The Urban Canyon

Postcard showing Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, circa 1925. The scale of the skyscrapers creates an urban canyon, de-humanizing the experience of the city.

It’s difficult to reconcile the inhuman scale of the skyscraper with the human experience at street level. In most Western cities of today, the experience of walking down the street is largely soul-less, with a relentless street wall rising up on both sides and massive towers rising above that, usually set back from the street wall a bit. Daylight and sky are things that exist way up there, above the street wall and alongside the towers, out-of-reach at the ground. If trees are planted, they struggle for sunlight and are usually small and sickly-looking, starved for the sky and dwarfed by the urbanity surrounding them. The building facades at ground level provide little else than a steel-and-glass wrapper that serves to encase a minimalist office lobby or an entrance for a large retail outlet. Same old story, same old city.

Contrast that with a main street in a smaller town, and you have a patchwork of four- to five-story buildings, with small, unique shops at ground level and apartments or offices above. Because of the lower street wall, the experience at ground level is filled with daylight and sky. The buildings and the trees are of a similar scale, and the trees are full of life, providing the dappled, ever changing shade that we humans love on a sunny day.

Is it possible for a dense city street to accomplish these things? My gut says no, but allow me to channel Willian Whyte and Jane Jacobs for a moment to discuss a few strategies. For starters, the street wall should be capped at 4-5 stories, and its height should be varied along the block. This creates visual interest and a sense of identity for each building. Second, trees should be planted. Not a single tree here and there, but connected rows of trees that create a healthy canopy at places along the block. Third, if we must include high-density towers, they should set back from the street wall so they don’t block out the sky or the sun. They should also be detached from the buildings along the street to avoid large swaths of monotony along the block. Keep the street-level experience atomized with smaller structures, and let the inhuman scale of the towers occupy the spaces in the center-block, away from the activity on the street. If these strategies were in place, the urban canyon could erode away into a valley of sorts, with plenty of daylight and greenery for the pedestrian to enjoy.

1930 illustration by Chester Danforth showing the intersection of Wacker and Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

Another strategy is for the city to concentrate high-density structures somewhere out of the way and let the center-city retain lower-height buildings throughout. Paris and Vienna come to mind here. The old cityscapes are preserved, with high densities concentrated in La Défense and Kaisermühlen, respectively.

I suppose the inhuman scale of modern cities is here to stay, so there’s not much to be done about the buildings we’ve already built. Maybe there’s a strategy somewhere to reintegrate tower bases into the city by breaking them up at ground level? Food for thought, and a subject to be explored elsewhere.