As someone who has known the city of Copenhagen for the last 30 years, the author of this paper observes an apparent discord between the various new projects and the existing spatial patterns of the inner city. In particular, the author discusses the controversy over Orestad, a new region being created to serve the global economy.

Walks through Copenhagen, discovery of old city maps, and visits to picture galleries have unearthed traces of historic transformation that are still visible in the city. Through these first-hand observations and discoveries, the author lays out principles that might be brought to bear on how current city transformations and expansions could be directed.

Analyzing the city from various perspectives, the author notes that major transformations and expansion of Copenhagen have generally followed significant changes in society. Worldwide, the current urge to serve global commerce has affected many cities. No city can afford to be left outside the global economy. However, the structures built under this trend have produced sameness and areas that separate people without giving them a sense of place.

The author offers alternatives by which Copenhagen might remain receptive to global influences and still retain its handsome city design, its sense of history, and its hospitable nature to people of diverse cultural backgrounds.

When, in 1972, Donald Appleyard, together with Kenneth Craik, received funding from the National Science Foundation to update what had been a rather simple environmental simulator purchased from Yale, both of them had been working in the field of environ­ mental cognition for several years. Appleyard's opportunity to work on the Image of the City project with Lynch and Myer had resulted in the book The Viewfrom the Road. During the course of that project he had experimented with three ways of simuiating the experience of driving along highways: notation systems, perspec­ tive sequences and films produced through a modelscope. The notation system describing the environmental experience was the easiest to develop, and it became common practice in urban design throughout the world. Although they do describe components of the experience, notation systems do so in an abstract way-and they are idiosyncratic. Only the inventor understands his system and no one else uses it. To the public, esoteric notation systems are incomprehensible. Sequences of perspectives are much more understandable. They are not used as much, perhaps because the method is still rather abstract and it takes some work to visualize the sequences as a continuous movement experience. Static per­ spective renderings remain the most common way of simulating environmental experience. However, modelscopes, motion picture cameras, and realistic scale models have the most promising pros­ pects of accurately and realistically simulating an experience of the environment.

Transportation and land use planners generally agree that high traffic volumes are incompatible with a good residential street. Danger to pedestrians and bicyclists and emissions from traffic, such as high noise levels and poor air quality, are the obvious reasons. In addition, traffic is also a barrier to social interaction. In 1969, Donald Appleyard demonstrated that residents living on streets with high traffic volumes are likely to have fewer friends and acquaintances among their neighbors, socialize less in their neighborhood, and identify less with their street as home territory than residents of streets with lower traffic volumes. He found that residents on high volume streets withdraw from the physical environment of the street and do not care for it.1 After studying 21 residential streets with a wide range of traffic volumes, he concluded that the quality of residential street life starts to diminish when daily average traffic volumes exceed 8,000 cars.2 Evidence of the detrimental effects of traffic on neighborhood livability has been compelling, and transportation planners have made it their goal to divert high volume through-traffic from residential streets whenever possible. Many cities have implemented traffic management plans designed to tame traffic on residential streets. Such plans created protected neighborhoods by routing non-local traffic along arterial streets.3 According to these plans, through-traffic was directed to commercial areas or other non-residential land uses, but with limited success — most medium to high volume streets in existing cities are also residential streets. In the inner city neighborhoods of San Francisco where Appleyard carried out the initial study, more than 75 percent of all streets with 8,000 cars or more per day also serve predominantly residential land use. In communities with lower densities, the percentage of medium to high volume residential streets is even greater.

America's growing dependency on the private automobile is widely cited as a root cause of many of today's urban problems -- traffic congestion, air pollution, and faceless urban sprawl. In 1960, 43 million Americans commuted alone to work. By 1990 their numbers had risen to 101 million (U.S. Department of Transportation, 1994). During the 1980s, the national share of drive alone commuters jumped from 64.4 percent to 73.2 (Pisarski, 1992). Nor do these trends appear to be slowing. The latest "State of the Commute" report by the Commuter Transportation Services (1994) -- the annual tracking study of commuter behavior in the greater Los Angeles region -- shows Southern California's drive-alone rate increased from 77 percent in 1992 to 79 percent in 1993. Similar trends have been reported for the San Francisco Bay Area (RIDES, 1994).

American cities have struggled to maintain the centrality of their downtown areas. As retail and office uses have continued to move into suburban areas and outlying regions, many local governments -- especially of smaller and mid-size cities -- have all but given up on the prospect of replacing the commercial vitality once found in many city centers. The ability to attract a permanent residential population, lured by good regional access, has become a necessary prerequisite for attracting new commercial uses back to the inner city.

In this paper, Bosselmann uses downtown Oakland to demonstrate an urban design strategy that starts with the history of the city’s urban form and its physical patterns. The strategy identifies the areas of vitality and the elements of the public realm that might be repaired if new development is directed and coordinated.

An important aspect of this essay is to explain what is implied when abstract terms are used, like "urban vitality," "urban repair," or "incremental development." These terms express professional values that require clear communication to the future and existing residents of the inner city. At the same time, the essay continues a tradition that identifies the need to balance the forces of competition with a need for cooperation. This tradition, one of the fundamental functions of city government, has emerged as a counter force to the worst effects of the industrial revolution. Then and now, city design professionals have seen it as their professional challenge to tame and cultivate what we now call "market forces" in a constant effort to protect the weaker elements of the city: culture, people and nature. In the inner city, these three elements will remain weak because market forces will only selectively address such concerns.