Founding of Urban Design Associates

David Lewis, FAIA

Our towns and cities are the physical languages of who we are. They tell us about our history and our values.

When we travel to a town in a foreign county for the first time, we might sit in a café on a public square and quietly watch the scene in front of us while sipping a cup of coffee or a glass of white wine. Our eyes will explore the quality and scale of the buildings around us that are unfamiliar and intriguing, and we might ruminate about the layering of past cultures that survive the town’s arcades and doorways and its balconies and towers.

We will watch how people interact with each other in the noisy complexity of the city they take for granted. Our ears will explore the cadences of voices, and the city will come alive for us through the rhythms of its life.

We might indeed ruminate about how our cities also gained their form over time, and how rapidly they have changed during our lifetime, and how we might explain these changes to foreign visitors.

Perhaps we would begin by recounting how, before the automobile, urban neighborhoods in our larger cities were essentially small towns within the city. Their antecedents were European towns and villages. Their dimensions were designed for pedestrians. Within a circumference of 10-15 minutes of walking time, each urban neighborhood had a shopping street, a park, a library, schools, and places of worship.

But the dominant uniformity of these urban grids is decidedly American. We might speak about the experience of flying over the expanse of our country and seeing our rural areas laid out in all directions as a rectilinear grid and how our towns can be seen as urban grids within the agricultural grid.

And within the towns, residential streets were laid out as rectangular blocks, with sidewalks and shade trees and standard lots for sequences of “pattern book” houses, each with a front porch and a back yard. Neighbors knew each other and their children, and public transit connected neighborhoods to the city center and workplaces.

Each neighborhood had its own ethnic character, influenced by the cultures that immigrants brought with them — churches, synagogues, shops, restaurants and markets, and even their own languages, festivals, and schools — characteristics that are still powerful to this day.

But we might then recount to our visitor how in the 1950s and 60s radial highways were built from the centers of our cities into the surrounding farmlands, and how these highways generated residential suburbs, shopping malls, and office parks. We might also explain how, in our city center, tall office towers were built of steel, aluminum, and glass — centers that in some cities are still referred to as “island of excellence” — resulting in those radial highways being clogged morning and evening by suburban commuters in automobiles at rush hours.

And we would also recount how some of our larger inner-city neighborhoods, drained by outward suburban migration, became low-income segregated communities with deteriorating residential streets and shops. We might also explain that the civil rights movement is continuing to evolve these inner-city neighborhoods from the fierce confrontations of the ‘60s and ‘70s into urban integration.

But we could also speculate that from the generation to generation our cities resemble tides that flow out and then flow in again. A new generation is beginning to discover the virtues of these older neighborhoods in our towns and cities and the evolving neighborhoods in traditions with the inputs and insight of new cultural initiatives.

Every neighborhood has its own character. As urban designers, it is our task to enfranchise old and new voices together and to infuse our urban heritage and traditions with the inputs and insight of new cultural energies.

We learned our techniques during the civil rights struggle of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Our approach at that time was simple and direct, and we have not changed. We need to look at every urban situation with the fresh eyes of innocence. We need to hear and see what heritage is trying to tell us and to understand at first hand the voices and ambitions of the unheard.

As urban designers, we need to bear in mind that while history deals with past tradition, it is the bridge to the future. Every city and every neighbor has its character and its sense of what it inherits. It also has a sense of how it wants its future to evolve.

Our mission as urban designers is to develop public and private sector recommendations based on the people themselves, their sense of living heritage, and their goals for the generation to come.

Over the years, David Lewis, FAIA, shared the story of the founding of UDA. David's legacy runs through the firm and our practice today. Most of all, we learned that Urban Design Associates is about an idea we are all tasked with sharing. David wrote this text in 2017.