‘Authentic’

Why do some urban spaces have character while others feel soulless? 

For the latest installment of “One Word Answer,” Stephen F. Gray, associate professor of urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, parses the qualities of an “authentic” neighborhood. 

---

Can you make brand-new authentic? It’s an interesting question, and the answer turns on a few things at once: how a place is built, who builds it, who gets to stay, and whether the experiences inside it connect to one another or just sit side by side.

Start with how it’s built. An authentic city is heterogeneous. But take the Seaport neighborhood of Boston, for example. A group sat down and contrived it, as opposed to an authentic neighborhood where there are so many experiences mixed up together, and each of them true to themselves — and more interesting in relation to each other. There’s turnover, there’s a fire, a family dispute, all these things happening that result in what we see today. What we think is an appropriate part of that mix is a question of values, though.

Heterogeneity is what developers reach for when they’re trying to manufacture authenticity, but they tend to reach for the surface rather than the substance. Developers, when they’re trying to pitch something new, want it to seem authentic to the place. For example, there’s a large area in Miami — Wynwood — that was redeveloped. It was all these warehouses, all this graffiti, and the developers essentially took that as the theme. So all these new condos and developments, which are very vertical and glassy and steely, are also very referential to that graffiti street culture, but only superficially. Now, that’s an attempt at authenticity. But who gets to benefit from that? Is it the graffiti artist who barely makes rent? Usually the answer is no. And in that case, is that authenticity, or is that appropriation? 

Pull back from any one project and a pattern emerges. There’s territorial inequality across cities. Usually the places where capital accumulates are the places where the people who make a city authentic can’t afford to be and don’t see themselves reflected; and the places where they do see themselves reflected are the places that are less capitalized. The new district gets built; the neighborhoods that already have what that district is trying to simulate go without investment.

The big question for developers, planners, and the people who live in these neighborhoods is, how do you bring that kind of authenticity and welcoming and belonging to the vast communities that make a city authentic and interesting and fun? And how do you bring opportunities and resources into areas that already have all of that great authenticity, but lack investment? 

“Authenticity describes both the buildings and the people inside them, which means giving the people who live there, or will live there, the standing to shape what gets built.”

The honest answer is that you can’t theme your way into it. Authenticity describes both the buildings and the people inside them, which means giving the people who live there, or will live there, the standing to shape what gets built. In my practice, when we’re engaging with communities about neighborhood change, it’s not a one-way street; it’s a dialogue. They’re giving us information about what needs to be addressed and what’s happened in the past and how they see the future. But we need to give them information too, about how these things actually come to pass. 

For instance, someone may say they want more affordable housing. So we say, OK, because of Boston’s inclusionary development policy, to make a project work you need 13 percent of units to be affordable and the other 87 percent to be unaffordable. If you want 100 new affordable units, you’ll also get nearly 800 units at market rate.

So the difference between urban spaces that have character, vitality, and life to them, and others that don’t? An authentic city is more than the sum of its parts. It’s not just a gimmick where you can take a selfie to show your friends that you were there. There’s a sort of connective and episodic movement through a set of experiences. There’s the idea of time and incrementality that results in a heterogeneity of not only individual buildings and spaces that are built and changed and reimagined and covered over and combined, but also of the people who make, inhabit, and activate the city. And there’s the agency that lets those people shape the places they live in.