The Phoenix Urban Research Laboratory is an extension of the College of Design at Arizona State University. Part think tank, part project center, we are pursuing a multifaceted agenda comprising funded design and research; studios; print and online publications; lectures, exhibitions, and conferences; and pedagogical workshops for mid-career professionals and high-school students.
Operationally, PURL is a link between the college and the city, a forum where the academic, civic, cultural, and business communities meet to discuss and debate multiple scenarios for the future of one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. In this we are inspired by ASU’s commitment to exemplifying a “New American University,” a university “responsible for the economic, social, and cultural vitality” of its region.
Intellectually, PURL is dedicated to furthering the broad-based inquiry into the complex challenges of 21st-century urbanism and to devising progressive solutions to these challenges. While our focus—our laboratory—is metropolitan Phoenix, our purview is wide ranging. Having grown phenomenally in the last 50 years, from 17 square miles and 106,000 people in 1950 to 515 square miles and 1.5 million (and counting) today, Phoenix is now grappling with the critical questions that confront cities around the globe: questions of rapid urbanization and infrastructural capacity; of sprawl and density; of traffic congestion and transportation options; of ecological sustainability; of local identity and global connection; of culture, comfort, and connection. How to ensure that we create sustainable buildings and landscapes? (And, for that matter, how to define “sustainability”?) How to negotiate the metropolitan edge, the transition from city to nature? How to introduce desirable density into auto-happy strips and satellite suburbs? What mass transit modes are most promising? How to create lively public spaces—vibrant public life—in the increasingly privatized American metropolis? How can cities encourage robust arts organizations and cultural entrepreneurs? What are the connections between creative communities and economic prosperity? How to strengthen local identity, or identities, in a globalizing culture?
These are some of the questions that urban designers and planners now confront, and they all inform the meta-question that has animated, and sometimes vexed, a generation of urban thinkers: what is the character of the contemporary city? For years now it has been clear that the old categories of “urban” and “suburban” no longer explain the heterogeneous settlements that we have been building for more than half a century. But if the concepts of “center” and “periphery” no longer hold, we tend still to conceptualize urban life in the traditional terms of our older cities, of New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, cities whose tight grids and compact downtowns were developed before the driver’s license became that indispensable rite of passage to adulthood. Historians and theorists have been energetic in proposing new words and phrases—edge city, edge node, technoburb, boomburb, zoomburb, citistates, megapolitan, megalopolis, postmetropolis, to name a few—to describe the polycentric agglomerations of contemporary urbanism; yet somehow we have not come fully to grips with our postwar, postindustrial cities, with cityscapes we experience at 4o miles per hour, where communities meet in myspace as well as the marketplace, where multiple centers blur into an ever-shifting edge.
In Phoenix these questions are at once urgent and exciting. Much of the city’s postwar growth has been quintessentially suburban in character, and because it has happened in the desert, it has depended not only on automobiles but also on conditioned air and regulated water. Here the challenges of urban identity and ecological responsibility cannot be ignored, and most agree that the next half century of growth, if that growth is to be socially and environmentally sustainable, must not repeat the patterns of the last half century. But what new patterns are most promising? What new strategies?
PURL is joining the debate at a dynamic moment, and we are building upon a strong tradition, via sponsored studios and funded projects, of academic engagement in the region. An integral part of our mission is to extend and strengthen this engagement—to drive a dynamic and progressive discussion of future development and to contribute to multiple groups the comprehensive information needed to plan wisely. Working with the city and neighborhood interests, with public and private groups, PURL will address such issues as civic space, the responsible use of resources, campus/city connections, infill and mixed-use development, housing, arts and culture, gentrification, historic preservation, landscape urbanism—and ultimately the achievement of an authentic and sustainable desert metropolis.
