Urban Highways and the Reluctant Public Realm - Jacqueline Tatom

TATOM, Jacqueline, ‘Urban Highways and the Reluctant Public Realm’, in Charles Waldheim (ed.) The Landscape Urbanism Reader; New York: Princeton Architecture Press, 2006, pp. 179-195

The realization of limited-access divided highways in the second half of the twentieth century points to many of landscape urbanism’s ambitions, to consider environmental and infrastructural systems as primary ordering devices. Critics on the limited-access divided highways emphasized the urban malaise and impending ecological disaster. The design of urban highways today to provide efficient automobile circulation in cities might be considered an urbanistic opportunity rather than a planning liability. For this to happen, the design of highways needs to be theorized and situated historically within professional design practice.

A critical reconsideration of the Parisian boulevards, the Boston parkways, New York’s Henry Hudson Parkway, and the Barcelona Cinturón yields a set of possibilities for urban highway design and confirms the theoretical robustness of the topic. The following projects constitute, programmatically and morphologically, a complete urbanism that produces new landscapes that are a hybrid of natural and man-made systems.
1. The boulevards of Paris (19th century)
Baron Haussman was the first to formulate a metropolitan-scale response to the function of a main road and to recognize the opportunity it provided to “modernize” Paris. The boulevard system was the master element of an urban renovation that included the provision of water, sewers, parks, and housing, as well as cultural and administrative facilities. Haussman’s new interventions created new networks of boulevards, parks, place and monuments as if they were etched into the solid figure of the city. This is still the case today, as the different morphologies continue to support different uses and rituals. The programmatic breadth of this new urban form, in plan and section, supports the social breadth of experience.
2. Boston’s Emerald necklace
The Necklace’s configuration is determined by site conditions. The Fenway, the first of the “jewels” of the Necklace, was created to manage the tidal reflux of the Charles River into the Muddy River in Boston’s Back Bay. The topographical and hydrological reconfiguration of what had become a wasted swamp provided the opportunity to create parks and parkways that served circulation and recreational needs. In this way the system is both local and metropolitan in its impact.
3. New York’s Henry Hudson Parkway (1938)
Multiple agendas of the original Westchester parkways to upgrade transportation, to sanitize creeks and rivers, and to create parks and cultural and recreational amenities while improving residential development. The striking topography facilitated and inspired the rich association of parkways, railroads, recreation areas, cultural institutions, playgrounds, and residences within a section that reached from the bluff to the water’s edge.
4. Barcelona’s Cinturón (1990s)
This project had to improve the quality of life in one of Europe’s densest cities and it had to position the city as a European player with global economic reach. Besides the plan had to improve public and private transportation and it had to provide greatly needed public amenities. It is located opportunistically to take advantage of marginal sites that remained undeveloped. The central four-lane throughway is depressed, while access roads remain at the surface to distribute entering and exiting vehicles at speeds slow enough to constitute a viable street front for the residential and commercial buildings along its length. Leftover land was subdivided into parcels. In some locations the access road is cantilevered over the depressed section, further reducing the width and noise and facilitating ventilation. The interchanges accommodate programs such as intermodal stations, parking, parks, and recreational facilities.
Local circulation, public transportation, pedestrian strolling, and high-speed traffic are accommodated by the sectional integration of a classic boulevard, a raised promenade deck above parking, a depressed and partly decked throughway, and a waterfront esplanade.

The discussion above reveals that the mobilization of public and private resources, political will, bureaucratic structure, and professional vision for modernization, justified variably for “scientific” reasons of sanitation and efficient circulation, or for boosterism in the form of civic identity, can provide the opportunity for a new road morphologies in the historic city constitutes a complete urbanism that allows for the full expression of everyday urban life.
The section ensures that the pedestrian and the automobile driver receive equal consideration while maximizing the use of public resources. In addition, it re-establishes a morphological continuity of the urban fabric that rapidly overcomes the social and physical disruptions.
These exceptional realizations were all undertaken in dense, well-established historic cities. They nonetheless remain relevant for the far less dense or the new twentieth-century American cities.