Houstonism: A Soft Theory

Essay, Houston Genetic City, Matthew Johnson, No Density, Territory and mobility, Urban Paradigms

Accessibility, Architecture&environment, Built landscape, City, City development, City evolution, Climate resilience, Diversity, Effective zoning, Essay, Extreme environments, History, Houston, Industrial context, Infrastructure, Livability, Masterplan, Metropolis, Neighborhood, Pedestrian realm, Political & Economic Approach, Programmatic coexistences, Quality of Life, Resilient cities, Territory&thermodynamics, Thermodynamics, Topography, Urban growth, Urban research, Urbanism, USA, Weather

This essay is an excerpt of "Houston Genetic City" by Peter Zweig, Matthew Johnson and Jason Logan, published by Actar Publishers and the University of Houston’s Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design -- https://lccn.loc.gov/2019934919

Each year, hundreds of magazines around the world issue their own “most livable city” surveys. These questionnaires attempt to measure urbanism by the vague idea of quality of life. Vienna is perpetually at the top of this list, followed in short order by Vancouver, Zurich, Paris, Munich, Frankfurt, Sydney, and other places that we might have enjoyed on a vacation but are not lucky enough to live in. Most of us inhabit perfectly functional cities that will never appear on a “livability” list. These are places that the tour books tell us to skip, ringed by industrial sectors, agglomerations of infrastructure, nondescript suburbs sprawling out into the landscape. Their historic evolution has not been an attempt to preserve some fictive past but to provide a staging area for future developments. Houston is one of these. It is unlikely to ever rank on a “most livable” list, because it lacks the historic districts, quaintness, and walkability that seem to be prerequisites for inclusion in this club. Instead, it is comprised of mirrored glass towers, broken pavement, abandoned storefronts, ubiquitous strip malls, and other detritus of contemporary urban life (which are, incidentally, qualities that many Houstonians have affection for). It feels, at moments, much more like a relic of the developing world than a gleaming, wealthy northern metropolis.