting or person while another finds the same wanting. We can acknowledge, as does Scruton, that “taste is rooted in a broader cultural context, and cultures are not universal. The whole point of the concept of culture is to mark out the significant differences between the forms of human life, and the satisfactions that people take in them.”11 Beauty in Cairo is not likely to be the same as beauty in Kyoto. But does this mean beauty lacks universality? Are we doomed to forever lack accord not only on which objects we find beautiful but on what we mean by beautiful and why we seek beauty in the first place? Not necessarily. Beauty is, for the one who perceives it, an aspirational experience. Fulfillment, purpose, and happiness are ambitions that cut across cultures, across epochs. Alain de Botton has the final word here: “It was Stendhal who offered the most crystalline expression of the intimate affiliation between visual taste and our values when he wrote, ‘Beauty is the promise of happiness.’ His aphorism has the virtue of differentiating our love of beauty from an academic preoccupation with aesthetics, and integrating it instead with the qualities we need to prosper as whole human beings. If the search for happiness is the underlying quest of our lives, it seems only natural that it should simultaneously be the essential theme to which beauty alludes. But because Stendhal was sensitive to the complexity of our requirements for happiness, he wisely refrained from specifying any particular type of beauty...Through his use of the capacious word ‘happiness’, Stendhal allowed for the wide range of goals which people have pursued. Understanding that mankind would always be as conflicted about its visual tastes as about its ethical ones, he noted, ‘There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.’”12

> What Does Beauty Have to do with Art, Architecture, and Signature Streets? Answering the Riddle of Existence We have spoken at some length of beauty, but little of art, architecture, or signature

Proving Stendhal correct. Left to right, from top: Island cabin, Denmark; Chicago; Tattooed Yakuza, Japan; Santorini, Greece; Young Woman, Amedeo Modigliani; Torii Gate, Japan; Circus, Bath; Amsterdam; Frieze, Rome.

streets. There is a thread, however, binding each to the others, that we shall now trace. Scruton writes, “Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.”13 But what is the meaning of art? Not of a single work, but of the entire effort? According to Scruton, “the impetus to impose order and meaning on human life, through the experience of something delightful, is the underlying motive of art in all its forms. Art answers the riddle of existence: it tells us why we exist by imbuing our lives with a sense of fittingness.”14 Art embraces countless media, from oil painting to installations. It can be as evanescent as a flash mob and as everlasting as the cave paintings at Altamira. Objects, performances, even negotiations can be considered art, or at least artful. We find art wherever meaning is expressed beautifully through a vessel of whatever form. Firmitas Venustas The mention of delight in the previous section should recall Wotton’s translation of Vitruvius’s venustas, which we could also call beauty. Venustas was once a chief concern of architects. “‘To turn something useful, practical, functional into something beautiful, that is architecture’s duty,’ insisted Karl Friedrich Schinkel. ‘Architecture, as distinguished from mere building, is the decoration of construction,’ echoed Sir George Gilbert Scott.”15 Supposedly, all that changed with the ascension of the engineer in the 19th century followed by that of the modernist in the early 20th. “Mastering the technologies of iron and steel, of plate glass and concrete, [engineers] drew interest and inspired awe with their bridges, railway hangars, aqueducts and docks. More novel even than their abilities, perhaps, was the fact that they seemed to complete these projects without ever directly asking themselves what style it was best to adopt.”16 Aesthetics may have been ignored entirely by some architectural engineers, but for many the question of style was a redundant one, as form and function

were the same. For them, venustas was found in the visible genius of their structures. And for all their forthright, if sometimes self-delusional, claims to have founded a new architecture based solely on science, “the relationship of Modernist architects to their work remained at base a romantic one: they looked to architecture to support a way of life that appealed to them. Their domestic buildings were conceived as stage sets for actors in an idealised drama about contemporary existence.”17 Notions of beauty change, but Schinkel remains correct in his assessment of the job of architects. Architecture is a functional art, but an art all the same. After all, “beautiful buildings change their uses; merely functional buildings get torn down.”18 Beauty Speaks We look to architecture to provide a proper context not only for the things we do but for the thoughts we have, for our moods, even for our dreams. “John Ruskin proposed that we seek two things of our buildings. We want them to shelter us. And we want them to speak to us – to speak to us of whatever we find important and need to be reminded of.”19 Consider how different the experience of entering a modern café is from that of a gothic church. The former can connect us to the moment; it can ground us by providing the relentlessly mobile with a temporary home, a crossroads of glocal culture. It speaks to us of technology, mobility, comfort, refinement, creativity, self-determination, and other values espoused by the bohemian-bourgeois ethos. The latter speaks of eternity, judgment, and grace, of penitence, of absolution. We behave differently in each place. Perhaps we are different people in different places, or at least varying versions of ourselves, stepping into the skins most context-appropriate, or else those that denounce the values spoken by the architecture (in all its definitions) that surrounds us. Moreover, our reading of architecture is anthropomorphic. Vitruvius paired the three

principal columns of classicism with deities of corresponding qualities, for example the relatively stocky Doric column with the muscular Hercules. We call those works of art and architecture beautiful in which we “sense the presence of a character we would like if it took on a living form. What we search for in a work of architecture is not in the end so far from what we search for in a friend. The objects we describe as beautiful are versions of the people we love.”21 Or else people we aspire to become.

“In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them...While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people...A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life.”20

—Alain de Botton

Urban Design & Communal Beauty Roger Scruton states that “we call something beautiful when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its presented form. This is so even of those objects like landscapes and streets which are, properly speaking, not individuals, but unbounded collections of odds and ends. Such complex entities are framed by aesthetic interest, held together, as it were, under a unified and unifying gaze.”22 Signature streets are public mosaics in which thousands of individual objects and elements—building heights, road width, architectural styles, colors, materials, lines,

light, the accretion of history, doorknobs, windows, pavers, usage, etc.—combine to present a unified notion of beauty: a beautiful life. But this beautiful life is not a solitary thing, a path walked alone. What is expressed in signature streets is a beautiful way of life. Here is an ideal vision of these people, in this place. “Implicit in our sense of beauty is the thought of community—of the agreement in judgements that makes social life possible and worthwhile.”23 One need look no further for evidence of this fact than the planning laws found for many centuries in cities throughout the world, laws that restrict building heights, materials, roof styles, and other design elements for aesthetic reasons. And this is why signature streets can exist in the first place, and also why they matter to us. Because, to recall Stendhal, there are as many types of beauty as notions of happiness, and the physical expression of these ideals in as grand a medium as a street can tell us not only who we are or might be but also where we are.

> How Do We Experience Beauty in Signature Streets? Harmony Why do the streets of Paris cast such a spell over us? What qualities and messages do we perceive when we turn our gaze toward them? What does our judgment of them as beautiful reveal about ourselves, about the human condition? According to De Botton, “The Parisian street moves us because we recognise how sharply its qualities contrast with those which generally colour our lives.”24 Our brief time on earth is rarely free from chaos and pettiness, doubt, jealousy, selfishness, and fear. We get caught up in the mundanities of domestic life and our vision narrows near to the point of blindness. But look instead at Avenue Montaigne, Avenue de Breteuil, Rue de Castiglione, or Avenue des Champs Élysées. What do you see?

“You know, I sometimes think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city. You can’t. Because you look around and every street, every boulevard, is its own special art form and when you think that in the cold, violent, meaningless universe that Paris exists...from way out in space you can see these lights, the cafés, people drinking and singing. For all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe.”

—Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

You see harmony. Symmetry. Order. Here is a place of stability and rationality, a sanctuary from worry, a symphony in which we all have our part to sing. “This ordered street offers a lesson in the benefits of surrendering individual freedom for the sake of a higher and collective scheme, in which all parts become something greater by contributing to the whole.”25 Our navel-gazing is chastised, our myopia cured. “Though we are creatures inclined to squabble, kill, steal and lie, the street reminds us that we can occasionally master our baser impulses and turn a waste land, where for centuries wolves howled, into a monument of civilisation.”26

The beauty of the Parisian street, and of its harmonious kin in cities throughout the world, is one of fittingness. “Ravishing beauties are less important in the aesthetics of architecture than things that fit appropriately together, creating a soothing and harmonious context, a continuous narrative as in a street or a square, where nothing stands out in particular, and good manners prevail.”27

Good manners here signify more than just bourgeois civility. In architecture, good manners prove the subordination of our animalistm by our humanity. Le Corbusier equated geometry with joy because he understood that, as De Botton would later write, “geometry represents a victory over nature and because, despite what a sentimental reading might suggest, nature is in truth opposed to the order we rely on to survive.”28

For the greater part of human history, nature was analogous to death and destruction, something to be feared and fended off. “Left to its own devices, nature will not hesitate to crumble our roads, claw down our buildings, push wild vines through our walls and return every other feature of our carefully plotted geometric world to primal chaos.”29 In the streets of Paris, “we recognise the very qualities on which our survival hangs. The drive towards order reveals itself as synonymous with the drive towards life.”30 Harnessing our intellect, imagination, and will, we have fortified ourselves against chaos. We are no longer merely reactive beings. The harmonious street demonstrates our ability to write our own destiny while inspiring us to become as refined as our surroundings. Poetry Here we should make it clear that when we speak of harmony we do not mean uniformity. “In art as in life fittingness is at the heart of aesthetic success. We want things to fit together, in ways that fit to us. This does not mean that dissonance and conflict have no part in the artistic enterprise: of course they do. But dissonance and conflict may also be fitting, like the climactic 9-note dissonance in Mahler’s 10th Symphony, or the jarring disarray of Hamlet’s encounter with his mother.”32 A street can feature buildings in a multitude of styles and still be harmonious. What is required is emotional fittingness—does it feel right? All streets tell stories; on harmonious streets, every element speaks of a single story. The best Parisian streets, like the great streets of Allan Jacobs, are harmonious, their narratives unfragmented. But it is more than mere harmony we find in signature streets. With a consistent structure centered on groupings of threes, nines, and tens, and with its interlocking terza rima, the Divina Commedia is certainly harmonious, yet harmony is not an end for Dante but a means. Harmony is the context into which his poetry is poured. Likewise, the poetry of signature streets does not end with harmonious urban design but rather emerges from it.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;beauty is the child of the coherent relationship between parts.â&#x20AC;?31 Pantheon, Rome.

Have we now lost ourselves in metaphor? What, in concrete terms, is the poetry of the signature street? The Greek poiēsis referred to skill in making things, skill beyond what is necessary, skill that elevates both the making and the made object from craft to art. The Roman artes did not end with sculpture or even architecture but included all manner of practical activities,33 much like contemporary Japan with its aesthetic traditions of ikebana, iaido, and cha-no-yu. The poetry of signature streets is found in the qualities that elevate the street above utility, above even harmony, until the beauty of the street becomes expressive, symbolic, iconic. The beauty of the signature street is unique, special; that is its point. The anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake argued that— “art and aesthetic interest belong with rituals and festivals—offshoots of the human need to ‘make special’, to extract objects, events and human relations from everyday uses and to make them a focus of collective attention. This ‘making special’ enhances group cohesion and also leads people to treat those things which really matter for the survival of the community—be it marriage or weapons, funerals or offices—as things of public note, with an aura that protects them from careless disregard and emotional erosion. The deeply engrained need to ‘make special’ is explained by the advantage that it has conferred on human communities, holding them together in times of threat, and furthering their reproductive confidence in times of peaceful flourishing.”34 Even if survival is not at stake, the existence and importance of great streets and more especially signature streets can be explained by Dissanayake’s theory. We feel the loss when we forget what happened in a place, who made it happen or was otherwise affected by its having happened, or when. History accretes, and its layers must retain translucency for us to draw identity from it. Signature streets are heraldic poems written in architectural forms, icons of a place, its people, and the memories, dreams, and values contained therein.

Transfiguration We see the harmony of the signature street and hear its poetry. We linger on it, drawn to its beauty, and then we...what? What do we do next? We have spoken of what the beauty of the signature street is, but what does it do? Scruton tells us that “Wanting something for its beauty is wanting it, not wanting to do something with it...Here is a want without a goal: a desire that cannot be fulfilled since there is nothing that would count as its fulfilment.”35 We cannot possess the street’s beauty, but we can contemplate it. We can internalize it. We can let it, like a compass, point the way forward. “By contemplating beauty the soul rises from its immersion in merely sensuous and concrete things, and ascends to a higher sphere...The love of beauty is really a signal to free ourselves from that sensory attachment, and to begin the ascent of the soul towards the world of ideas, there to participate in the divine version of reproduction, which is the understanding and the passing on of eternal truths.”36 The ultimate experience of the signature street, then, is a journey from harmony to poetry and finally toward transfiguration. Ideally, the signature street serves as (1) a visible container for local history and cultural values, for the dreams of a given people in a given place, and thus as a symbol for the same; (2) a conduit connecting the local with the universal—or else why would it matter to non-residents?; and (3) a catalyst for those who identify with its messages to expand and evolve, to become better people, better citizens. “For [true] beauty makes a claim on us: it is a call to renounce our narcissism and look with reverence on the world.”37

Looking with reverence on the world. True beauty in Stockholm, Sweden.

> Conclusions & Caveats “As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.”38 To record and to remind ourselves that in the midst of a history plagued by war and famine and suffering we have had moments of sublimity, and will again. To remind and to inspire each person, each community, each generation to add its own signature layer. To tell us where we are and who we have been in this place. Signature streets are beautiful because it is their job to be so. Friedrich Schiller in the late 18th century saw a world gone mad, rife with savagery, and yet he also saw in architecture the promise of sanity’s eventual restoration. “Humanity has lost its dignity, but Art has rescued it and preserved it in significant stone; Truth lives on in the midst of deception, and from the copy the original will once again be restored.”39 It might seem a strange comparison, but Schiller’s notion of art and architecture can be seen as a sort of Eight Fold Path toward peace and happiness (potentially limited, however, to the peace and happiness of the artist, the architect, the patron, or those the work is intended to speak for). Signature streets are beautiful because they are manifestations of rightness—not absolute Rightness. They show us local responses to universal dilemmas. “We value certain buildings for their ability to rebalance our misshapen natures and encourage emotions which our predominant commitments force us to sacrifice. Feelings of competitiveness, envy and aggression hardly need elaboration, but feelings of humility amid an immense and sublime universe, of a desire for calm at the onset of evening or of an aspiration for gravity and kindness – these form no correspondingly reliable part of our inner landscape, a rueful absence which may explain our wish to bind such emotions to the fabric of our homes.”40 We value certain streets for their organization of such buildings into a legible tableau

detailing which aspects of the nature of a people in a place have been misshapen, and by which path they might regain balance. Or, as Rybczynski succinctly writes, “It is not only because we think them beautiful, or significant. It is also because they remind us of who we once were. And of who we might be again.”41 Before we push this point too far, however, let us consider Santayana’s caution: “The relation between aesthetic and moral judgments, between the spheres of the beautiful and the good, is close, but the distinction between them is important. One factor of this distinction is that while aesthetic judgments are mainly positive, that is, perceptions of good, moral judgments are mainly and fundamentally negative, or perceptions of evil. Another factor of the distinction is that whereas, in the perception of beauty, our judgment is necessarily intrinsic and based on the character of the immediate experience, and never consciously on the idea of an eventual utility in the object, judgments about moral worth, on the contrary, are always based, when they are positive, upon the consciousness of benefits probably involved.”42 So, while beauty and goodness might often attend one another they are not the same thing. And while “architecture may well possess moral messages, it simply has no power to enforce them. It offers suggestions instead of making laws. It invites, rather than orders, us to emulate its spirit and cannot prevent its own abuse.”43 Terrible things can happen in beautiful buildings, on beautiful streets, their terribleness unmitigated by the beauty of their surroundings. “Architecture is perplexing, too, in how inconsistent is its capacity to generate the happiness on which its claim to our attention is founded...The noblest architecture can sometimes do less for us than a siesta or an aspirin.”44

Branding > why branding? In the forward to Keith Dinnie’s City Branding, Bill Baker writes, “Cities and megacities, rather than countries, are increasingly becoming the principal protagonists between geographical regions. The competition between cities to establish their credentials as the best choice for prospective visitors, investors, business, students and talented people will intensify as places focus on how to convey their competitive edge and relevance.”45 But how can cities, complex as they are, even begin to communicate the many qualities that make them the best possible location for whomever and whatever they might be trying to attract? Branding has become the standard method by which cities attempt to communicate their perceived advantages. “A place brand, in essence, represents a hedonic product that is the consumption experience of place.”46 Taking its cue from corporate branding, place branding commoditizes a defined area, such as a city, in order to sell it to a target audience. The power of branding, like beauty, is its potential to attract, to establish an emotional connection, and to provide cues for belongingness. However, beauty is essentially passive while branding is active. If beauty is a quality, branding is the wielding of that quality toward specific ends. Just as we found in the previous section that beauty contains far more than simple visual appeal, we will discover this section that the concerns of place branding go far beyond sales. According to Anholt, place branding “covers some of the hardest philosophical questions one can tackle: the nature of perception and reality, the relationship between objects and their representation, the phenomena of mass psychology, the mysteries of national [or city] identity, leadership, culture and social cohesion, and much more besides.”47

> what is branding? Aaker defines a brand as a “multidimensional construct, consisting of functional, emotional, relational and strategic elements that collectively generate a unique set of associations in the public mind.”48 More commonly, and reductively, brand is equated with perception, with “a person’s gut feeling about a produce, service, or company.”49 Famous examples can be found in the auto industry: Mercedes-Benz is prestigious, Volvo is safe. David Haigh identifies three primary functions of brands: navigation— helping consumers make choices; reassurance—communicating the intrinsic quality of a product so that consumers feel confident in the choices they make; and engagement—using distinctive communicative elements such as imagery, language, and associations to assist consumer identification with the product (e.g. “I’m an Apple® guy”).50 The process of branding is seen as the management of perception. Core values and narratives are embedded in logos, taglines, and a cohesive palette of color, typography, and imagery, among many other stylistic elements. These pieces are then strategically deployed to generate specific responses. Branding should not be confused with marketing, which is rather a tool used in the branding process. Marketing refers to promotion and selling, while branding is concerned first with identification and differentiation.

> what is city/place branding? City or place branding—two related but slightly different terms that are nonetheless treated here synonymously—shares the same concerns as traditional corporate branding, yet there are some notable differences. Brands are most effective and easiest to communicate when they can be distilled into a single message (again, Volvo = safe). This is possible for a company, whose values and culture can be determined unilater-

ally by a CEO or board of directors, but far more difficult in a democratic city with its endless list of actors and changing political landscape. Dinnie paraphrases Ashworth, explaining that city brands emerge from the identification of “some uniqueness which differentiates one place from others in order to gain a competitive brand value.”52 Govers & Go state that “Place branding links place identity with projected and perceived images through communication and experience.”53 City brands are not so much created as they are discovered, clarified, communicated, and reinforced. Signature streets, which we’ll deal with momentarily, are the stages on which city brands are performed and consumed.

“City branding is a topic of significant interest to both academics and policy makers. As cities compete globally to attract tourism, investment and talent, as well as to achieve many other objectives, the concepts of brand strategy are increasingly adopted from the commercial world and applied in pursuit of urban development, regeneration and quality of life. Much of the published research into city branding originates in the disciplines of marketing and urban studies, two fields that have tended to follow parallel rather than interdisciplinary paths.”51

—Keith Dinnie

How, then, does place branding happen? “Ashworth goes on to elaborate that such uniqueness is normally created through three efforts: personality association, flagship building (signature urban design and signature district) and hallmark events.”54 Personality association reinforces links between a place and famous persons, such as Søren Kierkegaard and Copenhagen or Gustav Klimt and Vienna, and suggests the sort of character who might flourish there. Flagship building can range from a single

iconic structure, such as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, to the entire urban fabric of a city, such as that of Venice. It is the most visible city branding effort, can be the most enduring, and can also have the broadest impact. Hallmark events, such as the Biennale, again in Venice, signal the current values of the city and in which direction the city is moving. “Such attributes,” writes Dinnie, “are those that the city brand would wish to see evoked when relevant target groups are asked the question, ‘What comes to your mind when you think of this city?’”55

> the evolution of city branding While city branding as a term, a strategy, and an industry is relatively recent, the evolution of the ideas behind city branding—specifically, bridging the gap between reality and perception—is not. Govers & Go suggest that the origins of branding are found in Cartesian representative realism, “which contends that our ideas are valid or relevant only when they correspond to the reality of the world around us.” Locke, Hume, and other skeptics claim that because we have no absolute proof of the existence of anything beyond that which our senses transmit, perception is king. The idealists, Kant foremost among them, and then the constructivists, argued that “physical things exist only in the sense that they are perceived,” leading to the conclusion that realities are all subjective. Kierkegaard and Heidegger and the existentialists developed the notion of dasein, or being there, and claimed that “all that matters is that humans participate actively in the world.” Psychology, particularly cognitive psychology, “which studies the processes of perception, memory and information processing,” becomes a major contributor to early notions of branding in the twentieth century. According to constructive memory theory, humans do not continually construct our perceptions of the world around us on a tabula rasa, but rather use our general knowledge of the world to fill in the gaps. “Human beings do this through simple inferences, stereotypes and schemata (a

What comes to mind when you think of a certain city? City branding efforts seek to identify these images and leverage them to create USPs (unique selling proposals) with which to attract choice residents, tourists, and businesses. Logos, iconic architecture, and signature streets are common place identifiers and can be integral parts of city branding campaigns. Following page: multiple brand attributes of Siena, Italy, featured in a single image: medieval urbanism, bricks of eponymous color, and the Piazza del Campo, named the best public square in the world in 2004 by Project for Public Spaces.

mental representation of a class of people, objects, events or situations).” 56 Further specializations within psychology such as social, environmental, and economic psychology also make contributions to understanding the extraordinarily complex and seemingly inscrutable ways in which human beings first perceive and then interpret our own perceptions. Such studies perhaps first become germane to advertising in the first part of the twentieth century when mass media and propaganda collided. More subtly, advertising post-WWII made a giant leap forward (whether one considers this good or bad is a topic for another discussion) when Madison Avenue realized that consumers did not behave rationally, always cooly evaluating available options for the highest utility value, but were rather susceptible to the power of implication and association. They linked products with ways of being, such as Marlboro cigarettes with the American ideal of rugged masculinity and frontier nostalgia. The initial perception of normative relationships—men like the Marlboro Man choose to smoke, and they choose to smoke Marlboros—are transformed into causal relationships in the mind of the viewer—if I smoke I will become like the Marlboro Man. If dasein is all important, branding helps each individual answer the question of how they will be, while place branding suggests where being that way is most fitting.

These questions took on added importance beginning in the early 1980s, with the rise of what Alvin Toffler termed the Third Wave. “The Third Wave, after the agricultural and industrial revolutions, represented the dawn of the information age. Its emergence had major consequences for the evolution of the marketing discipline; for example, in the application of the concept of mass-individualization.”57 Advertising was no longer sufficient. Marketing, a strategic sales-oriented system that included advertising alongside public relations and market research, emerged, as did information & communications technologies (ICT). The consumer was now a prosumer (again, Toffler’s term), actively involved in the consumption process, increasingly demanding of customization, increasingly skilled in bypassing middle-men (nonvalue-adding intermediaries), and increasingly self-service oriented. In the late 1990s, Pine & Gilmore claimed that the service-based economy had been replaced by what they coined the ‘experience economy’, in which “business is perceived as a stage and companies must design memorable events.”58 Jones and others responded critically, maintaining that the service economy still held sway. Govers & Go agree, though their explanation goes some way toward reconciling the two claims. “It would seem to be a matter of the hedonic aspects of the consumption of many goods, and the experiential aspects of most services, becoming more important as areas where businesses can achieve competitive advantage.”59 Imperfect as it may be, the term ‘experience economy’ has stuck, and no one denies that “as a result of advances in information and communication technology, tourism, hospitality and recreation are becoming increasingly integrated within the experience-economy context.”60 Just as advertising eventually found itself swallowed by the larger field of marketing, so has marketing been folded into the larger field of branding—this as a reaction to the greater complexity inherent in a networked economy characterized by mass individualization and the consumption of experiences, of narratives. Modern prosumers

want adventure on-demand, they want to experience time travel, they want to slip on foreign skins and know what it is look through foreign eyes. Conversely, residents and tourists alike increasingly seek a sense of place, of rootedness, of the local, likely in response to the spreading sameness that has accompanied globalization. ICT and cheap transportation have, if not eliminated, at least greatly reduced barriers of distance, and as the proliferation of goods and services intensifies—one can eat fine Ethiopian food or receive Reiki treatments in virtually every developed city on earth—and the question of not if or what but where gains primacy, quality (and distinctiveness) of place becomes a deciding factor. The precision, clarity, and creativity with which a city communicates its brand can mean the difference between attracting talented residents, choice tourists, and multinational companies or seeing them go elsewhere.

> Creating City Brands Who Brands Cities? City branding is not an action performed by a single entity, nor does it adhere to the same paradigm as corporate branding; that is, a branding firm hired by and only accountable to a CEO or other decision-making personnel. Instead, “national, regional or local governments, in partnership with the private sector, create the place brand strategy,”61 and a broad and diverse group of actors and stakeholders must be considered. As Dinnie writes, “The investments that [these stakeholders] make in the development of the place, the actions they take and the communications they put out are all vital elements of how the story of the place will be told.”62 City branding “involves the evaluation, (re)assem-bling, (re)positioning and (re)formulation of the identity of place, its product offering, and its communication strategies.”63 This process begins with the identification of sustainable competitive advantages.

Sustainable Competitive Advantages The best aspects of a city to build a brand around—assuming all are equally inherent and desirable—are the ones that competitors are least able to replicate. These sustainable competitive advantages are usually found in either core competencies (what the people of a place do exceptionally well, and typically have done exceptionally well for a long time) or unique resources, “generally to be found in both the unique natural environment (climate, wildlife or landscape) and cultural heritage: and the physical assets, sites reflecting place roots in terms of a rich history, religious or other cultural expressions such as the arts, architecture and design.”64 Signature streets can be integral to place branding efforts, as they can display both core competencies and unique resources, becoming unique resources themselves in the process. They are visible loci of place identity, making them the urbanistic equivalent of a logo. The Elements and Images of Place Identity What comprises place identity? How is one to select and weigh the multitude of qualities of a given place? Noordman identified three categories of place identity elements: structural, semi-static, and coloring.65 Not all elements are created equally. For example, attractive coloring elements cannot overcome unattractive structural elements (recalling the salty maxim, like putting lipstick on a pig). Successful city branding strategies identify desirable elements in all three categories and derive their strength from an honest assessment and representation of place identity. Once place identity is clarified, conveying images can be selected and created.

> The Role of Architecture and Signature Streets in City Branding Architecture as Visual Design As much as architecture is concerned with function, it must also of course answer the question of form. How should this building look? This street? This city? Every choice related to visible form is also an aesthetic choice, and as we discussed in the previ-

“Structural elements that are pretty well unchanging – the DNA of place if you like – are location (geography and climate) and history (roots).

Below: Structural Elements. Tahiti’s landscape and Rome’s history. Right: SemiStatic Elements: Hong Kong’s highrises and Varanasi’s holiness.

“Semi-static elements that can be changed, but that take time to transform, include size and physical appearance, such as superstructures, infrastructure, land-use planning and landscape. Also included as a semi-static element of place identity is the inner mentality of the population, as in the cultural and religious values, often embodied in language...

“Colouring elements include symbols (names, logos or emblems such as flags, costumes, folk dances or maps), behaviour and communication.” —Th.B.J. Noordman Colouring Elements. Geisha costume in Kyoto, Cycling culture in Amsterdam.

Architectural elements as visual design elements.

ous section on beauty every aesthetic choice is also a semiotic choice. We interpret architectural forms as being elegant or aggressive, humble or ostentatious, and in so doing imbue the forms with symbolic value. Imagine a series of empty buildings. All have identical interiors but each has a facade in a different style: classical, rococo, modern, whatever. If asked to select one to live or work in we will undoubtedly be heavily influenced by the symbolic messages we read in each facade. In this respect, architecture becomes visual, or graphic, design, and hence the architect becomes a graphic designer. Why does this matter? Steven Skaggs explains that “if graphic design is the planning of communication that transpires through the sense of vision, it’s inevitably rooted in the action of signification, and therefore visual-element-as-sign is central to the practice. Graphic design is naked semiotics.”66 Architecture-as-visual-element-as-signifier is of great importance to city branding, which, after all, is focused on the management of perception. Nothing has a greater impact on perception than visual elements, and architecture is the most visible element of a city (excepting rare instances of truly dominant landscapes, such as that of Rio de Janeiro). Signature Streets as Brand Containers By revealing local approaches to the building of masses and framing of voids, local concepts of urbanity, and the dreams and values most cherished by the shapers of the city, signature streets exhibit all three of our definitions of architecture in place-specific fashion. As well, they likely grounds for two and perhaps all three of Ashworth’s place branding efforts. The signature street may hold individual flagship buildings, and is itself an act of flagship building, as well as the site of many hallmark events such as festivals and parades. Personality association is less common, but examples such as Kierkegaard in Copenhagen (where else would his Seducer stroll but on Strøget?) can be found.

Many of a city’s sustainable competitive advantages—core competencies and unique resources—are also visible on signature streets. In fact, much of what gives a street signature status is the presence of exactly these things. Broadway is a signature street in New York City because it showcases the city’s theatrical pedigree. The high-fashion, sidewalk cafés, and monumental urban design that Paris is famous for are all on full display on Champs Élysées. Examples of Noordman’s elements of place branding can also often be perceived on signature streets. A signature street is a brand container in which its city has, over time, placed its most essential symbols, and is thus of the utmost value in managing the city’s brand. Cities with signature streets seek to preserve them as strategic brand images, while cities without signature streets strive to develop them. One need only Google “new signature street” for verification. City Branding, Signature Streets & Holism Sometimes, branding is seen as related purely to sales in the sense of luring multinationals or increasing tourism. “For example, the well recognized Las Vegas motto ‘What Happens Here, Stays Here’, created much consternation among residents after the decision was made to adopt it in 2001.”67 But the ultimate goal of branding is to make or keep a city healthy—economically, yes, but also environmentally and socially. A successful city brand helps “to create preference and loyalty to the city among the various segments which cities serve.” Chief among these are “business owners, investors, not-for-profit organizations, residents, students, special interest groups, tourists, and visitors.”68 A brand strategy can serve such a diverse set of stakeholders only if it is arrived at holistically. Holism and distillation are not mutually exclusive, but their compatibility demands much insight and critical evaluation. As valuable as they can be to a city brand, and as much as city branding can reinforce their signature quality, signature streets can also be put at risk. Overexposure or ten-

dentious positioning can generate negative reactions from current users. Excessive commodification can reduce complexity and lead to so-called Disneyfication (discussed in the final chapter). Increased rental prices can drive out tenants that once helped make the street signature. Signature streets are perhaps more rich in semiotic value than many other streets, but they are also the realm of mundane everyday life and must continue to be so. A city is first for those who live in it; a street is only signature so long as residents choose to claim it.

> Final Thoughts Branding happens all the time. It does not wait for someone to create it. Every viewer or user of a place—resident, tourist, or otherwise—perceives certain qualities and by association decides who the place is for. City branding seeks to manage these perceptions with the aim of increasing quality of life. Branding assists in the “sale” of the city, but its core functions are identification and differentiation: who have we been in this city? who are we now and who do we want to become? and what makes us unique? Legible signs of the history and culture of a city—signs that branding seeks to leverage—are embedded in its architecture, its urban design, and in its signature streets.

“What is the essence of the city and how does it wish to be perceived? Without a reasonable degree of clarity...the likelihood is that there will be no clear city brand but rather an incoherent set of fragmented sub-brands each delivering its own messaging, or worse still, no conscious branding at all, in which case the city’s reputation is completely at the mercy of a hostile or indifferent world.”69

—Keith Dinnie

CHAPTER FOUR CASE STUDIES

Introducing the Case Study Streets & Analytical Approach The two case study streets—Strøget in Copenhagen and Ringstrasse in Vienna— represent two fundamentally different types of signature streets. Strøget has been Copenhagen’s principal shopping street for nearly a thousand years. It is a lineal, slightly meandering compilation of four separate streets connecting the traditional west and east gates of the old city. Narrow and pedestrian-centric, and with few truly monumental buildings, its current form is the result of slow, incremental change over the centuries. Ringstrasse, in constrast, features broad, multifunctional rights-of-way and geometric precision in its polygonal form, the result of 19th century top-down administrative planning efforts. It rings the old city on the grounds of the former glacis and is in turn ringed by monumental buildings. The two streets are wildly different in form, function, and symbolism, and each speaks volumes about its respective city. The following analyses are divided into four subsections: (1) illustrated, guided street walk; (2) history & development; (3) contextualization; and (4) conclusions & cautions. Our three definitions of architecture and the dual drivers of signature streets— beauty and branding—are also touched on. My methodology consists of a narrative conflation (and cherry picking) of those pioneered by Peter Bosselmann, Allan Jacobs, and Jan Gehl, among others. That is to say I am primarily concerned with critical, holistic observation. My hope is that a layering of perspectives will go some way toward bringing to life the experience offered by these streets, contextualizing their usage and development, elucidating the messages they somewhat cryptically broadcast, and identifying threats to their signature status.

Toward a Semiotics of the Street I agree with Roland Barthes that “the city is a discourse,” but not necessarily that “this discourse is truly a language.”1 The language of the city, of the street, is largely metaphorical. It is not composed of morphemes or codified relationships of signifieds and signifiers—Barthes admitted as much—and is not likely to be deciphered with methods meant for linguistics. Barthes claimed that “the real scientific leap will be when we speak of a language of the city without metaphor,”2 but is such a leap possible? And if so, then why has an urban semiotics been slow to develop? “First of all because apparently most architectural objects do not communicate (and are not designed to communicate),” wrote Eco, “but function.”3 There is art in architecture, to be sure, but architecture is most often guided first by the goal of meeting functional needs and even then shaped as much or more by the hands of the engineer and the financier as by those of the architect-as-artist. Still, as Eco also points out, “a phenomenological consideration of our relationship with architectural objects tells us that we commonly do experience architecture as communication, even while recognizing its functionality.”4 There is no doubt that architecture, like all design forms, communicates more than its function; design elements suggest not only what but how and for whom. Perhaps a semiotics of architecture and urban design—a semiotics of the street— needs to eschew the continentalist semiology, derived as it is from linguistics, in favor of a Peircean mode of inquiry. Steven Skaggs has done exactly this, and his development of a visual design semiotics can be applied to the built environment, or at least its visible aspects. However, due to the length and time restrictions of this thesis, a Peircean-via-Skaggs semiotic analysis of the two case study streets will have to wait. For now, my approach will be closer to that of the aforementioned urbanists—Bosselmann, Jacobs,

and Gehlâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and limited to a close reading of the signature character and visual elements (signs) of the streets and the messages (referents) these elements convey to me (interpretant). Peircean semiotic analysis via Steven Skaggs Right: Taxonomy of Sign Function Classes. Below: Semiotic Action Matrix.

strĂ&#x2DC;get. copenhagen. Case Study Street 1

Walking Strøget: Observing Life, Space & Form I agree with Bosselmann and Jacobs that there is no better way to know a city than to walk it. Bosselmann’s Representation of Places offers methodological, narrative, and illustrative contributions to the work begun earlier by Jacobs in books such as Great Streets. Both men are flâneurs of a sort, but their eyes are more critical, more focused on the impact of architecture and urban design. They seek to clarify the relationship between the experience of a place and its designable aspects. This first section of analysis on Strøget consists of an illustrated observational walk from Kongens Nytorv at the east end of the street to Rådhuspladsen at its western terminus. The approaches of Bosselmann and Jacobs are conflated, allowing me to examine various aspects of Strøget’s architecture, urban design, and street life. A debt is also obviously owed to Jane Jacobs, William Holly Whyte, Jan Gehl, and others who elevated people-watching to an urban science. The presentation of images mostly follows Bosselmann, who stacked his and intended them to be viewed bottom-totop, a movement mirroring that of actually walking the street in person.

> At Kongens Nytorv One of Copenhagen’s major central squares (though elliptical in truth), Kongens Nytorv sits just off the eastern end of Strøget and offers views of iconic Copenhagen landmarks including Nyhavn, Charlottenborg Palace, the Royal Danish Theater, the Magasin du Nord department store, and Hotel D’Angleterre. The general grandeur of the surrounding architecture and the baroque formality of its layout communicate bourgeois, even royal, ideas of sophistication. Despite its prime location, fine landscaping, regular programming (such as exhibitions in summer and ice skating in winter), and impressive historic surroundings, the presence on all sides of relatively heavy auto traffic sets the square somewhat adrift.

> From Kongens Nytorv to Amagertorv It is an overcast Sunday afternoon in July. Construction has wrapped Kongens Nytorv in temporary barrier walls. I can just make out the rooftops of picturesque Nyhavn further to the east. Strøget is busy now, as it almost always is during fair weather, though not so much as the previous Friday, sunny and warm, when the press of the crowd reduced strolling to shuffling. I did not enjoy being on Strøget then, but today the experience is quite different. A steady stream of people moves in both directions, a good mix. Many are in their 40s and 50s, though not a majority. Many appear to be upper-middle to upper class, though not all. I hear more Danish today than on Friday and the crowd somehow feels more local. I also hear Swedish, English, German, Chinese, Spanish, Polish. Some people walk alongside their bike as cycling is not allowed on the pedestrianized Strøget. Are the omnipresent bicycle rickshaws given exemptions? Three young

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kids are performing for a small crowd, stacking and unstacking cups with impressive speed. A duo plays violin and piano at Ny Østergade. They sound to be accomplished musicians. Strøget is a shopping street. Allan Jacobs considered it represent “the very best of a type: the old, long-continuing medieval street that usually winds at least a little, is relatively narrow, and has about it a certain sense of mystery, determined largely as a result of its tightness, its relatively tall buildings, and an inability to see from one end to another.”5 Its predominant width is approximately 10 meters, all of it paved at a single level with no curbs. Here at its east end we find Armani, Hermés, Louis Vuitton, Rolex. There is also an ice cream shop, a souvenir stand, yet upscale international brands dominate. Buildings adjoin and form a continuous wall, except at intersections, are mostly neoclassical (the buildings that preceded them having burned in the 18th century), and mostly three stories on top of the ground level with small gables poking out of sloped roofs. “Though architecturally undistinguished, building facades are richly detailed: shutters, sills, cornices, frames, signs, lights, downspouts.”6 Facades on Østergade are often white or pale and possess a subtle elegance. Some are ornately detailed, but more exhibit the simplicity Scandinavian design is famous for. Buildings average 15 meters in length with a doors every five meters or so. A glance north up Ny Østergade finds architecture suggestive of the traditional Danish wood-frame construction that largely vanished following the great fires of 1728 and 1795. A glance above the ground level retail spots many til leje (for rent) signs—does anyone still live on this street? What about offices? No windows here show signs of habitation. I wait to cross the street at Bremerholm. The buildings on the northern corners of the

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street are both stately, rich in historic character. Sadly, they house more international chain clothing stores, whose garish signage so distracts the eye that the fine buildings seem hidden. I look again at the buildings I’ve passed, at those ahead of me, and realize this is not an exception but rather the rule. The narrowness of the street relative to the height of buildings obscures most of the rooflines and many of the gables and generally keeps the eye at ground level. International brands dominate here and force the architecture of the street into the perceptual background. Even Illum, Copenhagen’s venerable department store, despite its building’s stature and distinct grey striping, seems to blend in with the rest of the retail fronts. A surprise: looking back past Illum at Pilestræde I see a three-story building, dark gray at ground level and traditional Danish red above. Its white windows are simply framed, four gables extend gracefully from both street-sides of the roofline. In dark grey metallic lettering the word Gucci quietly emerges from the concrete, the luxury store contained within the last thing I notice.

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> AT AMAGErTOrV/HØJBrO PLADS Where Strøget opens up at Amagertorv I am treated to its first signature moment. The outdoor tables of Café Norden to my left are filled to capacity, as is the seating on the Stork Fountain ahead. To my right, Købmagergade curves away gently, providing views of buildings rich with place-identity value. To my left, once I’ve stepped onto the square proper, more unmistakably Danish buildings frame the relatively wide open space of Højbro Plads, which is separated from Amagertorv by a bicycleonly lane. Bicycle parking is extensive here, and beyond the statue of Absalon are terminating views of Christiansborg Palace. Here I know I am in Copenhagen. Amagertorv itself is designated by different paving, giving it the feel of a separate room within a house. Prominent Danish artist Bjørn Nørgaard designed interlocking geometric patterns laid out with pentagonal granite blocks in five different colors. They contrast subtly and tastefully with the cobblestones of Højbro Plads and the repetitive rectangular pavers of the rest of Strøget. And it does indeed feel like

Copenhagen’s living room. Crowds gather here to watch street performers—today a bagpipe trio followed by a juggler; Friday saw a breakdancing quintet hold court. Numerous signature buildings frame the space perfectly, combining containment with porosity. No fewer than eight points of entry and exit accommodate a steady flow of people and encourage locals, who might otherwise bypass the street, to join it for a block or two, mingle with the tourists, and take in its show. As the main attraction here is people, spectators are also participants. They cluster around performers—there are two main performance areas, one on either side of the Stork Fountain, and a lesser third area on the west end before Helligåndskirke—and at the café tables of Norden, Europa, and further down The Dubliner. They stand against the low iron fencing above the subterranean public bathrooms in the middle of the pedestrian way. They fill the benches—how many are there? 10? 12? It is not enough, but where else to put them?

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Amagertorv & HojbrĂ¸plads. Plan and section. Redrawn from Allan Jacobsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; original. Scale: approximately 1:600.

approx. 30 meters

approx. 16 meters

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Strøget at Helligåndskirke. Plan and section. Redrawn from Allan Jacobs’ original. Scale: approximately 1:600.

approx. 15 meters

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> From Amagertorv to Gammeltorv/Nytorv Amagertorvâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s signature paving ends at Niels Hemmingsens Gade. Traffic slows here where the street funnels, and after a short stretch of shops on both sides the northern street wall gives way to an iron fence. Beyond the fence and a small courtyard rises HelligĂĽndskirke, though visibility of the church is limited by the strange orientation of its set back footprint, by trees towering above the fence (roughly the same height as the adjacent buildings) and by numerous street vendors hawking their wares, from caricatures to bikes made from folded metal wires to fruits, nuts, and smoothies, in front of it. The larger vending cars are motorized, the smaller ones typically attached to bicycles. The gate to the church is open here, but even so the courtyard, and by extension the church, feels cut off from StrĂ¸get. There are several benches backing up to the fence, but they feel private, as if they belong to the vendors in front of or beside them. The next building on the northern side of the street, the only one between Valkens-

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dorfgade and Klosterstræde, is functionally opaque at the ground level, and here I notice that the locational high provided by Amagertorv has worn off. I am now less interested in continuing on Strøget and look to exiting side streets for something of greater visual interest. The buildings in the distance on narrow Klosterstræde compel me—if I were not here to study Strøget would I abandon it here? Probably. Store brands remain mostly international and are increasingly generic. Some are up-market, most are not. The street curves gracefully to the left ahead of me, the facades mostly refined, restrained, and, like much of the built fabric of Strøget, quietly beautiful. One can find Copenhagen in their design, yet the ground-floor programming is so easily dismissed here that the architecture can as equally easily go unrecognized. A socio-economic transition begins roughly in this area. It is not service of a less-wealthy clientele that degrades this stretch, however, but the lack of congruence between the buildings and the shops. This should be more a place for locals, with more local shops and services. Cobblestones replace the pavers at Badstuestræde, which is about where visual interest increases again, thanks also to a sturdy red brick building on the right, views ahead to a small square and past that to the green cupolas above Gammeltorv/Nytorv. My eye is drawn repeatedly to the north side of the street along the length of Strøget. Jacobs noted that “light passes over [architectural] details and [building] surfaces, so there is constant change of brightness and shadows.”7 Was Strøget designed this way, its architects conscious that more of a spotlight would shine on its northern wall? Jorck’s Passage, again on the right as I walk west, connects Strøget with Fiolstræde. There are other passages as well, linking this main street with its neighbors, unmarked as if in insistence that they are for residents who have taken the time to know this place, as if they are treasures to be discovered. I am again compelled to take one

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and leave Strøget, though I’m not certain whether that is because the experience of the street so much diminished—even the performers here are generic, the same living statues found on every busy shopping street in Europe—or simply because of its length. And then Strøget is redeemed by a man bedecked in a dandy’s finery and fully painted gold. He strolls with a cane, with a swagger, nodding as he passes—a flâneur from Copenhagen’s gilded age?

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> At Gammeltorv/Nytorv Strøget ends here, or seems to. Unlike Amagertorv, which swells Strøget without breaking it, Gammeltorv/Nytorv replaces its linearity with jarring horizontality. Motor vehicle traffic is accommodated by the street (also called Nytorv?) that bisects Strøget at the east end of the combined square, as well as by the streets at its southern and northern ends. The scale is overly large, with the effect that even though buildings technically frame the combined square they are at too great a distance to provide the perception of containment. Gammeltorv is smaller and livelier and features the Caritas Fountain which offers prime seating close to where Strøget crosses (and where an Incan band in elaborate traditional feather-costumes surreally play theme music from Titanic and Last of the Mohicans on pan flutes). The border between the two squares is designated only by the orientation of pavers and by the visual cue of the stream of pedestrians traversing Strøget. Still, Nytorv seems to be consistently less populated, a bit forlorn, and why

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not? What is of interest there? The combined square is not without signature aspects, mostly buildings such as the old town hall which is now houses the public courts, butâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;dirtier, dingier, less animated, with less compelling architecture and little retail or other programmingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;it pales in comparison with Amagertorv.

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> From Gammeltorv/Nytorv To RådhuspladseN It is 6pm now. Vendors are breaking down their carts. The stores that were open—it is Sunday—are closing. And it has begun to rain. The crowds have thinned, though the street is still well trafficked. Cyclists ignore their ban and thread their way cautiously, no one seems to mind. Two Roma play Sinatra’s “My Way” on violin and accordion. The socio-economic transition that began a few blocks back continues but is not sharp. What is most observable is the near total lack of identifying features. Lagkagehuset, a local upscale chain bakery, stands out. Jacobs wrote that “on Strøget the bakeries and coffee shops are the first to open and regulars stop into them to start their days.”8 I wonder if this is still true. Besides Lagkagehuset and a small, old shop specializing in traditional gloves, a shop that I’m told has been here for generations, this section of Strøget, Frederiksberggade, with its discount shoe stores and fast food chains, could be any middling shopping street. Storefronts and signage, some in neon tubing, show no regard for the

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architecture housing them, and seem louder, larger, more obtrusive here. Ahead there is no satisfying terminus. The Rådhus is set back out of view to the south and the construction area where the new metro station is being built suggests it will be set too far to the north to be seen until Strøget ends, officially, at Rådhuspladsen.

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Making Strøget: A Signature Street Takes Shape Strøget’s long slow march to signature street status begins with the first fortification of the city in 1187. By 1377, several more-or-less contiguous streets connect the west (Vesterport) and east (Østerport) gates, passing through Gammeltorv and Amagertorv, and the rude shape of Strøget is clearly recognizable in plan view. 1377

The next few centuries see only incremental change, mostly to the fine-grain network of streets linked to what will become Strøget. City fortifications are enlarged and city gates made more prominent, their connection to Strøget improved. Gammeltorv, which had been a market square even before Bishop Absalon’s 12th century fortification, held the first city hall and, with adjoining Nytorv from 1610, at least four of its successors (the current city hall was finished in 1905). It was referred to

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as the Forum until the 15th century, when the increasing importance of Amagertorv as a fish and later a fruit and produce market necessitated differentiation. Meat sold at Gammeltorv was butchered first at Nytorv, which by 1630 was also the site of a recently constructed scaffold for public executions.9 1630

Real estate purchases and new city walls doubled the size of Copenhagen in the 17th century under Christians IV and V, and Kongens Nytorv replaced Østerport as the terminus of Østergade in 1647. The map shows the substantial changes wrought by the two great forces shaping early-modern Copenhagen: royal ambition and calamitous fire. “Fanned initially by strong northwesterly winds, the [great] fire [of 1728] started on Wednesday evening, October 20, burned until Saturday, and destroyed the entire northern half of the city.”10 Neoclassical architecture proliferated in the rebuilding effort, redefining Danish architecture and shifting Copenhagen’s identity more toward that of urban gentility in the process. The program of street-straightening and -widening that followed forged

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Left to right, from top: The great fire of 1728; Gammeltorv, Nytorv, and Amagertorv circa 1750.

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Strøget’s collection of linked-but-separate rights-of-way into a continuous west-east axis, and what was still perceptually Copenhagen’s east end became now technically closer to its center. Strøget’s layout has remained virtually unchanged since. Kongens Nytorv was perhaps the most explicit statement of bourgeois desire in Copenhagen’s history of urban planning. The former garbage dump was cobbled in 1670, Charlottenborg and Thott Palaces were completed in 1683, and a baroque garden complex was added in 1688. Other plots were sold to wealthy Copenhageners, who continued the program of opulent construction for two hundred years. The effects are still visible today, as the east end of Strøget remains decidedly more posh than its western counterpart. Social equality may not have been high on the agenda here, but the signature value of the square and the buildings facing it is undeniable. Strøget was always a bustling, crowded place, a stage on which the city danced, the beating heart of Copenhagen where people lived, worked, and played in more or less copacetic chaos. But its character changed between the mid-19th and mid-20th

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Kongens Nytorv, 19th century.

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StrĂ¸get. From top, left to right: The heart of Copenhagen in 1880; Gammeltorv/Nytorv used as parking lots in 1954; A car dominated street in 1960; A signature street for people in 2006.

centuries as the average family size more than halved, the average flat size more than doubled,11 and ownership of private automobiles spread like gossip. By the 1950s few offices and fewer residents remained above the shops on StrĂ¸get. Narrow curbed sidewalks had been raised and choking car traffic sapped the street of both its pedestrians and its joy. In response, though not without controversy, StrĂ¸get was pedestrianized in 1962. Foot traffic increased 35% the following year12 and the extension of the pedestrianized zone to adjacent streets continues today.

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Contextualization: Strøget as Signature Spine We’ve spoken at some length about the experience of signature streets, about their iconic, place-identifying character. Strøget is undoubtedly Copenhagen’s signature street, yet a first visit may yield disappointment. As previously mentioned, the street has few signature buildings, most local shops have been replaced by international brands, and the moments while walking it when one can decisively say, “I am in Copenhagen and nowhere else,” are rare. So how can Strøget be considered a signature street? In part the answer is because of its long history, its prominent placement, and its lack of competition for the title—Strøget has been Copenhagen’s central artery and the site of its main squares and markets for nearly a thousand years. But it would be a mistake to view Strøget as an independent urban axis; rather, Strøget is the spine of central Copenhagen’s signature street network, and it must be contextualized this way for its significance to be fully valued.

Copenhagen’s inner city, with pedestrianized street network highlighted.

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Above: Købmagergade. Following page: Copenhagen’s inner city street network, of which Strøget is a signature spine.

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The beauty one finds here is rarely monumental. It is quieter, softer, more refined, simpler. It suggests that things should be done properly, but it lays no claim to the final word on rightness. There is modesty in the beauty of these streets, and there is also pride in being Danish, in being Copenhagen. Walk Strædet and you notice how signage is designed as extensions of the buildings; they do not shout for attention, displaying confidence that the stores they introduce like handshakes are of sufficient quality to be sought out. You notice the subtle variations in the arrangement of pavers, the way they suggest but do not impose order on shared space. You notice how newer buildings are informed by older ones. Youthful and innocuous counterculture is present in the ubiquitous graffiti and in the countless local fashion boutiques, and the easy mingling of people young and old suggests a culture that does not grow stale and hard with age. The speed here is slow, the speed of walking or of leisurely cycling. Discovery is a virtue, as is participation. As is simply being present. Copenhagen’s inner city was originally conceived as a human-scale urban environment traversed by pedestrians. After centuries of population growth and physical expansion, the addition of new modes of mechanized transportation, economic transitions from mercantilism to industrialization to de-industrialization, the fact that the indre by is still a human-scale urban environment traversed mostly by pedestrians is not accidental. Copenhagen has an idea of urbanism, of what it means to be urban, that is, like many things Danish, elegant in its simplicity: cities are for people. Copenhagen has insured that local architecture and urban design promotes and reflects such urbanity by retaining as its starting point the question of whether the quality of social life will be improved or degraded. Out of this humanistic perspective has emerged a vibrant people-centric street network rife with pronouncements of place and fine-grain design details, all of which feed and are fed by Strøget. Out of this urbanistic approach, one which seems somehow harmoniously both anachronistic and thoroughly modern, emerges Copenhagen’s brand.

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Conclusions & Cautions If one looks past the garish signage and the international chains and the monofunctional programming, one can see in Strøget the Copenhagen brand. Copenhagen as a city for a people, a city that celebrates being Danish without boasting, a city that does not select between livability and economic competitiveness but chooses instead to merge them. The slight meandering of the street line and the charm of its architecture belies the strategic development of Strøget and its street network, on which the continuous and still-accreting history of Copenhagen unfurls, and from which virtually every landmark in the city can be easily accessed. Copenhagen’s decision to pedestrianize its main street at a time when the car symbolized urbanity’s future and the pedestrian its past could be considered extraordinarily brave. Or it could be considered just, and left at that. It could be considered simply the correction of a mistake—the allowance of motor vehicles to overwhelm the city center—and the restoration of the public realm to the public. But most importantly it can be seen as an action representative of a vision of Copenhagen as the city for people. Copenhagen never ruled the world. It has never been Rome or Paris or London or Vienna. Yet it aspires to every bit as much greatness, albeit small scale, fine-grain greatness. In one stroke, Strøget shifted the focus of urbanism in Copenhagen back onto human beings, allowing it to gradually build perhaps the greatest cycling infrastructure on the planet, to largely eschew skyscrapers and large-scale urban development projects, to stress education and welfare, to experiment with architecture and design, to pedestrianize street after street in the urban core, to prioritize the environment, to avoid the extreme social stratification of many other wealthy cities (though recent issues related to immigration give cause for concern), and to build a brand around its distinct approach to quality of life.

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Brand Copenhagen can be traced back to the pedestrianization of StrĂ¸get, which reshaped the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vison of its future as one centered on openness, environmentally friendly transportation, and people.

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However, for all its popularity—the street draws more than 50,000 people on any given summer day13—the story of Strøget as a signature street is also one of loss and neglect. Brand decay is a real threat. When asked why he no longer frequented a once-local New York eatery that had since been “discovered,” Yogi Berra quipped, “No one goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” There exists the danger that this could happen to Strøget, that locals could abandon it entirely and that its signature status would gradually disappear. A survey of over 2000 people carried out by Prof. David Yencken in 1995 revealed ambivalence toward Strøget. When asked which places in the city center they most enjoyed visiting, 165 respondents mentioned Strøget, which placed the street second in popularity behind Nyhavn. Respondents cited Strøget’s fine buildings and atmosphere as the top two reasons for their enjoyment. Yet when asked which places they did not enjoy being in, respondents named Strøget 129 times, again good for second place. Third on this list was Strøget where it meets City Hall Square, making the street the least enjoyable place in the entire city center when both responses are combined. Overcrowding and ugly shops were among the most common reasons cited. In a follow-up question, people were asked where in the city center they felt least safe. Strøget was again the overwhelming response.14 Cities are by definition multifunctional amalgamations, making it unlikely that monofunctional streets can serve for long as their icons. Strøget became Copenhagen’s signature street in large part because it supported all the activities of city life, from living and working and playing to governing. Visiting dignitaries are still brought to Strøget. Parade routes still traverse it. Tourists still flock to it and locals still shop on it, still choose to walk it a block or two on their way somewhere else. Strøget is still Copenhagen’s signature street. But for how long? As the quality of place and sense of locality increases on streets like Strædet, Larsbjørnsstræde, Købmagergade, and Ny Østergade, will Strøget respond in kind by reigning in signage and welcoming back

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residents and office workers, by enhancing its once-great representative character? Will StrĂ¸get continue to be the spine that gives strength and structure to the rest of Copenhagenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s signature street network, or will its brand decay as the qualities that defined the street for centuries and which helped revitalize and redefine modern Copenhagen are stripped away?

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Ringstrasse. Vienna Case Study Street 2

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Walking Ringstrasse: Observing Life, Space & Form It is difficult to know where or how to begin with a spatial narrative of the Ringstrasse. Unlike Strøget, which is linear and so has two end points, the Ringstrasse, as its name implies, is roughly circular and without an obvious beginning or terminus. I have chosen to begin at Urania in the east and proceed clockwise, largely because it is there that I perceive Ringstrasse to begin. Why? As we will see, Ringstrasse struggles with definition in several places, none more so than at Schwedenplatz, which leaves the sense of a gap in the street and therefore allows the perception of a beginning where the Aspernbrücke meets Stubenring and an end near the Salztorbrücke on Franz-Josefs Kai. In fact, these are exactly the boundaries of the original 1860 plan that replaced the glacis flanking Vienna’s old fortifications with the Ringstrasse. Besides questions of geography there are those of size and complexity. Ringstrasse is much longer than Strøget (5.4km total / 4.6km study area vs. 1.2km) and much wider (55m vs. 10m, generally). It supports a greater range of transportation modes, with dedicated infrastructure for cycles, cars, trams, and buses in addition to pedestrian paths. Strøget is almost exclusively a shopping street, while the programming on Ringstrasse also includes educational, cultural, and administrative institutions, hotels, parks, offices, and residences. The challenge of analyzing Ringstrasse within the format of this thesis demands selective focus; here I will concentrate on identifying the components of the street, how they relate to each other, and how they combine to establish Ringstrasse as Vienna’s signature street.

Opposite page: Ringstrasse. Plan and section. Redrawn from Allan Jacobs’ original. Scale: approximately 1:600.

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10m

16m

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10m

> From Julius Raab Platz to Schwarzenbergplatz Just north of Urania, on the opposite side of the AspernbrĂźcke, I lean against the railing that prevents me from falling onto the left bank of the Donaukanal and wait for the traffic light to change. I look down and see swimmers and sunbathers at the Badeschiff, an old barge docked on the canal that has been converted to a pool. Cyclists and walkers pass on both sides, in both directions, some alone and others in pairs or with family. Young artists add to the long wall of legal graffiti. I look across the canal at the second district with its modern glass highrises shouldering traditional Viennese apartment houses. I see the Art Nouveau (Jugendstil in German) observatory Palace Urania, which with its curving prow and columnar buildings suggests a ship, both water and space. The light turns and with a crowd of cyclists and other pedestrians I cross the six auto lanes and four tram lines of Franz-Josefs Kai, catch a glimpse of Stephansdom up Wiesingerstrasse, and proceed south on Stubenring, soon stopping where, in a signature Ringstrasse moment, the Neo-Baroque Imperial War Ministry building opposes Otto Wagnerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s iconic Postsparkasse.

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Ringstrasse here has 15 lanes, in a manner of speaking: a pedestrian sidewalk, a parking lane and access lane for cars, a tree-lined median with pedestrian and cycle paths and tram shelters, a tram lane, three motor vehicle lanes (all of which move around the ring clockwise), a opposite-direction tram lane, another median more or less twinning the first followed by likewise mirrored access and parking lanes and a sidewalk, all of which are framed by mostly continuous lines of buildings. There are benches, telephone booths, bicycle stands, tram shelters, waste containers, vents where the U4 metro line passes beneath, entrances to underground car parking, circular advertising structures featuring the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s current cultural offerings, and several variations of light poles. It is more pleasant to walk on the median here than the sidewalk, despite the nearconstant tension of its ill-defined and frequently crossing lanes for cyclists and pedestrians (who with their different speeds and movements seem always in danger of collision). Why? The trees help, and the viewing angle is better for looking at the buildings on both sides. Ground floor programming is mixed commercial and office. A surprising variety of architectural styles flow one into the next, though a sense of unity more than diversity prevails due to uniform setbacks and similar massing. Ringstrasse is noisy here, its strolling areas overwhelmed by the intensity of adjacent motor vehicle traffic. I feel no compunction to linger, even if the signature architecture demands more sustained observation. A slight right turn at Oskar Kokoschka Platz and a view across the Wienfluss to the east of a large modern building with irregular geometry. The brick Angewandte (University of Applied Arts) and its adjoining MAK (Museum of Industrial Arts) are not only stylistically distinct from their neighbors but at only two stories, compared with the Ringstrasseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more standard ground-plus-five-plus-roof-story building height, are more horizontally oriented. Trees come close to the building wall and the street feels somehow calmer.

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At Café Pruckerl servers in tuxedos and the musty refinement of upholstered benches and ceiling carvings conjure Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. On the far side of Doktor Karl Lueger Platz—which gives testament that a pocket park can be grand—an elegant glass and steel entrance to the U-Bahn. Stadtpark meets the east side of Ringstrasse here and traces its edge for 500m. Three canopied lanes separate the park from the tram and motor vehicle traffic and serve as a transition area as well as a parklike promenade in their own right. Because of this and because of Stadtpark’s own appeal, pedestrians and cyclists tend to gravitate there, crossing the street at Stubentor. I remain on the west median, which is more peaceful for its having been largely vacated. I notice that the first three entrances to the park correspond with streets terminating at the Ring, though the fourth does not. I wonder why. A cyclist rings to warn me of his approach; the division of lanes are poorly marked and have apparently shifted again. I would sit but there are no benches. Just past where the low-slung modernist Gartenbau Kino meets the street, the Neoclassical Palais Coburg, now a luxury hotel, overlooks Theodor Herzl Platz as if from a throne. I find such striking architectural juxtapositions are surprisingly frequent on the Ring. To my left a tram arrives punctually. Allan Jacobs wrote that the Ring’s “small glass and wood waiting shelters are as elegant as any to be found anywhere.”15 These were replaced in 1994 by steel and glass shelters, but their original design seems to have been respected and the newer structures replicate their quiet elegance.

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> From Schwarzenbergplatz to Burggarten Schwarzenberg Platz, at least where it meets Ringstrasse, is a decidedly unpleasant place to be a pedestrian. Not because of the buildings, which are all statelyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;signage restrictions make even McDonaldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s look upscale and architecturally integratedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but because of traffic intensity. Numerous tram lines and auto lanes converge, leaving pedestrians and cyclists to seek refuge on islands raised like lily pads. The area appears to have been calibrated solely by traffic engineers with no consideration of its identity as a place. Who would come here by choice, and why? The view up Canovagasse of Karlskirche further contrasts the carefully considered totality of the 19th century Ringstrasse with the seeming haphazardness of more recent amendments. Contrary to what Allan Jacobs observed two decades earlier, the Ring appears poorly maintained and sloppily appointed in many sections. Here the median is more caked dirt than grass, elsewhere unmowed. The pavement is patched blacktop. Trees generally feel trimmed too low and are too short overall, their placement inconsistent as

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is their type. Traffic islands clearly exist only to define vehicle rights of way and are rarely bestowed with place value. Large box-like structures—do these provide workers access to utilities?—do not improve the situation. Benches are in short supply and appear randomly placed and oriented. Ground level activation is rarely compelling and sidewalks are mostly too narrow. Pedestrians prefer the canopied medians, yet here they are in regular conflict with cyclists as their respective lanes are woven like braids. How can the great Ringstrasse, an archetype of imperial absolutist planning, be in such disarray? The experience improves a bit as I pass Hotel Imperial, but if I were not performing this analysis what would ever compel me to come here? To stay? Could the attempt to accommodate all modes of transport be undermining the structural, functional, and perceptual logic of the street? I am pulled out of my critical reverie by the Staatsoper. Like Schwarzenberg Platz, the intersection here is chaotic and unwelcoming to pedestrians, but here the architectural power of the Staatsoper shines through. There is place value here—one knows where one is. There are no trees here, and I realize that they are absent wherever a busy intersection with the Ring occurs. This accentuates the urbanity of such places, though perhaps at the expense of the Ringstrasse’s design coherence. I look again at the Opera and in the distance see Stephansdom’s spire.

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> From Burggarten to schottentor At Burggarten I cross from the median to the sidewalk, which here expands to three canopied lanes as at Stadtpark. It seems that the middle lane is for cyclists and the outer lanes for pedestrians, with two more divided lanes on the medians. No attempt to create different experiences along the various paths seems to have been made. Wrote Jacobs: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Iron fences, such as at the Burggarten or the Volksgarten, provide excellent, pleasant-to-walk-along street definition that is more interesting than that provided by some of the buildings.â&#x20AC;? It is a backhanded compliment, for while the fence is pleasant enough it should hardly outdo the activity and visual interest of the buildings at ground level. Still, to walk here is a treat, especially when one discovers embedded moments of delight such as at Goethegasse, where the statue of Goethe is locked in eternal dialogue with his old pal Friedrich Schiller, whose statue sits across the Ring and in front of The Academy of Fine Arts in the appropriately named Schiller Platz.

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Little of Burggarten’s quality (and less of that of the Albertina museum or of the Hofburg’s fine Jugendstil greenhouse) is visible from the Ring, and once again there are no benches nor anything else that might encourage lingering on the Ring itself, as if the street purposely keeps people moving until they reach their destination. What destinations, though! As the backyard to the Hofburg, Burggarten is the first of a series of monumental buildings and imperial parks that I now encounter, followed by the Hofburg and the museums of natural and art history, the Parliament, the Volksgarten, the Burgtheater, the Rathaus, and the University of Vienna. All were executed as part of the 19th century Ringstrasse expansion. The massive Neo-Baroque Hofburg is the apex architectural monument to the dominion of the Habsburgs, though the indelible footage of Hitler proselytizing from one of its balconies to the rabid masses gathered on the Heldenplatz below casts a creepy pall over its grandeur. A defensive-seeming gate with five tall arched entryways—the inner three for vehicles, the outer two for pedestrians—is set back from the street. Without much to frame it the gate feels a bit awkward, as does the busy pedestrian intersection in front of it, which is littered with signage at street level and tram and utility wires overhead. Clearly intended to form with the Hofburg a grand imperial complex, the Neo-Renaissance Naturhistorisches and Kunsthistorisches Museums are nearly as evocative of power. This is certainly the most powerful visual axis on the Ringstrasse, especially now that the old imperial stables, which terminate the axis to the west, have been repurposed as the stellar MuseumsQuartier. I am tempted to make a brief detour onto Maria Theresien Platz, to wander the formal garden with its lively statues, but I am growing tired and the crowd here is thick, so I move on. Iron fencing appears again to my right, the same as at the Burggarten (Palace Garden), marking the boundary of the Volksgarten (People’s Garden). Also again, the

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quality of this beautiful public garden is largely hidden from passersby. Because I have been there before on similarly warm summer days, I know there are hundreds of people beyond the fence, people walking, talking, sunbathing, reading, picnicking, and admiring, but no sight nor sound confirms this knowledge. The Ring turns and the Greek revival Parliament building, gleaming white, comes into view. An ornate fountain statue of Pallas Athena accented by a golden helm, adds to both the splendor and the oddness of the building. Set back as it is, the Parliament has little connection to the street, nor to its surroundings. Stylistically, it feels like a fish out of water—is it impressive or in poor taste? Frank Gehry’s probably apocryphal quote, “I don’t do context,” comes to mind. With only large monumental structures and parks on this section of the ring, the activity level is reduced. Walking and cycling are less chaotic. It becomes easier to take in the surroundings, to observe the details. Cars still move too quickly and street crossings are still too infrequent, but the Ring is more able here to show off its jewels. The Rathausparkplatz, like Stadtpark, draws in users where it meets the street. I resist its pull and finally find a bench near the south entrance to the Burgtheater’s parking lot. A film festival is on across the street at the Rathausplatz, and a temporary village of restaurants and cafés and festival kiosks has been raised. A würstelstand bellows smoke. Beyond, the Neo-Gothic Rathaus dazzles. It was intended to recall late medieval Flemish city halls, and indeed it does. Despite its bulk there is an inexplicable lightness to the Rathaus, which almost seems a living thing. The majestic Neo-Baroque Burgtheater beside me relates more to the street, but it seems designed and sited more to be viewed from the Rathausplatz than from the sidewalk in front of it. “The wings on either side of the building were meant to provide appropriate proportion to the massive city hall across the street,”16 and yet the distance between the buildings as well as their different styles limits any perceived connection. There is also

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a contrast in the experience offered to Ring-goers: the Rathausplatz is well-defined, well-appointed, and welcoming, while the Burgtheater is surrounded by a moat-like asphalt parking lot. Mixed-use commercial programming returns along the Ringâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inner edge after Burgtheater. This is the 1st district, the old historic center, but the lack of views into the inner city connects it more to the Ringstrasse. The University of Vienna, a NeoRenaissance structure, meets my gaze from across the street. It is the very picture of what one imagines the traditional architecture of higher education to be. Even in summer, students are clustered about the entrance, reading or talking or taking a break from studying to enjoy a beer with friends.

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Bรถrse

Burggarten

Burgtheater

Kino Gartenbau

Hotel Imperial

MAK

Art & Natural History Museums

Neue Hofburg

Parliament

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Postsparkasse

Ringturm

Schwarzenbergplatz

Palace Urania

University of Vienna

Volksgarten

War Ministry Building

Rathaus

State Opera House

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> From schottentor to salztorbrÜcke With the exception of the striking Neo-Renaissance Börse, which once held the stock exchange and now hosts a café, offices, and event space, and the 23 story modernist Ringturm, the only skyscraper in the 1st district, the remainder of the Ringstrasse is not terribly memorable. Much of it, excluding where the street loses all definition at Schottentor and again where it turns from Schottenring into Franz Josefs Kai, however, is quite pleasant. A mix of hotels, offices, and residences reduce the Ring’s grandeur, but increases its urbanity and improves its sense of place. The architecture of the buildings lining it continues to be of fine quality and subtle diversity, and a dozen smaller cross streets offer access into the inner city, some with a view of Stephansdom. Bicycle parking is ample, auto traffic seems less intense. As on the rest of the Ring, the proximity and poor differentiation of cycle and pedestrian lanes creates awkwardness and a bit of tension. In stark contrast to Doktor Karl Lueger Platz, which mirrors its placement on the far side of the Ring, a raised pocket

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park north of the BĂśrse that features a monument to soldiers fallen during WWI is unkempt and a bit forlorn. Car traffic is pulled away from the inner edge of the Ring at Franz Josefs Kai, reducing the presence of motor vehicles to a single parking lane alongside a single one-way access lane, and the effect is remarkable. The street layout here, from west to east: sidewalk, parking lane, access lane, two tram lanes, a median with tram shelters, two more tram lanes, a sidewalk shared by pedestrians and cyclists. By removing vehicular through-traffic, the gap in speed between the slowest and fastest street users is radically reduced. The effect, if not quite shared space, is to make pedestrians feel comfortable crossing where they will. It is a strange part of the ring; lacking clarity and poorly framed, it certainly does not realize its own potential, yet the mere fact that it is not divided by a gulf of fast moving auto traffic gives it a sense of accessibility, of being lived in by human beings and thus of being local, that the rest of the Ring cannot (and perhaps should not? Let us pick this thread up again in the following section) match. As if proving the point, a dog park fills the triangular lot that extends south from the second U-bahn entrance to the intersection at SalztorbrĂźcke. Five or six dogs and their owners interact casually near a fountain, while an old hound with a gray muzzle dozes on a bench at the other end, his human reading a book contentedly by his side.

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Making Ringstrasse: A Signature Street is Decreed For six hundred years the Altstadt of Vienna sat proud and nestled behind its walls and broad glacis, even as city after city across Europe shed its medieval fortifications and long after they held any practical function. Then the revolution of 1848, the incorporation in 1850 of what is now the second through ninth districts, and the population boom of the 1850s all but forced the city to tear down the walls and develop the vast swath of prime real estate. But how? What should rise in its stead? The army called for broad boulevards, as in Paris, to deny a restless populace the option of blockades. The extension of the city demanded some sort of connection with the old city. And of course a substantial increase in housing was needed. Finally, in 1857, Emperor Franz Josef made his decision. Decreeing “It is my will” (Es ist Mein Wille) that urban fabric replace the defensive works, he soon “established a City Expansion Commission to plan and execute its development.”17 The decision to construct a broad boulevard ringing the inner city was quickly made. Initially, “the allocation of space and especially the priorities for monumental building still expressed the values of dynastic neo-absolutism,”18 but when the army (and thus the emperor) suffered losses to France and Piedmont in 1859 and Prussia seven years later, the ascendant liberals wrested power and altered “the substance and meaning of the Ringstrasse program [in response] to the will of a new ruling class to erect a series of public buildings expressing the values of a pax liberalis.”19 The message of the legends on the first plan released to the public, from 1860, which read “Strong Through Law and Peace” and “Embellished Through Art” could not have been clearer.

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Construction began in earnest in 1861, with the first phase focused on the provision of middle-class housing in addition to the laying out of the street itself. The liberals completed their coup over the following decade and shifted the focus to housing for the upper-bourgeoisie. In 1870 the former emperor, now a monarch after the adoption of a constitutional government in 1860, released the old parade grounds, some 200 hectares, for the siting of “the three public institutions most important to the liberals—University, Parliament, and Rathaus.”20 All three would be completed by 1884, followed by the Burgtheater (1888) and the Art History Museum and Natural History Museum (both 1891). Work on the large addition to the Hofburg, the Neue Burg, was finally finished in 1913, and marked the completion of the Ringstrasse’s Prachtbauten, or buildings of splendor. Some notable buildings not included in the original plan: Otto Wagner’s Jugendstil Postal Savings Bank (1906), remarkable both for its stylistic uniqueness on the Ringstrasse and for the stodgy reproach that the conservative and outdated-evenas-it-was-completed War Ministry Building (1913) seems to deliver from across the street; the modernist Ringturm and attached low-rise offices from the 1950s; and the late-modern Gartenbaukino (1960). The old imperial stables, which date from the 18th and 19th centuries, were repurposed as the extraordinary culture cluster MuseumsQuartier, and now form, along with the museums of art and natural history and the Hofburg, a more-or-less unified axis reminiscent of the intended-but-nevercompleted Kaiserforum. As impressive as the buildings adjacent to it are, the Ringstrasse itself was always intended to be the project’s dominant feature. The designers “organized all the elements in relation to a central broad avenue or corso, without architectonic containment and without visible destination. The street, polyhedral in shape, is literally the only element in the vast complex that leads an independent life, unsubordinated to any other spatial entity.”21 The street is about continuous motion, and like a river it flows past the buildings on its bank with little regard for them. Nor did it seem to

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An island in an urban sea: Vienna before demolition of the medieval fortifications, 1858.

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The first public plan for construction of the Ringstrasse, 1860. Proposed new buildings are in red, parks in green.

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University Rathaus

Burgtheater Parliament

Neue Hofburg

Natural History Museum Art History Museum

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War Ministry Building

Postal Savings Bank

Stadtpark

State Opera

Schwarzenbergplatz

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concern itself with integrating new and old Vienna— “Instead of a strong radial system, which one would expect to link the outer parts and the city center, most of the streets that enter the Ring area from either inner city or suburb have little or no prominence. They debouche in the circular flow without crossing it. The old city was thus enclosed by the Ring...What had been a military insulation belt became a sociological isolation belt.”22 Little has changed. The most recent major work performed on the Ring, a redesign of Schwarzenbergplatz, testifies to the street’s primary function as a space concerned with transportation, with movement. Its goals? “Redirect traffic near the fountain, lay out bikeways around the square, simplify the [tram] tracks...”23 The Ringstrasse still resists integration with the city. The monumental buildings are still impressive and aloof. And the flow of traffic, though now more multimodal, remains its most visible feature.

Contextualization: Ringstrasse as Signature Limes Construction of the Ringstrasse was such a significant event in the history of Vienna that the era took from it its name. “‘Ringstrasse Vienna’ has become a concept to Austrians, a way of summoning to mind the characteristics of an era, equivalent to the notion ‘Victorian’ to Englishmen, ‘Gründerzeit’ to Germans, or ‘Second Empire’ to the French.”24 In the blink of a few decades, imperial Vienna, which had ruled much of Europe under the Habsburgs for 300 years, became liberal Vienna. The newly powerful bourgeoisie looked to set their elevation in stone and forever join the old aristocracy at the top of the Viennese social hierarchy, and the Ringstrasse provided the perfect opportunity.

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“Taken as a whole, the monumental buildings of the Ringstrasse expressed well the highest values of regnant liberal culture. On the remnants of a champ de Mars its votaries had reared the political institutions of a constitutional state, the schools to educate the élite of a free people, and the museums and theaters to bring to all the culture that would redeem the novi homines from their lowly origins.”25 The neohistoricist architecture of the Ringstrasse communicates the voracious hunger of the liberals, who seemed to claim not only Vienna but all the world’s historical triumphs. Beauty here is synonymous with individual achievement, with the conquering of one’s peers. A curious cornerstone on which to build a new society. Where once a wall stood another has been raised, if only perceptually. Now, as then, both culturally and physically, the Ring binds and separates more than it connects. Wealth and power are concentrated in the 1st district, the old city, while the rest of the city is kept at bay. The Ringstrasse virtually ignores all other streets and suffers few vistas into either the old city or the new. It keeps users in perpetual motion, as if afraid of what might happen should they be allowed to stop. However, as in Lucca, one can walk these walls and read the story of the city. Whatever its shortcomings, the Ringstrasse is loaded with beauty—beauty that speaks, signature beauty—and custom designed to bolster Brand Vienna.

“The practical objectives which redesigning the city might accomplish were firmly subordinated to the symbolic function of representation. Not utility but cultural selfprojection dominated the Ringstrasse. The term most commonly used to describe the great program of the sixties was not ‘renovation’ or ‘redevelopment,’ but ‘beautification of the city’s image [Verschönerung des Stadtbildes].’ More economically than any other single source, the great forum built along Vienna’s Ringstrasse, with its monuments and its dwellings, gives us an iconographic index to the mind of ascendant Austrian liberalism.”26

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—Carl Schorske

Replacing one wall with another: perceived porosity of the Ringstrasse.

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As the capital of the Habsburg empire and the home of Mozart, Strauss, and Klimt, Vienna’s brand as a city of aristocracy, grandeur, and fine art has long been established. It is known to be a refined city, clean and safe, orderly if a bit conservative, well-heeled. Vienna has claimed the top spot on Mercer Consulting Group’s International Quality of Living Survey multiple times, including in 2011.27 Yet there is also a perception of Vienna as being boring, antiseptic, lifeless, and trapped in the past. The Ringstrasse reinforces all of these perceptions, positive and negative, particularly when viewed with the tourist’s gaze, which tends not to see the street’s fine-grain haphazardness and indecision (detailed in the previous walking narrative) for the its magnificence. But what has happened since the Ringstrasse era? What new layers of art and history have the Viennese added in the intervening years? The Ringstrasse masterfully communicates what Vienna was and what an ascendant minority of its population wished it to be, but on the subject of what Vienna is now the street remains mute. Except, that is, during holidays and festivals such as National Day and the RadParade (Bicycle Parade, shown below) when auto traffic is restricted or forbidden and the central motorway of the Ring given to people. These events display the incredible potential of the Ringstrasse to once again become a canvas for contemporary culture, a vehicle for Viennese visions, a place in which to be rather than just a space through which to move.

Opposite page: Schottentor, Ringstrasse, then and now. As discussed in the second chapter, streets are urban and incompatible with fast moving traffic. The speed and prioritization of private motor vehicles on the Ringstrasse simultaneously decreases its porosity, its urbaneness, and its place-value.

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Conclusions & Cautions Allan Jacobs wrote of Ringstrasse, “A strange street!”28 and indeed it is. Its size and location and historical value, not to mention the destinations sited along its length, guarantee its signature status, but this status is presented more to tourists than residents. With enough time spent on the Ringstrasse one learns to filter its grandeur. Local representational qualities fade and the Ring as a multimodal conveyer belt comes into view. Transportation needs, especially those of private motor vehicles, dominate, and a shocking lack of design and planning continuity is revealed in the street’s details. The pomp and circumstance of the Ring shouts power and confidence, but insecurity and uncertainty lie just beneath. It must not be easy for a city to forge a new identity once it has been the center of the universe. Holding tight to the imperial past seems only natural. But Vienna’s former greatness also stifles its present, as if the city is afraid that any new steps could never fill the shoes of its past. Where is the architecture of the 20th century, of the 21st? Where is proof of the city’s evolution in service to new eras with new ideas? Not on the Ringstrasse. Beauty here is frozen, the city brand it promotes grown dusty and out of touch with the reality of contemporary Viennese culture, the vitality of which finds no sign on the Ring. Vienna is rightly lauded for its high quality of living, but it needn’t sacrifice its top ranking in order to incorporate the present and the future. Ironically, the path forward may well be found by, in part, looking back. Schorske points out that “it was against the anvil of the Ringstrasse that two pioneers of modern thought about the city and its architecture, Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner, hammered out ideas of urban life and form whose influence is still at work among us.”29 Sitte, the great humanist and champion of medieval urban design, criticized the Ringstrasse for its lack of place and for its refusal to relate to its surrounding neighborhoods. He proposed adding squares, “islands of human community in the cold

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sea of traffic-dominated space.”30 The thoroughly modern Wagner disliked the Ringstrasse for its anachronistic historicism, and would have much preferred it “make visible our better, democratic, self-conscious and sharp-thinking essence, and do justice to the colossal technical and scientific achievements as well as to the fundamentally practical character of modern mankind.”31 Why couldn’t—why shouldn’t—the Ringstrasse represent the fusion, or better yet the recontextualization, of the perspectives of these two celebrated Viennese? Imagine if instead of one era of the city the Ringstrasse celebrated all eras. If it was not a museum but, recalling Alberti, a living architectural gallery, and recalling Vitruvius and Serlio, a stage on which the great dance of city life was performed. If people, residents and visitors alike, could come to the Ringstrasse to be and not only to move, to discover Vienna’s future as well as to be reminded of its past. What a signature street it could be.

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What if the Ringstrasse incorporated more of Sitte’s medieval-style squares (top left)? Or Wagner’s streamlined architectural urbanism (top right)? What if it displayed a similarly artfully eclectic joie de vivre as the adjacent MuseumsQuartier (above)? If it does not evolve in concert with the city as a whole, how long will it remain Vienna’s signature street?

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CHAPTER FIVE Conclusions & Final Thoughts

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A Concise Recapitulation We have defined the signature street as distinct from other types of streets and identified three essential qualities: signature streets are urban linchpins, cultural canvases, and place icons. We have sketched a brief history of streets and located the evolution of signature streets within it. Beauty and branding have been put forth as the dual drivers of signature streets, the former being important to our souls while the latter relates signature streets to the business of cities engaged in global interurban competition. Additionally, both were seen to be involved in our construction of identity, individually and collectively, and in our changing perceptions of place. Finally, we examined two case study streets, Strøget in Copenhagen and Ringstrasse in Vienna, considering each via our three definitions of architecture: shaping of masses & framing of voids, a conceptual structure for place identification, and a vehicle for visions. But there are yet a few points we should touch on and some questions we should raise.

Lessons from the Case Study Streets As with art, you know a signature street when you see one. Yet, also as with art, a comprehensive and absolute definition remains elusive. Strøget seems to do few things a signature street should do in terms of representing its city. It is largely monofunctional in its programming as well as in the mode of transportation it supports, but history, location, intensity, and a lack of challengers help it remain Copenhagen’s signature street. There was probably much magic here once, magic which has mostly left Strøget, along with the residents and offices and local shops, for the adjacent streets. But if we contextualize Strøget as the spine of central Copenhagen’s street network and the foundation of the city’s brand its status makes more sense.

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In Vienna, Ringstrasse was custom built to be a signature street and has all of the qualities one expects to find in such. It is iconic, features monuments, reveals the city’s history, is where protests and celebrations are held, and cannot be mistaken for anywhere else. Where it fails is in its connection to living Vienna, to the human beings who call the city home and whose activities and thoughts and innovations shape it today. Ringstrasse possesses much grandeur but little magic, and while undeniably pleasant to stroll, as is Strøget, it is not especially lovable. Both streets are surely signature streets, but in the case of Strøget for how long? And in the case of Ringstrasse, so what? Signature streets are not static; as proxies for a city, an entity that can only remain changeless when it dies, and does so rarely even then, how could they be? Streets are signatures of a city only when they represent it, when they speak for it, when they capture its essence and distill it in wood and brick and stone and glass, in the semiotic relationship of architectural elements, and when they foster life. Otherwise they becomes signatures of a city that was, or else no longer signatures at all. Strøget is gradually losing its identity, while Ringstrasse refuses to adapt and embrace the present. These streets highlight two threats facing signature streets: so-called disneyfication and petrification. In the first, the signature street’s popularity leads to a sort of permanent festivalization and consequent erosion of localness. Tourists come in greater numbers and residents seek alternate places. What was once characteristic of local culture and urbanity becomes theater; the sign is progressively deprived of its referent until all pretense of being signature is shed. In contrast, petrification is akin to embalming. The signature street is frozen, preserved in as close to an original state as possible. It is not allowed to reflect a changing society and so, as with disneyfication, is eventually abandoned by residents. The sign/referent relationship remains intact, it simply no longer corresponds to reality.

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It is difficult to imagine either Strøget or Ringstrasse ceasing to function entirely as a signature street—both contain too much history, are too great a draw, and are too integrally sited in their respective inner cities. When discussing threats to their signature status the question is more one of civic loss and squandered potential. After a thousand years of Strøget being Copenhagen’s center of urban life, why should Copenhageners lose it? And with the making of the Ringstrasse having been significant enough that the era was named for it, why shouldn’t it be dearer to the hearts of Viennese?

Closing Thoughts If visual design is naked semiotics, then architecture and urban design comprise the signs of a city and reveal its ethics & ideals, its notions of beauty, and thus its notions of happiness. By reading the built environment of a place we learn much about the people who live there. Signature streets are especially charged with semiotic value. They are political, economic, and cultural symbols reaffirming place identity. They manifest the qualities that differentiate this place from that, reminding residents who they are and where they come from while introducing their city to visitors. But they can only perform these functions so long as their historical layers continue to accrete. The beauty of signature streets must be steeped in place. Their brand must be honest. “We no more favour delusion in our built environment than we do in individuals.”1 Beyond its symbolic attributes, a signature street is also a place, and public. It can, and should, be evaluated like any other public urban space: is it comfortable? attractive? safe? how does it feel to be there? do people choose to be on it? does it foster public life? what is the aesthetic relationship between buildings (masses) and the spaces they frame (cavities); what logic governs the design and placement of street furniture and trees? what is the perceived relationship of the signature street to adjacent streets and squares?

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In the title of this thesis, in its content, and in the analytical approach to the case study streets, I have attempted to approach the complexity of the concept of signature streets holistically. I am neither a semiologist, geographer, historian, planner, architect, or psychoanalyst, nor even a fl창neur, spy, teacher, or poet. I am, however, an amateur, in the etymological sense of the word. I love cities. I love streets and architecture and art and history and urbanity. This thesis is in no way intended to provide the final word on signature streets. My hope is rather that it can serve, and serve well, as a beginning.

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Epilogue: On the Passeggiata

he heat is slow to break these long summer evenings. It crouches in the lee of squares in the town below, drags its heels in the narrow streets. Up here on the passeggiata the merest suggestion of a breeze, but the air is somehow cooler, fresher, beneath the trees. Past Baluardo San Colombano a woman leans out a second story window, putting her only slightly above me, and retrieves dried washings from their lines. Three young boys are drawing shapes with a stick in the pale dirt at the edge of the paved walk. They do not notice me. I stop in the colonnaded dark atop Porta San Pietro and watch traffic enter and leave the city, cars and bicycles and people walking and people walking with dogs. I study the buildings, their bricks and window frames, their painted doors. The lines that are streets that seem carved from a single block. I see the red tiled rooftops rippling like the afterimage of stones skipped on a lake. Past Baluardo Santa Maria two old men sit close on a bench as if leaving room for a third yet to arrive. One waves at me in greeting. On the low brick wall here is spraypainted siamo uniti sempre, we are united forever. I stop again and think about that, look out beyond the wall, beyond the city, at the long line of vehicles cruising along the ring road that divides the old tagliata from the newer urban sprawl. I am glad to be here and not there. On the passeggiata, which is Lucca. Which is Lucca and nowhere else.

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APPENDIX

Acknowledgements / Footnotes / Images

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Appendix / Acknowledgements

My family. For your endless support— My friends. For your patience and feedback— My fellow 4citizens, students and faculty alike. For so very much, not least the camaraderie and the opportunity— Martin Zerlang, Yvonne Franz, Walter Matznetter, Lars Gemzøe, Emilie Kleinszig. For your kindness, your contributions, and your criticism— Thank you.

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APPENDIX / FOOTNOTES Chapter One: An Introduction 1. Martinelli, Roberta. The Walls of Lucca. Lucca: maria pacini fazzi editore, 2006. 9. Print. 2. Barthes, Roland. “Semiology and the Urban.” In Rethinking Architecture: Reader in Cultural Theory (ed. Neil Leach). 1st ed. London: Routledge, 1997. 166. Print. 3. Gardner, Charlie. “Density on the Ground: Cities and Building Coverage.” Old Urbanist. N.p., 28 06 2011. Web. Web. 19 Aug. 2012. 4. Unwin, Simon. Analysing Architecture. 1st ed. London: Routledge, 2003. 14. Print. 5. Rybczynski, Witold. The Look of Architecture. Kindle Edition. New York Public Library Lectures in Humanities. Kindle Location 24-37. E-book. 6. Ibid. Kindle Location 53-58. 7. Rasmussen, Steen Eiler. Experiencing Architecture. 28th Printing. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 2000. 46. Print. 8. Moughtin, Cliff. Urban Design: Street and Square. 1st ed. Oxford: Butterworth Architecture, 1992. 129. Print. 9. Rasmussen, Steen Eiler. Op. cit. 48. 10. Unwin, Simon. Op. cit. 13-14. 11. ibid. 14. 12. ibid. 15.

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13. Vitruvius. The Ten Books of Architecture (trns. Morris Hicky Morgan). New York: Dover Publications, 1960. 150. Print. 14. Vidler, Anthony. “The Scenes of the Street: Transformations in Ideal and Reality.” In On Streets (ed. Stanford Anderson). Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986. 29-30. Print. 15. Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower, and Other Mythologies. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. 6. Print. 16. See Book of Genesis 11: 1-9 17. Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. First Tor Edition. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, 1996. 161. Print. 18. Scruton, Roger. Beauty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 128. Print.

Chapter Two: Contextualization, Definition, Origin 1. Le Corbusier. The Radiant City. London: Faber & Faber, 1967. 121. Print. 2. Moughtin, Cliff. Urban Design: Street and Square. 1st ed. Oxford: Butterworth Architecture, 1992. 129. Print. 3. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Penguin Books, 1965. 39. Print. 4. Smithson, A. and Smithson, P. Urban Structuring. London: Studio Vista, 1967. 15. Print. 5. Weekley, Ernest. An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. New York: Dover Publications, 1967. 1428. Print.

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6. Golany, Gideon. Ethics and Urban Design: Culture, Form, and Environment. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1995. 71. Print. 7. Gehl, Jan. Life Between Buildings. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2011. 63. Print. 8. Jacobs, Allan. Great Streets. First paperback ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. 2. Print. 9. Ibid. 8-9. 10. Ibid. 15. 11. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place. New York: Paragon, 1989. Print. 12. Galliani, Joe. “Redondo’s Signature Street Gets a Facelift.” Redondo Beach Patch. Patch Network, 1 12 2010. Web. Web. 19 Aug. 2012. 13. Kent, Gordon. “Construction of ‘signature’ street underway downtown.” Edmonton Journal. N.p., 28 7 2011. Web. Web. 19 Aug. 2012. 14. Golany, Gideon. Op. cit. 92.. 15. Aristotle. Politics. New York: Dover Publications, 2000. 282. Print. 16. Velibeyoglu, Koray. (1998) Walkable Streets: Evaluation of Streets in the context of urban theory, life and form, Izmir Institute of Technology, Department of City and Regional Planning, Unpublished master thesis, Izmir. 6. 17. Schinz, Alfred. The Magic Square: Cities in Ancient China. Stuttgart: Axel Menges Publishers, 1996. Print. 18. Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, 1989. 355. Print.

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19. Kostof, Spiro. The City Shaped. London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd, 1991. 70. Print 20. Velibeyoglu, Koray. Op. cit. 13. 21. Mumford, Lewis. Op. cit. 398. 22. Kostof, Spiro. The City Shaped. London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 1991. Print 23. Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Meaning in Western Architecture. London: Faber & Faber, 1993. Print. 24. Velibeyoglu, Koray. Op. cit. 19. 25. Kostof, Spiro. The City Assembled. London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 1992. 254. Print. 26. Velibeyoglu, Koray. Op. cit. 24. 27. Kostof, Spiro. The City Assembled. London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 1992. 224. Print. 28. Frampton, Kenneth. Modern Architecture: A Critical History. London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 1992. Fig. 3.18. Print. 29. Brill, Michael. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Transformations in Public Life and Public Place.â&#x20AC;? In Public Places and Spaces (ed. Altman and Zube). New York: Plenum Press, 1989. 16. Print. 30. De Botton, Alain. The Architecture of Happiness. Kindle Edition. New York: Vintage, 2008. Kindle Location 2182-2184. E-book. 31. Krier, Rob. Urban Space. New York: Rizzoli, 1993. 22. Print. 32. Hass-Klau, Carmen. The Pedestrian and City Traffic. London: Belhaven Press, 1990. Print.

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33. Kunstler, James Howard. “Home from Nowhere.” Atlantic Monthly. Vol. 278, No. 3 (1996). p. 43-66. Print. 34. See completestreets.org

Chapter Three: Toward a Theory of Signature Streets 1. Scruton, Roger. Beauty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 2. Print. 2. Santayana, George. The Sense of Beauty Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory. Kindle Edition. Kindle Location 276-281. E-book. 3. Scruton, Roger. Op. cit. 2. 4. Santayana, George. Op. cit. Kindle Location 276-281. 5. Ibid. Kindle Location 292-293. 6. Scruton, Roger. Op. cit. 5. 7. Ibid. 14. 8. Ibid. 9. 9. Ibid. 10. Santayana, George. Op. cit. Kindle Location 615-633. 11. Scruton, Roger. Op. cit. 141. 12. De Botton, Alain. The Architecture of Happiness. Kindle Edition. New York: Vintage, 2008. Kindle Location 838-852. E-book.

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13. Scruton, Roger. Op. cit. 117. 14. Ibid. 128. 15. De Botton, Alain. Op. cit. Kindle Location 411-412. 16. Ibid. Kindle Location 398-402. 17. Ibid. Kindle Location 525-528. 18. Scruton, Roger. Op. cit. 22. 19. De Botton, Alain. Op. cit. Kindle Location 514-516. 20. Ibid. Kindle Location 598-612. 21. Ibid. Kindle Location 724-727. 22. Scruton, Roger. Op. cit. 26. 23. Ibid. 134. 24. De Botton, Alain. Op. cit. Kindle Location 1558-1560. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. Kindle Location 1561-1563. 27. Scruton, Roger. Op. cit. 11-12. 28. De Botton, Alain. Op. cit. Kindle Location 1574-1575.

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29. Ibid. Kindle Location 1575-1577. 30. Ibid. Kindle Location 1580-1581. 31. Ibid. Kindle Location 1937. 32. Scruton, Roger. Op. cit. 126. 33. Ibid. 18. 34. Ibid. 35. 35. Ibid. 19. 36. Ibid. 41. 37. Ibid. 174. 38. De Botton, Alain. Op. cit. Kindle Location 1041. 39. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. New York: Dover Publications, 2004. 52. Print. 40. De Botton, Alain. Op. cit. Kindle Location 1031-1035. 41. Rybczynski, Witold. The Look of Architecture. Kindle Edition. New York Public Library Lectures in Humanities. Kindle Location 305-306. E-book. 42. Santayana, George. Op. cit. Kindle Location 368-373. 43. De Botton, Alain. Op. cit. Kindle Location 207-208.

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44. Ibid. Kindle Location 171-178. 45. Dinnie, Keith. City Branding: Theories and Cases. Kindle Edition. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Foreword. E-book. 46. Govers, Robert and Go, Frank. Place Branding: Glocal, Virtual and Physical Identities, Constructed, Imagined and Experienced. Kindle Edition. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Kindle Location 2551. E-book. 47. Dinnie, Keith. Op. cit. Kindle Location 1138. 48. Aaker, David. Building Strong Brands. New York: The Free Press, 1996. 68. Print. 49. Neumaier, Marty. The Brand Gap. Berkeley: New Riders, 2006. 2. Print. 50. Wheeler, Alina. Designing Brand Identity. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. 2. Print. 51. Dinnie, Keith. Op. cit. 3. 52. Ibid. 163. 53. Govers, Robert and Go, Frank. Op. cit. Kindle Location 685-686. 54. Dinnie, Keith. Op. cit. 163. 55. Ibid. 5. 56. All quotes since previous footnote, see Govers & Go. Op cit. Chapter Two: The Origins of Place Branding. 57. Ibid. Kindle Location 835-838.

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58. Ibid. Kindle Location 864. 59. Ibid. Kindle Location 868-869. 60. Ibid. Kindle Location 958. 61. Ibid. Kindle Location 1060. 62. Dinnie, Keith. Op. cit. 36-37. 63. Govers & Go. Op. cit. Kindle Location 1060. 64. Ibid. Kindle Location 1070. 65. Ibid. Kindle Location 1092-1098. 66. Skaggs, Steven. “A Visual Design Semiotic Primer.” stevenskaggs.net. p.3, 27 July, 2011. Web. 22 Aug 2012. 67. Insch, Andrea. “Branding the City as an Attractive Place to Live,” in Dinnie, Keith. Op. cit. 11. 68. Ibid. 9. 69. Dinnie, Keith. Op. cit. 94.

Chapter Four: Case Studies 1. Barthes, Roland. “Semiology and the Urban.” In Rethinking Architecture: Reader in Cultural Theory (ed. Neil Leach). 1st ed. London: Routledge, 1997. 170. Print.

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2. Ibid. 3. Eco, Umberto. “Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture.” In Rethinking Architecture: Reader in Cultural Theory (ed. Neil Leach). 1st ed. London: Routledge, 1997. 182. Print. 4. Ibid. 5. Jacobs, Allan. Great Streets. First paperback ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. 21. Print. 6. Ibid. 26. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 32. 9. http://www.kobenhavnshistorie.dk/bog/kko/g/kko_g-8.html 10. Bosselmann, Peter. Urban Transformation: Understanding City Form and Design. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2008. 123. Print. 11. source: Lars Gemzoe, Gehl Architects 12. Gehl, Jan. “A Changing Street Life in a Changing Society.” Places. Vol. 6, No.1 (1989). p.12. Print. 13. Gemzøe, Kirknæs, and Søndergaard. Det Nye Byliv. Copenhagen: Center for Byrumsforsksning, 2006. 9. Digital file. 14. Yencken, David. Central Copenhagen Pedestrian Survey. Copenhagen: Department of Urban Design, School of Architecture, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, 1995. 24-25. Digital file.

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15. Jacobs, Allan. Op cit. 145. 16. Fassmann, Hatz, and Patrouch. Understanding Vienna: Pathways into the City. Vienna: Lit Verlag, 2006. 94. Print. 17. Schorske, Carl. Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. Kindle edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. Kindle Location 894. E-book. 18. Ibid. Kindle Location 898-899. 19. Ibid. Kindle Location 920-921. 20. Ibid. Kindle Location 1003. 21. Ibid. Kindle Location 937-937. 22. Ibid Kindle Location 942-945 23. Fassmann, et al. Op cit. 102. 24. Schorske, Carl. Op cit. Kindle Location 826-829. 25. Ibid. Kindle Location 1082-1085. 26. Ibid. Kindle Location 864-869. 27. www.mercer.com/press-releases/quality-of-living-report-2011 28. Jacobs, Allan. Op. cit. 143. 29. Schorske, Carl. Op. cit. Kindle Location 833-834. 30. Ibid. Kindle Location 1328-1329.

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31. Ibid. Kindle Location 1506-1508.

Chapter Five: Conclusions & Final Thoughts 1. De Botton, Alain. The Architecture of Happiness. Kindle Edition. New York: Vintage, 2008. Kindle Location 2061. E-book.

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APPENDIX / IMAGES Chapter One: An Introduction Three street scenes of Vitruvius: Serlio, Sebastiano. The Five Books of Architecture. Reprint of the English ed. 1611. New York: Dover Publications, 1982. Second Book, The Third Chapter, Fol. 25 and Fol. 26. Print. Tower of Babel: http://www.eikongraphia.com/?p=2748 La Ville Radieuse: http://www.themodernist.co.uk/2012/03/le-corbusier-modernist-of-themonth/ Dubai: http://f2architecture.com.au/experience/urban-design-and-masterplanning/dubaipearl/

Chapter Two: Contextualization, Definition, Origin Sao Paulo Road: http://allworldcars.com/wordpress/?p=11866 Greenwich Village Street: http://www.flickriver.com/photos/mapplegate/3372289325/ Allan Jacobsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Great Street (boulevard saint-michel): http://www.rudi.net/books/12222 David Hockney Mulholland Drive Detail: http://melisaki.tumblr.com/post/305406632/ mulholland-drive-m-c-a-t-308-home-made-print Palmyra: http://www.middle-east-pictures.com/middle-east/Palmyra-Street.htm Changâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;an: http://www.tslr.net/2007/10/short-history-of-ancient-gridded-cities.html Medieval Street: http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2011/01/city-snow-owning-the-sidewalk.html

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Industrial City Street: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/historyintheclassroom/jacobriis Haussmannâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Paris Street: http://www.rolandcollection.com/films/?prm=a16-b249-c2338d0-e0 Modernist Street: http://newshopper.sulekha.com/china-car-restrictions_photo_750224. htm Shared Space: http://www.gruene-havelland.de/falkensee/shared-space/ Street Art as Commodity: http://www.thegirlinthecafe.com/photoblog/202-banksy-innotting-hill

Chapter Three: Toward a Theory of Signature Streets Swedish Interior: http://www.letmebeinspired.com/a-lovely-swedish-home/ Island Cabin: http://freecabinporn.com/page/3 Chicago Loop: http://www.metroseeker.com/chicago/where-to-live/central Tattooed Yakuza: http://petitlion.deviantart.com/art/tattoo-yakuza-portrait-309580728 Torii Gate: http://www.booooooom.com/2008/10/23/michael-kenna/ Amsterdam: http://www.habitatapartments.com/en/amsterdam/whattodo/view/Discoveramsterdam.html Woman: http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/amedeo-modigliani/portrait-of-a-woman Bath, England: http://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-circus-bath-england-mal-bray.html

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Santorini, Greece: http://www.fotocommunity.com/pc/pc/display/18010340 Paris Boulevard Painting: http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/pierre-bonnard/parisian-boulevard-1896 Paris Harmonious Boulevard Photo: http://media.photobucket.com/image/paris%20street/ Aviller71/Paris2upc.jpg I heart NY: http://hideyourarms.com/2009/12/14/i-love-ny-style-t-shirts/ Hollywood Sign: http://newsone.com/1808385/human-head-found-near-hollywood-sign/ All You Can Paris: http://www.coloribus.com/adsarchive/prints/expedia-city-breaks-paris-15522705/ Champs Elysees Painting: http://www.antoineblanchard.org/view_image.html?image_ no=1861 I Amsterdam: http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Netherlands/South/Noord-Holland/Amsterdam/photo1229119.htm Broadway Painting: http://leonidafremov.deviantart.com/art/Broadway-Oil-Original-129626847 Siena Photo: http://blog.travelintelligence.com/luxury-hotels/toscana-in-and-around-siena/ Marlboro Man: http://ideasinspiringinnovation.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/the-changingface-of-the-marlboro-man-an-intriguing-case-study/ Tahiti: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lynd-Ward-1930-SHORE-TAHITI-MOUNTAINSArt-Deco-Print-Matted-/130741746195#ht_2128wt_922 Hong Kong: http://popupcity.net/2010/02/book-review-hong-kong-outside/

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Varanasi: http://stevemccurry.wordpress.com/page/3/ Japan: http://stevemccurry.wordpress.com/page/3/ Amsterdam Cycling Culture: http://vanwaardenphoto.photoshelter.com/image/I0000HY5H35mFdNM

Chapter Four: Case Studies StrØget Painting: http://kirstenstabler.wordpress.com/2012/02/ Copenhagen Figure Ground: vienna figure ground: http://nuweb.neu.edu/citymapping/ vienna/figure_ground_maps/2003/ All StrØget Pics: google maps street view, except: Gammeltorv/Nytorv: http://crazyhappyleigh.blogspot.co.at Copenhagen Maps 1377, 1630, 1757: courtesy Lars GemzØe Gammeltorv 1610: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Copenhagen_City_Hall_(14791728)_from_Gammeltorv.jpg Gammeltorv 1750: http://www.genbase.dk/gamle_billeder.asp?h=1&s=2 Nytorv 1747: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nytorv_1747.jpg Amagertorv 1749: http://www.tyra.dk/Publikationer.htm Great Fire of 1728: http://mrswoffington.blogspot.co.at/2009/09/icelands-bell-part-2.html

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Kongens Nytorv: http://atlantic-cable.com/Books/GNT/index.htm StrØget 4-pack photos: http://www.pps.org/reference/howtorevitalizeacity/ Copenhagen Pedestrian Network Map: http://www.except.nl/consult/pedestrianizationtools/Fig%2011%20-%20Copenhagen_ped_map.jpg Kobmagergade: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Købmagergade_in_rain.jpg Street Network photos: panoramio via google street view Open Copenhagen logo: http://www.opencopenhagen.dk Copenhagenize: http://www.copenhagenize.com Vision for Walking: Copenhagen Together. “More People to Walk More: The Pedestrian Strategy for Copenhagen.” Copenhagen: City of Copenhagen, 2011. 4. Digital file. Ringstrasse title illustration: http://countries-of-europe.com/?p=649 Rathaus: http://www.ismh.org/en/about/vienna/ University: http://thomasfitzgerald.photoshelter.com/image/I0000FUiOR4ekH4k Parliament: http://www.freeimageslive.co.uk/free_stock_image/parliamentbuildingsviennajpg Neue Hofburg: http://wilson.hkkcchan.com/gallery/EEuropeDay3Austria/SANY0175_001 Museums: http://www.nhm-wien.ac.at/jart/prj3/nhm/images/img-db/1288702436934.jpg Opera: http://mitglieder.ecard-service.net/ecard.php?account=a-staedte-landschaften-a-chwien&foto_id=wien-staatsoper

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Burgtheater: http://www.all-free-photos.com/show/showphoto. php?idph=PI25007&lang=en Postsparkasse: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/13/postsparkasse1.jpg/sr=1 War Ministry: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcyvr/5715162372/ Urania: http://www.euxus.de/wien-kultur.html Burggarten: http://www.moseleyworld.com/blog/page/2 Volksgarten: http://www.earthinpictures.com/world/austria/vienna/volksgarten_(vienna_ peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s_garden)_800x600.html MAK: http://www.shopikon.com/vienna/shopping_guide/547_mak_designshop Ringturm: http://viennaphoto.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/ringturm-the-one-tower-onthe-ringstrase/ Gartenbaukino: http://www.flickr.com/photos/russianchild007/6162503366/ BĂśrse: http://www.flickr.com/photos/russianchild007/5499623607/ Schwarzenbergplatz: http://www.sehr.org/verkehr/linien/linie.php?linie=21 Hotel Imperial: http://www.604bc.ca/hotel-imperial-vienna.htm 1858 ring map and 1860 plan: http://www.grids-blog.com/wordpress/otto-wagner-designing-the-city/ Old Ringstrasse aerial: http://www.bu.edu/av/ah/fall2008/ah382/lecture15/

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New Ringstrasse aerial: google earth Schottentor then and now: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=662594 Sitte and Wagner illustrations: http://www.grids-blog.com/wordpress/otto-wagner-designing-the-city/ MuseumsQuartier: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StadtLesen_beim_Museumsquartier_Wien.jpg

Cover image: http://www.bricoleurbanism.org/ideas/urban-fabric-form-comparison/ Title page image: redrawn from Roberta Martinelliâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Walls of Lucca. All other images taken by the author.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153; I fv i s u a ld e s i g ni sn a k e ds e mi o t i c s ,t h e na r c h i t e c t u r e a n du r b a nd e s i g nc o mp r i s et h es i g n so fac i t ya n d r e v e a li t se t h i c s& i d e a l s ,i t sn o t i o n so fb e a u t y ,a n d t h u si t sn o t i o n so fh a p p i n e s s .B yr e a d i n gt h eb u i l te n v i r o n me n to fap l a c ewel e a r nmu c ha b o u tt h ep e o p l e wh ol i v et h e r e .Si g n a t u r es t r e e t sa r ee s p e c i a l l yc h a r g e d wi t hs e mi o t i cv a l u e .T h e ya r ep o l i t i c a l ,e c o n o mi c ,a n d c u l t u r a ls y mb o l sr e a f f i r mi n gp l a c ei d e n t i t y .T h e yma n i f e s tt h eq u a l i t i e st h a td i f f e r e n t i a t et h i sp l a c ef r o m t h a t ,r e mi n d i n gr e s i d e n t swh ot h e ya r ea n dwh e r et h e y c o mef r o m wh i l ei n t r o d u c i n gt h e i rc i t yt ov i s i t o r s .B u t t h e yc a no n l yp e r f o r mt h e s ef u n c t i o n ss ol o n ga st h e i r h i s t o r i c a ll a y e r sc o n t i n u et oa c c r e t e .T h eb e a u t yo ft h e s i g n a t u r es t r e e tmu s tb es t e e p e di np l a c e .I t sb r a n d mu s tb eh o n e s t . â&#x20AC;?