Understanding Cities

When most people visit a city, they consult the regulation guidebook, dutifully trudge around to examine the local museum, the famous landmarks, and the historic sites--and then think they know all about the place. Nothing could be farther from the truth, says Richard Saul Wurman, 37, a Philadelphia architect. Only when Americans really understand the thrust and logic, or illogic, of their cities can they start to improve the urban mess around them.

Easier said than done. But Wurman is convinced that the man-made environment of cities holds few mysteries if urban information is explained clearly and concisely. "Given a good map," he says, "a person can see how parks relate to schools and residential areas. With that information, he can make intelligent decisions about where his city should build new schools or should not build new roads." Similarly, photographs, drawings, density studies and traffic counts can reveal how cities really work.

Trouble is, this data is seldom available. "The New York Times illustrated the moon landing of Apollo 14 with maps and diagrams clearer than any ever used to describe the location of a new highway on earth," says Wurman. "We talk in numbers we can't comprehend and about sizes we can't visualize." All of which has led the plump, bearded architect to try to fill the need himself. He and Fellow Architect John Gallery have just written a guidebook to his own home town.

Entitled Man-Made Philadelphia (M.I.T. Press; $3.95), the guide is a boon to tourists and may open Philadelphian eyes as well. Instead of starting with the usual panegyric to Founder William Penn, it begins with three pages of maps of major streets, bus routes and the subway system--the city's bone structure. The guide duly describes and portrays such Philadelphia splendors as Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed, the old residential area of Society Hill, the Beaux Arts vistas of Ben Franklin Parkway. But the authors always remind the reader that there is a lot of ordinary, gritty urban landscape between such touristic highlights, and that these gaps--not the landmarks alone--give the city its texture, content and life. They thus unabashedly show Philadelphia's dilapidated docks, bleak slums, traffic jams and ubiquitous graffiti--the real city.

The book's user can find his way around with the help of the clearest, most informative urban maps this side of France's Michelin guides. He will discover the delicate wrought-iron tracery of Fairmount Park's old bridges, the city's best ice cream stand (Bassett's in Reading Terminal Market), and even a giant automobile crusher on Penrose Avenue. To make sense of the city streets, the book traces Philadelphia's growth from the neat rectangular grid of streets studded with parks laid out by Penn himself in 1622, through later annexations of communities like Germantown, to the present sprawling conurbation. It diagrams the changing patterns of ethnic distribution. The old Irish, Russian and German neighborhoods have largely dispersed; only the Italians in south Philadelphia and the blacks in the decaying north-central area still cluster together. In short, the guide treats the city as a series of human decisions, economic pressures and geographical imperatives.

School houses. The point of the book, Wurman says, "is to allow people to gain a sense of participation in the city and so take an interest in improving it." It is a theme that he has sounded in various museum shows of urban data and conferences. Indeed, he used his position as chairman of last June's week-long International Design Conference at Aspen, Colo., to exhort architects and educators to make cities into "learning resources"--in effect gigantic schoolhouses where citizens can be taught to look at and learn from the man-made environment. With his urging, the Art Directors' Club of New York, a group of 600 top graphics and advertising specialists, last month turned its attention to that goal too. The directors aim to promote designs that make New York more understandable to the average resident, thus more changeable and ultimately more livable.

Wurman's next task is to serve on President Nixon's new federal task force on design, which is supposed to find ways for Washington to encourage better design of buildings and graphics. But given Wurman's proselytizing zeal, it is easy to imagine him buttonholing the President and saying: "We can't design signs that lead people into a city and let them get lost there. We can't allow architects to design monuments isolated from their surroundings. These things have to relate to people. They have to be used and understood. Let's make sense of man-made America, sir, and get this urban nation moving again!"

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