Transcriber: Carlos Arturo Morales Reviewer: Ivana Korom
I have been spending the last few months
not in Philadelphia but in Cambridge, at Harvard,
where I'm a fellow at the Design School,
so it's really great to be back in Philadelphia.
I've been taking classes there
in Urban Planning, and Chinese History,
Baroque Rome, "the Internet",
yoga, and one day
I realized that all my classes were essentially
about the same thing. They were about
memory, identity, place.
Even my yoga class.
Does anyone do yoga? Namaste.
So, my class is taught by a real yogi from india.
She is four feet tall, she is three feet of hair
and she comes to class with full evening makeup.
She is great and I've learned a lot from her.
And so, since the theme this year
of the TEDxAxis, is the city, I thought I would do
a pose, a yoga pose, to ilustrate the idea of the city.
I'm not very good at yoga but
she is a great teacher, so I've invented this pose.
I have to take off my shoes and hike up my pants.
Luckily, there's a stool right here so... in case I fall.
So, this is called the skycraper pose
and I think you might recognize some of them.
So, this is the Liberty Place. (Laughter)
Comcast Center (Laughter)
and The American Commerce Center. (Applause)
(Applause)
I get applause for doing bad yoga.
So, two of those you recognize
and the third one, American Commerce Center,
of course, was not built and I want to talk about
the reasons why not and why Philadelphia shouldn't waste
any time feeling bad about that. (Laughter)
When americans visualize the city,
they almost always imagine skyscrapers.
As a culture, we've loved the idea of skyscrapers
if not always the buildings themselves.
And the cities tend to measure their worth by how many skyscrapers they have
and how tall they can build them.
Americans invented the skyscraper
but lately, the form is being appropriated by emerging nations
like China, India, Dubai,
Dubai, of all places, just broke the hight record
with a twenty seven hundred foot tall skyscraper.
If you took the old World Trade Center towers
and stacked them on top of each other, they'd be as tall as that.
For these up and coming societies,
skyscrapers are their way of stating their ambition,
of saying, "Hey, you know we're modern too".
And they also have millions of people to house
and skyscrapers are a great way to do that.
But not everyone loves the fact that the world
is becoming more urban. When I was a foreing correspondent
for The Philadelphia Inquirer, back when The Inquirer had
foreign correspondents (Laughter),
I covered two wars that were essentially wars against cities,
in the sense that all the guns
were trained on cities and I saw
Sarajevo and Grozny pretty much shot
to the ground and hundreds of buildings were destroyed.
When I came back to Philadelphia,
I was pretty determined to write about
cities that were being built rather than demolished
and that's how I became the architecture critic.
Back then, which was in the late '90s, there were a lot of Americans
who were almost as hostile to cities
as the people who were firing at Sarajevo and Grozny.
As a nation, we tend to associate cities
with the distopian failures of public housing.
We talks about concrete jungles and high-rise barracks,
but they now began to change with the real estate boom.
And suddenly, cities became cool again.
It was the Sex and the City effect
and skyscrapers climbed back into vogue.
It's not just affluent Americans
who've discovered the pleassure of looking on the world from on high.
Also progressive planners now trumpet high-rises
as the antidote to the environmental catastrophe of suburban sprawl.
And tall buildings are an easy way
to increase urban density. You know, superheroes
used to leap from tall buildings; now the tall buildings are the superheroes
coming to the rescue of the planet.
You know, skyscrapers are a good idea,
but like a lot of good ideas, they can be taken to extremes
and skyscrapers had become a one size fits-all solution to sprawl.
You know, tall buildings, they are not
the only way to achieve the worthy goal of density and sustaintability.
They're just one way and sometimes they're not even the best way.
Take Philadelphia.
It might not have a lot of skyscrapers
but it's one of the densest cities in America
with eleven people to square acre.
You know, it turns out you can pack a lot of people
in a row house block or in a mid-rise building
like The Piazza at Schmidts.
Different cities need different densities
or, actually, they need a range of densities,
from the Himalayas of The Market Street towers
to the foothills of the South Philadelphia row houses.
And we also need something in between, we need to build
more mid-rise buildings... like The Piazza at Schmidts.
Developers love skyscrapers, of course.
And why not? When you build up, you instantly increase the value of land,
but then you have a problem;
you need someone to buy the extra apartments
that you're building.
In Asia, that's not a problem; there are millions of people
who would jump at the chance to get out of slums into a decent apartment.
But it's a very different situation in America.
If you look at Waterfront Square, for example, in Philadelphia,
at night, when the lights go on, you can count
the number of occupied units on two hands.
Asian cities are like adolescents who grow a foot a month.
You know, in China, they are building a new skyscraper
every five days.
By contrast, american cities are like mature adults;
they've essentially stopped growing.
You know, Philadelphia boasted
it gained eight thousand new residents in the last decade.
Well, in Mumbai, they gained that number yesterday.
You know, during the boom decade here,
something like forty skyscrapers were proposed in Philadelphia
and maybe ten were built, yet we continue
to dream of new skyscrapers in our city.
The Delaware Waterfront Master Plan was just provide to include
some new skyscrapers.
And that was against the wishes of the economic consultant
who said, "You know, they're never going to sell.
You're going to have a skyscraper here, a skyscraper there,
and you're going to be isolated islands of habitation
very far apart, and you're never going to build a neighborhood.
If you want to build a neighborhood, you need to build laterally;
you need to buil mid-rises and row houses."
But that message really hasn't taken and so,
on Chestnut Street, the state, is all set to contribute
20% of the cost for a new skyscraper.
Sixty million dollars skyscraper;
that's twelve million dollars in public money.
At a time when the city is forced to close
schools and libraries and firehouses.
People going to swoon over skyscrapers;
remember the American Commerce Center,
fifteen hundred foot tall office building.
Did people really think that was going to be built?
American corporations are cutting their workforces
not expanding them. And they don't need more office space.
And that has profound implications for our downtowns.
It's time that we let go of our skyscrapers fantasies
and concentrate instead on making our mature city a better place to live.
Instead of focusing on the Grand Vision, we need to make the Grand Adjustment.
And, what do I mean by the Grand Adjustment?
A Grand Adjustment makes the city better for the people
who are already here. A Grand Adjustment
is taking a good transit system and making it great
by running the buses and trains twice as often.
A Grand Adjustment is providing space for bike lanes on every major street.
(Applause)
A Grand Adjustment
is making every sidewalk into a beautiful promenade,
it's building parks for residents and not just for tourists.
(Applause)
You know, we need to stop measuring our worth by skyscrapers
and megaprojects and judge ourselves on the quality of our public spaces
We have to stop treating them as a frill
that we pay for with leftover change.
The best way to increase density in Philadelphia:
build the amenities that will make people want to live here.
(Applause)
The most transformative buildings
from the last decade weren't towers; they were mid-rises,
Schmidts in Northern Liberties and Skirkanich hall at Penn.
The Convention Center didn't change the paradigm for Philadelphia
nearly as much as the recreation path on the Schuykill River
or the Race Street pier or the dozens of infill houses that sprouted on empty lots.
You know, planners and politicians like these big projects because...
Well, you can cut a ribbon, you can take a photograph.
They make a nice backdrop.
A Grand Adjustment is harder to capture in a photo op
but it has a lot more lasting effects.
So, my yoga teacher, she's only four feet tall, but she is really flexible
and she can hold a pose a long time
and I think Philadelphia needs to be flexible
and it needs to do that by making The Grand Adjustment.
Thank you very much.