The question of alleys, revisited

ISSN： 1468-4519

Source： Urban Design International, Vol.6, Iss.2, 2001-06, pp. : 76-92

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Abstract

In 1919, American planner Karl B. Lohmann pondered ‘the question of alleys’ within a published review of town-planning principles for contemporary master-planned communities. In the early 20th century the back-alley was not necessarily ubiquitous in urban and suburban America, but it was commonplace; Frank Lloyd Wright, among others, had decreed residential back-alleys to be wasteful, unsightly anachronisms (Wright, 1916). Lohmann considered both the aesthetic pathologies of back-alleys and their added cost, while acknowledging their valuable ‘backstage’ utility; he concluded that back-alleys were still appropriate for commercial development, but were perhaps no longer necessary components of modern residential neighborhoods (Lohmann, 1919). Back-alleys were almost unknown in post-Second World War American suburbs, until advocates of the recent planning trend known as ‘new urbanism’ began an attempt to rehabilitate the back-alley as a streetscape-enhancing strategy, particularly for residential blocks. The new urbanist critical position is selective – reaffirming the argument for utility, without due consideration for the problematic side of the issue that was so much in evidence in planning discussions of the earlier era. In neither era, however, have the arguments for or against back-alleys in residential environments concerned much beyond utility, cost, and aesthetics; almost completely overlooked is the residential back-alley's value or potential as a unique cultural landscape and as a vital, block-scale neighborhood social realm.