Old Patterns Solve New Problems

Observations on Urban Form: A Series on Architecture, Planning, and Urban Design

 
We are pleased to present a new Terrain.org series exploring architecture, planning, and urban design by Anne Tate, professor of architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. Anne’s research focuses on the challenges of large-scale urban design, and in this series she will explore place with a critical eye though prose and photography.

 
The University of Cambridge is now more than 800 years old. The village that hosts it is older still. In the 21st century it remains a walking city—designed and built before cars or even carriages were common. The scale of public space reflects the scale of the human body—with occasional exceptions for the size of a horse, cow or now, MINI Cooper. By the time the car was a major factor, the critical sections of the old city were fixed and guarded by the reverence of one of the world’s most illustrious universities, an institution that had the confidence and power to preserve its physical character.

The narrow cobbled streets lined with stone and brick buildings present a unified public realm of hard surfaces, interrupted by the occasional dazzling view through a building archway into startlingly broad and brilliant green gardens. From above, the streets of this and many English villages appear to be three-dimensional snakes comprised of two parallel lines of building defining the route between. The continuous experience of being in the built roadway belies the expanse of green gardens and fields beyond.

But what struck me on this visit was less the extraordinary walking and biking environments than the green belt of gardens, fields, fens, and waterways that surround and infiltrate the old city. Cambridge seems to be built originally on a dry island in the midst of the fens.

In the era of the Anthropocene, the need to create spongy spaces throughout cities has become increasingly urgent. This city balances a dense built character with extensive connected green expanses, some carefully cultivated, others wilder and more swampy, and provides a model not only for pedestrian design but also for flood control in an era of erratic and intense climate-driven weather events.