Architecture and the Geography of the American City

Abstract

RBAN geography is concerned with space and place-two-dimensional patterns and three-dimensional landscapes. But rarely are these two approaches adequately merged in the study of a city. The urban landscape is an architectural container that constrains and directs spatial decisions, imparts personality to place, and plays a major role in the creation of positive and negative images of places that can affect the future character of the urban landscape. Across time, changes in the socioeconomic and technological structure of society greatly influence some sections of the city but have little effect on others. Some urban landscapes have long-term staying power, while others have undergone massive alteration.1 The purposes of this article are to examine the role of ordinary, that is, common domestic, house architecture in shaping the geography of the city and to explore the relationship between this architecture and spatial-temporal changes in cities. In addition to identifying and mapping house types and presenting a typology of urban houses grouped according to their salient characteristics, we compare house-type distributions and neighborhood definitions, and discuss the societal acceptance, or staying power, of particular house types in the context of spatial-temporal change. These issues are studied in two cities: Columbus, Ohio, and San Diego, California. Both are moderately large cities with residential landscapes composed primarily of single-family houses. Both city governments have strong commitments to improving environmental quality and urban design; both have expressed interest in monitoring changes in the urban landscape; and both are attempting to develop methods and procedures that would encourage recycling of existent buildings and upgrading of neighborhood quality. Both cities have neighborhood commissions to advise local government on problems of neighborhood change, have passed ordinances to review designs, and have developed design plans for specific neighborhoods. We delimited a sector with maximum diversity of house types in Columbus and San Diego. Data for the delimitation were obtained from field observations,