Greetings from Anywhere: Supporting Postcard-Worthy Places
Editor’s Note: Joe Minicozzi of Urban3 is one of the featured presenters at next month’s Strong Towns gathering in Santa Ana. Come meet Joe, Chuck Marohn and other Strong Towns staff, and incredible Strong Towns advocates from around Southern California and across the nation. Check out the agenda here, then make sure to register while there are still spots available. Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Fieldstead and Company, tickets are now 75% off. Just use the code BLACKFRIDAY at checkout.
How many buildings springing up in your community would you be proud to put on a postcard?
You know the kind of postcards I’m talking about—the embossed, vividly-colored kind that was wildly popular in the early 20th century. In every community where Urban3 works, we seek out postcards like these that give clues about the local architectural heritage. My favorites are the ones that say “Greetings from [insert your town’s name here!]” with imagery of the town’s architecture and culture housed inside each of the letters. Every postcard is different, just as every place is different, but they all share the same cheery civility and sense of community pride.
Putting aside any nostalgia, take a moment to think about why these postcards were so widespread in the first place. They represent an era of American history when the new technology of automobility made it easier than ever before to hit the road, see new places, and share your experiences with friends and family. With today’s technology, it’s hard to put in context why people would take the time and effort to go out and purchase a photo on cardstock, hand-write a note and pay to mail it as evidence of what you discovered. So, think of it like this: Postcards were the Instagram of the 1920s, portraying an idealized articulation of the values of the sharer. That analog world seems ancient, but it has always been in our nature to curate images of our communities and share them with one another. In its day, a postcard was a kind of community advertisement.
This particular postcard greets you from Urban3’s hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. It includes the Biltmore Estate, of course, and boasts of the area’s natural splendor, but it also features City Hall, the Civic Center, the high school, and four private hotels. Not only did postcards like this showcase their community’s newest buildings, but its newest commercial buildings. Could you imagine doing this today? Would you send your friend a “Wish you were here!” picture from the parking lot of an office park or a mall? Of course not. Yet many postcards depict nothing more than functional buildings on Main Street or downtown. If you’ve ever encountered neighbors who balk at the idea that your town could support people-scaled, walkable places (or if you yourself are skeptical), it might be worth a quick internet or library search into the not-so-distant past.
For example, here’s a postcard depicting Kansas City in the early 1900s. Caption: “Having a great time here in KC with all the multi-modality and pedestrian chaos. The shopping and the mass transit are awesome. Wish you were here!” At the time, the city had a population of 163,572. For context, that’s much smaller than the modern auto-oriented suburb of Gilbert, Arizona, population 208,453.
While Gilbert has a couple of blocks of a Main Street, Kansas City had a typical Main Street worthy of a city, with buildings home to offices, shops, hotels, civic gathering places, and all the needs of a community. These old postcards are replete with lessons of how we can make our communities stronger by taking notes from our authentic roots.
One piece at a time
At this point, you might be thinking that there are plenty of postcard-worthy places where you live. Maybe there’s a new master-planned community just off the interstate, or a corporate-sponsored plaza in front of an apartment complex or a sports stadium. That’s all fine and good today, but I question how long their postcard-worthiness will last. As longtime Strong Towns readers know, places that are built all at once to a finished state might be appealing initially, but they epitomize a pattern of development that only declines in value steadily over time. Our modern financial systems, tax, and zoning codes incentivize developers to transform whole swaths of land for a single use instead of focusing on the details of one building at a time. This results in increasingly fragile communities full of buildings that fail to inspire pride or awe.
In comparison to the community taking big risks on mega-developments, the traditional development pattern allowed for many small bets and incremental improvements, and these additions were often celebrated on postcards. A postcard building was usually not the original building to exist on its site, but rather an iteration taken from that time period. Some represent significant investments that demonstrate the community’s wealth and values.
Architecture
The buildings on postcards also remind us of the way that the modern architecture profession has shaped the way we build our communities. In my work, I’ve observed that many people claim to value good architecture, but for some reason don’t clamor for it. This might be due to the disproportionate influence that “starchitects” like Rem Koolhaas or Hertzog & de Meuron wield over the profession. I’m happy that firms like theirs exist, and I find their work sublime, but they are incentivized to produce work that shines in magazines and portfolios instead of on the streetscape at the human scale.
While these cities are lucky enough to be graced by such expressionist buildings, most new buildings are placeless, lifeless boxes that degrade the streetscape instead of adding to the community feel—certainly not anything to celebrate on a postcard. Even worse, backlash to change often leads communities to trap our cities in amber and designate aesthetically pleasing places as unchangeable historic preservation areas while pushing our incremental growth to the periphery of town.
Caption: “Behold! An office building!” Even though Minneapolis was still served by equestrian transportation systems, they were able to achieve this feat of architecture. Today’s financial systems would never allow a developer to build this, due to its lack of parking.
Perhaps a measure of community value could be that we ask ourselves “Would you put this building on a postcard?” This isn’t to suggest that every building needs to be gilded or Neoclassical in style, but that it should be an improvement over its predecessor and it should express an aspect of the community’s aspirations.
What makes a postcard-worthy place? A well-proportioned facade, a storefront that lines the street and makes it interesting to walk by, and local cultural references in material or detail. It’s simple and intuitive. Would you send a photo of the nearest community center to a friend, or would you post it on your Instagram feed? What about our infrastructure? Does the image of our buildings remind us of our community’s identity and shared values, or is it just another box on a Stroad?
These postcards weren’t about nostalgia; They were about progress. We view them nostalgically today because our built environment has been degraded to such an extent that postcard-worthy places now seem unachievable, since modern financial apparatuses and planning processes fail to incentivize the mechanisms that would lead to the development of a postcard-worthy place. We now have far more capital than the communities featured on those old postcards, yet they had the wherewithal to invest in themselves to create lasting wealth, and in the process, build stronger towns.
Postcard mosaic via Spoon Graphics.
About the Author
Joseph Minicozzi is the principal of Urban3 and an urban planner imagining new ways to think about and visualize land use, urban design and economics. Joe founded Urban3 to explain and visualize market dynamics created by tax and land use policies. His award-winning analytic tools have garnered national attention in Planetizen, The Wall Street Journal, Planning, New Urban News, Realtor, Atlantic Cities and the Center for Clean Air Policy's Growing Wealthier report. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Miami and Master of Architecture and Urban Design from Harvard University. In 2017, Joe was recognized as one of the 100 Most Influential Urbanists of all time. He is a founding member of the Asheville Design Center, a nonprofit community design center dedicated to creating livable communities across Western North Carolina.
Public art can do more than add personality and beauty to a space — it can change the way people behave, bring the community together and avoid the resistance other changes to city policy face. It’s time to stop overlooking this powerful and accessible tool and start making our towns stronger, one bucket of paint at a time.